Are Your Employees More Important Than Your Users?

That's not something most entrepreneurs think about. But you know what they say: the customer is always right.

If we are to believe that, however, how could your employees ever be more important? Christophe Frerebeau, the CEO of

(a cloud-based analytic and reporting platform for the hedge fund industry), sees things a little bit differently. During an interview with Benzinga, Frerebeau provided us with his top 10 tips for young entrepreneurs:

Beyond that, Frerebeau said that getting funded is always a “fun and challenging” task for a startup, “especially the first time you are going out looking for institutional investors.” “To be honest, Facebook, Twitter, or more funding-focused social media, such as

, are probably great for a more traditional startup,” said Frerebeau. “But for Fundspire they ended up not being very helpful. I believe it's because of the high specialization of our product. It doesn't appeal to a large audience of investors, you have to research in order to find investors interested in investing in a Financial Technology company (FinTech), who also understand the challenges of the hedge fund industry.” Frerebeau said that he believes many FinTech and B2B startups will eventually realize that their “options are limited and they need to focus on building a relationship with a more limited set of individuals.” “In Fundspire's case, it has been mostly networking, networking and more networking,” he said. “While we were searching for funding, we already had major clients and were trying to keep up the growth while servicing our existing clients. It was a major challenge.” Despite the challenge, Frerebeau did not have any horror stories to tell. “But we had some setbacks as probably every startup does at some point,” he said. “One advice I would give is to start looking for funding as early as possible in the process and always have alternative options.” Fundspire's journey to profitability has been ongoing, Frerebeau said. “We decided it would be best to focus on growing the business faster in order to innovate the industry offerings, while existing companies still continue to stagnate using older technologies,” he said. “Therefore, we raised a second round of funding to help us accomplish this. We expect to reach profitability within the next year or so, while remaining at a size that we believe will help us to deliver great features to our clients while still staying nimble enough to respond quickly to market changes.” The company may not be profitable yet, but Fundspire is well on its way. “We started 2011 with limited resources both on the engineering side and the sales side, and we had about 25 users from established financial institutions,” said Frerebeau. “But in 2011 we really started to get traction as we finished the year with more than 400 users. “We had to hire help on the development and sales side months before we were planning to. We were able to release many exciting features that increased by many fold the value our clients realize by using Fundspire. Beside the excitement of having Fundspire adopted by so many users, it was also a very insightful year, as we learned and listened from a broader customer base.”