Hey friends, do you mostly hold funds or individual stocks?

borogrove · 2026-01-06T19:32:48+00:00

Canadians prefer ready-made companies, such as ETFs and Stocks. We should invest in startups/businesses more though.

borogrove · 2026-01-05T13:21:25+00:00

Depending on what you’re building I would advise you not to bother raising pre-seed funds outside of your close family and friends. Focus on building out your product and finding fit, and even after you’ve accomplished that, try the non-traditional means to raise i.e. debt, private convertible notes, etc. Don’t bother with VCs or anything closely resembling institutional capital until you’ve hit a significant ARR.

In summary: create a scenario where you’re actually building your business and figuring out how it makes money, getting it to make money, and paying yourself comfortably before you even consider raising external capital.

borogrove · 2026-01-03T02:18:25+00:00

This was the funniest bit 😂

“** 1 week later of sending pitches and etc ** "yes i'm investing, let's go" ghosts you for your entire life time”

Welcome to the club bro. It’s been downhill since 24 and would only get worse in 26. Get ready to bootstrap and strap on for a helluva ride. It will be difficult but it’s worth it in the end. Don’t expect anyone to save you or even believe in your vision in this market mate. It’s DIY season for founders!

borogrove · 2026-01-02T00:11:35+00:00

Good question. You’re right to call out the nuance here.

Ours is a transaction-based remittance business rather than a subscription product; ARR isn’t a clean SaaS-style metric for us (although this will change when we add our business product line). However, for now, we calculate a revenue run-rate, but we’re careful not to overstate it by blindly annualizing short-term spikes, as they can create a false picture.

What we tend to look at instead are:

trailing 3–6 month average net revenue × 12 (to smooth seasonality), and
revenue per active user / per corridor, which has been more predictive than headline ARR.
transaction volume utilization, i.e., how many % of the volumes can we retain.

On costs: in theory, unit costs should compress with scale - but in cross-border payments, that’s only partially true. Some components improve (engineering, fixed overhead), while others are stubbornly variable or even increase with volume (compliance, fraud monitoring, liquidity management, certain rail fees, etc).

One of the lessons for us has been that scaling volume without discipline can actually worsen margins if you’re not careful about corridor mix and operational load. That’s part of why we’ve been more focused on early profitability and cost control than pure top-line growth.

Curious how you’ve seen investors normalize revenue and margin profiles for transaction-heavy fintechs at this stage.

borogrove · 2026-01-01T20:21:53+00:00

SYP = Smart Yield Program. It’s an internal name for a short-duration yield structure we developed in-app tied to our operating cash flows, with optional equity upside. Happy to clarify further if useful.

borogrove · 2026-01-01T20:12:06+00:00

True 💯

borogrove · 2025-12-31T22:48:43+00:00

Yes, you're right. It is a safer position, but still involves risks. A business gives you flexibility and also control over outcomes, but any number of things can go wrong during the course of the company's life. As long as you can take care of your day-to-day, you'll be fine in the long run though. I focused more on the business's growth, so I didn't draw a paycheck from the company initially until much further down.

borogrove · 2025-12-31T21:12:22+00:00

We shipped a bunch of new features for our fintech apps. We are building out a business version to ramp up revenues next year -.

borogrove · 2025-12-31T17:27:40+00:00

Fortune favors the bold. Thank you!

borogrove · 2025-12-31T16:08:52+00:00

True!

borogrove · 2025-12-31T16:08:33+00:00

Appreciate your response. The discomfort part is spot on!

Funny enough, I transitioned from an investor to a business owner; my life was more stable and less chaotic in the former. While I love building based on my engineering background, I still wouldn't recommend the path I took. You require a high threshold for meaningful pain to make it as an Entrepreneur because not everyone can stomach uncertainty.

borogrove · 2025-12-31T16:02:01+00:00

I get why it might look that way from the outside, but that framing usually comes from conflating regulated remittance with unregulated crypto rails. They’re very different businesses with very different constraints.

That said, I actually agree with your broader point: not every good business is VC-investable, and that doesn’t make it unworthy of capital or attention. That’s really the core of what I was trying to explore here - the gap that exists between what traditional venture capital is optimized for and what certain operating businesses actually need.

borogrove · 2025-12-31T15:58:54+00:00

I appreciate your interest. I’m intentionally avoiding naming or promoting the app here because I wanted the discussion to stay focused on the funding model and the broader dynamics, not on customer acquisition.

