They Found a Problem Nobody Had Solved, Built It, and Scaled to 4.5M Users in Two Years | Ep. 325 with Martin Jensen and John Ramos CEO and CTO of Prop Firm Match

Hey, it's Howie Mandel and I am inviting you to witness history as me and my Howie

Do It gaming team take on Gilly DeKing and wallow 267's million dollars gaming in an

epic global gaming league video game showdown four rounds multiple games one winner plus

a halftime performance by multi platinum artist Trabi McCoy watch all the action and see

who wins in advances to the championship match against Neo right now at globalgaming league

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so I'm excited today to talk through something that I don't really know much about and I

I'm an avid trader in the sense of I've been trading different things from stocks to

crypto to other things throughout my my lifetime I remember when I was in elementary school

and my teacher gave me here some fake money put it into some stocks and then we had a contest

I interned put that money into the stock and that's actually how I bought my first car

back when I was 16 years old so I'm always fascinated with new things and John and Martin

you both are going to walk us through exactly what is prop firm match doing and what we need

to know so let's first off by that what is prop firm match thank you for that introduction

so profit match is a platform that compares prop films for those not familiar with prop films

is a kind of company that let's trade us trade with more capital than they have on their own

so it's a way to for profitable traders to leverage their skills and trade with notably more

capital than what they have access to on their own a profit match compares the best

prop films and have a strict vetting process to ensure that the prop firm is solid that it has

the right backing both in terms of of the team and the funding and do comprehensive vetting

of the firm before we decide if we're going to list it or or not so traders know that that they

find under the best prop films and can compare to found the best one for them on our platform

and what type of trading is somebody doing where they need a prop firm I would say most kind of

really any kind of trading you have the prop firms that you have the forex prop firms you have

futures prop firms you're crypto prop firms you have stops prop firms so regardless of

yeah what kind of assets you trade there is prop films and that fits and what is the importance

of having a prop firm can you can you give me some more details around that like me I'm new to this

I want to jump in why do I really need a prop firm and then when I'm looking at it because obviously

you all are doing a lot of analysis I imagine a lot of data what makes a good one versus one

that's not as good so to answer the question about why you need a prop firm first of all it's

it depends on you there are traders who have a lot of capital to to trade with and don't necessarily

need to leverage their capital a lot but likely 99% or more of those who do any kind of trading

has too little capital to make a living out of it or make a good side salary out of it where

prop firms let you go in with less capital and if you have the skills this is like like any kind

of trading there is no magic formula you have to be good it's only a small percentage that

succeeds but if you are among the best of the best it's an opportunity to leverage your skills

and earn more so there are several things that decides if a prop firm is good or bad

the most important thing is to pay out reliability you have to know that if you follow the rules

and you receive or you accomplish a payout you are actually getting a payout and that's

not a given with prop firms that are not verified that are not solid so that's where prop

firm match ensures that we vet the the prop firms comprehensively to ensure that the traders

can be the safe form on that aspect then there are several differences when it comes to pricing

when it comes to the rules that the different packages have in terms of how much profit you need

to to make and so on so without going too much into the details there is a lot of variations between

the firms and also the similarity of the firms that we try best to cover and very

comprehensively on our platform to give my take on on prop firms and why someone would want to

use a prop firm so I remember when I first started trading trading I needed $25,000 just to be

an intraday trader to day trade basically which means just going in and out of trades multiple times

a day you needed a certain threshold and prop firms the barrier to entry the barrier to start

trading and potentially make profit was much lower where it's you know you pay a one-time fee maybe

a hundred bucks to get access to a specific amount of capital or you pay you know a subscription fee

personally I I use a subscription model for futures and I pay around $80 a month I think it's

$89 and I have access to to $50,000 if I pass the test right so with with prop firms what you do is

you get like a test and if you pass it you get access to make profit with a certain amount of capital

and the other reason I like prop firms is because you know trading is is a bit of a difficult sport

so it takes time to get good and rather than risking your own capital like let's say I word

two went to the market with $25,000 and I'm not a good trader yet I could essentially risk

that $25,000 and you know doing things like over trading or you know things that are the traders

are susceptible to which you know revenge trading or going on tilt trading emotionally all those

things but if you if you pay a one-time fee and you know you fail the challenge you know okay I just

invested 50 to $100 and I lost that investment maybe I need to refocus rethink how I trade and do

better the next time so I have a bit of skin in the game I want to do good trading but if I

lose that investment I know it's not going to be the end of the world so that's why I like

prop firms you know you put a little bit of investment it test your skills and if you pass the test

you pass the challenge you get access to a lot more capital capital to to make profit off that

that kind of leveraged capital that you get. God it's so it's trying to manage the risk

as what I'm hearing what are some things that people need to really look for when they're getting

into this what should they what are the dangers like you were just saying some John like you could

