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Chris Brycki Stockspot: Building Australia’s Largest Robo-Adviser.

April 27, 2026 · Hosted by Dexter Cousins

Chris Brycki built Stockspot the wrong way, according to most of the advice that was circulating in Australian fintech between 2019 and 2022!

While the sector spent those years scaling headcount, chasing VC and pivoting into whatever category was attracting capital, Chris ran a different playbook. He founded Stockspot in 2013, rejected venture capital, built his customer base through content and referrals, and stayed entirely focused on one thing: generating long-term investment returns for everyday Australians at the lowest possible cost.

In a recent episode of Fintech Chatter, I sat down with Chris in person at the Stockspot offices in Tankstream Labs, Sydney. It was the first time we had recorded face to face, and the conversation covered 13 years of building one of Australia’s most quietly successful fintechs. The numbers tell the story.

Stockspot by the numbers

  • $1.5 billion in assets under management
  • 16,000+ clients across Australia
  • $500 million in total client profits generated since launch
  • 99.3% of clients invested for at least one year have made money
  • 28 staff, no mass layoffs in 13 years of operation
  • Zero venture capital raised
  • Founded 2013, launched 2014

How Chris Brycki built Stockspot without VC

Chris left institutional finance in 2013 after recognising a structural problem: everyday Australians could not access sensible investment portfolios without paying fees that eroded their returns or using self-directed platforms where most people lost money. He pitched the idea to engineering friends in a pub, validated interest, built a basic website manually, and gave himself two years to make it work before his savings ran out.

He deliberately avoided venture capital from the outset. His reasoning: VC growth timelines and a wealth management business are structurally incompatible. Building trust and track record cannot be accelerated with capital. Throwing money at paid marketing in a category dominated by Commonwealth Bank’s marketing budget is a losing proposition. Stockspot grew instead through content, referrals, and a steady compounding of client results.

“VC wasn’t the right source of capital,” Chris told me on the podcast. “You can’t throw $100 million at a wealth business and make it work. Unless you’ve got five or ten years of returns to show, consumers still aren’t going to trust you.”

The Fat Cat Funds Report and content-led growth

One of Stockspot’s most effective early moves was the Fat Cat Funds Report. Chris manually collected performance data and fee information from Australia’s major super funds and published a report naming and shaming the worst performers. The logic was straightforward: the evidence for low-cost, index-based investing was clear, but most of society did not know it, and the financial media had little incentive to say so clearly.

The report drove media coverage, triggered regulatory attention, and contributed to real industry change. Several of the funds named have since shut down or merged. The approach also established Stockspot’s content-led growth model: produce research that proves your thesis, publish it clearly, and let the evidence do the sales work. Paid marketing was never going to compete with CBA’s budget. Proprietary research could.

Staying lean while the rest of the sector hired big

The 2019 to 2022 period tested Stockspot’s hiring discipline. Capital was cheap, fintechs were scaling headcount aggressively, and the meme stock trading boom of 2021 put direct pressure on Chris to add single stock trading to the platform. He declined. The statistics on retail traders losing money were, in his assessment, too clear to ignore. Stockspot was not a gambling business. It was not going to become one because the market was excited about GameStop.

The result: when March 2022 arrived and the liquidity taps turned off, Stockspot had nothing to restructure. No mass layoffs. No emergency pivots. No forced profitability targets from investors. They kept doing what they had always done. With 28 people, they manage $1.5 billion.

“We were very careful in hiring,” Brycki explained. “Whenever we did hire someone, it was someone that we could support through good times and tougher times. We’ve been fortunate that we haven’t had to do mass layoffs like a lot of the other fintechs.”

What Chris Brycki sees coming next

Chris is watching the next generation of fintech founders closely. His view is that the tools available now, including AI-assisted development and lean infrastructure, mean you can validate and build faster and cheaper than at any point in the industry’s history. The constraint is no longer capital or technology access. It is having a clear thesis and the discipline to hold it.

He is seeing more founders who can reach $10 million in revenue with fewer than 10 staff. He believes many of the next significant fintechs will be bootstrapped or lightly funded, built by people who have been through the 2019 to 2022 cycle and have no desire to repeat it. The frictionless business, lean by design and close to the customer, is the model he sees winning.

“If you can avoid it, capital raising reduces one level of stress and complexity,” he said. “And you get to stay true to your original vision.”

Listen to the full episode

The full conversation with Chris Brycki is available now on Fintech Chatter. We cover the origin story, the Fat Cat Funds Report, the regulatory path Stockspot navigated, why he rejected VC, and what he would do differently if starting Stockspot from scratch in 2026.

About Tier One People

Tier One People is Australia’s leading executive search firm for fintech and the digital economy. We work with founders like Chris Brycki to find the 1% who redefine what’s possible. If you’re scaling your leadership team, start at https://tieronepeople.com.

