A corporate card that keeps spend under control.

Problem

Having personally experienced the problem of spend management within a small company dealing with numerous SaaS vendors, a colleague and I began envisioning what a better corporate spend experience would resemble.

Getting procurement approvals, juggling purchases on both personal and corporate cards and filling expense claims is tedious for employees, a poor use of productive hours for the business, and a nightmare for finance teams trying to figure out how much has been spent so far this month.

Process

Step #1: Discover the competitive environment

We knew from the outset that there were a number of competitors that had recently ascended to unicorn status in this space. Accordingly, I broke down the competition to understand whether or not we could find a market gap to focus on.

Competitors broken down by geography and business model elements

In Airtable, I imported relevant information from Crunchbase and broke down the competitive environment based on target audience, geography and business model. In doing so, I also identified key features from competitors which we later used to prioritize MVP discussions with expert advisors.

Feature set prioritization, inspired partly from competitor research

Step #2: Distill and communicate the opportunity

The initial survey of the market confirmed that while there were numerous competitors across the world, none were serving the Canadian market, and none were likely to do so in the foreseeable future, leaving a sizeable market opportunity untapped.

Using the learnings acquired from the initial competitor research and ad hoc user interviews with financial controllers and employees in my network, I created the brand identity and crafted a pitch deck to communicate and discuss the opportunity with strategic advisors.

Visualizing the market gap

Step #3: Validate demand

Recycling the graphic elements I had created for the initial presentation and the learnings from discussions with users and experts, I used Webflow to create an elegant landing page for the project (see fusecard.ca)

Fuse landing page: fusecard.ca

Impact

Finally, we decided not to pursue the project further based on the time and resource requirement related to taking such an idea to market. This said, we remain bold on the opportunity and believe there will be significant innovation in this space in the coming few years.