without it you could spend money and then you lose all your money and you make emotional trades

are there any sort of dangers that people need to look out for when they're getting into

this type of trading or when they're leveraging prop firms in trading. Yeah just just to follow up

on that thread I would say the risk is finding a prop firm that doesn't pay you if you if you do well

that's like the worst thing that could happen and that's why prop firm match exists for traders that

put their hard time their their effort even their money even though it's not as much money but they

put their money their time and effort to get good and pass a challenge if at the end you pass and

you make profit and you don't get paid that's the worst so that's why prop firm match exists so we

only list the most reputable firms that will pay traders if they make profit with after passing

a challenge so I'd say that's the biggest risk but it's a lot it's a smaller risk than let's say

putting up 20,000 and not being a good trader and 20, 25,000 not being a good trader and then losing

it all so you know prop firms is a very in the trading world the trading industry prop firms are

I'd say they're growing because the the business model is attractive low barrier to entry and if

I'm a good trader I get access to more capital capital and I get to to profit on that based on what's

happening right now in the world what's going on in different industries you obviously are seeing

what people are doing and you have some I imagine some good data that you're tracking what types

of trading are people looking at right now in this moment so we don't have any trading data

the data and the training isn't happening with us but what would you know we do know which

which take us an instrument's people trade and currently gold is the most popular pair in

in the industry gold is heavily traded we have now had a lot of volatility in oil the recent days

so traders go after volatility so whatever moves you will see you will see increased

the trading activity in and in addition to to the pair status always well traded such as the YanQ

and the euro and so on commodities and metals are traded heavily this days when you all got started

what was the thing that spark when you when you're like we have to do this what was it what happened

in your life that made that steered you toward this and why did you co-founded together yeah so what

happened was that both both John and me were full-time traders at that point I had been trading for

for six years and we're at the point where I was doing well I was consistently profitable and

had been that for quite some time but I struggled scaling up so I made enough money to to make living

but not enough to to scale up my trading and one of the fascinating things with trading is that

what you do with with little capital is exactly the same thing that you need to do with big capital as

long as you trade liquid instruments the only thing that's different is the psychology which is

a big factor but the actual um clicking of buttons and strategy can be just the same just with

much more skin and the game the maps app that came with your phone it's fine if you enjoy waiting

and guessing and inefficient routes or you could use map quest map quest is back with live

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prints are needed no paper no more misterns just you and the app get there fast with map quest

download the map quest app on the app store or visit mapquest.com map quest still getting you there

so I got over the concept I heard about the concept of uh of profiles and uh we're really

intrigued by that on a personal level uh to scale up my my own trading so I reached out to to John

who had the same passion for it and when we were looking for profiles there were really

difficult to to find out which profiles that were reliable which were we were confident would

pay out and so on also to know which films that suited our style there were no such tools so we

decided to build it um knowing that there had to be a lot more traders than just the two of us

in in this situation so we decided to build a platform where we would showcase just the best firms

and show objective metrics so traders could could use that to base their decision on

so that's uh that's where it all started uh yeah yeah Martin we were part of the same trading

community and uh we met there and uh yeah we had the same Martin pitched the idea and I was like

this this makes a lot of sense and I was using a prop firm at the time time it's still them a lot of

traders in our community were using prop firms uh say I was kind of a no-brainer for me and I had

the technology to to build kind of the the initial site and and a lot of the the things we needed

so Martin and I we got started pretty much right away so it sounds like the business thrives

on community or it kind of creates a community because you you're in a community I know that

the trading community is always very strong and I like that people collaborate with one another

and they want to win together so when when you had this scale and as you're growing this business

sounds like you have to cultivate the community because that's a part of it obviously there's

also a lot of trust involved because people need to trust you I think always in any trading space

trust is huge transparency like all these things are important how as you've grown in scale

have you consistently tried to also uphold those things at the same time so as you you're saying

yourself the trust and transparency is as key for us so when we launched in 2023 one of the things

that made us different from the the sites that were around comparing problems was that

what we put on the site were only based on objective metrics and that model is something we have

a hold study since since them we don't do any besides the initial vetting of the firm

we don't do any reviews there was no way for the firm to to pay themselves to a good rating

or anything like that so we showcase the objective facts what it costs what the the profit targets

are and so on and then instead of us doing any kind of reviews we let traders to the reviews so

we have a system where our support is verifying every single review manually and the trader has to

have been traded with the firm so we verify that they actually have been trading with the firm so

it's real experiences so now we have almost 10,000 verified reviews from traders that have been

trading with the various firms on our site and that's what makes up the the right things

so we are taking ourselves out of the consideration of what's the best firm and so on and let

traders decide themselves based on on the metrics and the trader experience that we showcase

yeah and you mentioned the idea of community and I think that resonates with us in a specific way like

