He Raised Millions Before He Had a Business Idea | Shakeel Lala, Marloo

We had all the ingredients to start a business, except for the exact application or idea. It very much felt like we were in this void for about six or seven months where we had both left our jobs. We appeared like we had a product, but it was something that we had vibe coded in the week before. You can vibe code your ideas, you can vibe code products, but you can't vibe code customers. The best time to provide like life-changing advice is that the younger end of the spec, but unfortunately that group of people are locked out of getting advice purely because of the cost. Shock, raise venture capital before he had a business idea. Then spent nine months, 800 conversations, and a vibe coded conference demo in order to find the right idea. Now, his company, Marlou, is the AI doing the work inside more than 650 financial advice first across six countries. And he just raised $10 million to fix the one thing he couldn't find for himself, affordable financial advice. My name is Shakyolala, I come from Marlou, and this is Founders Emotion. Quick thing before we get started. We have a huge goal this year of hitting 10,000 subscribers. Yes, it's ambitious, but it lets us help more people build really great companies. So if you enjoy the content, learn something new, the best way to support us is by subscribing. Okay, let's get back to the video. So Shock, you spent years in high-structured environments, consulting corporate development product lead, then you walked away from all of it, to start something from scratch. So what was the moment you knew you were actually taking the lead? We had a bit of an interesting start, right? Where we decided to start a business, and I felt like we had all the ingredients to start a business, except for the exact application or idea. So, Hardy and I spent almost a year investigating and validating different spaces before we committed. It didn't really felt like we had started a business until we had found that exact application, and that was about nine months into the year. Oh, well. And so very much felt like we were in this void for about six or seven months, where we had both left our jobs. And we were constantly pitching and propositioning different ideas to each other. But in many ways, it felt like we were agreeing on the principles of how we would build and run an operator business before we decided exactly how it would look and feel. So it very much started and felt like we were on our own from the get-go. But then in terms of business building, that was a six months away period. So take us all back to this six months period. When you were testing different applications and ideas and industries, how did you go about it? What were some of the frameworks you guys had in place to do that easily or quickly? Probably three big lessons from that. And I'll mention them and then we can go deeper into them. And the first one, and it's funny that you mentioned frameworks because I call the-- It's the consulting background. It is the consulting background or 100%. The first one is frameworks don't find markets. As an ex-management consultant yourself, I'm sure you can appreciate the most logical thing to do when thrown in a high degree of uncertainty is try build a framework. A decision tree. Or a ranked and ordered list of the key characteristics of the market and the idea that we would essentially assess every potential initiative on. The challenge with that is the five point list grew to a 10 point list, grew to a 20 point list. And then all of a sudden, nothing ever ticked all the boxes or even three quarters of them. So it became this constantly exhausting exercise of when are we going to find the perfect idea. And I'll talk you through some of those framework points. And some of them were almost principles of the market that we'd like to have. We wanted to be in B2B. We wanted to be in vertical SAS. So those ones are much more easy to tick off. Imagine if you just wake up in the morning, you're like, I have to build B2B vertical SAS. I feel like that is also most found as at the moment. So I will not ignore that that's probably the majority of people at this stage. But some of them were nuanced ones where it had to be like a high frequency high-paying point, where we could communicate not only the product, but also the feeling of the solution within a sentence and a half. And that became very, very hard to do for many, many problems and situations, because it had to be a natural extension of what someone is doing today without being too far ahead that it loses their interest or loses their ability to believe in you. Yeah. There was an interesting two or three months of constantly frameworking up ideas, where-- and we actually investigated things like vertical B2B, AI, SAS, for home services, like roofing, plumbing, electrical, incredibly hands-on labor intensive industries that don't have a good software stack or at least a very strong set of fragmented tools saw the value in bringing those tools together. Through to a bunch of other ideas like helping retiring business owners sell their SMB businesses, which we ultimately decided was not only a software problem, it's also a market problem. I think the way I close out that period is that the frameworks don't find markets. So we just decided to have more of a gut feel and found a market-let approach to initially giving our way in narrowing down the selection of ideas. Yeah. And I would say that exercise of trying to force framework fit on things helped us rapidly go through a whole bunch of different ideas, helped us sharpen our problem and idea identification such that when we found a particular space, we're interested in it. We could defend it and articulate it far better and faster. So while it was a good exercise in and of itself, it just wasn't the only exercise we went through to find the eventual idea. And that sort of takes me on to the second one, which is, when you have nothing, or it's a particular in our case, our network was our mode. Mm-hmm. You're in that work, is your net worth, you know? Yeah, exactly. Oh man, we were so