6th Birthday is a big deal for a startup, because the data says it takes 7-10 years for startups to build real value.

We have consistency on our side, having published original insight every day for 6 years from this post on 28 July 2014. Yes. Every. Day. That consistency and a focus on quality got us this silver medal out of 100 Fintech blogs. 

We can celebrate that we have come a long way from a single blog post to multi author silver medalist in a big market, but we also know that we have a long way to go. 

Bootstrapping Daily Fintech through an advisory business enabled us to avoid the trap of being focussed on advertising revenue. As we watch online ad revenue cratering for everybody not called Google or Facebook, we breath a sigh of relief that we dodged a bullet there.  On our 5th birthday we chose to de-emphasise the advisory business so that we could focus on building a scalable business. To that end we created a paywall. We wanted to be quite clear about who we serve; our readers pay our bills, rather than being the product we sell to advertisers. 

A paywall also forced us to up our game in every way. When you charge for your content you have to justify your value every day to the folks paying your bills.

During 2020 we are focussed on two related priorities to up our game – content expansion and subscriber experience:

• Content expansion. Getting more experts to contribute their knowledge. Fintech is growing up. According to research by UBS, Fintech industry revenues will more than triple from USD 150bn in 2018 to USD 500bn in 2030, implying an average annual growth rate about three times faster than the broader financial sector’s. We need to grow our content to match that reality.

• Subscriber experience. Content expansion means we need to enable readers to customize what and how they read our content so that they get actionable just in time learning.

Like everybody else, we need to do some of this growing up during a pandemic. Fortunately for Daily Fintech, we have been a decentralized operation since we started so the fact that “talent is equally distributed, opportunity is not”  (Leila Janah) means that location is never a factor in our hunt for talent. What we want to do with that good fortune is ensure that Fintech serves the mission of financial inclusion that got many people excited to be involved on the early days. Little known fact: before we chose the Daily Fintech name we went by Fintech4Us.

These are busy times because Daily Fintech, on our 6th birthday, has some exciting developments in the pipeline focussed on both content expansion and subscriber experience. We will keep you posted as we take significant steps on that journey.

Daily Fintech’s original insight is made available to you for US$143 a year (which equates to $2.75 per week). $2.75 buys you a coffee (maybe), or the cost of a week’s subscription to the global Fintech blog – caffeine for the mind that could be worth $ millions.