Generally we're just trying to help people be a lot better with their money and we offer an investment product in order to solve one of those issues. We're trying to give access to people that haven't had access to quality, low-cost investment products before.

Our business is all about partnering with people, helping them access products that they hadn't had access to before, getting them to trust us, helping them with their money. Whatever we do needs to fit in with that.

I don't think it's been difficult, primarily because our USP is our north star. When you introduce a new feature or when you're thinking of introducing a new product, you just ask if it will jeopardise our USP in terms of simplicity.

We've got a mechanism that we use where we segment customers into how much they like us. It's not a great segmentation mechanism, but it works. We ask people how disappointed they would be if Franc wasn't around tomorrow.

In terms of engineering, we run sprints over two weeks to execute certain tasks on the app, or the website or the backend. There's a lot of stuff that goes into what a customer sees, but also what they don't see but are needed to make the app work and the experience as good as it can be.

It's playing a long-term game. A lot of the stuff that we're doing in terms of content generation and the academy itself, is to build people's trust so that they end up seeing Franc as the go-to people for financial advice. It might take a person 18 months to make the first deposit because that's how long it took them to trust us.

The process of automating takes time. So if we tried to do that too early, it would have taken a couple of weeks of development time and headspace that we could have put into things like product efficiency, for example. So we had to balance when to do things and why to do them.

When you're developing the talent that's going to take over the role, you need to teach as much as possible. Be patient, and impart as much of your knowledge as possible to them because you can't expect them to know. 

You can do a lot of stuff with open source software. You can use Google forms, or if it's a delivery service, you can use Uber. There's a lot of free tech that you can leverage off in order to validate whether your idea is good or bad.

In terms of the ecosystem, we need more successful companies, and companies that have scaled to a certain funding metric or a customer acquisition metric - whatever measure you want to use.