Examples of Past Successful Applications

Peek's Application Form

Peek is an AI-powered personal finance platform that helps you track, manage, and grow your net worth. Peek integrates global accounts, provides real-time portfolio insights, and streamlines rebalancing to empower users with informed financial decisions.

Peek addresses the unique problem that global citizens face in managing their finances. Global citizens - which comprise of expats, immigrants, digital nomads, and second-generation immigrants - currently make up 500M of the word’s population and are expected to grow 20-50% over the next decade. However, they face the challenge where consolidating all their finances in one place - across different accounts and currencies - is still quite a pain, and underaddressed by the solutions today that are usually designed as single-market (e.g., US product for US citizens). Lack of full visibility into one's finances makes it significantly harder to plan for and make informed decisions around major expenditures, manage cash flow, save for retirement, manage risk across net worth, optimize investment decisions, budget effectively, understand their tax liabilities, or prepare for unforeseen expenses.

We’ve validated the need for Peek through real world traction and user feedback during our beta program (launched April ‘24). Since we launched, we reached 2K people on the waitlist, 300 trial users, with 25% free trial to paid subscription coversion, and generating ~$10K ARR. Our weekly active user base is growing at around 80% MoM in the last 3 months.

If we consider our specific ideal customer profile - global citizens with ties to Asia who fall within the emerging affluent category (with net worths between $250K and $5M) - this amounts to 40M globally. This is based on the assumption that there are 500M global citizens worldwide, with 40% having ties to Asia, and 20% falling into the emerging affluent segment.If the average revenue per customer per year stays consistent at $100, then that’s a $4B annual revenue market. If we capture just 2.5% of that market, then we’d be a $100M annual revenue business.

And there is a track record of similar companies - albeit in the US - that have reached large scale and exits. Personal Capital had 2.5M users generating $100M+ in revenue before getting acquired by Empower for around $1B.Younger companies in the space like Monarch Money (in US) are generating around $10M in annual revenue currently, so if they grow 60% YoY, they could also reach the size of Personal Capital at $100M annual revenue in 5 years.

Few people understand the opportunity in building Peek, which solves the unique challenges around financial consolidation for digitally-native global citizens. And even fewer believe or have seen people demonstrate willingness to pay for a premium consumer SaaS (vs. typical fee-based model or freemium), especially within this region. However, the demand does exist because there are very other comprehensive alternatives besides Excel to help solve for the high-stakes problem of properly managing one’s money.

I am in a unique position to understand the problem because I am my own ideal customer profile, especially as an intersection between the different identities (grew up in the US as second gen Chinese American, expat in Singapore, ex-Googler with a portfolio that qualifies as emerging affluent). I’ve also been openly sharing my personal finance journey on LinkedIn, where I have around 24K followers. By speaking transparently about a typically taboo subject, I’ve encouraged others to share their own challenges, giving me access to valuable insights that would otherwise go unspoken. I’ve had people reach out on DMs on LinkedIn saying “What you are building is GREAT! I’ve been searching for something like this since 7 years ago.”

After we launched Peek, I decided to run a very hands-on beta program where we do things that don’t scale. I’m in direct contact with around 300 trial users via WhatsApp, where we discuss questions and feedback (funny story but I actually get banned on WhatsApp every few weeks because of this). We manually onboarded the first 100 users one-on-one to gain a deep understanding of how they interact with the product. As we’ve scaled, I’ve continued monitoring user behavior by reviewing hours of product recordings via PostHog, observing exactly how people engage with Peek. Through this process, I’ve discovered that users are willing to pay for financial consolidation because of the administrative burden and lack of visibility they face:
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- The admin pain comes from the fact that they often have to juggle 5+ separate accounts to be refreshed a few times a month taking around 30 mins to 2 hours per review and update.
- The fragmented nature of these platforms also makes it hard to understand their entire financial standing, leaving users feeling unsure about their financial decisions.

Currently, without my product, they are using Google spreadsheets or Excel. Often they are doing this after work hours or on a Saturday or Sunday morning as part of their digital errands. They are going into each of their accounts and manually updating their holdings on their spreadsheet - some people do this a few times a month or monthly. If they have time, they might create additional charts or calculations for deeper insights, but the manual updating process is so time-consuming that they often don’t reach that stage.

