Why is Carry Special?
Helping business owners build wealth
Problem
Setting up a new 401 is really hard for independent business owners. Not only that, but just sending the money is tedious and not easy. There are a few solutions in the market and they are not good. For example, Vanguard, Fidelity and a few law firms. They all have a few problems:
The interface sucks. They don’t have an intuitive and easy to use interface;
Investing in startups, crypto or rolling funds is really hard;
Some require to deposit contributions by mail.
Team
The team is composed by an experienced team. The team is lead by Ankur, co-founder of Teachable. He already has experience starting and scaling a startup. Ankur plays the long game as you can see from his investors updates in the years since Teachable inception. The whole team behind Carry is experienced and the team is focused in the right areas. Alejandro Roman is the co-founder and leads development of the product has really good experience in startups including Venmo. The team also includes Nick Rasch (product) , Fahd Ananta (operations), and Paul Kim (SEO).
Market
The market is big, and there is potential for the team to achieve great results. There are more than 50M independent workers making a living online, and the creator economy keeps growing. Lots of platforms exist to help them make money, including Teachable, but no one is teaching them how to build wealth. Carry will teach them everything they need to know about money and personal finance AND build financial products for them.
YouTube shares 55% of the ad revenue to creators. 2022 projected revenue is around 28B, so only 15.4B for creators. YouTubers generate a lot more money indirectly through sponsored ads, products and services. Just as a good datapoint, one of the most successful YouTubers, Mr Beast, has great business around his channel and was working on raising a 1.5B valuation around his business. It is just the start of the creator economy. That is just creators. Carry is targeted at independent business owners, which is a much bigger market.
No one is teaching them how to build wealth and helping them along the way. That’s the gap that Carry is filling.
Solution
“Indie Money” - An Online Personal Finance University
First, Carry is helping independent business owners understand personal finance and helping them create wealth. It will create an “online personal finance university”. First, teaching them what type of business to set up (LLC, S-Corp, C-Corp). Second, it helps them figure out what kind of tax optimization is ideal based on the business type and scenario. Third, it will help them make sure to setup a trust and estate formation, for saving for retirement.
An online university that will teach this demographic everything they need to know about building wealth. Again, drawing on our experience at Teachable, we know exactly how to do this — and believe the propensity for this demographic to pay a reasonable fee for a service like this is very high. Carry already has lined up some great people that will help create the first few courses.
A Solo 401K Retirement Account
Second, Carry is helping business owners create a Solo401k. Why is Solo401K so powerful?
Super High Contribution Limit (and Tax Deduction) - You can put away $61,000 into a Solo401k by maximizing your employer and employee contribution and claim a tax deduction on the entire amount.
Tax Free Compounding - You don’t pay taxes as your money compounds, which makes a massive difference over the course of a lifetime.
Roth Solo 401k - Regardless of how much money you make, anyone can contribute $20,500 of post-tax LLC income annually into a Roth 401k — that means there are no taxes at all during compounding and distribution.
Invest in Any Asset Class - Unlike a traditional 401k, this is self-directed, which means people can invest in literally any asset class including real estate, startups (if accredited), crypto — super powerful combo!
In addition to that Carry will also help Incorporating your business if you don’t have one and rolling over existing retirement accounts. It will add an easy way to track and make employer and employee contributions. This seems like a no-brainer for a ton of independent business owners.
Strategy
Carry exists to help business owners (creators, consultants, freelancers and independent workers) build wealth.
It will do the following steps:
Start by launching the university and Solo401k and start growing a paying audience of independent workers that love us.
Expand to immediately adjacent products — SEP IRA’s etc.
The investments / brokerage part of the product keeps getting really good and it starts getting customer demand to break that part out, and let anyone use it.
Slowly start expanding the market, by offering the same services to everyone.
And then think about, building the most important financial institution of our generation.
Distribution
First and foremost, Carry will built a great product. And there is nothing more viral than a great product.
The second part of the secret is that Ankur already built a following on Twitter with his account, and he is investing in production in his home. He already set up a studio on his home office so that he could create great content as you can see from this tweet:
And the result already speaks for itself. One of his videos that he produced home already got 16.9k views: A great video that already got 16.9k views: