The wall of Post-it notes that became a business
Shane Chanel was not looking for an idea. A group of fintech Founders kept complaining about the same things at breakfast, so they covered a wall with them.
A group of fintech Founders had been meeting for breakfast every few months. Every time, the same complaints came up. Different card issuers, different providers, the same things broken. They had all bolted on external providers to handle identity verification because what came out of the box was not good enough.
Three of them decided to do something about it. They covered a wall with every pain point they had hit building digital financial products. A room full of Post-it notes, and a reaction Shane describes as realising how many problems there were to solve.
That wall became Kobble.
The idea was already in the room
Shane was not hunting for a business. He was eighteen months into having Yondr in market, and Kobble came directly out of what building Yondr had cost him - years of work, and for most fintechs somewhere between two and ten million dollars before a product exists.
The barrier to entry that made his life hard was the same barrier that made the opportunity real.
You can only solve problems you have had
His example is joint accounts. Up made them easy to open, and it moved their customer numbers - Megan's own reason for joining Up was that she could open one without a fight.
Then the supply side. As far as Shane knows, no other banking service provider can offer joint accounts at all. Kobble built it, because Shane had already hit the gap himself.
That is his whole argument about where ideas come from. If you have not shipped the product, you do not know the feature is missing. There are hundreds of those, and none of them surface in market research.
The test for whether a pain point is a business
Three things were true of the ones on that wall. They recurred rather than happening once. They were shared - every Founder around that table had them. And none of those Founders could fix them alone, because the fix was infrastructure.
A pain point that only you have is a workaround. One that everyone in your industry has, and nobody can solve individually, is a company.
Where it went
Kobble has been in market about eighteen months, processing a few million dollars of transactions a day. It serves insurance and automotive as well as fintech. One client went live with a full end-to-end banking stack in 44 business days, against the two to three years it took Shane.
More than two hundred companies have approached them wanting to build product.