Meet The Disruptors: Chris Roper of MyConstant On The Three Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry
“Customers are your most sustainable source of funding.” — This came from a serial entrepreneur whom I used to write for while a freelancer. Chasing investment or spending a fortune on marketing won’t matter in the long run unless you make customers happy. In fact, delighting customers is one of the few strategies that all but guarantees growth.
As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Chris Roper.
Chris Roper heads communications for alternative finance startup, MyConstant. Chris has spent almost a decade writing about technology, exploring complex, interconnected systems and bringing them to life in meaningful ways. After a stint as copywriter for an award-winning, global energy company, Chris now educates people about alternative investing. Most recently, Chris started a podcast where he and his co-host discuss emerging fintech that can help achieve your financial goals.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
I’ve always been interested in how technology shapes society, how it has both helped and transformed us — for better in some cases, worse in others.
My “big break” was landing the copywriter role at billion-dollar tech startup, Octopus Energy. I joined when they were still small, with only around 10,000 customers. My job was to demystify the UK energy market, helping customers to cut bills and shrink their carbon footprint.
From there, I started my own copywriting business, freelancing for a range of clients in the SaaS, finance, and energy space. I’d begun writing about decentralized finance when I joined MyConstant full-time, back when it was a USD-backed stablecoin project.
Today, I’m proud to say we’re one of the fastest-growing crypto-backed lending companies in the US. It’s my job to educate and inspire customers to exploit the financial tools and services that weren’t technically possible ten or so years ago.
Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?
Think back to thirty years ago. Life in the US was almost like a fairytale. You graduated, got a stable job for life, and put a bit aside for the future in high-yield savings or pension account. You’d retire at 65 in relative comfort.
Today, that fairytale has died. People struggle to afford what their parents and grandparents took for granted. Job security is scarce. Homes, just a pipe dream.
In part, this is due to a broken financial system that rewards greed and excludes those on the lowest rungs of the wealth ladder. Worse, wages have stagnated while the cost of living has risen, and yet the top US banks pay less than inflation.
At MyConstant, we use technology, education, and a unique asset class to help people create wealth. Our crypto-backed, peer-to-peer lending products deliver inflation-beating returns, up to 20x more than a CD, with none of the obscurity or exclusivity of traditional investments.
Since launch in 2019, we’ve matched over $80 million in loans and returned an average of 7.42% APR with no investor losses. In other words, we empower people to earn rates commensurate with the stock market while enjoying greater access to opportunity, information, and support.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
This example isn’t particularly funny, but it did teach me a valuable lesson about communication.
In the early days, we let customers choose whether or not to enable 2FA on their accounts.
However, after someone had their login credentials stolen from another website, we chose to make 2FA mandatory for everyone as an extra security precaution.
I was responsible for communicating this change to our customers.
Rather than presenting this as a simple security upgrade, I framed it as a response to a security incident. I thought this would incite people to action, faster.
While the gambit paid off, I got a few customers complaining the email was unnecessarily alarmist. Some even thought our site had been hacked.
It’s hard to convey nuanced messages over email, even harder when it’s a sensitive topic that sets off alarm bells in customers’ heads.
Needless to say, this lesson made me a much better communicator.
We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?
I’ve been lucky to know and have worked with many inspiring, intelligent people in my career.
The earliest is probably Laura Rutherford, who was my mentor at Aviva, an insurance company I joined after graduating university.
Laura was sharp, charming, and incredibly humble. I remember panicking before an important client meeting and she said, “Chris, don’t worry. It’s just money. No-one is going to die or lose millions if you make a mistake.”
Laura taught me the value of perspective, which helps keep nerves in check and my mind clear when making important decisions.
In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?
Personally, I think the “disruptive” adjective is misused in business.
It works for truly transformative ideas such as cloud-based services (SaaS) replacing software licenses, for example, or cryptocurrencies disrupting finance. Now, however, it’s a catch-all term for incremental improvements, or worse, no improvements at all.
Take blockchain technology, for example.
On the one hand, it’s transformative. It enabled the birth of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, powers decentralized finance platforms, authenticates digital art (NFTs), and helps democratize access to traditionally illiquid capital markets like fine art and property.
However, blockchain technology is not a panacea. It’s expensive and complex to set up, transactions can be slow (if you want to retain decentralization and security), and some configurations consume lots of energy.
