Lendio

Change the business with product

The charter: build a SaaS product for lenders, in a company that had never had a product team.

Lendio sold leads for small business loans, mostly in the subprime market. The hypothesis was that if the lenders buying those leads had a tool to manage them, they would see their conversion rates, work the funnel better, and Lendio would earn recurring SaaS revenue.

The people at the center were small business owners, often under pressure, and the loan officers, brokers, and underwriters working their deals. I set a goal before the research started: demo a live product at the American Bankers Association conference in New Orleans in the fall of 2012.

• Small business owners needing options, fast, from people they can trust.
• Loan officers and underwriters juggling paper, spreadsheets, phones, and texts.
• Lenders buying leads with little visibility into what happened to them.

Research first: options, speed, and trust

Thirty contextual inquiries, a conference room covered in sticky notes.

With lead designer Adam Tolman and CTO Trent Miskin, I ran contextual research that reached 30 enterprises, 100 personas, and 100 business owners, then spent weeks synthesizing. Every insight went onto a sticky note, the notes covered the conference room, and we grouped them: options, speed, and trust.

Two things came out of it. There was clearly an opportunity to organize origination for loan officers and underwriters, which became the SaaS product. And there was an opportunity to help small business owners directly, which became the idea for a marketplace.

A SaaS product, then a marketplace

Built in six months, validated in three, then deliberately set aside.

We designed the SaaS product around integrated communication: CRM workflow, email, texting, telephony, calendar, and document management. Engineering took a bootcamp in Angular, then built what was at the time one of the largest Angular apps in the world. We demoed it live at the ABA conference and had 20 clients on it within three months.

In parallel, four loan specialists ran an MVP of the marketplace on that same product. When it validated, I proposed pausing the SaaS and sunsetting it for clients, several of whom offered to buy it. We then built lender scoring and a North Star metric: a survey six months after funding asking whether the owner was still in business, better off, and better off because of Lendio. Roughly 90%, 89%, and 92% said yes.

• ABA launch from ambiguity to a live demo in 6 months.
• 20 SaaS clients signed within 3 months.
• Marketplace MVP $0 to $100M in loans in 2 years; $16B cumulative by 2026.

Principles that outlasted the product

What we codified, and why I was ready to move on.

The research gave us lasting principles (options, speed, and trust) that shaped everything we built after. I grew the product team from zero to ten across PM, UX, implementation, and support, and later took on customer service, people ops, and IT as COO. Shutting down the SaaS product was hard, but handing clients a clean migration was part of earning the trust we were selling.

By 2016 the marketplace was closing loans at an exponentially growing rate and revenue had climbed from about $6M toward $20M. The next step was automating applications and building a lender API, and the milestone I came for was done. BambooHR’s founders called.