cliche. We really needed to get the consulting background out of us. Yeah, when we threw out the frameworks out the window, we essentially went back to, okay, like, who are the people who are interesting that we can just talk to to start testing applications of vertical B2B AI SaaS in a whole bunch of different markets. And it just started to feel like a snowball where we were able to reach out to managing directors, heads of firm CEOs with our background experience at Sharesys. Yeah. Because we did and held like relatively impactful roles there. That in and of itself was how we got our first early beta conversations, customer testing, that opened up doors to eventually get that 800 conversations we had in the first 12 months. Beautiful. And the last thing just to close it out was like, when we're in those 800 conversations, it wasn't just tell me about your pain points and listen for problem identification. We took a slightly different approach. We initially got those conversations by saying, okay, look, let us sit inside your firm for one or two days, let us talk to management, compliance, support, advisors, and we'll help you shape what could be an AI first way of operating, waiting. So very much was that consultative approach to get us in the door. But when we're in the door, it quickly transitioned to more of like a product propositioning exercise. Where we constantly positioned Marlu and reposition Marlu to eventually we got to the point of having someone listen to the half sentence and through that alone, being keen to buy the product. But we didn't get there overnight, right? It took a number of months to get to the point where we had that really sharp proposition. And so the proposition was at by the end of it. Let me record a meeting between yourself and a client. And by the time you get back to your desk, the notes will be written for you in your own style tone structure format. And that was it. That was enough to people feel like, wow, okay. If these guys are saying this true, then I'm not doing my notes after I put the kids to bed. I'm not constantly stressed between meetings, trying to tell my team what I actually discussed with a client. Like I feel the sense of relief when they're describing the product to me. Yeah. Awesome. So okay, before we get ahead of ourselves, I do have a follow up for that. Oh, sorry. No, no, no, no. It's a really great breakdown. I'm sorry, I just wanted to dive deeper into it. But before we get there, so what? What is Marlow? Marlow is an AI partner for financial advisors that helps them do their work within an advice firm. So we started very much as a note taker and assistant for advisors when we launched a year ago. Now Marlow is doing the work inside advice firms to ultimately allow advisors to be much more client-facing. So back to how you went through that process of ideating, testing and pivoting. There is a balance between moving from ideas quickly and also building a deep understanding in that space before you move on. Like how do you balance that? The fastest way to balance that is to try and defend it in front of someone else. And if you can't get strong alignment unbiased and that was like the hardy and I approach, then immediately it's dead. The sort of time investment we gave ourselves was very much, can we convince the other person that this is worth a day's work to further button down and investigate. And then we'd both commit to helping push the idea forward. But then we'd almost force ourselves to write another one page and repitch the idea back to each other. That would unlock potentially the next three days. We forced ourselves to be relatively commercial with our time so we didn't spend the whole year just in research mode. We very much knew that we had to still have a product in market within 12 months and by the time we were six months in and still without an exact idea that very much turned up the heat again. Just needing to have a large surface area of exploration to get a good sense of what good felt like and what bad felt like was a necessary exercise because I don't think we would have jointly agreed that the exact application that we've chosen now was the right one unless we had turned over all of those hats. But then once we did turn the advice AI application over, that was the right one immediately. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense based on how you guys met your background in FinTech. So it really felt like a natural. It did feel like a lot more of a natural fit than potentially roofing. I love roofing though. It's the positive cash flowing business. It's actually make a lot of money. They do. Yeah. I can do a sense that you guys are very much about pain point discovery and making sure you're building the right thing before you even start building. So I think there's a story that you mentioned that before you guys had a working prototype, you and Hardy paid to exhibit one of Australia's biggest financial advice conferences. So at some point, probably I assume someone walks up to the booth, maybe ask you a few questions or maybe try to play with a broken demo. What's going through your head at the moment as someone that has always been very deeply analytical? Well design build is the way to build products, particularly in this era. So it's not enough to be analytical and sure because you can get a lot further just by being highly iterative and fast. And that that starts to contend a little bit with what you're saying around really, really analyzing the situation in the market before being confident enough to get something out. The way things are moving now, speed met is more than anything else. And so you're not going, I think it's about accepting that you're never going to be right, but the fastest path to be right is to just getting started as opposed to over analyzing the situation. Once we decided on the idea, we spoke to, you know, Adam and advisor on the world. The tail end of that was buying an exhibit of stand at the financial advice Australia conference in Brisbane at the end of 2024. We appeared like we had a product, but it was something that we had vibe coded in the week before on