Jason Schappert grew up in an entrepreneurial family. His Mom and Dad were always working together, and never had jobs. Jason's first job was working for his parents pest control company, where he crafted his understanding of what success looked like. Outside of tech, he is married with 3 kids, and is very into all of their sports. Fun fact, his kids enjoy doing their homeschooling in the office with their Dad, listening to calls and asking big questions - so business is actually what they do for fun.For 16 years, Jason grew and ran a business in aviation. After a successful exit, he and his wife Magda were considering what to do next. She quickly remembered all of the things Jason did behind the scenes to setup their personal finances for success, in the midst of a chaotic startup life.This is the creation story of Moola.SponsorsSpeakeasyQA WolfSnapTradeLinkshttps://moo.la/https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonschappert/Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.com* Check out Vanta: https://vanta.com/CODESTORYSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
Chapter 1: What is the creation story of Moolah?
We couldn't manage our personal finances, which means we couldn't manage our business finances. We almost lost that business on several occasions. And Moolah, oddly enough, was really built out of that. I'm Jason Schappert, and I'm the founder of Moolah.
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I'm your host, Noah Labpart. And today, how Jason Shepard is building smart tools so you can unlock the power of your paycheck and its moolah. This episode is sponsored by Speakeasy. Grow your API user adoption and improve engineering velocity with friction-free integration experiences.
With Speakeasy's platform, you can now automatically generate SDKs in 10 languages and Terraform providers in minutes. Visit speakeasy.com slash codestory and generate your first SDK for free. This message is sponsored by QA Wolf. QA Wolf gets engineering teams to 80% automated end-to-end test coverage and helps them ship five times faster by reducing QA cycles from hours to minutes.
With over 100 five-star reviews on G2 and customer testimonials from SalesLoft, Grotta, and Autotrader, you're in good hands. Join the Wolfpack at QAwolf.com. Jason Shappard grew up in an entrepreneurial family. His mom and dad were always working together, and Jason's first job was working for his parents' pest control company, where he crafted his understanding of what success looked like.
Outside of tech and professional life, he's married with three kids and is very into all of their sports. Fun fact, his kids enjoy doing their homeschooling in the office with their dad, listening to his calls and asking big questions. So business is actually what they do for fun together. For 16 years, Jason grew and ran a business in aviation.
After a successful exit, he and his wife Magda were considering what to do next. She quickly remembered all of the things Jason did behind the scenes to set up their personal finances for success in the midst of a chaotic startup life. This is the creation story of Moolah.
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Chapter 2: How did Jason Schappert transition from aviation to fintech?
We couldn't manage our personal finances, which means we couldn't manage our business finances. We almost lost that business on several occasions. And Moolah, oddly enough, was really built out of that. When my wife and I sold that business and we looked at each other and said, well, we're too young to retire.
And we believe that when you have a skill set, you are called to use it and bring that to the marketplace and whatever that may be. So we relaxed for about two days and we said, what's the next thing we're going to do? My wife said, think of what you've done for our personal finances.
When we knew nothing, when we were making money, you know, in one hand and it was flying out the other hand, right? Like when we had to get a grip on our own finances and we had no clue what we're doing, you built the spreadsheets, you built the algorithms, you built the budgeting system.
It is time to add the technology around that and help other people to steward their finances, their investments in the same way you pulled this family and you pulled this business back from the ropes of defeat, essentially. And that was her little pep talk she gave me. It was taking the system that we know works and applying it to the masses.
Because sometimes, you know, I'm a three-time college dropout. I have just school hard knocks, you know, in everything. I learned the hard way, like so many great entrepreneurs like yourself. And sometimes that is the best education because, you know, what happens in a book and what happens in the real world are often two different things. And that's really what we set out to do at Moolah.
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Chapter 3: What was involved in Moolah's MVP development?
So tell me about Moolah's MVP. So the first version of the product you're building, how long is it taking you to build it has taken you to build and what sort of tools are using to bring it to life?
It was nine months in the making. So we call it our little baby, literally. And it's so funny taking the skills that we learned in the last business, what took us two or three years to come to market. Now, 16 years later, using the same totally different niche, right? From aviation to personal finance and investing. But business is business through and through.
So using that skill set to get us to MVP and using the same philosophy that someone told me 16 years ago with my aviation business. You don't have to get it right. You just have to get it going. And that sounds crazy when you talk about teaching people to fly. It sounds even crazier when you say, Jason, you're dealing people some money in personal finance. And I get it.
There's a perfectionist in all of us that we have to defeat sometimes and remind ourselves that you don't have to get it right. You just have to get it going. So for our MVP, did I want to launch the full banking platform with debit cards and secure credit and business accounts and family accounts? Of course, I wanted to do that. But that wasn't feasible given the budget.
We're entirely self-funded, by the way, from our exit of our last business to what were we going to bring to market? Because it is all about getting to market quickly and testing these iterations. So we launched just the investing side. And we rolled out investing based on what we call the Moolah meter, which is it's more machine learning than it is artificial intelligence.
But there is a large language model in there as well, as well as IRAs, right? Individual individual retirement accounts and setting these sort of things up to set the next generation up for success. Because people are trying to time the market and buy at the right time. In reality, it's time in the market that does so well. So we wanted to get people in and get them in there quickly.
Let's prove our concept here first. And then we roll out the other features. So that's really how we determined our MVP. And that's so tricky as someone in technology to know. When do I feature lock? When do I say enough is enough? When do I stop giving the dev team tickets and bugs and everything else and say, hey, this is it. This is what we're going to market with.
You can make an argument for either side of it. Look at the recent news of what happened to the CEO of Sonos. Released a buggy app and look what happened. Versus the person who never releases the app because they're pursuing to squash every bug. Where is the balance between the Sonos failure and the perfectionist that never launches? You have to meet in the middle on those two things.
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Chapter 4: How does Moolah build its product roadmap?
And that's what's so critical with an MVP.
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I'm so pumped about my new offshore dev partner. I'm saving a ton. And they even signed an NDA. Wait, is that our financial statements on the internet?
My dev partner has great communication. They can acknowledge an issue or email message super fast. After they run it through Google Translate, of course.
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Chapter 5: What is Jason Schappert's approach to team building?
I have a call set up with my partner right now. Hey, guys. Guys, are you there? Wait, did you just ghost me?
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Learn more at tekla.io. That's T-E-C-L-A dot I-O. This episode is sponsored by Speakeasy. Whether you're growing the user adoption of your public API or streamlining internal development, SDKs can turn the chore of API integration into effortless implementation. Unburden your API users from guessing their way around your API while keeping your team focused on your product.
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Everything you need to give your API the developer experience it deserves. Deliver a premium API experience without the premium price tag. Visit speakeasy.com slash codestory to get started and generate your first SDK for free. So you've got the MVP, you've launched the investment side. How are you progressing and maturing the product?
And, you know, there's a lot more sides that you want to release. I'm curious about how you build your roadmap. How do you go about deciding, okay, this is the next most important thing to build or to address with Moolah?
I look at every decision as levers. Does this give me an additional revenue lever to make additional money by delivering additional value to the same customer? In the FinTech space, the customer acquisition cost is off the charts, as you can imagine. It is a very long onboarding process.
If you looked at my Figma screens, you would go, oh my goodness, you know, what is your drop-off percentage on the onboarding, like the abandonment? Because I don't get to pick all these. The SEC has the requirements. FDIC has the requirements. FINRA has the requirements. All these different screens, all these different disclosures.
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