Deploying blockchain technology into your business or industry to “disrupt” it, therefore, won’t always have a positive impact. You might simply introduce cost and complexity into an already efficient system.
It’s easy to be seduced by the latest trend or innovation. The real question is whether this alleged disruption offers value or is it just a sideways (or backwards) step.
Can you share 3 of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.
“Perfect is the enemy of the good.”
Our CTO at Octopus Energy loved saying this whenever we wanted to delay a launch due to some minor bug or copy issue.
It’s critical to get your product out there as fast as possible as you’re always in a race to market. Your early adopters will also provide meaningful feedback whereas perfecting beforehand is little more than educated guesswork.
“Customers are your most sustainable source of funding.”
This came from a serial entrepreneur whom I used to write for while a freelancer.
Chasing investment or spending a fortune on marketing won’t matter in the long run unless you make customers happy. In fact, delighting customers is one of the few strategies that all but guarantees growth.
“Times change, people don’t.”
I’m not sure who coined the phrase, but the advice came from Drayton Bird, one of the world’s best copywriters and marketers.
The takeaway: The internet has changed how we buy, but not why we buy.
Today, you have myriad marketing tools and analytics at your disposal. But their utility depends on what insights they reveal. Above all: does this data or tool help you sell? If not, you might as well scrap the tool or data.
With so many self-appointed gurus claiming to have reinvented the marketing wheel, Drayton’s advice has helped me focus on what matters.
We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?
We have plenty of things brewing!
One key focus for us over the next year or so is closing the loop on personal finance.
Right now, you can invest in instant-access or fixed-term investments on MyConstant. Lots of people use us as an alternative to a savings account or stock portfolio, or simply to hedge against the market.
However, we’d like to help people manage their spending, too. We’re thinking debit cards, budgets, income and expenditure tracking, and lots more. That way customers can set financial goals and do everything they need to meet them in one place.
Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?
Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow has had a huge influence on my thinking.
First, it opened my eyes to cognitive biases, and how emotions can limit our ability to reason. It’s difficult to counter these influences, but simply being aware of them has helped me respond better in challenging situations.
It’s also helped me to become more empathetic. Too often we believe we’re acting rationally when in fact we’re under the influence of some unconscious emotion or bias.
A few years ago, I remember a colleague asked me to help them do a task I’d shown them multiple times before. I failed to hide my irritation and the CEO asked why I’d responded in that way. They — quite rightly — pointed out that not everyone gets things first, second, or even third time.
When I understood my mistake, I was embarrassed and apologized to my colleague.
I discovered Kahneman’s book a year or two later and then everything made sense. It’s easier to respond kindly when you’re aware of the cognitive struggles going on inside all of us.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“If you’re scared to fail, you’re scared to succeed.”
I like this because it goes deeper than just embracing failure.
I’ve known a few people in life who thought they were scared to fail when in fact the opposite was true. You see it everyday in people with imposter syndrome.
It sounds paradoxical but some people are scared to succeed. They’re anxious about how they’ll be perceived, how it might change their lives and those of the people around them.
More, they worry about the loss of that success. That it might only be fleeting, be stolen from them, or not as good as they’d hoped it would be.
I use this quote to remind myself that success and failure are bound together.
You must embrace failure on your way to the top and not take success for granted. Instead, just enjoy the journey, the push and pull — and never stop trying.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
Tough question!
I find it frustrating to think there is abundance in this world and yet so many have so little.
If we provided good food, clean water, and comfortable shelter to everyone, and gave them a chance to express themselves, creatively or otherwise, most would be happy.
Daniel Khaneman looked at money and happiness and discovered that our emotional wellbeing plateaus at an annual income of $75,000 — even in the most expensive cities.
I would like to inspire a movement where the world’s richest, whether individuals, organizations, companies, or governments, willingly gave up some of their profits so the less fortunate yet no less deserving could enjoy the plenitude of modern society.
The world collectively has the means to pull everyone out of poverty. All it needs is the will.
How can our readers follow you online?
You might be surprised to learn I’m not a fan of social media. I have profiles but don’t use them (too busy to tweet!). If you’re interested in what I’m doing, you can follow the MyConstant Twitter and Facebook pages. That’s where we post everything new about the platform.
You can also listen to our podcast, Alternative Investing with MyConstant, which is available to stream or download through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Deezer, and more. Each episode is an easily digestible thirty minutes or so, covering what’s new and fun in the investing world.
Learn more about his company at MyConstant.com
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
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