Links from this episode.

Chris Brycki on Fintech Chatter.

More on investing and founder-led fintech.

Full transcript.

Lightly edited for readability — filler words removed, wording otherwise unchanged.

Dexter Cousins
Chris, welcome back to Fintech Chatter.

Chris Brycki
So good to be back and doing it in person.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, I know. This is kind of part of my decade celebration of Tier One People, was really to be able to connect in person with people like yourself who’ve been on the show previously but for whatever reason, whether it was COVID or we were doing the Finnies awards, we never got to do it. So it’s brilliant to be here in the offices with you. It was great also just to meet the team as well.

Chris Brycki
The team was excited to meet you and yeah, nice to have you in the office. Yeah, for a people business, good to finally have some people.

Dexter Cousins
Absolutely. Absolutely. But look, for the listeners that aren’t aware of Stockspot, cuz I’m taking a lot of liberties here. I’ve been a customer for a number of years. Give us the elevator pitch of, you know, the investor pitch for Stockspot.

Chris Brycki
Sure, Dexter. So Stockspot is a online digital investment advisor. So what we do is we help to build portfolios for people. We use these low-cost ETFs or exchange traded funds to do that. And then our value proposition is really to help people manage an investment portfolio that they don’t have to worry about themselves, and so people that are busy with their own lives can have their money growing for them without having to worry at all.

Dexter Cousins
In terms of, I guess, the origin of that, what did, and the idea that you had for Stockspot, how did it all come about? Like, surely you weren’t sitting there going, oh, Dexter can’t get access to Mellin. How am I going to help him?

Chris Brycki
Yeah, I mean, for me it was about 13 years ago now. So it was a while ago, and I was working in a very different role on the kind of institutional side within finance and realised that everyday people, whether it was my family or friends, really struggled to be able to access a sensible investing portfolio. You know, you could go and see a financial advisor, but for a lot of people they were cut out of that because it’s too expensive or they didn’t want to use a traditional advisor.

And then I’d see people doing it themselves using CommSec and making awful mistakes and, you know, losing money, head over heels. And so I thought there’s got to be a better way that we can really enable people and empower people to invest in the right way without having all of the costs that used to come with it.

Dexter Cousins
You say used to, but they still do come with it. How have you managed to keep those costs down?

Chris Brycki
Well, yeah. I think with any industry that’s sort of changing, there’s always going to be incumbents that want to hold on to the traditional model that they’ve become accustomed to. For me, that was a great opportunity, cuz I did actually think originally that if these big players were truly forward thinking, they would completely change their own business models and cut me out of the market. They could do my business. But I believe that their business models that were such big cash cows because of their profits made it very difficult to implicitly or explicitly endorse a business model like ours, because it’s basically an admission that their high-touch, high-cost value business wasn’t potentially adding as much value as they were saying.

So yeah, I mean, it was a bit of a different business model to approach. I mean, one of the ways that we’ve kept cost low is really being very particular about our own hiring. So there was different times that we’ve gone through over the last 10 years where fintechs are really scaling up their people side, particularly as there was a lot of capital sloshing around, hiring big teams of 50, 100, 200 people. We were very careful in hiring and making sure that whenever we did hire someone, it was someone that we could support through good times and tougher times. So we’ve been fortunate that we haven’t had to do mass layoffs like a lot of the other fintechs.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. We’ll talk about that in a little bit more depth a little bit later, but I want to go back to the origins really, first of all, and it’s important, right, because I think there’s a lesson here for anybody who’s thinking about starting a business in this next 10 years. But I want to go back to that kind of moment where you decided, hey, the kind of perceived security of working in a big institutional bank, all of that side to it. What was the catalyst for you to go, actually, I’m going to leave all of that behind and I’m going to go and take this big risk of doing something myself?

Chris Brycki
I mean, honestly, it’s probably because I’m sort of at heart a bit of a risk taker. And I think for a lot of people it would have been a bit of a strange decision, because having the security of a great job within an investment bank or a hedge fund is not something that most sensible people would walk away from. And so I did have a lot of people kind of questioning, you know, why are you doing it? Why would you go from having an income and a pretty decent job to having no income, taking on a lot of risk, and ultimately walking into a world where you are likely to fail?

For me, part of it was personal growth. Like, I really love sitting in front of a screen and trading, but it doesn’t really allow you to meet people and develop other skills. And so I thought, where I was in my career, I wanted to learn about building a business and some of those other skills that you need to actually do something that’s a bit bigger than just trading.

And also, where I was in my life, I was lucky. I didn’t have a mortgage. I didn’t have kids, so I felt like I could take a bit more risk than I probably would now. I think starting a business once you’ve got family and mortgages is a lot more difficult in Australia because there are obligations that don’t go away if your startup fails, and it puts people in a tough position.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. I’m going to take a snapshot here because, you know, day one, 2013, you probably had fewer grey hairs, but you’d been sitting at a desk in Tank Stream Labs probably with a laptop and a “what do I do next?” So what was the first thing that you did to get the idea in motion and out of your head and into a business?