Martin and I coming from a trading community understanding the hardships of trading

understanding the successes of trading all that factors in maybe I don't know subconsciously

or consciously into how we run the business because we run the business with ourselves in mind

which is we're traders what do we want to see as traders what do we want to uphold as traders how

do we want to communicate with traders so that is something I think we both hold very dear

and it makes coming to work every day exciting for me because you know I trading is a bit

of a passion it's something that I've put a lot of hours into and running a business that's

aligned with traders is something that I like to hang my hat on something that makes me feel good

about what we're doing and providing that transparency in the industry when you look at the

marketing that you've had to do in order to get to 10,000 reviews is a lot and it's only

been a couple of years what has been one or two marketing strategies that have helped you

when we first started out we had to find a way to to to be seen in game traction so what we did

even before we launched was to launch a a Twitter handle where we started the marketing before

we went live and we found we found a way into the industry where we made a fun competition

between various platforms but we made it like a championship where platforms battled against each

other and we compared them in different metrics where one would come out ahead and we had the

community vote and it became a big event in the industry just like a World Cup where we ended up

with the final and that's something we did even before we launched which gained a lot of traction

so we had we had a flying start when we did the launch a few months after so I think that's

that's important to to be creative and find out how you can stand out and how you can

make a mark especially when you when you are new and need to need to be seen after that we have

focused on building the brand building the business with the things we have discussed in mind with

transparency and trust and things have come naturally from from that that's we have

I've grown from studying out with just John and I to to now being a about 80 people

team in to an off year that's incredible like in two and a half years the great thing about

what you're doing is it's very unique I almost want to say it's like a niche thing because it's

it's not it's not so big that eight billion people on the planet know about it but it was a major

problem that you saw that no one really had solved before and I think it's hard it's I think it's

nowadays hard to find a lot of problems that need to be solved in many industries because so many

have been so most people are kind of like redoing what's already happened right like like oh this

is a problem it's not a major problem and they're just redoing it but you found a major problem in

something you were doing which is very unique and it's a that's a great story what has had to

change in the two of you I mean your co-founders it's obviously this you know amazing parts and

complexities around around having just co-founders in general and then growing to 80 people so what's

had to change in the two of you whether it's your leadership skills your mindset whatever that is

that's that's had to the do this as you've gone to where you are now so when we started out

we were two and as we just touched on we are now a lot more and that's a huge difference obviously

and things have gone really really quickly so what we when we started out and also with a small team

and we could be we didn't need a lot of processes things we got an idea and we went quickly

to execution whereas now we have more people to relate to we have we need processes for what we

do to be be scalable so one of the the phase we're in now is to figure out how we can keep that

same mindset we want to to be able to move quick we want to have the fun of of a startup but still

introduce more processes and make sure that we have a model that's scalable that's less dependent

of of of John and me so that's an interesting challenge that we are in the middle of as we speak

yeah as the company grows there's there's more people to talk to there's yeah more processes

but it's really enjoyable we have a great team really like communicating with everyone on the team

but yeah when we had Martin first started it was like you know things moved very quickly

and things don't move fairly quickly but it is with more people there's more communication

more people need to know things things tend to move in a more process type way yeah the agility changes

when like you said when you have more people you have to think about could you might have

investors you have to think about you there's a lot of things you need to think about as you grow

in scale so you can't move as quick but you can still move quick more thoughtfully and I love

the the processes and procedures that is something I think a lot of entrepreneurs were like

driving a hundred miles a second and we sometimes forget that if we had a process and procedure

it could make life easier also if we have employees that leave or change and they can just easily

pick it up that it it sounds so simple but I think so many people do forget to do that

but if people want to get in touch with you guys they want to find out more information how can

they do so all right so to find out more about us go to profamatch.com that's where you can find out

more about both the team as a whole but most importantly for for the traders watching

the information about profam profums as a whole and the the various profums that we that we

list we also have accounts on on X on Instagram YouTube every social media that that is out there

we post a lot of valuable content for a profam traders with with details around

prof trading as a whole and also various profums well Marit and John co-founders of prop firm match

I learned something new today I don't know everything but I've definitely learned a lot over the years

and I do like it when I can talk to some people doing something that I don't know yet

and it's unique and I learned a lot so I appreciate your time today and thanks for joining us

on founder's story thank you thank you for having us hey it's howie mandel and I am inviting you

to witness history as me and my howie do it gaming team take on ghillie de king and wallow 267's

million dollars gaming in an epic global gaming league video game showdown four rounds multiple

games one winner plus a halftime performance by multi platinum artist travi macoy watch all the

action and see who wins and advances to the championship match against neo right now at global

gaming league dot com that's global gaming league dot com everybody games if you like the show

please take a moment to rate review and subscribe it really does help the show to grow thank you for

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