If at First You Don't Get Clients...

Try, try again? That's the lesson of Facet, an innovative financial planning startup that tried everything to get its first customers.

- LIZ BRODY

A great business idea is worth nothing, until you can find paying customers. But how? Here's a start: Think like the founders of Facet. It's an online financial advisor platform that spent years (and multiple pivots) figuring out how to get members. Now it has 22,500 of them, and brings in $37.7 million in annual recurring revenue.

Facet was partly born out of a new rule issued in 2016 (but ultimately never implemented) by President Obama's Department of Labor. It required financial advisors to become fiduciaries (meaning they must act solely in their clients' best interests). What caught the attention of Brent Weiss and Anders Jones was a number they saw in the public comments: The planning industry said this would make services too expensive for 8 million people currently using advisors.