This episode goes in-depth into Skydo’s journey from Day 0 to emerging as a category leader in India's cross-border B2B payments today, helping more than 6,000 Indian products & services exporters receive payments from 150+ countries & in 32+ currencies.

We cover everything from the untapped cross-border payments opportunity, learnings from fintech MVP iterations, doing customer research to identify unique product & business model insights, the philosophy of "do things that don’t scale" and figuring out differentiation pre-PMF, leveraging founder-led sales to acquire early customers, building a culture of radical transparency, learnings from VC fundraising and finally, Skydo’s plans for the next 2 years. 

Joining me for this discussion are Skydo's co-founders - Movin Jain and Srivatsan Sridhar. Previously, Movin held leadership roles at PhonePe, Meesho & Ola, and Srivatsan at McKinsey, Ola, and Rupeek.

TIME STAMPS:

(01:00) The Skydo backstory

(04:08) Why cross-border payments is an untapped opportunity

(09:10) Iterating a fintech MVP

(16:54) Examples of “do things that don’t scale” in fintech

(20:47) Figuring out product differentiation at the early stages

(26:52) Importance of intellectual humility

(30:09) Finding early adopters in a high-trust business like fintech

(35:01) Right-sizing the early sales team

(36:53) Optimizing the marketing funnel 

(42:51) Doing “unscalable” founder-led customer service to differentiate 

(44:59) How to discover what to build or improve in a B2B payments product

(51:37) Building a culture of radical transparency

(59:30) Learnings from VC fundraising 

(1:07:38) Navigating cross-border payments regulations

(1:14:35) Why should Indian exporters prefer Skydo over traditional banks?

Connect with Movin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/movinjain/ and Srivatsan - https://www.linkedin.com/in/srivats80/

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I am a venture investor focused on the US-India corridor. Feel free to reach out on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/soumitrasharma5/) and follow me on X (@soumitra_sharma).