Chris Brycki
The real first thing was probably just talk to some people. So I had this idea that I could create a technology-driven business to manage people’s money. I first spoke to some of my friends who were not in finance. I had a few engineering friends that I went to university with, who studied with me and we were friends growing up, who were interested in investing, and I’d often talk to them about investing and they’d build spreadsheets and ask me to check them, and we’d be going back and forth on things like that.

And so I would pitch the idea to some of these guys and say, hey, look, if we built a website that you could come to and I do all of that for you and don’t charge you much, would that make you comfortable, where you would use that rather than doing it all self? And so really it was kind of testing the idea on some early adopters who I thought would be perfect customers. When I got a bit of traction there and I got plenty of feedback from those guys, you know, yes, this is good, or no, I’d like more control there, that led me to go and try and put the basics of the product together behind the scenes to see if I could actually offer a very simple version of what I wanted to do.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. What was the point where you thought, hey, this actually could really take off? I think I’ve got something here.

Chris Brycki
I mean, that probably wasn’t for another year and a half or so. So there was a lot of work to go on behind the scenes just to validate there was some sort of interest in the idea before I went to actually start.

Dexter Cousins
Were you still doing this as part of your kind of just like a side hustle, or you…

Chris Brycki
No, I mean, I really, I did commit early. So I left my job and decided I was going to give myself 2 years to try and get something up and running, and try different variations of it if it didn’t work. And then I knew that after 2 years I was going to deplete my, you know, not too large savings at the time and have to go back to get a proper job. So I kind of gave myself time, but I did commit fully.

And yeah, it took a year and a half because I had to go and get a financial license. I had to go and negotiate with a broker to make it work. I had to go and build some spreadsheets. I had to work out an onboarding process and a brand and think about how we’re going to actually get this business up and running. So the first version of the product that we eventually launched in 2014 was like super, super simple. It was a very basic website that was really just a tool for helping customers find out who we were.

Then a lot of the onboarding was manual and done by me. I was filling out forms to open bank accounts and brokerage accounts. And then I was managing these portfolios on spreadsheets and then relaying the data back to clients in a way that they could see online. So it was the most simple version of the product, and it was really just to validate that it was a product that people might want to use.

Dexter Cousins
How did you get from beyond friends and family to then getting, what is it, 15, 16,000 customers now?

Chris Brycki
I mean, gradually is the best answer. Like, it’s taken a long time, and just like the portfolios grow gradually in a compound way over time, we’ve seen our business grow in the same way. So I remember in the first year, like, month one might have been two customers, and then four customers, and then six, and then you’d go backwards some months and only get five, and you think, oh, maybe this is going to be a flop. Like, I’m already shrinking my growth rates and I’m only four months in.

I think it took like 6 or 8 months before I had the first customer that I didn’t recognise. So that was a big moment, when you actually onboard someone who you don’t know, and you have this moment that you’re thinking, “Wow, someone who doesn’t already know me and can’t call me up on my mobile when something’s not working has actually trusted this website to do something for them.” You know, that’s pretty exciting.

And yeah, the growth really kind of has just been gradual. A lot of our growth has come from referrals, so friends and family. And that’s a great channel for growth, because if you offer a good product that people like and are using and develop a bit of a track record, then, you know, the fire spreads. And that’s definitely a channel that we’ve relied on more than traditional paid channels.

Dexter Cousins
One of the things that I really admire about your growth strategy, and I’ve took inspiration from as well, has been how Stockspot is also almost like a media education business, to my mind anyway. And, you know, even though I was in fintech, I wasn’t a customer, but watching your videos on YouTube, I was like, “Oh, wow. This guy kind of really gets it.” And what I felt and feel through those videos is a trust and a kind of alignment with values that I hold around what is investing for the long term.

And I just wanted to, cuz you talked about the growth element for you. How did you go from being an investment banker and kind of doing trades to then becoming a media guy and a marketing guy and all of these other hats that you had to wear as a founder?

Chris Brycki
I mean, on the marketing side, something I realised early on when I tested paid marketing was it’s bloody expensive.

Dexter Cousins
You’re not beating Google, right?

Chris Brycki
Yeah. And you can’t beat not only Google, but you can’t beat Commonwealth Bank, because they have an enormous budget and every year their head of marketing at Commonwealth Bank has a use it or lose it budget for marketing. So they’re pushing millions of dollars through Google and Facebook and it’s very hard to compete efficiently. So I realised that paid marketing was always going to be a challenge if we were only relying on that source of growth.

