Interview with Hussain Elius, Founder and CEO Of Wind.App

Welcome to this month’s Founder Spotlight series, where we introduce Hussain Elius, Founder and CEO of Wind.App. Wind.App is a secure digital wallet that lets you manage your money anywhere in the world. Join us as we delve into Wind- app’s exciting and inspiring story with Hussain.

Welcome, Hussain Elius! Can you provide an overview of Wind.App and its unique position in the market, especially in offering a non-custodial wallet built on the blockchain, allowing instant global payments with near-free transaction fees?

Traditional payment players such as Payoneer or Wise are extremely useful for freelancers and people who are working in the gig economy. It allows us to open a multi-currency account and transfer the money from clients and then cash out in local currencies. However, when they do that, they are also holding your money. A common complaint that these freelancers and gig economy workers have had these services arbitrarily lock you out of your account. These payment players are not banks and they are not regulated like banks. In this scenario, these users usually don’t have much recourse. There are many, many users who have been locked out of their own hard-earned money because of this. What makes Wind.App different is that it is a self-custodial wallet, which means the money is stored and secured within the blockchain, not with us. This allows our users full access to their funds. We cannot lock you out of your money even if you want to. Further, using blockchain allows us to send money globally to anyone, anywhere instantly and at the cheapest price possible. This allows us to be unique compared to the existing players who are in the market today.

What inspired the creation of Wind.App, and what specific objectives in the fintech, DeFi, and blockchain space were you aiming to address with the development of this decentralized banking platform?

I myself was a freelancer before I started Wind.app. So I am acutely aware of the challenges that the existing incumbents have. So when I started to understand a lot about decentralized finance and blockchain, I was very inspired to start a decentralized banking alternative that cannot be censored.

In your current role at Wind.App, what strategies or initiatives have you implemented to effectively lead and position the platform in the competitive landscape of decentralized banking and subscription maintenance services?

The existing players out there who help you do these conversions are usually very expensive. They are really built around the purpose of trading and not just for remittances, which is a much lower margin business. So what we have done is focus more on the on-ramp and off-ramp side of the business so that we can be competitive. And what we have eventually seen is that we were able to drive our pricing down to below and down to below the cost of the likes of Wise or Payoneer. We are one-third the price while providing the same or an even better service.

With your background, including your tenure as the Founder/CEO of Pathao and your experience in angel investing, how have these experiences shaped your approach to building and scaling Wind.App?

Before Wind.App, I had already started and scaled a company before. My first company was Pathao, which is the largest consumer tech platform in Bangladesh and Nepal. I started Pathao with three employees, and by the time I left, it had 2,000 plus employees, raised over $50 million, and had over 10 million plus users. So I am very familiar in building and scaling up a consumer tech business. In the blockchain space, there hasn’t been a consumer tech platform. So when I started learning more and more about blockchain, I got very interested and inspired to start what could be the largest consumer tech platform in blockchain. I believe that my experience will lead us to do just that.

Congratulations on the recent pre-seed funding of $3.8M for Wind.App! How do you, as the CEO, plan to utilize this funding to further the goals and vision of the Platform?

Thank you! The funding is going to go for:

• #1 – Product development. We want to continue building one of the better products in the consumer tech DeFi space.
• #2 – on Compliance. As we are ultimately moving money cross-border, we want to do this in a compliant way.
• #3 – on Growth. While we have a number of users, we want to continue pushing the product out in the hands of as many people as we can.

As Wind.App grows, could you mention the importance of the cap table management system in dealing with relationships among founders, investors, shareholders, and others?

Of course, as you have not just more investors, but also more employees, it is extremely important to effectively manage your cap table. Different employees will have different vesting schedules, they start at different dates, and of course they should be and are concerned about how their equity is being vested. Having that very easily trackable is better for all the employees. It allows them to effectively maintain and manage their performance. For other investors or shareholders, allowing them to have easy access to their shareholding is important so that they are also can transparently see the growth of the company. And finally, as founders, we work for the shares. That’s all our upside. So it’s important to have that managed and maintained well.

What advice do you have for founders in the decentralized banking space to secure funding from investors?

The biggest thing to take care of when you are building in the decentralized banking space is to really reduce your cost of on-ramp and off-ramp. While traditional players may not have as much challenge over there, this is going to be your biggest challenge. The number one thing to build is very good on- and off-ramp infrastructure. You’ll find that using third-party on-ramp and off-ramp infrastructure is often expensive. So what we have done with Wind.App is that we have also made our on- and off-ramps much cheaper than anyone else. And what we do now is also provide this set of APIs to other founders who are also building in this space – what we call is Wind Platform. So if you are building in decentralized banking, decentralized finance, or even in crypto, reach out to me and we can have a chat and I can help you tangibly over there.