the early, on the sort of 2024 versions of vibe coding. So it was probably a lot more fun. Is it been around for you now? Then what you can get shipped with Claude today. And it was a very simple product. It would allow me to record a meeting, a fake meeting with someone who had come to our store. And by the time the minute was up, 10 seconds later that get an email summary of the meeting. But the key difference we started to show was the benefit of it being an advice specific. We deliberately talked about how's the weather, things that extended beyond the advice conversation just so I could show them by the time that recording was done and they received the email. It filtered out all of the additional information. It was just a nice concise advice specific summer. That was it. And then we had people really willing to buy it. So it's as much as we could have analyzed the situation, we could have predicted where exactly people would get interested in the exact words that we would say that would light up their eyes. That's why like being analytical helps for a little bit, but it doesn't help you push through into getting a product proposition out to market. So once we had people interested to buy the product, we knew we should have started building it yesterday. Yeah, you know, it's like sometimes you have to live in the uncomfortableness to test certain things out in the wild. Yeah. Because like you can vibe code your ideas, you can vibe code products, but you can't vibe code customers. Yes, for sure. And you can't vibe code sales. No, exactly. Distribution metas mold and anything. So, so somewhere along this process between the 800 advisors, between the six months, between the nine months, one of the largest VC in Australia, back to you and Hardy, before you settled on a business idea, something that is quite and heard of in Australia, when was this across that discovery journey? It was right at the start. Right at the start. Right at the start. Almost as we were getting started. Oh, really? So. But at this point, you've quitted your job. You've already determined that you're going to do it either way. How did you quit his job? I hadn't just yet. Yeah. He was, yeah, ready. He was all in and I needed a few more months to get there. As soon as I committed, but I had had a few more things to wrap up, but he managed to secure some early funding before we got started on the promise of let the two of us spend a year investigating different markets and trust us that we will get a product to market in 12 months. Yeah. And, or know that we haven't found anything and be relatively honest about it. And that was a bit of a trust exercise as well. Yeah. So, obviously that's very uncommon with the funding market here. What do you think made you guys really good bets? You are purely investing in the people. If we really, really believe that founders are the driving force behind a business, why do we need to make sure that they have an idea? Yeah. So, the number of situations we've seen found is pivot change or end up over capitalizing and potentially dud ideas. It kind of does make sense to give someone or group of people the space to properly test a specific market and application before doubling and down, doubling down into the exact idea. And so, like, and that formed a lot of our early thesis as well. We wanted to be very, very sure about the market before we decided to go guns blazing at building and it, because the belief we had there was that it's never been easier to build technology. What matters more is that you build the right thing. You can distribute it and you can't vibe code those two things. I do think conviction is a really important thing. Like I can imagine like you guys are already saying that oh, we're going to do this like either way, we already have the methodology and the thinking and the frameworks and the timelines innately for ourselves that we're going to follow with or without this. Yeah. Yeah. We were up for doing ourselves anyway. Yeah. So, like, the upside was that we had a little bit of extra cover on the, you know, keeping ourselves afloat side. And then with taking external capital so early on, which is a little bit against the philosophy right now of like you can bootstrap up until like one or two mil, do you ever feel a sense of internal pressure? You always feel a sense of pressure, I would say. And like we sit very high expectations of ourselves. And I think like the helpful thing in that dynamic is like, I think the internal pressure is probably higher than the external pressure. So we constantly challenge ourselves to the point where external pressure doesn't matter so much because the internal one is so happy already. Exactly. The internal expectations and the internal intrinsic motivation we have is so powerful that that carries us through a lot as well. And that's also what I would say catalyzes the team to feel motivated as well. It's not this, this is happening to us sort of like victim-led mindset of like pressure is being forced upon us. We've completely flipped that narrative. It's like, we have the power. And the resources to make something like truly large now. It's on us to like, to execute and turn it into a really big thing. So your co-founder is based in London. You have a deaf team in Wellington. You are around Sydney, London and Wellington every now and then. Sometimes New Zealand to visit family as well. You guys kind of been running. rather across hemisphere. How is it like on a day to day building with a co-founder from the opposite side of the world? I would say it comes down to having really good and clear alignment and division of responsibilities that allowed us to build almost entirely async. The product was developed largely on the apex side of the world and it was distributed in the UK and other markets via Hardy in the UK too. We very much had good instincts as to what each other should be leading from to make it easier to build almost entirely async. That worked well but we're now at the size where there's a lot more overlap regionally and that has allowed us or made us think more deeply around how we build now a global team where