Fintech startup Call Levels has grown its user base 20x in the past year

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As fashionable as fintech is right now, it’s no walk in the park when you have a company you need to grow. Fintech is not only a heavily regulated space, but you have all kinds of financial behemoths to beat – or impress enough for them to invite you to the club.

Singapore’s Call Levels has been doing some impressing of its own in the last year. The startup co-founded by Cynthia Siantar and Daniel Chia makes an app that allows users to monitor financial markets in real time. When users’ specific assets reach pre-selected levels, they get a notification so they can act on that info.

“We tend to target people in key financial markets who trade in equities, forex, liquid commodities,” Cynthia tells Tech in Asia.

‘Your product is scalable but you are not.’

The startup reports a 20-fold growth on its user base over the past 12 months, now at around 150,000 users. Cynthia says that about 40 to 50 percent of that are active on a monthly basis and they come from all over the world, most notably financial hubs like New York, London, Singapore, Hong Kong, and the UAE.

The startup’s first year was spent on developing and launching the product as quickly as possible. This might not have allowed it to gain users as quickly, but it helped the app itself.

“The app is very simple to use, and we designed it that way,” Cynthia explains, talking about its appeal to users. “In fact, people underestimate the work that went into building the back-end.”

The team is now about to unveil version 3 of its app, which it says will include several improvements and new features.

Call Levels raised US$500,000 in November 2015, in a pre-series A round led by 500 Startups. It was the venture firm’s managing partner, Khailee Ng, that advised the startup that its priority now should be growth. “He told us, ‘Your product is scalable but you are not,’” Cynthia says.

So the team made hires with that in mind and also focused on getting the message out through social media, online content on its blog, and other marketing efforts.

Validation

All that work paid off. A few months ago, Call Levels inked a partnership deal with trading firm DBS Vickers, through which it has been able to reach more users and gain the added legitimacy of working with a large financial institution.

“We were very fortunate that the CEO of DBS Vickers was one of the early adopters of our app,” Cynthia says. “He was the one who pushed it through, because he understood why the app could be useful.”

The work in getting the message out paid off.