Plaid
connecting bank accounts for $13B
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How Plaid grew to $13B with a “build vs buy” strategy
Plaid is an API platform that lets finance apps connect to various banks and financial services without needing individual integrations. They've raised $734M and are now valued at $13.4B.
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Plaid’s GTM strategy
Product
Plaid has expanded over the years to provide different sets of data for different use cases. The product strategy has stayed the same: connect users’ bank accounts to one API. Plaid is an essential connection layer for finance apps like Venmo, Robinhood, Wealthfront, or Coinbase.
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Plaid’s products
Distribution
The main reason Plaid grew to today’s size is picking to right customers and amazing timing. They serviced the most popular consumer fintech apps — which some grew exponentially. This focus on the “growth/expansion” fit customers helped Plaid win in the “build vs buy” strategy.
Consumer apps require even more testing and experiments to achieve product-market fit. This leads to building fast — and integrating into all national bank chains doesn’t fall into the “build fast” category.
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How it works + Plaid’s customers
Market
Plaid is banking on the growth of the open banking market (projected to grow to $135B!) Math is simple: the more companies are building financial products/apps the bigger the market will be.
Here is an article that explains it in detail.
Resources
What Does Plaid Do? — awesome technical writeup by Technically
Plaid’s Network — financial technical report with cool images!
Plaid Research Memo — by Contrary Ventures
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Notion Growth Strategies - great breakdown of how Notion achieved hyper-growth. Read it for free here.
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