But ultimately, we also really needed to educate consumers and address some of the misconceptions about growing wealth and saving and investing that I thought existed. You know, these misconceptions that you need to pay a lot of money to an adviser to pick stocks. That if you pay a big brand investment bank, you’re going to get a better result than if you go and buy a bunch of ETFs. That high fees means higher returns. All of these I knew to be false, but I thought most of society didn’t really know.

And so, yeah, a lot of that early content that we produced, whether it was super fund research on which were the best and worst performers, whether it was research on ETFs, was really just to kind of help to educate the masses, to bring them on the journey that we wanted them to come on, that low-cost ETFs were going to give them a great long-term investing result compared to other options out there.

It’s still an education process, because a lot of the information out there, whether it’s in the media or other websites, is always pushing people in the other direction, for reasons usually commercially driven, because there are lots of businesses out there that want you to trade more, that want you to pay active fund managers, that want you to pay financial advisers. And so I find that it’s, you know, 13 years on, still an area that there’s a lot of opportunity for us to have a point of view, to kind of push against the common thinking.

Dexter Cousins
You release every year the Fat Cats report. How did that come about, and can you tell people a little bit about it?

Chris Brycki
Sure. And that was one of the early examples of content that we did. So something I had noticed in the super fund world was that super funds in Australia that were managing literally trillions of dollars were still charging relatively high fees, and they weren’t really adopting the evidence that was really quite clear in the industry, that low costs and indexing outperforms active management over the long run.

And so I really wanted to bring these facts to light, and I thought the best way to do it was to actually go and get the data and present it as a research report. So I personally went to all of the websites of the big super funds in Australia and grabbed the data of their performance and their fees and then published this as a report, which we called the Fat Cat Funds Report.

We gave it a bit of a catchy title because we know how unsexy super was, and if we just called it the super fund research report, absolutely no one would have read it. And so we decided to position it in a way that really allowed us to both call out the great funds that were doing well, but also name and shame the ones that weren’t doing so well and explain why they weren’t doing well.

And for us, yeah, it was a great early education piece that got picked up by the media. And actually, now, looking back over the last 13 years, actually drove real change in the industry. So a lot of the big fat cat super funds that we called out have now shut down or merged, partly because of the education we were doing, but also because the regulator then cracked down on them and forced a lot of these changes. So for me it was quite a nice feeling to feel that you’ve had some sort of impact on the industry as well.

Dexter Cousins
I want to talk about that regulatory piece, because there’s a saying, and this would have been very much prevalent at the time that you started Stockspot, which was made famous I think by Mark Zuckerberg, where their culture was move fast and break things. And I think the tweak in fintech is you have to move fast and make things, because with regulation being what it is, you just can’t be that reckless and just break stuff.

But what I think has been really interesting is to see, and you’ve been on this journey as well. You were there early at the inception of FinTech Australia. You’ve had an input in the kind of formation of the kind of seeds that have kind of turned this now into a, what, 50,000 employee industry, right? What is it that you’ve seen from a kind of regulatory perspective that’s worked, and what do you think is kind of inhibitive to helping businesses like you continue to kick on?

Chris Brycki
It’s a good question. So I think, yeah, that mantra of move fast and break things doesn’t quite work in fintech, for the main reason is if you break things, you can go to jail very easily in our industry. And so that’s something I think a lot of founders in fintech and people starting financial businesses are acutely aware of, is that it’s a tightly regulated industry generally, and Australia has some of the tightest regulations, for good reason, because there’s a real view that consumers need to be protected in this area because there’s such information asymmetry.

You know, I liken it to medicine, where doctors know a lot more about medicines than the consumers buying them. And so there’s a lot of trust put in the advice that they’re giving. And I think it’s the same in financial services. A lot of consumers don’t understand the ins and outs of the products they’re buying. And so there’s a lot of onus on the providers of those products and the businesses and people providing them to do the right thing by consumers.

What I noticed in regulation in the early days in Australia was that it just was kind of behind the way that, in our area, financial advice was being provided. There was really no concept of digital advice or online advice, because all of the laws had been written with the view that financial advice is a person sitting with someone in a room, asking them to fill out a form, collecting that information, and then going and giving them a written recommendation and having another meeting with them. I knew that that wasn’t going to be their future, but unfortunately the rules were written in a way that that’s all that they captured.

Where we got involved is I decided pretty early on to be very open and transparent with the regulator around what I wanted to do. And so originally, I think I flew down to Melbourne to ASIC’s office and basically pitched to them the Stockspot idea, and really wanted to show them how it was going to open up access to more consumers, which was something they wanted. It was going to improve transparency. It was going to lower costs. It was going to remove conflicts of interest. It basically suited a lot of the things that they wanted to achieve in financial services. And so it wasn’t something they should be concerned about, but actually something they need to be conscious about ensuring the rules allow for, because it was going to be positive for the industry.