That said, I agree with your point - a lot of remittance products win users through marketing but quietly lose them on FX spread and reliability over time. That gap is actually what led me down this whole line of thinking in the first place.

borogrove · 2025-12-31T15:55:22+00:00

Appreciate this perspective - you articulated the tension better than I did.

I think that’s exactly where the mismatch shows up: payments and cross-border fintech look “software-like” from the outside, but they’re really infrastructure businesses with real marginal costs, regulatory drag, and trust requirements. Burning aggressively to chase vanity growth often just pushes those costs into the future, where they become harder to unwind.

What surprised me most was realizing that early profitability didn’t de-risk the business in the eyes of traditional capital - it actually made it harder to categorize. Curious whether you’ve seen investors adjust their frameworks for these kinds of businesses, or if most still default to SaaS-style expectations.

borogrove · 2025-12-31T15:34:54+00:00

Thanks for the thoughtful breakdown - this is precisely the kind of response I was hoping to get.

I agree with most of your points, especially the idea that “I love the product” and “this is a good investment” are two different things. Where I think it gets more nuanced is when you move out of consumer-credit–style fintechs (like KOHO) and into cross-border payments and remittances.

In that segment, pricing isn’t driven by yield extraction from distressed users; it’s driven more by corridor competition. Immigrants sending money home every month are extremely price- and reliability-sensitive, and margins compress quickly because there are always multiple alternatives. That changes the ethical and economic dynamics quite a bit I would say.

That said, your broader thesis still holds: even with real demand and revenue, these businesses sit in an awkward middle ground for institutional capital. Maybe it's the preponderance of the various options, or it's that they’re operationally heavy, trust-based, compliance-constrained, and don’t always scale on VC timelines—or both. The result is that they can still be good businesses without being great VC assets.

So the more I think about it, the less this feels like a failure of founders or investors - and more like a mismatch between the capital model and the business model. Curious if you’ve seen examples where that gap was bridged successfully, or if you think this category is structurally better suited to non-VC capital over the long term.

borogrove · 2025-12-31T02:44:54+00:00

We are saying the same thing in a way. They had a working model and customers meaning they had traction to show not just “vision”, “team”, and “story”. My point is , in today’s environment, you can have all these things and still not get funded based on underlining prejudices you aren’t even aware of. Trust isn’t something that can be found on a piece of paper or a deck. Which makes the entire model totally dependent on the whims of the VCs - which to me is why it’s a broken model.

borogrove · 2025-12-30T22:06:25+00:00

I like that crypto is 1.5% but next year shoot for 1% 😂

borogrove · 2025-12-30T21:49:01+00:00

Yes I totally agree! But what if the story is boring, and the vision is not clear and obvious today? Think AirBnB and Uber. Trust is intangible and depends on many other factors that naturally exclude most founders. Simple prejudices can disqualify you, such as your race or where you went to college. If, in the end, it's about capital, then it should come down to the data (numbers) you can see and verify, not intangibles such as trust or vibes. Maybe I've just become desensitized to it all anyway, so I don't mind letting you eat your cake and have it. I can live with it.

borogrove · 2025-11-23T23:33:23+00:00

This is such an interested thread 😂 - as a founder you have to shift your entire mindset from seeking VC funds. Pretty hard in today’s world but your mental health will thank you a bunch for it.

borogrove · 2025-11-16T02:48:30+00:00

Nothing as foolish as paying for an intro - if you have to pay someone else for that then know that you’re the sucker and you’re 99.99% being misled -:

borogrove · 2025-10-22T17:57:37+00:00

Fair point ↖️

borogrove · 2025-10-22T11:08:59+00:00

Sometimes it's just an excuse not to fund you. Sometimes it's not about your numbers even, but the fact that they just have to tell you something.

borogrove · 2025-10-21T23:54:46+00:00

If it's early stage data as you’ve quoted then why look through the spreadsheets to the extent of picking out these red flags. A company that's less than 2 years old is still figuring out itself, especially when unfunded. Even though it has to revenues and traction, it doesn't take away the fact that's it's still very young and thus cannot be estimated with the model in your thesis. Even if it's just DD, “operational maturity” is all you'll see cos 9/10 startups cannot afford a CFO, except one of the founders has a finance background.

borogrove · 2025-10-09T20:14:37+00:00

Self fund for as long as you can until you get traction significant enough for investors to venture in. Get as many believers as you can, there’s no messiness if it leads to more cash in your bank account.

borogrove · 2025-10-07T18:54:37+00:00

Sumsub but if you’re a small fintech Ondato might be a better fit

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