We were trying to construct a pitch deck for an investor. For those who are not familiar with fund raising, it is a 10 slides of hell that we have to make to convince investors to give us money, in exchange for more money in the future should our business succeeds. It was a hard sell, especially during tech winter in Indonesia, with news of massive layoffs and down-rounds.
Building the deck was not hard, but convincing investors was a big challenge. I am more a person who enjoys thinking about building products, new features, thinking about investment opportunities for customers rather than making huge promises to skeptical investors who’s already was having a hard time raising money from angry LPs. So it certainly felt like playing a losing game.
Plus the stakes were high. Budi was stressed out. We were taking minimum wage salaries for months and some of our clients grew impatient due to the lack of movements in the Indonesian stock market. It felt quite dysfunctional because there were so many dirt cheap companies with attractive valuations, yet all the stocks that saw a price rise were the crazy speculative ones.
But anywho, what I heard from our client who’s an executive was to tell good stories. Find a narrative he says. Narrative convinces people.
But how? We are literally just helping people to invest in the stock market in Indonesia. This is very similar to what a lot of people are already doing. What sets us apart?
So I turned into social media of course and searched for “investment” related posts.
For active individuals, there are loads of information out there, many conflicting, and some plain weird. There is even a YouTube channel about predicting the stock market movements by observing the motion of planetary bodies! Today mercury is going to be aligned with Venus, so tomorrow the market will go up. And you should exit your position when Earth’s moon is at a 45 degree angle with Mars. I am definitely no astronomer, but these guys are convincing. I even ended up trying out the course offerings that they sell to the public. Of course, with little luck.
But for some reason, watching these “investment courses” online is such a triggering experience. It causes a deep seated anger as our family (my dad) has bought these courses, met new “investment experts” loss countless of dollars in search of just growing our wealth better.
So I was thinking with the Recompound system:
Only charge a success fee
That’s extra safe because the money is not transferred to us
That really is going to be super appealing to people. Because you don’t have to trust us 100%. Just trust the system that is working right in front of your eyes. And the central thesis was that when this system is established, we will be able to “destroy” the scammers, the fake gurus and put them out of business.
We are disrupting the investment education and advisory space in Indonesia. With the latest AI technology and LLMs deployed in the cloud for maximum scalability and market penetration.
It has a nice ring to it as well. Isn’t it?
Until my Dad (yes my very own Dad), unsubscribed from Recompound. Yep, the worst part? His portfolio was up like 50%+ after 2 years joining in support of his son. Clearly the math is not math-ing. I mean like, what do you really want from an investment? More money? No? The worse part is, I can’t really convince investors if I can’t convince myself. How am I suppose to disrupt the space if my own Dad buys these crazy expensive courses with dubious and unrealistic promises??
In YCombinator (a super respectable startup investor based in the US), startups need to pass the Mom test by gathering honest feedback. Because your Mom will always literally back your idea up. Saying that it is a good idea even if its not.
Well, the Asian (or Chindo) Dad test is basically saying that all of your ideas is sh*t as Chindo Dads are usually just out there to win arguments against their own children to safeguard their ego. It is a force of nature. But if you still think that the idea makes sense as they will poke as many holes as possible, you might be onto something.
But what became clear as day after the interaction with my Dad was that I cannot force people’s behaviour onto them. People who want to gamble, want to fomo, want to speculate will always be doing it as they please. I can’t change their behaviour. Same thing like I can’t tell people not to over consume sugary drinks to avoid diabetes. But I can build the gym for people to exercise. I can organise running events. I can endorse sugarless healthier options.
So what I can do is to build a system to people to get investment advisory in a smarter, more transparent, and most importantly sustainable way. The bet is more and more people will grow to fall into this category. That is when I realised that the goal is not to disrupt. Not to destroy and hate on all the scams, marketing gimmicks, cheap tricks. The goal is to build. That’s one hell of a narrative.
If you’d like to start growing, perhaps you can start from building a better mindset by seeing what we’ve learned in helping high achievers invest better for the long term for years. Just let me know by putting your best email and we’ll send you the materials over the next 30 days.