In our area then, we did see class orders and different regulatory guides come out that supported digital advice, I think in the right way, which allowed providers like us to launch but still held us to the same standards of traditional businesses. Because as well as having the desire to make it available, I also wanted to make sure that digital services didn’t have a different set of rules where there were lower standards, because the easiest way to ruin the industry would be a few bad players coming out and harming consumers, and then no one wants to deal with digital providers. So I think in Australia they found a reasonably good balance in our area between enabling digital service providers like us to exist while still maintaining good consumer protections, and so one person doesn’t spoil it forever.

Dexter Cousins
I think one of the big frustrations that I’ve had in the industry is the buzzwords and the platitudes. You know, oh, we’re solving financial inclusion, we’re banking the unbanked, we’re democratising finance. What is it that you’ve seen with your business that has made you kind of stay true to the principles that you’ve had? Not chase the, oh, well, now we’re going to go after financial inclusion, not chase the investment dollars, not kind of somehow figure out you’re going to be a buy now pay later for shares, or whatever the buzzword was at the time. And how have you kept that discipline to remain true to that initial idea that you had?

Chris Brycki
Well, yeah, I think you’re right. There’s certain buzzwords that you keep on hearing in fintech, and then it seems ironic that they’re applied to businesses like payday lenders. You know, effective interest rates are 50% a year, and…

Dexter Cousins
I’ve got nothing against it, right? It’s not to be judgmental. It’s just to say, hey, look, call it for what it is, right? Rather than dressing it up as this, you know, you’re saving society, it’s like, look, it’s not what you’re doing, right? You’re building the business and you want to make profit. That’s cool. That’s what businesses do, right?

Chris Brycki
Yeah. If you’re a digital payday lender and you’re filling a gap in the market, that’s absolutely fine. But I agree, yeah. I think a lot of businesses position themselves as kind of do-gooders when, yeah, maybe it wasn’t as clear what good they were doing.

I mean, for us, it was very clear what our values and mission was. We want to give Australians the ability to invest in a way that’s safe, easy, and consistent. And I think if we were a trading business, we could make the easy work, but safe and consistent isn’t something a trading business can offer, because we know that most people when they trade stocks lose money.

And so, in sticking to that kind of vision, it’s kind of directed the sorts of products that we build and offer to customers. And it’s really helped us avoid some temptations along the way, because certainly during the meme stock trading era of 2021, I remember there was so much going on, and I’m sure you saw it as well, and a lot of hiring in that space as well. There was temptations, and a lot of other digital advisers around the world offered single stock trading. We strategically decided not to, just because we thought it wasn’t the right thing to do for customers, knowing the stats around how few people actually make money from that endeavour.

The stats are phenomenally bad for someone that starts trading stocks in terms of your ability to survive and actually make money over the long run. And so we thought, look, we’re not a gambling business. We’re not a casino. We’re a business that wants to generate long-term wealth for clients. And I think it’s helped us.

A stat I found out recently is we’ve made money for over 99, I think 3%, of our clients who’ve invested for at least a year. No trading business could sort of share a stat like that. I think that motivates our team, because we can see that we’re actually doing good for our clients. It also retains our clients. We have great retention, and it also leads clients to tell their friends and family about us. I guarantee our growth from referrals would be a lot lower if we’re offering a product that actually lost our clients money. So I think it comes down to our values, but obviously it kind of permeates into lots of other areas.

Dexter Cousins
I told you about this a couple of weeks back. So I was using Claude to create a financial plan, which I’ve got to say was absolutely mind-blowing, what you’re able to do with that. But when I was putting in the investment strategy, it gave me a number of suggestions, and I said, “Hey, I’m using a product called Stockspot.” And I gave it the info, and it came out and said, “This is the ideal strategy and product for what you’re trying to accomplish.” So Claude agrees with those sentiments as well.

Chris Brycki
Yeah, it’s amazing how consumers… Yeah. I mean, you’re probably not the only one. And we’re seeing more people come through Claude and ChatGPT as their source of discovering Stockspot, because they’re obviously asking similar questions, like how do I manage $10,000, or what’s the best way to invest my savings, and we end up coming up as one of the options that suggests. Yeah, I’m not sure these days how much of it is it just agreeing with whatever you’re putting in there. So I wonder if something totally crazy in there, “Should I put all of my money in Dogecoin?”, whether it would say, “Dexter, fantastic idea.”

Dexter Cousins
That is a danger, but, you know, I think you’ve kind of… My use of Claude, I’m always pushing back. So I’m never… You know me, Chris, right? I’m not one that does platitudes, right? I’m from the northeast of England. Anybody that gives you a compliment, what do they want? So, yeah, I think, look, there is a danger, but I think the other thing as well is that the kind of evidence is there. So you’re now, what, over a billion dollars of…

Chris Brycki
Yeah, that’s right. We’re almost one and a half at the moment.