we do have you know go to market initiatives that technically overlap a little bit across the different regions and we're now thinking through how we connect other members of our team so we don't have like an entirely globally split team but we're all singing from the same song sheet. But some of the feedback early on was definitely that we are building the business on hard mode having this re-founders. So Ben, our engineering co-founders based in Wellington, having them all us all synced up was fairly challenging but once we got into good rhythms and patterns like it's allowed us to divide and conquer a lot faster I would say. Yeah and is there any benefit from that as well? Yeah obviously like the main benefit in that is that we get to be present in three markets at once. Usually startups that we've seen you know go on this journey of graduating market to market, particularly being from New Zealand. We always had this view that like every other market other than New Zealand is bigger than New Zealand market so it's challenging. You've got to like either graduate but if you employ that methodology of needing to graduate from each market as we kind of discuss like if times of the essence you need to go now. So that's why we took the approach of like launching in the UK and Australia and NZ all at the same time and being up for the challenges that came with it. So we built the business around that being true as opposed to the alternative which was like needing to graduate through all the different markets but that has enabled us now to be present in six or seven markets which is you know truly a phenomenal achievement that I don't think would have happened if we were to have just started in one. It forces a high degree of flexibility to be built into the product from day one such that now we are far more flexible as a team in terms of executing product opportunities. That's really interesting too because you would think for a product like financial advice or financial services it's quite localized based on the regulations around the financial services. So how do you think about like building a product with the flexibility for it to be in six or seven markets? Yeah totally it's a high to do at the get go but once we've cracked it it was unbelievable in terms of how much of like the same infrastructure we could use as a business to apply and create quite different materially different outputs in different markets. So like I give you a super quick overview of it. It's almost we built four levels of flexibility into the product. One is like essentially the laws of the country that you're in. The next degree of flexibility is like the network and licensing arrangement for firms within that country and each firm could be in a different network and that's important because each licensing arrangement has different things that they're regulated by the regulator on. Then you've got the firms preferences styling compliance program and then you've got the individuals tone structure preferences as well. So building a product that could be variable to four different you know environments or have four different levers that could all change for any particular individual on the product was a complex problem to solve for you. But now that we've cracked it it's allowed us to rapidly scale out to different markets. Yeah super exciting and then so when you think about commercial pull where is it mainly coming from market-wise for you guys? We had our early success and growth in the ANZ side of the world but now we're growing fastest over in the UK. Oh okay exciting. Relic-sounding. And then you said 67 markets so it's UK, Australia, New Zealand. And we've got small numbers of paying customers in US, Canada, South Africa. That's impressive. A lot of English-speaking countries. We handle 44 languages in the app but that's for the purpose of recording and meeting and getting an output or creating a document. The UI is all in English currently and obviously we're thinking about ways we can be flexible in that front as well. So the mission framing of Marlou is all about access. The everyday person who can't afford a financial advisor. But the product that you're selling right now goes to large financial advisory firms. So how does one become the other and what has to be true for that to actually work out? The story behind the question and the story behind the answer was that while I was working about five years ago I tried to find a financial advisor and I was unsuccessful. And the two reasons behind that were one I did not have enough liquid assets to transfer into a portfolio where someone could charge a variable fee on those liquid assets to cover their fixed cost of servicing me as a client. The second piece is that I didn't feel like there were any attractive propositions that spoke to me as if I wanted to be a client of that particular business. Most of them were geared towards people who were perhaps 10 or 15 years my senior. Probably had a family, probably had a mortgage. I had neither. I was very much in the growth stages of my career. But I wanted some like early advice to help me just test some ways of thinking around my personal financial situation in the modern world where a lot fewer people are now buying property. There's a lot more renting. What if you weren't to follow the traditional path if you need to buy a property to financially secure your future? Like help me test some other ways of thinking and I didn't find those propositions. One of the big drivers of advice in accessibility is the cost to deliver advice. You talk to any advisor, you talk to any client or potential clients considered. The cost is not a small amount. The value is certainly there. But the compliance requirements for an advisor to provide advice to someone are so high that the cost get pulled up in order to deliver that advice person. So we very much work in events that the inaccessibility is driven by the cost to deliver and that translates into the cost to the client. That's how you end up with those high minimum fees. It's an area I'm also very personally aligned to. I think growing up I did a finance degree and even