Waitlist sign-up:
~2K September: 1,730
August: 1,412
July: 1,150

Trial users: ~300
September: 290
August: 220
July: 140

Subscribing users:
~80 subscribing (25% conversion)
September: 75
August: 54
July: 32

Weekly Active Users: 180
September: ~130
August: ~80
July: ~40

Retention (98.7% MoM retention over the last 6 months)

I've been working on Peek for about 6 months. Initially, I validated the market need through a fake door test, posting a mock prototype on LinkedIn. After seeing significant interest and sign-ups for the waitlist, I started building a basic version of the product (just a dashboard, no integrations). We recruited our first batch of users on a minimal viable product (MVP), iterated on it, and ran an Ellis test (survey question of “How disappointed would you be if Peek did not exist tomorrow?”) to identify the biggest gaps. The biggest gap for V1 was API integrations, which we didn’t have in our first V1.

Based on feedback, we refined the product and expanded to a second batch of users with a new and improved V2 product (which had 4x the functionalities of V1). When we re-ran the Ellis test, we saw a 3.5x improvement in our score, especially after adding integrations, but realized that the next key gap was around insights - especially the kind of insights you could uniquely get if you consolidated your entire portfolio in one place. This led us to focus on AI-driven insights to help users derive actionable financial analyses from their data in Peek. We also encountered onboarding challenges with batch 2 users as we moved toward self-onboarding, but improving the process with a sandbox mode has significantly enhanced the user experience, where users could play around with a dummy profile to understand the full extent of Peek's value prop without having to fully onboard first.

Throughout this process, we've been learning about users’ specific use cases for tracking their finances, such as preparing for home purchases, semi-FIRED lifestyles, or planning family life.

Okapi's Application Form

Okapi is a technology company connecting solar service providers with global sources of capital empowering them to offer zero upfront 10-year leases for homeowners to install solar energy systems irrespective of location. Tech-driven instant underwriting, onboarding, and remote asset management capabilities allows for low CACs and NPLs while scaling rapidly.

Rooftop solar is the cheapest form of energy in Malaysia, in some cases even after taking into account electricity subsidies, but remains inaccessible to the masses with only 2-3% of landed homes having a rooftop solar system despite favourable policies since 2016.

There are 3 main barriers driving this:
1. Lack of financing results in up to 50% of drop-offs in the residential solar sales funnel.
2. Going solar requires RM30-50k of cash savings (equivalent to ~2 years of household savings).
3. Credit card instalment plans go only up to 5 years, leading to high monthly payments and negative savings.

There are 300 registered solar service providers in Malaysia, most of whom are active in the residential solar space. Only a fraction have access to financing or credit card programs, and are forced to compete for cash buyers through a race to the bottom on pricing.

Solar financiers have invested billions of dollars in Large Scale Solar projects which provide yields of 5-6% p.a. for capital locked in for up to 21 years. Yet, they are unable to effectively tap into the residential space despite attractive project yields (10+% p.a.) due to expensive origination /underwriting models catered towards larger projects.

We have pitched our point-of-sale financing solution to about 50 solar companies in Malaysia since April. Out of these, we have onboarded 30 onto our platform on a trial basis as Okapi Partners. 9 Okapi Partners have signed formal program agreements with us, including agreeing to pay us 5% of the project cost for any financed deals. We are closing about 4-5 leases a month through this B2B2C channel today and gradually increasing the throughput as we guide and train our partners how to sell a leasing product using our platform.

Separately, we have also been running simple facebook ads as a means to gauge consumer interests and to supplement our B2B2C channel as that takes time to ramp up. To avoid cold or irrelevant leads, we make them fill out a form providing home ownership details and information about their current electricity consumption before we record them as an inbound lead. These currently give us about 300 warm leads a month at a cost of about S$1.80 per lead, capped by our budget of S$15/day. We expect a conversion rate of 10-20% from this channel at maturity, and can easily 10x the top of the funnel with the right marketing resources.

We have also lined up conversations with multiple ESG debt investors who are ready to participate in a future debt round to fund the acquisition of our residential solar assets when we raise enough equity to support our capital structure.