Dexter Cousins
How do you feel when you say that number, and we talk about those times where you had two customers? It must… You got to look back and go, like, wow.

Chris Brycki
I think what brings it home is not so much the assets that we’re managing for people, but the money we’ve made for people. So another stat I looked up recently is how much profit have we made clients in total over the last, you know, 12, 13 years since we launched? And it’s just under half a billion dollars. So, you know, to me that’s exciting, because we’ve essentially helped Australians save half a billion dollars more than they potentially would if they had money in other places, if they left it in their bank accounts. And that’s money that’s getting used to buy houses, go on holidays, or fund kids’ education. So that’s money that these families can actually use for things that they wanted to use it for.

Dexter Cousins
I want to talk about the future. We’ve talked a lot about what you built at a time that, when I started my business, the kind of real liberator was that I could, with a phone and with cloud computing, start a business where my costs were like $50 a month or whatever, right? It was crazy. And that liberated me to go out and fulfil a dream that I’d always want to fulfil. I look now with AI and I go, wow. Like, the things that you can build now.

You don’t need to go and hire a load of people. You have that discipline that you had around, hey, let’s not go and hire lots of people, cuz you don’t need to do it. If you were looking at starting Stockspot again from blank canvas today in 2026, what would you do differently versus what you started doing 13 years ago?

Chris Brycki
I mean, I think some things would be the same, which is the philosophy and the values behind what we’re doing, but probably our way to getting to market would have been slightly different, because there were certain things back then, like you mentioned, that you just couldn’t do. So for instance, when I was pitching that idea to some of my friends, I was like literally in a pub with a piece of paper explaining the idea to them.

Dexter Cousins
Every single fintech in Australia has started the same way, I’m pretty sure.

Chris Brycki
You know, it would still probably be in a pub, but maybe with a prototype developed on Claude, or some way of visualising what I wanted to do. I think definitely the ability for non-engineering types like myself to be able to bring their vision to life has changed, and their ability to get, not necessarily fully working models up and running, but at least kind of visualise ideas.

And I think I saw some stat recently around the number of new apps that are getting launched every year has just gone exponential, because it’s just so much easier to get something out there. That doesn’t mean there’s going to be more successes. If anything, it means there’s going to be a lot more failures, just because there can only be so many successful companies. And if 10x more companies are launching, then the numbers are looking even harder. But it at least allows those that do have a vision and an idea to get it to market quicker and to get feedback sooner.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. And look, I don’t think there’s a great deal of difference from, if you think back 10 years ago, Tank Stream Labs, Stone & Chalk, all of these kind of co-working spaces. You would have seen people come and go, sitting next to you at the desk, and kind of you’re going, “Oh, what you do?” “I’m launching a business.” “What are you doing?” “Oh, I’m putting together a pitch deck.” And I was like, “But what’s the business?” “Oh, well, I’m doing the pitch deck first.” And said, “No, but what’s the problem that you’re solving?”

Chris Brycki
Yeah. Democratising finance.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. Right. And two weeks later they weren’t at that desk anymore, right? Probably back sending me a resume for a job that I’m advertising.

Chris Brycki
There was a bit of that. I mean, we’re lucky in our very first office, which was Tank Stream. So we’ve been in Tank Stream for the whole time that we’ve had an office. We sat next to Airtasker.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

Chris Brycki
Still exists, listed company. Expert360, another early sort of successful startup in Australia. So I think those early years for me were the kind of most exciting in fintech and startup land, because there wasn’t really a vibe around startups and there was only a bunch of quite crazy people starting businesses at that point. And I remember entering startup competitions back in 2013 and ’14 when I was setting up the business. There weren’t many entrants. There weren’t many people there. These days you have a startup conference and there’s thousands and thousands of people.

So, you know, I’m a bit of a contrarian. I don’t really like to go into places where everyone’s already looking. And back in the early days of fintech and startups, it was an area that not many people were considering. Now it’s a pretty hot area to get into.

Dexter Cousins
Preston Chris, I don’t go to fintech events, and probably haven’t for the last two and a half, three years. And the reason being is that people like you on there, they weren’t… 2016, 2015, it was 2017 when I was launching the business, and you’d see people like Larry from Zip at an event, right? And I think now it’s so competitive that everybody’s building, right? Their head down, bum up, right? And they’re just focused on their business.

And so I think that kind of, and I’ve seen this reflected in the podcast numbers, right, which have dwindled, but I’ve still got my hardcore. And when I look at the ones that, you know, well, it was the height of the craziness, right, in 2021, where you’ve got PR and you got people thinking about joining the industry, and you got other recruiters, and you got all of these other people that just chase the noise, that really kind of aren’t contributing to the industry.

And so I think what we’ve still got left is that core hub of, one, the people that were around at that time, but then this next generation of founders as well. And what’s been really interesting is to talk to those original founders, and I think even the ones that went on and built the big, huge thousand, 2,000 person business, they’re all saying the same thing: I think out and do the same business again bigger, but with about 100 people.

