“I’m an entrepreneur at heart. It’s something I realized pretty early on, but I never really knew there was a title for being called bossy all your life and most opinionated in high school…”

Interview by Mike Sullivan

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Mike:
Hey everyone, I’m Mike Sullivan. Thanks for being with us once again on MO.com, where we feature small business owners and entrepreneurs and bring you hints, tips, insights, and perspectives on how to be successful.

Joining us today is Stella Fayman from FeeFighters. Stella is quite the entrepreneur. She’s got quite a bit going on, and I’m going to leave the thunder to her to talk about, but Stella, thanks for joining us today. I appreciate it, and can you start out just tell us a little bit about yourself, paint the picture.

Stella:
My name is Stella Fayman. I’m 24 years old. I am a founding member of FeeFighters.com. We’re a comparison shopping site for credit card processors. I also co-founded Entrepreneurs Unplugged, which is a Chicago really cool event that connects entrepreneurs and has them tell their stories on stage in front of other entrepreneurs, and I also run the Ignite Chicagos.

Mike:
Next, the obvious question is what is FeeFighters, and why is it important to business owners? Can you tell me more about it?

Stella:
The best way to describe FeeFighters is to kind of talk about why the business was started. It was basically started because a couple guys who were business owners, especially one, Sean, he had an e-commerce site and he’s a really smart guy who thought he did a great job picking out a credit card processor. Then after he looked back a year later, he found that he was overpaying by something like $40,000. And so he thought, yeah, right. He thought, “If I had this problem, I bet other business owners and entrepreneurs are facing the same challenges.” So he started blogging about credit card processing because there’s just not a ton of information out there that’s unbiased and transparent. He got a lot of response.

So FeeFighters is kind of the baby of that. It’s a comparison shopping site. It makes shopping for a credit card processor as easy as shopping for a plane ticket on Expedia or Kayak. So it just really simplifies the process and makes it much more transparent. Also, because we’re all business owners, on the marketplace we’ve instituted a lot of merchant-friendly rules. So, for example, there can’t be any cancellation fees. A lot of times merchants will get locked in to contracts that have unfavorable terms with a hefty cancellation fee, so that’s not allowed and there can’t be any hidden fees. We actually audit statements each month for our customers to make sure that there’s no bait and switch or anything like that.

Mike:
What are some of the basics that small business owners and entrepreneurs should look for or be aware of regarding credit card processing?

Stella:
It’s hard. The number one thing to know about credit card processing is that you should pay the lowest rate possible. There’s really no reason to be paying extra because of a brand name or something like that. They all do the same thing, and most credit card processors are actually white-label versions of larger credit card processors like First Data. So the things to look for are interchange plus pricing, which is the most transparent form of pricing. I won’t go into the details because it will probably bore you, but interchange plus pricing. Contracts that don’t have a lot of extraneous fees, like annual fees or minimums or things like that. It’s important to read the fine print and make sure that there’s no cancellation fees, that’s a big one.

Most business owners don’t know that you can actually really negotiate down by comparing a bunch of different providers. So FeeFighters makes it really easy, but if you were to go out and just kind of make processors compete by sending different contracts, you can lower your rates significantly.

Mike:
What is your marketing strategy like? I know on a lot of the sites I go to I’ve seen the FeeFighter banner ads. Is that your primary strategy?

Stella:
Most of our marketing is actually inbound. We have a very prolific blog that I manage, and we write about credit card processing. We write about small business and startups, and so a lot of our traffic comes through our blog. We also have a pretty active SEM campaign as well as an SEO campaign. The challenge for us is that credit card processing is one of those things that you really can’t make someone care about it if they think they’re okay. But at the point at which they’re searching for a processor, if they find FeeFighters, they’re so happy. So the challenge is finding the right people at the right time. That’s why we’ve found inbound marketing to be pretty effective, because if someone is searching for “compare credit card processors online,” that’s the person that is the ideal customer for FeeFighters.

Mike:
From your perspective, what can you tell us about being a young startup company?