In Malaysia, there are 3 million landed properties, out of which about 1.4 million households currently use more than 600kWh of electricity per month, based on data from the national utilities company. This is considered the sweet spot at current pricing levels, when home solar energy still saves the homeowner cash on an absolute basis even after factoring in financing payments to Okapi. At an average cost of RM30,000 (USD6,500), we estimate the TAM for residential rooftop solar today is RM42 billion (~USD10 billion). Of which financing income at 10% p.a. yields a US$1bn annualised revenue, before other fees and value added services.

This figure is expected to rapidly increase as removal of electricity subsidies and the electrification of transportation gain traction. Each EV is expected to require 300-400 kWh of electricity per month. In car-centric Malaysia, every household in the country would be comfortably within the sweet spot for solar, even with no change from today’s pricing or electricity subsidy levels.

Similar dynamics play out across the rest of Southeast Asia, where the case for home solar across the region could be even greater with most countries having higher electricity prices, lower grid reliability, and possibly faster transport electrification due to lower transition barriers involved with 2-wheelers.

Specifically for the residential solar financing space:

B2B2C is better than B2C: The residential solar service provider space shares many economic features of the home improvement industry, including its structurally fragmented and commoditized nature with very little differentiation in supply chains and unit economics. There is minimal room to extract economies of scale due to the physical nature of the business, while it is difficult to justify pricing premiums for branding or sales experience, as the main market consists of homeowners looking to reduce monthly expenses. Instead of being 1 out of 300 solar companies in Malaysia directly competing for deals from homeowners, we work with all of them as a financing partner and sales multiplier. Using tech, we enable every solar salesperson in the market to become our sales channel, empowering them to offer instantly approved financing packages through a simple web app during solar sales pitches. This drives our marginal CaC to be close to zero at maturity.

Speed is not dangerous: The homeowner looking to go solar, while cost sensitive, is also financially responsible and self-selects to a large degree for upstanding credit behaviour. Instantly underwriting a residential solar lease based on the projected net savings and the homeowner’s credit and utility bill payment histories from trusted sources is no less reliable than spending weeks gathering and scrutinising their current income or debt levels based on paper documents.

Cash is king: Homeowners are willing to take financing packages that are relatively ‘expensive’ on a P&L basis, but are net savings positive from day one. People wanting to go solar today want to save expenses immediately - not 5 years from now when credit card payments end. Okapi ensures that the homeowners are cashflow positive with our leasing plan, that is, the dollar savings on their energy bills would be more than enough to cover their monthly commitment to Okapi.

Ten years is short: Rooftop solar contains no moving parts and comes with manufacturers’ guarantees for up to 30 years. In more mature markets like the US or Europe, the most popular solar financing products have tenors of > 20 years. The typical profile of our end customers are homeowners, not tenants, typically aged 40 and above with families and thus relatively settled in their current homes.

Safety in Numbers: Unlike Commercial or Industrial solar projects, large numbers of small ticket residential solar assets can be accumulated quickly which effectively diversifies away idiosyncratic risks associated with individual homeowners. As an asset class at scale, it is also much less correlated to economic cycles. If you lose your job, you still need to keep the lights on at home (with solar which is cheaper than grid energy). That is not the case with the lights at your factory if your business fails due to an economic or industry downturn.

95% of residential solar transactions today are paid via cash or credit card. The remaining 5% are paid via personal/bank loans. The average solar salesperson, when faced with a prospect that needs to go through an onerous and documentation-heavy bank loan application process, would deprioritize and write-off that prospect and focus their efforts on cash/credit card customers.

Some solar companies partner with general consumer credit providers that can offer quicker and easier underwriting, but these are treated as high risk personal loans, with interest rates as high as 15-20% p.a.and yielding negative savings to the homeowner.

A large majority of middle income homeowners are completely unaddressed by current products in the industry and would be unlocked by our financing solutions.

Cumulative vs June 2024 projected

No. of Leases: 24/5
Okapi Partners onboarded: 30/3
Signed Okapi Partner agreements: 9/2
Number of salespeople onboarded: 45/11
Activated salespeople: 14/10
Number of online applications: 36/7
Direct B2C leads: 315/155

We are convinced that the demand for our product is high among the solar service providers given the closing rate we have experienced so far. In June, we pivoted our attention away from onboarding more solar companies onto our Okapi Partner program towards deepening our relationship with a few key existing partners through concentrated customer success activities such as training and co-selling. We are currently capping our monthly leases to 5 per month until we have more visibility over the timing and quantum of our next raise, which will likely be a mixture of debt and equity.

