Guest: Founder of a $1Billion Startup.

Read time: 3 minutes

I’m here today with Jacques Fu, a tech founder and angel investor based in the Orlando area. Jacques is an expert in proving out ideas and he has the distinction of being the co-founder of the first “unicorn” ($1billion+ valuation) startup in the Orlando area.

Disclaimer: This is not a sponsored post. We are receiving $0 and Jacques is receiving $0. He wants to help us understand the early days of a startup.

Jacques, thanks for spending some time with us today. Let’s jump right in.

Aron: You were the co-founder of Stax, a payments platform that you recently exited from. Today, Stax Payments is the all-in one payment processing solution for countless small businesses. Can you take us back to day one, please?
Can you explain how you recognized the need in the market for this? Day 1 stuff 🙂 

➡️ Jacques: My co-founder, Suneera, first pitched this idea at a Techstars Startup Weekend. She was selling credit card processing services as her full-time job and felt that a subscription-based solution would not only be well received by the market but would solve a lot of complexity and expenses passed onto our customers, small businesses, who could really use that cash to grow.

Aron: Once you had this initial concept, how did you validate it? We all trust our intuition, but entrepreneurs want to have proof that customers will pay money for their solution. What did you do after the concept was developed?

🏭️ Jacques: Well, we didn't start with a product so the best way to validate the need was to sell someone else's product but with modified pricing. They really liked the service but the technology was lacking. It allowed us to get early revenue but critical information for building the MVP of the technology product.

Aron: Ok, along those lines. Exactly how did you approach early customers? Did you call them? Email them? Get introductions from your network?

👷 Jacques: We were incredibly scrappy. We entered every startup competition and spoke to everyone in the audience. We pretty much had a 100% success rate because we got really good at developing our pitching skills. Luckily for us, everyone needs to take payments. We asked our vendors to become customers. Are you our attorney? Use us for payments. VOIP provider? Use us for payments. Marketing agency?... you get the idea.

Aron: Ok. What questions did you ask when approaching new customers? And when did you bring up your solution (right away, or after listening to their problems)?

❓️ Jacques: During sales conversations we kept it simple in the beginning. Your payment solution sucks? You want something cheaper and simpler? Let's get you signed up and the first month is free. The accelerator did drill into us not to ask leading questions when we were validating product-market fit and developing the technology product, so those questions were more focused on what wasn't working well with their existing solutions, where did they find out about the solution they ended up purchasing, and what was important to them as a business owner.

Aron: How many iterations of your original product did you have to make until you felt it was aligned with the feedback you were hearing from the market?

💻️ Jacques: As the first engineer, I sat on sales calls. If someone wished we had an option for X, or a field that they could enter Y, I would simply add it right away and call them back and say we added the feature for them, let's get the deal done. When I say right away, I had my code editor open and was writing code as I was listening to the customer to put in the comments in the right places, so I could fill them in over the course of the next hour or so.

Aron: Ok great. You have your target audience, and you have a product that will fill their needs. How would your plans have changed if you were a solo entrepreneur without a team?

📝 Jacques: I think I would've been a little less reactive to customers. It was great for generating early revenue but at some point we didn't know how to close customers on the existing solution. Once we had a product to sell I would've captured the feedback but allow more time to put a proper roadmap in place which we did end up doing later on.

Aron: People like to know about funding. You’ve raised over $250Million for Stax. The initial funding you brought in was $850,000. At what point was Stax as a company before you approached those first investors? Did you have customers lined up? Did you have a fully working product? Can you explain that process please?

💰️ Jacques: We were generating low six figures in sales and then we built the product during the Starter Studio accelerator program so we had something ready to go during demo day. That's about the time we raised because we had a viable commercial model that was now supported through technology.

Aron: And, you recently had an exit from Stax Payments. Congrats! What are you working on now?

📰 Jacques: Thank you! I have a new startup I'm working on called Senseily. It’s a service that allows anyone to monetize their knowledge by creating an online course. You can check it out at Senseily.com but it's always been my dream to take people's knowledge and help them create an online business helping others. Use ARONISACOOLDUDE for 50% off! 🙃 

Aron: Thanks Jacques. We appreciate you sharing some insight and advice with us. I’m sure we will talk again in the near future.

If you want to learn more about Jacques and his projects, check out: Jacquesfu.com 
You can see a link to his podcast there and his full bio.


Thanks everyone.
Up next, more product updates at ValidatorAI.com and more founder interviews and advice.

Take care out there!

Aron Meystedt

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 PS: Send this to someone who wants to found a startup!