The Vicious Cycle Of Debt - Christian Zimmerman of Qoins

Imagine a debt-free world where you’ve fully paid off your student loans, auto loans, credit card debt, and mortgage. That’s how Christian Zimmerman, one of the co-founders of Qoins, envisions the world will be with the help of their app. Qoins is a debt-free financial app that helps people achieve financial freedom by starting a habit of saving money. The beauty of this app is that everything is fully automated too. Now, who wouldn’t want to use this? 

Christian shares his own experience with student loans and how creating Qoins wasn’t initially part of his plan. He simply wanted a solution to his personal problem. After reaching a low point in his life dealing with a health condition, Christian soldiered on. One thing led to another and serendipitously, Qoins was born. 

He talks about the validation they received that became their impetus to building Qoins, the process of raising funds and finding investors, what sets them apart from other financial apps, as well as how him being Latino and his co-founder Nate being black somehow played a role in all this. Christian also walks us through the Qoins journey and how exactly their product works both for setting money aside and paying off debt. Financial debt is something that plagues pretty much all adults, so what Qoins does truly creates an impact, because just like maintaining physical health, our financial wealth and financial health are important aspects of our lives too. 

Christian’s key lessons and quotes from this episode were:

• “I never really told myself I couldn't do something. And so, I think that was one of the biggest things that I took when I started my own company was that, I have to have that type of mentality, otherwise, it's not going to work.” (15:36)
• “The win is when we're able to say that we've successfully exited. We're able to create impact and again that goal, hitting that 100 million dollars in total debt paid off or a billion dollars, whatever we can to make sure that we did create a positive impact in our customers' lives.” (23:58)
• “By automating this habit, we build education. By educating the customer, we then create impact, and then it's a full circle.” (34:29)
• “Personal finance has three big pillars: automation, education, and recommendation.” (34:42)
• “We're in the business of putting ourselves out of business… if we've done a good job of helping everyone become debt-free, then we've probably put ourselves out of business.” (36:09)

In this episode, we also talked about:

• Christian’s personal problem with debt and the debt issue as a whole (2:00)
• Bootstrapping Qoins and how they raised funding (9:47)
• Dealing with health issues and the entrepreneurial mindset (14:31)
• Christian and his co-founder Nate’s experience as minority startup founders (21:59)
• Challenges they faced and how they overcame it (26:48)
• The Qoins experience (29:23)
• How Christian sees the world in 10 years if Qoins succeeds (36:09)