Coverio's Application Form

We use crypto rails to manage payroll for companies.

Managing payroll for distributed teams is expensive (fees can range from 0.6% to 5.5% of the amount sent) and cumbersome, even when using the latest fintech solutions like Aspire, Paypal, and Wise.

As startup founders with team members based in Singapore, the Philippines, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Germany, we've faced this issue ourselves. To send out our monthly salaries, we have to use multiple services - Paypal (for our teammate in Germany), Wise (for our teammates in Kyrgyzstan), Aspire (for me and my co-founder in Singapore and our teammate in the Philippines), and Crypto.com/MetaMask (for our teammate in Kazakhstan).

It's been a headache handling payroll through these services:
1. Banks have blocked our transactions, resulting in multiple bank visits from our team to resolve the issues and to receive their salaries.
2. Spending limits on our debit cards (the fastest option vs. ACH or bank transfer), which restricted the amount we could send per day.
3. Expensive fees ranging from 0.6% to 5.5% depending on the amount and the country we're sending the salary to.
4. Multiple authentication and OTP steps that made the process much longer.

The simplest process by far was using Crypto.com/Metamask to process our Kazakh colleague's salary. By looking into how we could optimize the process even further, we ended up finding a way to use crypto rails to send payroll (fiat -> crypto -> fiat) 1,000x cheaper and faster than other fintech solutions.

Our current solution is very focused on a specific type of company - startups like us, who have distributed teams, use a number of tools to send payroll, and have USD-denominated salaries.

We think we can expand this focus in the future, initially by serving companies with non-USD denominated salaries, and eventually companies of any size by building out / acquiring solutions that are tackling other areas of the HR stack such as employee benefits, onboarding, time management etc.

For most crypto startups that send salaries through crypto, the problem we are solving is a non-issue. Anyone who joins a crypto startup usually has a wallet and a fiat off-ramp.

This is definitely not the case for web2 startups and companies. Getting each employee to sign up for a CEX, receive USDC, and withdraw it to their bank account is a daunting task. On the surface, from an employer's perspective all we're doing is taking fiat payroll from them, and magically it appears in their employees' bank accounts much faster and cheaper. All the while, in the back-end, we're on-ramping to USDC, sending the USDC to a dedicated CEX account that we've made for the employer, and whitelisting and off-ramping to their employees' bank accounts. This approach enables us to take advantage of crypto's existing rails which makes our process magnitudes cheaper and faster, but also provides employers with a much better user experience than a crypto-native application.

As I mentioned above, we have to use multiple solutions to send our salaries. The simplest and cheapest route we've used is a direct wire from our Aspire bank account, which is a flat fee ranging from $20 to $45 depending on the destination country. For our salaries this means a min. 0.6% cost basis.

The most expensive route we've used is Wise, which can cost up to $100 for a ~$4k USD to USD transaction done outside of the US. This can vary depending on the source of funds - we tend to use our debit cards since it's the fastest, but it's also the most expensive.

We're building an MVP for our own team to use to manage our own payroll. We're going to do this manually (think Google spreadsheets, manual setup etc.), and then automate steps that we find to be the hardest / most labor-intensive. Once we've been able to perfect the process manually, we'll begin selling our solution to other companies while we automate the process.

We started our company in March, and initially worked on a different idea related to helping crypto users manage their Discord dealflow, and providing rugpull insurance on their investments.

After testing out our initial idea, we didn't find enough traction that convinced us that it was worthwhile to keep building it. From user interviews, it was clear that most users did not feel insurance was a need-to-have, even despite the recent issues with Terra and other failed projects. Due to the macro changes in crypto, most retail crypto investors have pulled out of the space, which further pushed us to pivot.

We came up with the solution after noticing that we faced this recurring issue when managing our own payroll, and realizing that we were already hacking it by using Crypto.com / MetaMask to send one of our teammates his salary.