Digital Social Hour
Master LinkedIn Marketing Like Saphyre's Founders I Stephen & Gabino Roche DSH #1306
Mon, 07 Apr 2025
Ready to **master LinkedIn marketing like Saphyre's founders**? 🚀 Tune into this episode of the Digital Social Hour with Sean Kelly as we sit down with Stephen and Gabino Roche, the brilliant twin founders of Saphyre. These trailblazing entrepreneurs reveal how they leveraged LinkedIn's organic strategies to dominate the B2B finance world, even during a global lockdown. 💼✨ From Saphyre's groundbreaking technology that accelerates fund launches to secrets of executing a winning LinkedIn strategy, this episode is packed with valuable insights you can't afford to miss. 💡 Learn how they turned challenges into victories, built a company with ZERO customer churn, and gained heavyweight clients like BlackRock and JPMorgan—all while staying resilient through the ups and downs of entrepreneurship. 💪 Want to know their insider tactics for LinkedIn marketing success? How they repurpose content from conferences for massive visibility? Or why Kevin O'Leary praised their execution? This is the ultimate playbook for aspiring entrepreneurs and marketers alike! 🎯 Watch now and subscribe for more insider secrets. 📺 Hit that subscribe button and stay tuned for more eye-opening stories on the Digital Social Hour with Sean Kelly! 🚀 Don't miss out—join the conversation and take your marketing game to the next level today! 🙌 CHAPTERS: 00:00 - Intro 00:34 - What is Safeguarding 02:55 - Your First Start-Up 05:02 - Did It Take Off Right Away? 06:07 - How to Get Your First Customer 11:24 - How Saphyre's Accelerated Growth 12:44 - LinkedIn Marketing Strategy for Start-Ups 17:32 - Importance of Branding in Business 20:14 - Importance of Pre-Trade Data 24:30 - Value of Pre-Trade Data in Post-Trade Issues 26:10 - Insights from Kevin O'Leary 27:58 - Suffering the Details in Business 33:19 - Recognizing Your Value 34:57 - Will AI Replace Stock Traders? 40:32 - Funding Raised by Safeguard 47:23 - What's Next for Saphyre? 48:54 - Real-Time Statuses for Portfolio Managers 50:06 - Benefits of Saphyre for Front Office 50:48 - Upcoming AI Announcements 51:40 - T+1 Settlement in Europe 52:12 - Where to Find Saphyre APPLY TO BE ON THE PODCAST: https://www.digitalsocialhour.com/application BUSINESS INQUIRIES/SPONSORS: [email protected] GUEST: Stephen & Gabino Roche https://www.instagram.com/twinning.roche https://www.instagram.com/grochejr https://www.saphyre.com/ SPONSORS: PROLON: http://prolonlife.com/DSH LUMATI: https://www.lumati.com/dsh LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/digital-social-hour/id1676846015 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Jn7LXarRlI8Hc0GtTn759 Sean Kelly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmikekelly/ #linkedinoutreach #linkedinsalesnavigator #emailmarketing #coldemail #growthmarketing
Chapter 1: Who are the founders of Saphyre?
All right, guys, got some twins on today, Steven and Gabino from Sapphire. Thanks for joining me today, guys.
Thanks for having us.
Yeah. So for those that don't know what Sapphire is about, could you briefly explain?
Chapter 2: What is Saphyre and how does it help financial institutions?
Yeah, sure. I mean, if you were a C-level executive, I'm meeting you at the elevator. The elevator pitch would be, we help financial institutions launch new funds as fast as 24 hours to be ready to trade. And after trade execution, we can help settle those trades at near real time.
Mm-hmm.
Now, what does that mean? Well, a big investment manager wins a pension fund, let's say the Walmart pension fund. In the old days, before we existed, it could take a few months, six months, maybe 18 months before they could start trading on it. Now with our tech, it's plausible to get ready tomorrow.
Wow.
So a big investment manager doesn't want any slowdown. They'll put their onboarding through our platform. They'll tell their broker dealers or custodians, hey, if you want to be first to trade in this new fund, you might want to look at this technology. So it's quite compelling in that aspect. And then we eliminate some of the issues in post-trade.
And we do this with 108 patents that my identical twin brother invented. Wow, that's a lot of pints, man. Yeah. It remembers a data point entered and a document shared for the lifecycle of the fund, from inception to settlement. Now, we have a lot of big clients that use us. I mean, it's very humbling. You couldn't ask for a bigger win than having your first client as BlackRock.
And then, you know, to follow that, how can you make it any bigger? Our second client was JP Morgan and then BNY Mellon and so on and so forth. A lot of them have the press releases out on our website. You can check it there. We've been in business for about eight years and knock on wood, we have a zero churn. Not one customer. Wow.
That's insane. I've never heard of a company with zero churn that's been around that long. Well done.
Just to put a little color to this, because the complexity in actually launching these funds, I mean, we're dealing with global investment managers and they're not just trading in the US and the UK. It's India, it's Brazil. And so you have to deal with the local regulators, the local banks. That's part of this process of why it takes sometimes months.