Stella:
It’s very challenging, and you have to be very flexible in terms of both the day-to-day and the long-term visions for the company. It’s really exciting. Up until the beginning of 2011, there were just three of us working on FeeFighters. Now we have eight people. So when I tell that to someone who’s working at a large company, they don’t really understand the significance, but for us it’s a big deal. We’ve almost tripled our team in just the last few months. Finding the right team members is tough, finding funding is tough. We’re lucky that our CEO spent a lot of time talking to investors and getting the right investors. So I think we’re in a good place for growth right now, and we’ve got some exciting stuff going on. But I would say the most important thing is just kind of sticking to that core value proposition. We’re all about saving business owners money and making things really simple and user friendly, and we’re really passionate about that.

Mike:
You’re pretty young. This is your first venture out of college. What kept you from just following the path of the masses and joining a corporation and following that traditional path, as opposed to leaping from graduation to being part of a startup?

Stella:
I’m an entrepreneur at heart. It’s something I realized pretty early on, but I never really knew there was a title for being called bossy all your life and most opinionated in high school and things like that. Then when I was in college, I realized that there was an actual job that I could do that was that, and that was to be an entrepreneur. So when I was just graduating from college, it was in 2009, which, just two years ago, the economy was like the worst economy that you could possibly graduate into. I’m actually thankful for that, because I probably would have gotten sucked into something like consulting, which is what all of my peers, most of my peers ended up doing. But by talking to a lot of people at a lot of different companies, I came to realize that I really wanted to work at a place where . . . I didn’t feel quite ready to go off on my own, but I wanted to work somewhere where it was really early stage, and I could learn quickly and contribute, and that my contribution would actually be taken seriously and have an impact. So I love it. The company has grown, it’s changed, and I learn every day.  I couldn’t have asked for a better opportunity after college. It’s amazing.

Mike:
Aside from FeeFighters and all you do there, keeping you busy, you’re also involved with Ignite Chicago. How did you come to be involved in that? Talk a little bit about your experience.

Stella:
Yeah. So I started organizing Ignite Chicago last year. It was kind of passed down to me by a friend who was moving away, and he said, “You should do this.” I said, “I don’t really have time.” He was like, “No really, you should do this.” Then I went to South by Southwest, and it was my first time there and I was just amazed at all the energy and excitement. I came back energized, and I met my partner for Ignite Chicago, Tim John, who actually had the same experience as I did, where he went to South by Southwest and came back and was like, “Let’s do something for Chicago.”

So we started doing the Ignite Chicagos and have really grown it. It had an attendance of like 30 to 40 people when we took it over, not really much of a website or a social media aspect. Now, we have over a hundred people at each event, and we’re on Twitter all the time. It’s just a really exciting place. For those who are not familiar, people get up and speak for five minutes and they have 20 PowerPoint slides. It’s just really fast, and they can talk about whatever they want. So it can go from lean startup methods to how to make your own bacon to the history of bra development in the 20th century, which are some of the examples of the last Ignite. So it’s a lot of fun.

So Tim and I, we were putting on the Ignite events and we loved it, and we wanted to do something that was a little bit more focused on entrepreneurs and also to have a storytelling aspect, because one thing that we both really love is just the story behind entrepreneurs and how they get to be where they are and learning about that makes you make some conclusions about yourself and your own journey. So we launched Entrepreneurs Unplugged earlier this year, and it was a great success. We had over 200 people at the first event and a little bit more than that at the second event. We had amazing entrepreneurs speaking, like Genevieve Thiers from Sittercity and Dan Rattner, Chuck Templeton from OpenTable, just amazing, amazing speakers and amazing experience. I can’t say enough about it.

Mike:
I love to ask this question of Chicagoland entrepreneurs: How do you see or how would you describe the Chicagoland startup scene right now?

Stella:
In the two years that I’ve been involved in the startup scene, it’s just a day-and-night transformation. It’s a bustling community of supportive entrepreneurs who really want to help each other and help the community at large. There are so many organizations and so many resources now, like the Chicagoland Entrepreneurial Center, the Illinois Technology Association, Built In Chicago, Technori, Tech Week, the list goes on and on, Entrepreneurs Unplugged. So the community is growing, and it’s very supportive. I’m really excited to see where it goes in the next couple of years.

Mike:
Thanks for your time, Stella. It’s been great talking with you!

Stella:
Thank you so much. I appreciate it!