Most founders don't get two chances to launch their company, but Susan Langer is on the cusp of her second launch now.
She sold a fintech startup, which helps people with saving money and donating to charity, more than two years ago. Now, she has the tech back and plans to relaunch it in a new market.
Reseda Group, a service organization owned by Michigan State University Federal Credit Union, acquired her startup Live.Give.Save in 2021 for an undisclosed amount and rebranded it under the flagship app’s name Spave. The app works by connecting to users’ bank accounts and deducting a portion of their spending to be saved or sent to charities of their choice.
Reseda is still using the technology — but it's also letting Langer have it to to expand in a different direction.
“They were so embedded within the credit union industry that they would then take our technology into that arena solely and be a B2B solution, whereas we then wanted to take Spave to the rest of the universe," Langer said.
She said she wanted Red Wing-based Spave to move forward rapidly. It partnered with the credit union to get access to checking, savings, credit and rewards programs. But things weren’t moving quickly enough. The Spave team wasn't reaching its target audience, it wasn't getting needed access to the bank products it needed, and Reseda had a host of priorities to contend with, sometimes putting Spave lower on the list.
“What we didn't realize when we saw credit unions and nonprofits, they too, were looking to attract a younger generation,” she said. But because those users weren’t in that sphere, they couldn’t bring young people to Spave.
The Spave team came up with Olivia – a fictional 30- or 40-year-old married mother with a job. That would be one of Spave’s target demographics.
“We knew we really needed to accelerate our drive toward attracting Olivias,” Langer said. She said her team knows that demographic because they are Olivias.
She recently met with a past investor to share Spave’s current status and future plans. The team is also developing a pitch to investors to raise some capital in the first quarter of next year.
The eventual plan is for Spave to focus on B2B while still offering a consumer-facing product. She said interested businesses could be an employee benefits company or an employer that wants to add more to their part-time and gig employees’ benefits.
For now, the plan is to prove the concept with a direct-to-consumer launch. That’ll start with an intensive social media and PR push targeted toward millennials and Generation Zers. Spave will have a soft launch for friends and family soon, and the national campaign will start sometime in November.
