Sergio Jiménez, Flink | Real Market Fit, Business Model Innovation, and Financial Literacy as Product Strategy [Ep. 60]

The audio and video are in Spanish. These notes are a translation.

It is no secret that Latin America lacks financial education. It is very hard to learn finance in a context as theoretical as school or university. Financial education, especially for young people, should be more practical and applied to real life, and Sergio Jiménez, CEO and cofounder of Flink, is working precisely on solving that problem.

Flink is the first investment platform in Mexico that lets you buy shares on the stock exchange from two dollars and with no commissions. Today Flink is used by almost two million Mexicans, mostly young people.

Sergio told us the reasons behind its explosive organic growth and how reaching Product-Market Fit changed his founder role. He also explained why financial education is a key part of Flink’s product and marketing strategy.

To date, Flink has raised close to 70 million dollars from venture capital funds such as Lightspeed Venture Partners, Accel, and ALLVP.

Thanks to Chloé Novene of ALLVP and Adriana Saman of Clocktower Ventures for the excellent question suggestions.

What You Can Learn Today

How to tell whether a startup has Product-Market Fit
How to innovate on the business model
The state of financial education in Latin America

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Youtube Timestamps*

About Sergio and Flink

[1:40] - How did Sergio get into the world of startups?
- He started building companies in college
- He was looking to create a business on his own and to create something new
- He attended a Fintech Hackathon in CDMX, where he met his cofounder
[3:34] - What is Flink?
- It was created in 2017, and it started as a digital bank account
- In 2019 they decided to pivot toward an investment platform
- With Flink you can buy shares for a little more than a dollar, with no commissions
- They had a waitlist of 500 thousand people when they launched their new product
- They have 1.7 million users, and 90% are investing for the first time

True Market Fit

[8:44] - Flink’s Product-Market Fit
- The platform’s servers used to crash from so much traffic
- The whole team had to provide customer service because they could not keep up
- They started acquiring more than 9 thousand users a day
- On the app stores they started getting more downloads than Netflix
[13:14] - Sergio’s evolution as CEO
- He had to engage with investors all the time
- He started talking with regulators and lawyers to obtain licenses
- He went from focusing on the product to focusing on Flink’s strategy
- He started asking himself harder questions than the ones he used to ask
[16:03] - How do you prepare to grow quickly?
- Understand the regulatory side very well and follow up on it
- Cultivate good relationships with regulators and investors
- Surround yourself with people who identify with the startup’s mission

Business Model Innovation

[18:55] - What explains Flink’s organic growth?
- Users’ interest in investing
- The market is full of opportunities to invest
- Listening to the customer is essential
- Before launching the investment platform, they validated it with more than 100 thousand people
- Technology made it possible to democratize many services, including investing
[25:02] - Explosive growth from innovation in the business model
- Users quantify their investments by the money they invest
- The importance of behavioral economics
[28:01] - Risks and benefits of not charging commissions
- Concern about the reaction of traditional stock exchanges
- Fear of not living up to the value proposition
- Zero commission is a win-win for Flink and its customers

Marketing as Product, and Financial Education

[31:36] - Flink’s challenges in the face of the lack of financial education
- If users have a bad experience with the product, they do not invest again
- Strengthen the Flink community to help beginners
- Creation of very digestible content for customers
- Development of interactive features inside the platform
[36:48] - Flink’s user acquisition strategy
- Customers are the first promoters of the platform
- Flink’s CAC is below 28 cents of a dollar
- Affinity with Flink, more than with traditional banks
[40:24] - Market segmentation
- Focus on young people
- A very youthful visual identity, attractive to the new generations
- People who invest for the first time and who know basic finance
- The community is a great source of feedback for Flink
[45:53] - The role of marketing at Flink
- Convey the mission and the vision of the company
- Talk to users about Flink in an attractive way
[48:36] - Key metrics of the marketing strategy
- User retention
- Customer development (increase in the user’s investment ticket)
- An average Flink customer opens the app 8 times a day
[50:38] - What makes Flink’s marketing team different?
- It questions the why of everything
- It is in constant communication with the customer
- They are not afraid of experimenting all the time
- They encourage new employees to contribute ideas

Tweet Round

[53:29] -
- Recommended books: books written by Dan Ariely
- Changes in the Latin American startup ecosystem: avoid unfair competition and promote cooperation to improve the customer experience
- Founder to interview: Mijael Feldman of getxerpa, and founders of Around

Episode Mentions

You can find Sergio on LinkedIn and Twitter

Recommended books: books written by Dan Ariely

Founders to interview: Mijael Feldman of getxerpa, and founders of Around

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