Chris Brycki
Yeah, you’re hearing more businesses that are reaching $10 million of revenue with less than 10 staff. So it’s definitely happening. And yeah, maybe then that sort of cleanup of the industry has already happened. Maybe we’ve already seen that wave, and now is the time people are, you know, passionate about something to be looking at starting something, because the heat’s already come out of the sector.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. Look, I think certainly what I’m taking from it is that that kind of initial energy and excitement that we were part of is coming back, and it’s like, hey, I can rebuild this. And it’s been a really tough, well, 4 years really. March ’22 is when the kind of liquidity taps turned off, and all of a sudden it was, hey, we said how you got to grow at all costs, now you got to cut costs at all costs, and now we needed to be profitable in the next 12 months.

Chris Brycki
Well, I think it’s been a big challenge, yeah, on the liquidity side, because historically after these booms there’s been a window where there’s been like IPO liquidity or some level of liquidity. And like you say, since 2002 when the taps got turned off, there’s been little windows where they turned on a little bit, but not in a big way like in ’99 or 2000, where every tech company could list. And so I think the market’s been quite discerning around business models, and that’s why you’ve seen some companies struggle or run out of funding or merge or do other things. That’s probably a healthy thing to happen, and those that have survived and continue, probably good ones to back.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. And look, I definitely, from the conversations I’m having and what I’m seeing being built, there is this kind of resurgence of, hey, it’s not going to be that expensive for us to start all over again, where you think, you know, those kind of Series A and Series B rounds, like, oh, now we got to build an enterprise platform and not this.

Chris Brycki
Yeah. So do you think people will raise less then, because they just don’t need it?

Dexter Cousins
Most the people that I’m speaking to are saying, I don’t want to raise. I can raise. I’ve got people offering me money, but I don’t want to kind of dilute the cap table. I want the people that are on this journey to own that.

Chris Brycki
Yeah. You might see more bootstrap business.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

Chris Brycki
We will we are the VC struggle, because they’ve got such big coffers of capital ready to deploy.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. And look, I think that should actually be the way that it works, right? Like, anybody who’s raising seed money, it’s a bit like in 2016, you’ve got these people with their pitch decks. First question I’d ask would be, have you asked your mum and dad if they want to invest? “Oh, no, no, I don’t want to get family involved.” It’s like, that’s usually a sign that you haven’t got conviction in your idea. And so I think if you’re going out and raising seed capital right now, with the tools that you’ve got available and the opportunities, you said that you could spin something up in a weekend and at the end of a month be doing a million dollars in revenue, right? Why do you need to raise?

Chris Brycki
Well, that’s it. Yeah. And if you’re going to avoid it, it definitely reduces one level of stress and complexity of being a startup, cuz capital raising is, yeah, extremely time-consuming and not something most people want to do.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. I think the other thing as well is just the level of conviction that founders have, and they know that once you bring investors in, “Oh, but what about this?” We touched on this before, how you’ve been able to remain true to your original vision and hypothesis and values around the type of business that you’re building, and if you had some of the top VCs on there, you wouldn’t have been able to do that.

Chris Brycki
Well, yeah. VC, I realised quite early on, wasn’t the right source of capital for our business because of the type of growth they’re trying to drive. And I just didn’t think it was aligned to a wealth management business, where building trust and track record inevitably takes time and you can’t really rush it. You can’t throw $100 million of advertising dollars towards a business and make it work, just because, unless you’ve got 5 or 10 years of returns to show, consumers still aren’t going to trust you.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. And I think this is really one of the reasons I wanted to get you on the show, Chris, right? Was to show to people that, hey, look, it isn’t all about banking the unbanked in Africa and building a Revolut-style business. As much as I think those businesses are incredible and they’ve done an amazing job, I also see the impact on my life of what businesses like you are providing as well, right? And I think ultimately the reason I’m so passionate about fintech, and always have been, is because I want my kids to have a fairer financial world. And there are lots of many different ways that you can do that.

And I think this is the beauty of Stockspot, is what you’ve done and the legacy that you’re building, $1.5 billion money under management. You’ve saved half a billion dollars. That’s a guy with an idea that’s had a significant impact on the world, right? And I think this is kind of the agency now that we’ve got at this moment in time, is, wow, you can… As one of my favourite lines of the movie Gladiator is, what we do in life echoes in eternity. And I think we’ve got that opportunity to do things if we remain true to the vision and the values and the kind of essence of what we’re building.

Chris Brycki
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, that makes the grey hairs feel worth it. You’re actually having impact on lives. But yeah, I think for a lot of founders the motivator to start a business is to have impact on the area that they’re passionate about, to change the way things are worked. So…

Dexter Cousins
And I think all of that, over time, it just gets drawn from you. The more people you hire, the more problems you get, right? The more money you take on, and investors, the more problems it creates. The more customers you get, the more problems it creates, right? And some of these are good problems, but some of these are problems that just drain you of energy.