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Chapter 3: What challenges did Saphyre face in its early years?
Chapter 4: How did Saphyre achieve zero customer churn?
So a big investment manager doesn't want any slowdown. They'll put their onboarding through our platform. They'll tell their broker dealers or custodians, hey, if you want to be first to trade in this new fund, you might want to look at this technology. So it's quite compelling in that aspect. And then we eliminate some of the issues in post-trade.
And we do this with 108 patents that my identical twin brother invented. Wow, that's a lot of pints, man. Yeah. It remembers a data point entered and a document shared for the lifecycle of the fund, from inception to settlement. Now, we have a lot of big clients that use us. I mean, it's very humbling. You couldn't ask for a bigger win than having your first client as BlackRock.
And then, you know, to follow that, how can you make it any bigger? Our second client was JP Morgan and then BNY Mellon and so on and so forth. A lot of them have the press releases out on our website. You can check it there. We've been in business for about eight years and knock on wood, we have a zero churn. Not one customer. Wow.
That's insane. I've never heard of a company with zero churn that's been around that long. Well done.
Just to put a little color to this, because the complexity in actually launching these funds, I mean, we're dealing with global investment managers and they're not just trading in the US and the UK. It's India, it's Brazil. And so you have to deal with the local regulators, the local banks. That's part of this process of why it takes sometimes months.
And a lot of this was actually manual paperwork, actually FedEx documents. to kind of get the wet signatures and stuff. So that's part of what we're bringing into bear with the digitization of this entire workflow. And it's not even just a workflow. It's actually, we'll get into that a little bit. What we're actually doing is remembering this data for the industry, digitizing it.
And COVID has created an opportunity now to accelerate that because at that time, people couldn't go out and interact. So you had to be digital.
Yeah, that makes sense. And now this was your guys' first startup, right? Yeah.
Well, I've done a couple other startups before. They failed and it was a mobile app business that broke even. And honestly, and I say this for anyone who's watching as an entrepreneur, you could pay, I lost 80,000 the first year in the mobile app business. That's a lot as an individual. This is back in 2012 or something like that. And I learned so much from it.
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Chapter 5: What is the importance of resilience in entrepreneurship?
Because you can't afford it, yeah.
Yeah. You wouldn't know the names, but, you know, we don't want to go sue them. We went with the product approach and, you know, our history growing up, we're all about resilience and, you know, perseverance. So we stuck through it. And I would say, you know, about five years in, we started getting our footing really well and establishing ourselves moving forward.
I think the thing is... persistence and perseverance. And I always liken this because people who want to be entrepreneurs, they're enamored with the Instagram experience that they see and posting their vacations or or cars or whatever it is.
Anyways, but the truth is, is like you work out at the gym, you go regularly three to four times a week and you're suffering to get that chest pump, that shoulder press, those bicep curls. It's painful. It's annoying. You got to do the grind. You got to do the same thing mentally and even spiritually weekly. And people don't spend time like that.
The smartphone creates instant gratification and distraction. So now it's even harder than ever. I will tell you that Regularly I spend at least at a minimum three hours on the weekend, maybe close to four, where I zone out. I listen to music that's instrumental, without words so I don't sing along. And then I just write notes. Like I journal what I did the last week.
What story do I want to tell in three months from now, six months from now, a year from now? That helps me plan. And I'm pivoting on that regularly. And I say this because you'll say, hey, I checked the box. I took a course and people told me to do these things and didn't work because people are memorizing assets following instructions.
And the truth is you have to tailor that stuff as it comes so that you know you're meeting the market's needs.
And part of what Stephen just shared, and I can give my background a little bit on how we arrived here, but I say this for any entrepreneur who might be watching is that you may have a great idea, but the altruistic nature of that idea isn't enough to get the adoption for people to buy your product or service.
You have to come to terms with the fact that you have to address the selfish needs of your customers first. So I'll give two quick examples, if that's okay. Like that mobile app business I talked about. The funny story where I had, my company was listed on a clickbait website, but some Quady family found us and thought we were like the number two best mobile app company out there.
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Chapter 6: What is Saphyre's LinkedIn marketing strategy?
Very boring.
If you sit around, my board used to argue and say, what is this? You know, you're trying to get followers like you do on Instagram, et cetera. They didn't get it. It's like, guys, think of it like the 1980s, you know? So there was 13 channels. What happened when a commercial came on? you walked away or you turned the channel. Okay.
But if you're making me put an ad every single time on LinkedIn, and I have to talk about what my product is and what, you know, you should pay for this and that, people will stop following you. They'll tune out. So we're about informing or entertaining in our approach. Now that goes- And that's the other thing real quick. You've said this before.
People follow people.
Yeah.
They don't really necessarily follow companies, although there are exceptions. And you tell a story, and I think we've been very open about our journey and even our struggles and the hustle. I mean, even to arrive here, I mean, what was it? I went to Orlando, St. Petersburg, London, Dublin, London, Las Vegas now, then I go to New York and then Boston back to New York.
