Strabo Personalizes Global Investments With Bubble

Two entrepreneurs take on international finance

Michael Magdongon cut his entrepreneurial teeth by founding (and selling!) a startup in the auto-imaging space. In 2016, Michael turned a page in his career, moving from the U.S. to the Netherlands to earn his MBA, and then to London after school. As he moved from country to country, Michael’s personal financial portfolio spread across multiple currencies and platforms. The associated tax requirements followed Michael, as well, growing in complexity as his portfolio diversified.

At the same time, Ben Waterman left a career in professional sports for the excitement of private banking, wealth management, and venture capital. He soon encountered the same problems as Michael while managing multiple asset classes and vehicles spread around the world.

So when Michael and Ben met one fateful day in London, they quickly realized they were on a similar quest. A quest to find a personal asset management tool built to handle international portfolios. Almost as quickly, they decided to stop searching in vain and build a tool themselves. And the story of Strabo began.

A single tool to span countries and currencies

Though Michael and Ben share over a collective decade of finance and business experience, they are both entrepreneurs at heart. Fueled by that entrepreneurial spirit, they resolved to build exactly what the world of personal finance lacked. Strabo was envisioned as an all-in-one dashboard to manage myriad asset classes across multiple currencies and jurisdictions, track investing goals, and provide forecasting tools.

“With Bubble, we could not only create our prototype in a matter of weeks but also collect and rapidly iterate on user feedback.”

As experienced, repeat founders, the duo knew to avoid building complex and expensive tools without user validation. The immediate goal instead became launching a prototype that would not only impress investors, but also facilitate user testing, feedback, and rapid iteration on the core Strabo idea.

MVPs should be DIY

Ben and Michael researched no-code solutions. Bubble stood out from the crowd for its robust extensibility and easy integrations with third-party APIs. While neither partner had previous programming experience, they found Bubbles logic and tools easy to pick up. “With Bubble, we could not only create a prototype in a matter of weeks, but also collect and rapidly iterate on user feedback,” Ben said. This meant rolling out new features customers really wanted, and quickly at that.

With Bubble’s API connector, we could easily integrate our app with various banking institutions’ open APIs.

The heart of Strabo’s power lies in its ability to pull portfolio data from multiple accounts and institutions — across countries, currencies, and asset classes. “With Bubble’s API connector, we could easily integrate our app with various banking institutions’ open APIs,” Ben explained. Strabo users get an at-a-glance view of their entire portfolio by currency, location segmentation, or investment vehicle. Strabo also provides insightful net-worth forecasting, and users can set custom investment goals, manage portfolio allocations, and track risk over time.

Bubble – and the greater Bubble community of developers and template makers – enables entrepreneurship for non-technical founders. “If it didn’t make sense to build something ourselves, we never had trouble finding Bubble ecosystem contributors who already had in the form of plugins and add-ons,” Ben said. In Strabo’s case, that meant leveraging a chatbox plugin found in the Marketplace, and outsourcing a portion of the most complex backend work to a professional Bubble Developer.

The forefront of asset management powered by Bubble

No-code development let Michael and Ben move quickly and decisively. In June 2021, Strabo was accepted into F10 Switzerland’s accelerator program. There, the team leveraged F10’s network of experienced builders to shape Strabo’s product and business strategy.

Today, Strabo connects to 11 countries and 10,000+ financial institutions around the world. But they’re just getting started. The platform is expanding to support foreign-exchange (FX) transfers and tax filing, and offering tailored financial education. The dashboard is continually improved and refined, and is now launching to a group of beta users. This process will be used to decide which features to roll out next, including portfolio risk analysis, more detailed retirement planning, tagging and goals and the first part of the tax optimisation system. Michael and Ben are optimistic about feature expansion and their steps towards scaling.

Strabo is harnessing the power of no-code to change peoples’ relationships with their finances, bridging the cognitive gaps between life and money. Bubble lets the Strabo team focus on the latest in asset management, not keeping up with code bases. Or, as Michael put it, “Use tech to build your startup. Don’t use your startup to build fancy tech.”

Strabo is harnessing the power of no-code to change peoples’ relationships with their finances — sign up to see what Strabo can do for your portfolio. With Bubble, the Strabo team can focus on the latest in asset management, not keeping up with code bases. “Use tech to build your startup. Don’t use your startup to build fancy tech,” said Michael. Sounds like sage advice for any founder to follow.