Jessica Mah Seeks to Hook Small Businesses on Her Mint
As co-founder and chief of inDinero, Jessica drives the development of inDinero’s product strategy, software development, and design efforts. She and her partners built the core product over the Summer of 2009, and the company has since raised funding from investors such as Y Combinator.
In her early life, Jessica was the founder and technical lead behind internshipIN.com, which helped match students with internships. She’s been programming since age 9, building businesses since age 12, and finished high school at age 15. Jessica holds degrees from Simon’s Rock the Early College, and from U.C. Berkeley, where she studied computer science and was president of the computer science undergraduate association. Jessica has been mentioned in publications ranging from Inc. magazine to the Wall Street Journal, and has been featured on PBS to encourage students to pursue science and entrepreneurship.
We recently had the pleasure of catching up with Jessica Mah, the co-founder and CEO of inDinero. inDinero is a financial monitoring platform that allows you to easily track all aspects of your finances and see exactly how your business is doing at any given moment. In her early life, Jessica was the founder and technical lead behind internshipIN.com, which helped match students with internships. She’s been programming since age 9, building businesses since age 12, and finished high school at age 15. Jessica holds degrees from Simon’s Rock the Early College, and the University of California at Berkeley, where she studied computer science and was president of the computer science undergraduate association.
This impressive young entrepreneur has already accomplished a lot and is sure to see much more success in her future. Here’s what she had to say about her business and her advice for other young entrepreneurs:
A lot of would-be tech entrepreneurs have great talent for writing code but no idea how to run a business. You’re not only the founder and CEO of inDinero, but you’re also the software architect. How have you managed to pull it off so successfully?
Most entrepreneurs aren’t perfect at everything, and that includes me too – I can code, design, and sell, but my forte is in designing and selling. My partner in business, Andy Su, is one of the most talented engineers I know. Which means he gets to do most of the heavy-lifting as far as our coding goes.
With so many money management software suites out there, the competition must be pretty formidable, but you didn’t let that stop you. What doubts did you have while starting inDinero, and how did you work through them?
We don’t think much about competition at inDinero. The underlying challenge of helping business owners to track their money has yet to be completely solved, and we won’t rest until we’ve achieved that. We originally had doubts about our ability to compete against Intuit and other startups, but have since realized that nobody will solve the problem as best as we.
inDinero.com
Your entrepreneurial journey started at a very young age. Where do you think your entrepreneurial spirit came from? Are your parents entrepreneurs? Did they encourage you?
I started my first serious business in middle school because I thought it’d be far more interesting than taking a normal job. Both parents were very encouraging. It was during these early entrepreneurial endeavors that I realized the importance of keeping on top of my business finances, and that’s what inspired Andy and me to create inDinero.
What three pieces of advice do you have for a young entrepreneur just getting started with his or her own company?
1) Find a partner-in-business who compliments your skills.
2) Build a product/service and try selling it as soon as humanly possible.
3) Talk to your customers as often as possible, and use them as inspiration for product development.
How do you define success?
If our customers are even a little more organized using inDinero than any other tool to help them manage their money, then we’ve done a good job. But as we build out our product offering, our bar for success gets higher and higher.