In The Room with Katherine Salisbury
In this week’s episode of The Room Podcast, Madison and Claudia sit down with Katherine Salisbury, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Qapital, a mobile banking app designed to help incentivize people to save smarter. Qapital is a unique start up in many ways, one of which is it has a Chief Behavioral Economist! Dan Ariely serves as their “CBE” and leverages science to propel people into better money habits. Since its inception in 2015, Qapital has helped millions of users collectively save over $2 billion.
This week’s key themes include navigating raising venture capital with an untraditional background, co-founding your business with your significant other, and the benefits to making your consumer product paid in the world of free. Let’s open the door.
Season 4 is sponsored by our friends at SVB and Cooley.
Key Theme 1: Navigating raising venture capital with an untraditional background
After graduating from Cornell Law, Katherine started her career as a lawyer in New York City before moving to Europe to found and run a sports management company focused on soccer. This isn’t your typical fin tech founder profile. Katherine advises founders who may have doubts about starting a company in a space they’re less familiar with to show up ready to learn and be willing to put the time and energy to get there. While it maybe be a learning curve to work out all the kinks, in her experience, perseverance pays off. That’s how’s she’s built tow businesses successfully in completely unrelated fields.
Key Theme 2: Co-founding your business with your significant other
Co-founding Qapital with her significant other George Friedman, Katherine gives some tips on how to balance personal and work life. In her experience, she’s found it is easier to be on the same rollercoaster with a significant other as they can have shared empathy on the big wins or hard days. Katherine caveated all this with the importance of being able to turn workoff and to know when to put work aside for the day.
Key Theme 3: Making your product a paid product in the world of free
When deciding the pricing plan for their product, Katherine and her team went to several pricing experts and ended up developing a lasting partnership with Simon Kucher. Through this partnership,Qapital tested different options out and was able to back up Katherine’s initial intuitions with detailed research. Specifically, we loved Katherine’s framing of the value her customers place on their product. Qapital is so useful for their core customers that they are willing to pay for it. For a founder out there who’s wrestling with converting your consumer experience to a paid one, take a play from Katherine’s play book and speak to your customers to understand their needs. For another episode which touches on the conversation around paid consumer experiences, see Sridhar Ramaswamy of Neeva.
Thank you so much for tuning into another week of The Room Podcast. Join us on Clubhouse on Wednesday, Sept. 1 at 1:30PM PST to hear directly from Katherine! New episodes launch every Tuesday at 7AM PST.
