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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.

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.

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.

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

🔥BONUS SaaS Growth Tips

• The Ultimate SaaS Growth Strategy Workbook — It’s free, used over 2000+ with only 5-star reviews! Grab a copy here.

• Notion Growth Strategies - great breakdown of how Notion achieved hyper-growth. Read it for free here.

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