I posted on LinkedIn today that we’ve talked a lot in fintech about providing frictionless experiences for customers. Now what I’m seeing is the businesses themselves are starting to become frictionless by taking out those layers and actually getting lean again. And kind of going back to the foundational element of the business, which was, to what you’ve stayed true with, which is how do we keep lean so that we can keep cost down, so we can pass that on to our customers, but deliver a better product and a better service and more value and all of those things, which is what it was all about in the beginning, right? I wouldn’t say it’s lost its way, but I just think you’ve got to keep those kind of values and principles if you’re going to build a successful business.

Chris Brycki
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, maybe the future for recruiting is like a business that’s only trying to recruit one person, and that’s their whole hiring plan. So, well, look, I mean, hire their second person and that’s it.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. That’s actually the philosophy that we’ve got, right? It’s like, we help you hire that rockstar, and they should be able to bring in the other people. They should be able to attract them. And, you know, we’re hiring that person and you’re saying to us, oh, we need to go and hire more, have kind of failed.

Chris Brycki
Oh, yeah. I think these days that rockstar that you’re hiring can have more impact, particularly if they know how to leverage their capabilities using things like AI. Definitely one person can have the power of 10 10 years ago. And so I think those more valuable people become even more valuable.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, I’ve seen this certainly over this last decade. Every business that stalled, the product that they’ve built, they lost the essence of the founder being at the very forefront and doing what you did. And then they go and scale and they’ve got a CPO, and they’re like, “Hey, we want to build something that’s going to be really cool. We’re banking the unbanked.” And I think this is where a lot of fintechs who’ve scaled have fallen into the same trap that the incumbents who they were trying to dislodge, and they become all kind of bloated and heavy, and they’re no longer at the forefront of driving innovation, which is being honest with you, having honest conversations with customers, asking questions you don’t want the answer to, but acting on that and actually fixing the problem.

Chris Brycki
Yeah, I think that’s just, yeah, again, the essence of building a product, and wanting to keep on learning what your customers are after and addressing the actual problems they’re having in their lives. Yeah, if you’re not doing that, then you are going to lose your way.

Yeah, I mean, even when you are talking to our team, they’re always keen to hear your experience with the product. You know, what’s working, what’s not, what can we learn, what can we do better. And it’s why we try and, yeah, speak to as many customers as possible. We don’t get to meet that many face to face, because everyone’s spread out around Australia. But the more we can survey clients, hear from them on the phones, hear from them on chats and collect that feedback, the better we can make the experience.

Dexter Cousins
And yeah, that’s a common theme, right? I look at the best product experiences that I’ve had, whether it’s Alex at Spriggy, it’s you at Stockspot, it’s the people at Revolut. If I share something with them, let’s get on to this, right? I remember Dom Pym, Up Bank, and I tweeted something. I was at the pub on a Sunday afternoon and my card wasn’t working, and I tweeted him and he fixed it. He fixed it on the Sunday afternoon, and then I got a thank you email the next day from them saying, “Hey, you highlighted something that we’ve recognised as a bug across the system. We’ve fixed it. Here are the things that we’ve done.”

Chris Brycki
Yeah. And that’s the kind of 11 out of 10 product experience. It’s going to make you go and tell everyone you know about the bank. The CEO on the way. So…

Dexter Cousins
That’s it. Look, and I think that’s kind of fundamentally, if you look at the kind of origins of fintech and those businesses that have lasted, right? What I would say, the enduring businesses, that’s a common thread throughout all of them.

Chris Brycki
I think, I mean, definitely having the founder passion in businesses, like, I know Alex from Spriggy, and he still has the same passion that he had starting the business, and it’s always awesome to hear the passion for the end customer come through. If you don’t have a founder, then someone has to kind of take the lead, I guess, internally, and really kind of own that passion for the vision of the company. Otherwise, yeah, I can see it easily drifting.

Dexter Cousins
Well, Chris, it’s been fantastic to catch up. Where can people find out more about Stockspot, from, first of all, being a customer perspective? And then, you know, they kind of like the mission and they think they might be able to add value to you as a part of the team, what’s the best way to get in touch?

Chris Brycki
Well, to learn about Stockspot, it’s very easy. You can just go to the website, which is stockspot.com.au, and you can learn about investing, whether it’s your super or other savings, or if you’re older, a pension. That’s the best place to learn about Stockspot. I’m pretty active on LinkedIn, posting updates and insights, and also on the Stockspot blog. So if you want to learn, you could subscribe to either of those and keep up to date with what’s happening in markets and in ETFs and super and investing. And then LinkedIn’s probably the best place to look for opportunities.

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