So like, that's a grind, right? We're going through it. And I think we try to share, like, sometimes it's not about the product. It's just, hey, I'm heading here. We take a picture of the skyline or I take a picture out of the plane's window to kind of show, I mean, there's some pretty nice shots. I tell people don't close your window shades. God's got a beautiful canvas he's painting.
But this draws people in because they can relate. Yeah. As opposed to just a logo and then, oh, here's this service.
We're taking an approved, here's the other thing, a lot of people don't get, they get an approved marketing message or a PDF that they give and hand out at the conferences. Nobody wants to see something that's all selling on there. And everybody should be saying the same message and sharing that one slider that we have. We think it's great. Well, guess what? These platforms are very smart.
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Chapter 7: How can startups leverage LinkedIn for B2B marketing?
And we get constant feedback that everyone's saying it's, it's top notch, but still for the regular entrepreneur from the adoption plan piece. And what we've done in our case is, our targets are these banks, how do we transform them? Steven alluded to it in his explanation of like how the process kind of works today. I point to smartphones because smartphones are not that smart.
They point to the cloud and there isn't, you know, three versions of Steven's LinkedIn profile. Cause there's three of us here. There's one version of the cloud and we all reconcile that. And the industry, although they'll argue otherwise, I know because I worked with all these major institutions, I saw their data.
And Stephen quickly said it, but I don't think people who are watching me appreciate this. He talked about consortium. I got to see several banks' data together. I used to think, I used to work at JP Morgan and I thought the world worked like JP Morgan. And then I got to see the data from all the other major players on the street. And I realized it's a little bit of a cluster.
And what's happening here is their customers, such as BlackRock and others, right, that are doing business and trades with them, are not just trading with one bank, they're trading with all of them, right? And if they win the Coca-Cola pension fund, the Walmart pension fund, the IBM pension fund, they're trading on their behalf, right?
They're resending that information to every single one of those firms that they trade with and everyone that they custody or bank with, okay? And the pitch that I made is, and the learning I made was, okay, how about we create this repository in the cloud? This was the altruistic idea, by the way.
So the idea that I wanted to come out with that supermarket delivery app piece was, why don't we create this repository where people can real-time, the customers can real-time reconcile their data And all the banks that do business benefit from it. And the customers can self-serve it.
So you can't have better information than your customers identifying that it's Sean or it's Stephen that can trade on these accounts. And here are the data points, the tax forms and everything, validating it real time. Because right now, the firms are working more, not right now, some of them, some of them are working with us, are still working in a batch process. We're doing Excel file exchanges.
It's point in time. And they still have mainframes and Windows 95 and multiple departments and they bought multiple banks and they duct tape this stuff together. And they're plugging the holes in the dam. So they're afraid to come off of it. But if your clients are self-affirming this in the cloud, it's a great on-ramp to revamping and doing this digital transformation.
All of them agreed, by the way, that we need this type of technology, this market infrastructure, creating the rails to do this. Not a single one wanted to adopt it. And so the plan was we went to, you know, the top 22 investment managers have a trillion dollars or more in assets, right? BlackRock being at the top, but you know, that's public, right?
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Chapter 8: Why is branding important for business growth?
A lot of the investments have done in post-trade because they're reacting to traders. A trader made their money during the day and they're screaming, fix my failed trade, my crash trade, because something happened in operations. And so they have all these thousands of people in post-trade to try to reassemble things.
And the way they're treating it is like they're trying to reassemble a crash plane to go fly to its destination and land there. But if they just invested in the pre-trade before the plane took off and just put the right security precautions in place, you wouldn't have to deal with crash planes. And that's where the value is that we bring in here. So we start in pre-trade, we create the memory,
And then we eliminate 75 up to 75% of those issues in post-trade just by doing our stuff in pre-trade. And then when there are issues, we can re-expose the information. Like my brother was talking about the H2 digit code. We already mapped it. We know exactly what it is, where it belongs to, who it's for. You can assemble it quickly in post-trade and settle that trade in near real time.
Yeah. It's a proactive approach, right? Right. You mentioned Buffett. Did you guys see he sold all his stocks the other day?
Oh, we were traveling, of course. Right.
Yeah. Really? Sold everything. To what? Do you see what he's buying now? I don't know. He stays pretty low key. I feel like he doesn't really announce that beforehand usually, right?
Yeah. No, he doesn't.
Yeah. That dude's really smart. So that kind of spooked me a little bit. We'll see what happens. Yeah. Kevin O'Leary spoke at your conference last year, right? Yeah. What were some big takeaways from that?
It was an honor to have him there. Obviously, he's notorious for Shark Tank and entrepreneurship. And he gave some nice words for us over there. And it was kind of like a nice time. We had it at NASDAQ. Nice. Kind of like leading to what could be our future. Um, IPO maybe. Yeah. We'll have to see. Uh, but he was quite impressed about what we've been doing.
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