after all of that I felt like I had no understanding of what actually works in terms of my own portfolio, how to grow my own financial assets and what's actually accessible to me. So and I think it's something that a lot of people struggle with especially at the early where you're having small sum of some money and you don't even know what assets you can invest in. Totally. But if you speak to any advisor they would say the best time to provide life-changing advice is that the younger end of the spectrum when you're 25 to 35, when you've just started earning money you're thinking about forming your long-term financial habits. If you can change someone's habits and make them think about money saving budgeting before you get to investing and depositing, like if you get them to think about money differently fundamentally, those are some of the biggest shifts you can have in terms of someone's long-term financial trajectory. But unfortunately that group of people are locked out of getting advice purely because of the cost. And I think that's why we were so motivated to attack the specific area because we ourselves wanted advice and couldn't get it through largely the cost and accessibility. You guys just raised a huge $10 million round. Well first off congratulations. Thank you. No small fee in this market. No it's not. What does Marlow have to look like in five years for you to feel like it was all worth it? It's all going well. Look I think the first of all timelines are being extremely compressed. A year ago we started out as a note ticker that allowed people to use a custom template to get an output that looked like theirs felt like theirs and they could ask questions of that particular engagement or meeting to get a very specific output. That was a note ticker. plus a few extra features that wrapped it up to feel compliance, tailored, personal and also reminding or reassuring if someone had forgotten a particular detail. We always had the view that note-taking would be commoditized fairly quickly. A year later, I think we can all say note-taking has been completely commoditized. Every digital tool out there offers some version of an AI summary now and so the bar for us is so much higher, which we've met and definitely exceeded in terms of then it's not enough to help with the work. You actually need to do the work within advice firms and what I mean by that is now we do notes, emails, advice documents, tasks and forms. We pull that all into one area to build Malar as the AI partner for advice. Doing the work that's the current state where we want to get to is to be that true system of action where advises are focusing on the parts that they are good at, that they're good at, that they are paid for which is the trust, judgment, empathy and delivering advice. But right now there's been 80% of their time not doing that. It's on the busy work. So my three-year vision is that Malar becomes that true AI partner for advises that allows them to focus much more on clients and delivering advice and Malar her does a lot of the rest of the work. For the different personas in a firm so it's extending from just being a tool for advises and support staff to being a tool for or a product for a compliance and management to understand how the firm is actually operating because at the end of the day compliance is such a key consideration in the advice provision when the rules are so specific and clear that there's a lot of nervousness around the version of advice and so there's a lot of checking in sampling that goes on in the compliance world. Exciting you really compress your time frame. I as a five you're like three we'll get in three. We'll get there in three because like I said 12 months ago we said not taking will be commoditized we said it'll take a year it took six months. So it's been over a year for you guys. Still early days but disimmittal time. So what do you think has been the most valuable lesson that you've learned in your founder journey thus far? I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to sell the product before you build it. Find some people who are so excited about your product they're willing to tell other people about it. Your product does not even have to exist. It's the proposition that matters more and your proposition should be so clear that your product does not need to exist for them to communicate and tell someone what it does and for at least you to understand how that proposition makes them feel. You can get very far with the likes of Claude design right now that your job is to communicate a product that has an insane amount of value in a very simple manner and that should be your sole focus. Some of those early conversations we had like the 800 people that we spoke to. That's also a large amount of people that is a large amount of people. Working alongside them, working in their firm, multiple different personas within a firm, management, compliance, support, advice, conferences, webinars, virtual meetings, linked and outreach. It was attack on all fronts to find that 800. We needed to be sure enough that they came from different advice verticals, different countries, different ways of thinking so that we were more sure and tested from just a single market product. That helped form the base of our early customers. So when we had a product ready to go, we didn't have to go find the customers. We already had a network of people to market it too and that became the early capitalizer of our go-to-market motion. So not only did you get advice, you literally have a perspective list as well. So you're essentially doing kind of like go-to-market distribution prior to even building everything. Totally. Network is your moment. Thank you so much, Zach. I appreciate you coming on and I learned so much about the early discovery period. Awesome. Thank you so much for having me. That's a wrap. If you like this episode, please hit the like and subscribe button. It helps us bring on more awesome guests, love our production and bring on new series you'll want to watch. And if you want to hear more early sage builder stories, check out our other episodes. Okay, see you next time.