Jessica Mah, Mark Zuckerberg

Both Jessica Mah and Mark Zuckerberg were 19 when they launched their respective companies. The difference though is that Mark dropped out of college, Jessica had already finished college.

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TechCrunch: inDinero’s Jessica Mah: This Is A 20-30 Year Company That We Want To Build (TCTV): She launched her first startup at 13, graduated from high school at 15, debuted InternshipIN in 2008 and most recently founded inDinero, a financial management site that promises to be the Mint for small businesses. ...... with her latest venture, inDinero, she’s finally making a legitimate play for the big leagues. ..... the company (which helps small businesses track and manage their expenses in real-time) wrapped up a $1.2 million angel round with several high-profile investors, including Yelp’s Jeremy Stoppelman, 500 Startup’s Dave McClure, Microsoft’s Fritz Lanman, Intuit’s David Wu, Slide’s Keith Rabois, and YouTube’s Jawed Karim. The final collection of 20 angel investors was no accident:”We had a few rules for who we wanted to let into our round, the first prerequisite was that they had run a business before, not all of them had but most of them had,” she says, “I thought that was really important because we’re building a product for businesses so if they get it, they can probably help us out more.” ...... the round was oversubscribed and inDinero could have easily raised $2 million, if necessary. ..... is and is not like TC40′s Mint (which was sold to Intuit for $170 M back in 2009). ..... While Mah welcomes the comparison— she has even talked to Mint’s management for advice—- she doesn’t see a similar fate for inDinero: “I don’t think we’re bribe-able at this point, because we just want to build a real business…5, 10, 20 year timeline. The entire money space is not just ripe for disruption but there are so many things that need to be done. If you run a business and you start tallying up all the different problems you have to solve, its just an infinite list, like taxes, payroll, sending money, receiving money, dealing with predators, the list goes on. Until someone can easily solve them all and in an easy way, then we’re not done with our job. And I don’t think we can do that in 5-10 years, this is a 20-30 year company that we want to build”

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she decided to focus on metrics..... When Mah studied InDinero’s “conversion funnel” (the process of convincing a website visitor sign up and then actually pay), she found that only 0.01 percent of visitors became paying customers. So instead of trying to bring more users to the site, she focused her efforts on how to convert the visitors she already had. ...... Mah recalled that she and her co-founder Andy Su liked to brag about how poor and hard-working they were, putting in more than 70 hours a week and sleeping under their desks. But in the business world, she noted, “You don’t get an A for effort.” Without metrics, a lot of that work was wasted. Once she started measuring her funnel, Mah could see that for all its hard work, the team were still leaving $5.4 million in revenue “on the table.” ....... Articles that focused on InDinero as a small business tool paid off, while those that profiled Mah as a young entrepreneur or as a woman in tech didn’t. Mah said that’s what she suspected, but the metrics gave her the courage to stop wasting time on fluffy profiles. .... Mah said InDinero’s conversion funnel improved dramatically, so now 0.2 percent of website visitors are signing up.