1 session inside Boa
Fred Schebesta
Founder, Finder
Fred Schebesta founded Finder in 2006, starting with a single site called Credit Card Finder while earning about $1,500 a month and living off a credit card. He grew it into a comparison business now described as a $600 million tech company, expanding from credit cards into home loans, insurance, crypto and investing. Earlier in his career he ran a digital marketing agency and won Young Direct Marketer of the Year at 27.
The session
What Fred teaches
Test demand with a domain, a blog post and a PayPal link
Before Finder scaled, Fred bought findlostsuper.com.au, put up a single blog post asking people to send $50 and their details, and waited. Money landed in his account before he had built anything, so he manually found people's super afterwards, sometimes three weeks late, and nobody complained. That was his proof of product market fit. Run the cheapest possible version that takes real money from a real customer before you build.
From Fred Schebesta: cheap tests, boring categories, big content →Define the right path as the one you can repeat, not the easiest one
Fred's test for a good business model is whether it lets you do the same thing over and over. At Finder that meant publishing content, so he tracked pages published on a whiteboard and the team clapped for each other. He points to burger chains cutting chips the same way every morning and just pumping out cash. If a new direction cannot be repeated at lower cost and higher output, it will not scale.
From Fred Schebesta: cheap tests, boring categories, big content →Let the vision move as the model proves itself
Finder's vision changed four times: help people with credit card content, compare everything like Amazon's everything store, help people make great decisions, then help people build wealth. Each shift only happened after the previous model worked. The wealth shift, driven by people going into stocks and crypto in 2020 and 2021, changed the org structure and the PR messaging from saving money to deploying money.
From Fred Schebesta: cheap tests, boring categories, big content →Build credibility with press first, then use it to open partner doors
Banks would not deal with a 28 year old with a small site in 2006, so Fred joined affiliate networks that took a heavy cut and paid him about $50 per credit card. He accepted being a price taker to get in the door. He then chased visibility, landed a story on the front of news.com.au and a morning show slot, and used that profile to push into the networks, driving to their offices and presenting his build plan when nobody else ever visited.
From Fred Schebesta: cheap tests, boring categories, big content →
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