From the age of 35, he is a co-founder of the personal finance website, which is valued at more than 500 million US dollars. And a few years ago, when this story was just beginning, he was unemployed. In those days, this was not unseen: the whole world felt the harmful effects of a sudden crisis, many people lost their jobs. But if most of the desperate dropped their hands, our hero decided to grow fruits on the basis of his own failure.
Lost Worker
Meet Tim Chen, the current CEO and co-founder of NerdWallet’s personal finance website, which is visited by 10 million people a month. The cost of his brainchild is estimated at more than $ 500 million.
Once he could not even dream of such success. The man worked hard for several years in hedge funds such as Perry Capital and JAT Capital Management. But once the manager called him and announced his dismissal. “It was unexpected, I was terribly upset. I always tried to do my job as well as possible and did not expect such an outcome, ”Chen said.
Nevertheless, today Chen evaluates this event as one of the best things that happened to him in his entire life. And this is not surprising, since the dismissal made him a successful entrepreneur. “I always dreamed of my own business, but I never felt that I have a moral right to do so. After all, I was a hired employee and devoted all my strength to my work, ”he says.
Helped my sister, and at the same time developed a business idea
One day, back in 2008, he received an email from his sister, who lived in Australia, asking how to find a credit card with a lower fee for foreign transactions.
Tim opened Google, confident that he would quickly find the answer. And he was surprised that he could not find anything in the search engine that would not be marketing or advertising material.
Chen notes that he relied on his own financial experience, and it took him a whole week of extensive research to collect what several major banks and credit card companies could offer. He sent his sister an Excel spreadsheet that analyzed all the options. And after some time, this table has already scattered among family friends and relatives.
This situation made Chen realize that there is a real problem with the bandwidth of financial services, when consumers often had to study the materials of banks to obtain information.
That is why it was difficult to compare products without a professional financial advisor.
Personal finance online
Chen wanted to offer more transparency through financial services on the Internet. He set about creating the site, working in his apartment in Manhattan, New York. And for the implementation of the project he had only 800 dollars - the remaining savings. They were enough to cover startup costs, such as web hosting, domain fees and software. So NerdWallet was born.
The plan was to provide the pros and cons of various financial services and answer questions, give advice and help people make financial decisions using articles written by professional personal finance experts.
Difficulties that did not break
At first, everything was not so simple: 9 months after the site was launched, Chen was forced to move to his girlfriend’s apartment to save money, because he earned only $ 75 in the first year of the site’s work, working from 16 to 20 hours a day. He had to save on food, but he did not lose faith in success.
But in the second year NerdWallet brought 60,000 $. But that, too, was not enough. Chen even thought about whether he should continue to work in the company or try to find work in another hedge fund.
Success
Soon, NerdWallet finally began to gain momentum. The number of visitors grew, incomes tripled. Chen stopped thinking about returning to Wall Street.
In 2015, NerdWallet raised approximately $ 105 million. But the path of the company was not always stable. In 2017, Chen was forced to fire a dozen people (approximately 11% of his workforce) after losing profit targets. In an email sent to employees last fall, the entrepreneur called staff reductions "extremely painful," but also expressed optimism about the future of the company.
“I’m sure that we made the right investments when we entered 2018,” Chen told his staff, emphasizing that they pay more attention to the company's mobile application and online membership, which also helps users keep track of various financial goals.
A significant portion of the business revenue comes from financial services companies that pay NerdWallet when users come to it from this site. This is a fairly common practice among financial advisory sites.
Another NerdWallet feature is the use of voice features. Also toThe company regularly conducts tests and surveys to track the needs and desires of users.
Chen says: “We always strive to attract the best experts, invest more in creating content. People may feel that they are getting the most useful information. ” Today, the entrepreneur understands that even the experience of failure helped NerdWallet become better and succeed.
Finally, Chen says: “When I founded NerdWallet, I was much less mission oriented and much more worried about success. Now the most important thing for me is to offer readers tips that they would not get anywhere else on the Internet. ”