The story of askRobin

We excelled and we failed.

This month, we should be celebrating our 5th?birthday at askRobin. However, the office is not too festive this year. After 5 years of ups and downs, a lot of learnings, passion, and energy that we have put into askRobin, we have decided to shut down the company.?

Once born with a big mission to become a true customer advocate in the financial services market, we managed to grow our customer base from 0 to 1,9 million across Mexico, Colombia and Argentina. We partnered with over a hundred lending companies to get the fairest credit to our customers. But something we never really achieved was a strong product market fit - not strong enough to allow us to stand against the storm, anyway.

It all started with great passion.

I come from a relatively poor family, so I have strong empathy to the people who work hard every day, just to make ends meet. Completely by accident I found myself in the financial services industry about 16 years ago, with no previous experience of finance or banking. Driven by the real understanding of how damn expensive it is to be poor, I got to know the lending business across the board. My efforts focused on serving those people who are typically invisible to so many of us and managed to produce great results for those people.

After a decade of learning lending practices, askRobin was the most logical next thing to happen. From my previous experience I knew that I needed to get closer to customers and build a company that is a true customer advocate – that helps the underserved population to be part of the formal ecosystem, get support and access to fair credit.

Being a true customer advocate has always been on top of the list for askRobin. I need to admit, it has not always been easy for the team to keep the right balance. But we did try hard and constantly challenged ourselves to do what’s best for the customer. We even assigned a Chief Customer Advocate role to help us police our decisions and progress. A job with full veto right.

Aspirations vs real needs.

Our first product was the Financial Education chatbot. The aim of the bot was to bring the complicated financial world closer to customers by serving small, clever bites of advice to people. We did it in a cool and playful way, so that anybody would understand.?

We got to over 200.000 users within our first month of business. That was mad. We were feeling like kings. Until the day we started to ask for customer feedback… We quickly found out that they didn’t need the snappy product that we were so proud of. What they did need, was a lot simpler – they needed money.

We went back to the whiteboard and the change was not long in coming. We understood that we needed to get our customers the real thing – the money. We started to build up the supply side and operate the marketplace. We were aware that the marketplace business is hard to build, but we believed that value proposition was very clear!

The dilemma of purpose and Excel.?

What made our business particularly complex was the constant clashing of our purpose of always being on the customer’s side with the numbers in the Excel – the best deal to our customer was rarely the best deal for us.?

We didn’t want to be merely the ‘lead generator’ and we hated when people called us that. At some point we even thought of ourselves as the ‘anti-lender’ – well, that wasn’t exactly right either. Our job was to help the customer and to get them the best deal, always. We still believe that it was the right way to do business.

We kept battling the problem and believed the quality and the volume of the customers would fix the margin issue. We focused on quality over quantity and invested into customer data. This added cost to our business and the outcome was slow to change. We believed that our lending partners would start to compete for the customers by offering them better deals. But they never really did.

The perfect storm before the Grande Finale.

When the COVID pandemic hit, we knew that there would be very dark times in lending. From the experience of the previous financial crises, we had an idea of what to expect from the insecure lending market. And we also saw this as a big opportunity – finally the lenders needed to adapt and increase flexibility to meet the demand. We believed that we had an upper hand with excellent customer data and a great platform to bring the right customers to our partners.?

That was not the correct assumption, after all. The lenders had their house in flames. They were focused on saving their business and a new customer was the least they needed. Well, they did, and then they didn’t, and then they did again… The market became extremely volatile on the supply side.?

The storm also hit the customers. While businesses were closing down, our customers lost their jobs and income, reducing their position as a loan receiver. With dramatically reduced lending activity and scorecards turning extremely conservative, the global lending industry led its natural course at a difficult time. This is an unfortunate part of the lending business – the moment you desperately need a loan, there isn’t one available. The underserved people will understand us on this one.

I’m a cucaracha – I won’t give up.

It’s hard for me to admit defeat. I’m a fighter. I always tell people that I’m a cucaracha – I won’t give up. But today I must admit and tell people that the only fair thing to do is to stop and to close down our business.?

We haven’t been able to build a product and find a value proposition strong enough to last this storm. Despite our best intentions and all the energy we put into askRobin, we must admit that we are not able to deliver real value to our customers nor is our product essential to our lending partners.

The COVID crises has lasted so terribly long – we all know and feel it so clearly. This has sent some serious waves towards us, and while we have stood quite a few of these waves, it will still take a long time before the waters calm and the market starts building up again.?

Our biggest win – the team.

The best thing we achieved in those years was our killer-team. I’m most grateful to every single team member – to all our people who are just brilliant, with good hearts and a true Spartan spirit, 100% committed to the mission and to making this world a little better for all of us. I admire every single one of you and I’m sure your next challenge will be something really great. Something with the right mission.

Mission alignment has been our key thing from the very start. It’s so important for the team to understand the WHY: why do we do what we do. And that every one of us is in love with the mission and 100% engaged in it. I’m so proud of achieving it.

The end is naturally a very hard moment for all of us. It is very sad and disappointing, no question here. But one thing we can be very sure of – our team will be friends for life. Or the Family, or the mafia… We like mafia parallels here in #estonianmafia, with the Skype mafia, the Pipedrive mafia and so many others. Now we have one tiny new mafia here – the askRobin mafia. Small, but strong like stone.

I’m extremely grateful to our Investors. It breaks me to disappoint you, because I know that you were backing us because our cause matters to you. I cannot thank you enough for your trust and patience.??

What happens next?

Certainly, the best thing about going through hard times is that you learn a lot. It will take a bit of time to digest it all, to analyze everything that happened and the mistakes we’ve done on the way. These five years have by far been the toughest exercise for me so far.

After reuniting with the surf waves, ski slopes and extended quality time with my family, I’ll be sure to let you know what’s next. I’d be happy to shift my focus on giving back to the community, helping Startups on their journey. The issues of the environment and equality are particularly close to my heart, especially if related to fintech. Feel free to reach out!