Planning to start own entrepreneurship venture

I graduated in 2022 have a decent salary and saving, 2 more of my friends are planning to start a startup, we have our product ready it's basically for banking and fintech companies to help them leverage text data using custom build NLP models not just llm as inference becomes hard. The problem is we don't know how to approach people. And it's hard to find companies that are willing to take us seriously we were lucky enough to demonstrate our product to few companies they were really impressed by it. But for some reason they thought we are just kids 😅 and not very serious about it. They want some 40+ year person I guess to talk to. I don't know how to proceed with this have shown to some director level people of 3-4 billion dollar valuation fintech and they seemed really interested.any suggestions any help would be greatly appreciated

Jordon Hyrum

Fintech Startup

10 days ago

Was founding member of a fintech startup. We build stacks for psu banks. Our CEO is a well respected person in banking space which is why he is able to get into doors and crack deals. Again to materialise these deals it takes around 8-14 months, as there are multiple levels of approvals and people to convince to. You need to onboard someone who has experience or is well connected in banking space, onboard him/her as a mentor/advisor and give advisory shares if possible. Again this was my personal opinion you can research a bit more

Jordon Lee

Fintech Startup

10 days ago

Also banks are very cautious with their data as rbi has strict guidelines. You might have to check with rbi policies. Reach out to big startup founders they might be able to connect you with some networked people. Go with signzy, digio, m2p etc. They’ll guide you as well

Coy Lee

Stealth

10 days ago

You need to look at decision makers. If whoever you are speaking is actually a decision maker and they are convinced with your product, then it’s good to go. Otherwise , will not recommend spending much time on them. You should also target small banks first or mid tier banks and deploy your solution there. For large banks or fintech companies, the decision makers don’t want to take risks until you offer them a very low cost or free POC as there is zero accountability at their end.

Isaiah Carmden

TCS

10 days ago

I may not be the person you want to hear this from- but investors generally are keen to invest only in minimum viable products that are generating some minimum viable revenue. Then again I’m just a guy who loves watching how greedy people are on Shark tank 🦈