Ben Waterman started his career as a professional runner who competed for Great Britain on the track, narrowly missing the 800m at the 2016 Olympics. When that path ended he moved into finance, spending almost three years managing client money. What struck him was how dated the experience felt: wealthy clients were paying high fees and still handling much of their money over the phone. After an early sustainability startup that did not work out, he kept circling back to the idea of fixing how people see and manage their accounts.

With co-founder Michael Magdongon, Ben set out to build something closer to a customizable dashboard for money, often described as the Notion for personal finance. The plan was to let people sync bank accounts, brokerages, crypto, property, pensions and loans into one place, normalize the data and add an analytics layer on top. Because Ben had no coding background, the first version was built in Bubble, a no-code tool, and handed to 150 people in his network to try. That early traction helped the team raise a pre-seed round and move to a full stack on Node.js, React and a serverless setup on AWS.

The move off no-code was painful. Ben relied on outsourced developers for the rebuild and called it a source of endless headaches, concluding that he would never start a software company again without a committed technical co-founder and that he would avoid agencies entirely. The team eventually brought all development in-house, which gave them far more control over the product.

Strabo launched publicly in November to a waitlist of around 2,500 people. By the time Ben shared his numbers, the product had roughly 1,100 monthly active users logging in about three times a month, and monthly recurring revenue was just reaching $1K from a freemium subscription model. A real constraint for the business is unit economics: every connected account carries API costs, so the team has to be deliberate about how it scales and monetizes rather than chasing raw user growth.

On distribution, Ben expected marketing to be the easy part and found the opposite. The UK is full of free financial content and well-funded fintech apps burning venture money, so standing out was hard. He leaned on SEO early because search traffic comes with buyer intent, added some LinkedIn outreach and a presence on Twitter, and avoided paid ads. His blunt advice for founders: keep launching, talk to users constantly, write code, and treat almost everything else as a distraction.