From Great Product to Growing Fintech Business

The Real Test Begins After the Build

You’ve built the product. Now comes the real test: turning it into a business that grows without burning you out. I'm Julian Moore, and I've helped UK fintechs like Xero and Uncapped navigate this exact path. The journey from a functional product to a predictable revenue engine isn't about finding a single secret hack. It’s about implementing a sound B2B fintech marketing strategy that addresses the challenges unique to our industry.

Many founders I speak to are brilliant at product but find themselves hitting a wall when it comes to marketing. They face a common set of hurdles that can stall even the most promising ventures. This is a practical playbook, drawn from real-world experience in early stage fintech marketing, designed to help you clear them one by one.

Hurdle 1: Overcoming the Fintech Trust Deficit

You're asking customers for their financial data, or to trust you with their money. That's a bigger ask than just a software subscription. In a regulated industry, trust isn't a marketing buzzword, it's a fundamental product feature. It’s built on demonstrable proof, not just clever copy. You have to move beyond surface-level branding to showcase security, reliability, and compliance from day one.

A practical way to start is by creating a ‘claims and evidence matrix’. For every value proposition on your website, you should have a corresponding piece of evidence to back it up. This could be a technical spec, a customer quote, or a compliance certification. This process of backing up claims is crucial when you're trying to get your first 10 B2B customers. Case narratives are also powerful because they show, rather than just tell, how your product solves real problems for businesses like theirs. For example, here is one of mine:

💡 Result: 10x customer growth in a regulated market.
🛠️ What we did: At Contis (BaaS fintech) , in partnership with Product, we devised new compliant use cases and ramped ABM and trade PR that made enterprise deals winnable by proving our stability and expertise.

Your next step is to audit your marketing claims. Can you back every single one with hard evidence? If not, start there.

Hurdle 2: Escaping the High Cost of Paid Acquisition

You know that sinking feeling when your paid ad costs creep up, but the quality of leads doesn't? You're on the paid acquisition treadmill, and it only gets faster. While paid ads can provide an initial boost for fintech customer acquisition, they rarely build a long-term, sustainable growth engine. The real goal is to shift from short-term lead generation to long-term demand creation. This is how to reduce fintech CAC for good.

Building an inbound engine that compounds over time is the answer. This means creating assets that attract your ideal customers when they are actively looking for solutions. A modern, AI-driven SEO playbook for startup founders can help you build these assets efficiently. Focus your efforts on:

• Bottom-of-funnel content like solution pages that target high-intent keywords.

• Comparison guides that honestly position your product against known alternatives.

• Calculators or tools that provide immediate value and capture qualified leads.

This shift reflects a broader trend. As McKinsey highlights in their analysis of the sector, the new paradigm for fintechs is a focus on sustainable, profitable growth. It’s a move away from the hypergrowth-at-all-costs mindset.

💡 Result: Doubled revenue and cut customer acquisition cost (CAC) by a third.
🛠️ How we did it: With Uncapped, we shifted budget from pure paid ads to a high-intent SEO content cluster, rebalancing the marketing mix and attracting customers who were already problem-aware.

Your takeaway is to identify one bottom-of-funnel topic your ideal customer is searching for right now. Create a single, definitive piece of content that answers their question better than anyone else.

Hurdle 3: Moving from a Rented to an Owned Audience

If your favourite social media platform changed its algorithm tomorrow, would your pipeline dry up? If the answer is yes, you have a rented audience. A rented audience consists of followers on social media or traffic from paid ads. An owned audience, on the other hand, is made up of your newsletter subscribers, community members, and direct relationships. It provides a reliable line of communication that isn't subject to the whims of third-party platforms.

Building an owned audience requires a commitment to providing genuine value. This could mean creating a newsletter people actually want to read, fostering a user community where customers can help each other, or developing a partner ecosystem. Developing these ecosystem plays is one of the core services I provide to help startups scale beyond paid channels.

💡 Result: Tripled inbound lead flow.
🛠️ How we did it: We pivoted Penfold to a B2B2C model via the accounting channel, building a partner program that turned accountants into advocates and created a new, owned distribution channel.

Your next step is to create one asset that allows you to capture direct contact information in exchange for genuine value. This could be a simple email course, a webinar, or a specialised calculator.

Hurdle 4: Making Sense of Your Marketing Data

You have dashboards full of charts, but if you're honest, you can't trace a clear line from that marketing spend to last month's revenue. It's a data black hole. The solution is to create a 'single source of truth'. This isn’t about tracking every vanity metric, but about connecting marketing activities to commercial outcomes. I’ve seen this at almost every startup I’ve worked with, from Bullhorn to Penfold. The simple act of creating a source-of-truth report that the whole team uses is often the catalyst for smarter, faster growth.

The table below clarifies the distinction between metrics that feel good to track and metrics that actually measure business health and drive strategic decisions.

Your next step is to answer one question: what is our customer acquisition cost and payback period, by channel? If you don't know, building the report to find out is your top priority.

Hurdle 5: Breaking the Founder Bottleneck

If every new marketing idea, campaign, or piece of content has to go through you, you are the bottleneck. The business can't scale if it's all on you. The solution is to build systems and an operating cadence, not just hire more people. This is about creating playbooks, templates, and repeatable processes that empower your team to execute with confidence.

A good operating cadence includes a weekly growth review, an experiments backlog with simple ICE scoring, and clear ownership for key results. This turns marketing from a reactive function into a proactive, systematic engine. AI and automation can help here, but as tools for speed, never as a crutch for strategy. This is where a B2B fractional CMO can transform your startup, implementing these systems without the cost of a full-time executive.

Your next step is to document one successful marketing activity you did recently. Write it down as a simple playbook so someone else on your team can run it next time. That's the first step to building a system.

There Is No Hack, But There Is a Method

There’s no single hack. But there is a method. Nail trust. Bake in compliance. Own your audience. Know your numbers. Build systems so it’s not all on you. That’s where I usually step in. As a fractional CMO for fintech, my job is to help founders achieve sustainable fintech marketing growth in the UK by building the engine that gets them from a great product to a growing business.

If you’re stuck between product and predictable growth, that’s exactly where I help.