Entrenio

Rachel Carpenter and Joey French met at the University of Wisconsin-Madison while studying finance and accounting. They had an ambitious idea: build an app to automate business valuations, which typically cost $50,000-$100,000 but involved largely automated processes. Rather than outsource development, they made a counterintuitive decision—they'd teach themselves to code. Joey dove into backend work (Ruby, databases, algorithms), while Rachel tackled frontend (HTML, CSS, JavaScript). This wasn't the cheaper path, but it meant they wouldn't dilute equity and could move quickly with shared domain expertise. "Most people don't take the time to do that," Rachel explains. "Having both financial expertise and technical skills let us move really fast."

For the first year and a half, Rachel and Joey were practically alone, supported only by a $100,000 friends-and-family investment. They slept in a shared studio apartment and bartended at Rachel's mom's wine bar in St. Petersburg, Florida to make ends meet. Joey's colleague Connor Farley joined as CRO, and Rachel's brother Andrew came aboard as the first full-time employee. Together, they built the app—but immediately hit a wall: legitimate financial data licensing.

The big five data providers—Bloomberg, Capital IQ, Thomson Reuters, FactSet, Morningstar—quoted them $50,000 per month. "It was a complete dead stop," Rachel recalls. "I was sleeping on a couch that year. There's no way we could justify that expense." They would have needed $5 million in funding just to afford the data rights. Frustrated but determined, they realized the real opportunity: if data was a roadblock for them, it was a blockade for thousands of other developers. They pivoted from building the valuation app to building a better way to source financial data.

The next phase was brutal. For a year and a half, the team manually sifted through financial statements to train a machine learning algorithm. They had to understand the complex relationships between line items, financial ratios, and accounting standards in order to teach their code to automatically clean and organize raw financial data. "It was a bad year," Rachel admits. They eventually built an algorithmic, then machine-learning-powered system that could pull in financial filings and automatically extract clean, structured data at a fraction of the cost and time of traditional methods.

By the time the technology was solid, the core team was just Joey (primary developer), Rachel, Connor, and Andrew. No revenue yet. Rachel and Joey continued bartending. Connor and Andrew lived on a sailboat. "We had probably combined with the four of us the number of square footage we were living in was pretty pathetic, but it made us stronger," Rachel reflects.

Once the technology worked, the team had to figure out the business model. They cycled through multiple pricing strategies—starting at a flat $25 for everyone (great signups, massive value leakage), then swinging to enterprise-only "contact us" pricing (scared everyone away), then an overly complex 8-tier model based on API call limits (confusing for non-technical users). The breakthrough came when they realized their customer base wasn't monolithic: developers didn't understand API call limits, while Excel-based investors didn't know what an API was. The solution was personas.

They renamed the tiers: Individual, Professional, Developer, Startup, Enterprise. Suddenly, signup rate climbed because people could instantly identify their category. "If you're a developer, this is the plan for you," Rachel explains. "It instantly answers the question: is this for me?"

But they'd been targeting the wrong primary audience all along. Initially focused on investors and quant funds, they eventually realized developers were the perfect fit—they were already asking for exactly what Entrenio offered. The moment came when Alex Solo joined as CTO and said bluntly: "Guys, this is the perfect product for developers. I live and breathe in this world, and these guys are loving this." They also noticed their new Developer Program—offering six months of free data to qualifying startups—was attracting 2-3 new startups per week. The inbound signal was undeniable.

For customer acquisition, Rachel and the team did something unconventional for fintech: they dominated SEO and Quora. They wrote quality content on their blog (driven by support questions, new product launches, and developer spotlights), but Quora was the real engine. Developers were literally posting questions like "Where can I find an affordable financial data API?" and Entrenio kept showing up with genuine, helpful answers. Within a month of focusing on Quora, it became their #3 traffic driver—above social media, above the blog.

Once customers arrived, Rachel and the team did something equally important: they obsessed over support. Using Intercom, they answered customer questions in under 60 seconds. They worked 24-hour shifts—Joey handled 3-4 a.m., Rachel took 5-6 a.m.—turning customer conversations into product intelligence. "We have thousands and thousands of conversations with customers," Rachel says. That feedback loop drove product roadmap decisions (e.g., "75 conversations last month asked for Indian market fundamentals—let's prioritize it"), UX fixes, and a battery of helpful blog posts and saved replies.

They were strategic about what not to do: they wouldn't teach customers how to code or debug their Python implementations. "We can't teach you how to code. We can't edit your GitHub repo," Rachel explains. "But if it's an API issue, we'll help." This boundary kept support sustainable.

Entrenio has grown from a 4-person team on ramen to 8+ employees. They've pivoted from building a single app to building a marketplace of financial data feeds—stock prices, fundamentals, Indian market data, and more—accessible via APIs, Excel add-ins, and Google Sheets. Developers are now their core audience, and the developer community is generating the growth. The company is profitable and bootstrapped through the lean years, then raised angel capital once they had proof of concept.

Rachel's advice to founders? Talk to your customers relentlessly. Have belief even when you're sleeping on a couch. And don't underestimate a boring channel like Quora when your customers are actively searching for exactly what you build.