One Woman’s Guide to Avoiding Debt, Starting a Company, and Asking for a Raise
This entrepreneur studies the connection between money and emotion.
If you’ve popped in to Wells $treet, you know that money makes the world go ’round. This is a safe space for anything from dumb questions (there are no dumb questions) to smart business ideas. Forward this story to anyone who’d enjoy these journalistic shenanigans, and catch up on my past articles here.
April is Financial Literacy Month!
Zzzzzzzzzzzz.
“Financial literacy” needs a sexier name. Like... DON’T-BE-AN-IDIOT-ABOUT-MONEY-acy. I’m all about that! So is the woman featured here today.
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Folks, we are being played when it comes to spending. We’re rewarded for going into debt with a credit card. Rewarded. The more you spend, the more points you “earn” (a wonderful hijacking of that word).
Daniela Corrente started in high finance at a young age. She wrote her first check at age 7. By age 17, she was financially underwater with her first credit card.
It was a tough lesson about debt, but one she eventually turned into an opportunity. “I’ve had a deep interest in financial psychology,” she tells me.
Daniela Corrente
Daniela co-founded Reel, an online platform that allows shoppers to buy big-ticket items without debt.
Here’s how it works: A shopper selects and reserves an item on Reel, then decides how much money Reel will deduct at regular increments — daily, weekly, monthly — from the shopper’s bank account. When enough has been saved up, the shopper makes the purchase with cash. No debt, and no credit card interest.
Reel has over 150,000 customers who subscribe to the site, and they’ve made over a half-million purchases. As of this writing, Daniela says customers are saving toward $25 million in goods from thousands of well-known retailers who use the platform, including Apple, West Elm and Gucci. Daniela says those retailers are discovering that Reel shoppers become repeat customers who spend more.
Daniela created the company from scratch, and she’s raised several million dollars in funding.
Her story is inspiring and useful on so many fronts:
She’s a female entrepreneur — one of the top Latinas in tech fundraising.
Her insights into the connection between money and emotions are lessons for all of us.
She has great advice on how to ask for a raise (and I’m all about that, too!).
An Entrepreneurial Family, but No Experience with Credit
“My grandparents left Italy after World War II and went to Venezuela,” Daniela tells me from her headquarters in Santa Monica, California. Those grandparents were forced to start over — he drove a taxi, she was a seamstress — until they saved enough money to open a bicycle company. Daniela’s parents eventually took over the business and expanded it by buying a radio station. “I grew up around an entrepreneurial mentality,” she says. “It was okay to make mistakes and go again.”
Daniela and her brothers spent their summers working at the bicycle company, and since she was on the debate team at school, she landed the role of marketing. But Daniela was also good at math, and her father insisted his children learn about money. “I was, like, seven years old when I wrote my first check,” she says, with her father standing over her shoulder.
She graduated high school early and came to the U.S. just before her 17th birthday to study industrial design in Miami.
That’s when Daniela says she got her first credit card. “Back in 2002, if you had a pulse, you got a credit card.” She may have known how to write a check, but she had zero knowledge about debt and interest payments. “I thought it was fantastic, right? And then the statements started coming home.” Daniela became her own case study in the psychology of spending.
An Idea is (Eventually) Hatched
Daniela went on to earn a masters degree in communication and moved to New York to work at advertising giant Saatchi & Saatchi.
She began noticing the growing popularity of “buy now, pay later.” This is when a retailer lets you buy something but doesn’t make you pay for it at the time of purchase. “I said, ‘Okay, wait a minute,’” Daniela recalls. “I’ve been reading about behavioral economics for so many years, and how come nobody’s connecting the excitement of shopping with savings?”
Her entrepreneurial DNA kicked in. Maybe there was a gap in the market she could fill.
After doing some research (*cough* Survey Monkey), Daniela and a partner launched Reel in 2018. “The first version of the platform probably cost around $5,000,” she says. It was very basic, but it proved the concept in the marketplace.
Then they landed $180,000 from a tech accelerator program in Los Angeles. From there, things snowballed with more rounds of funding from more investors.
Daniela holds her first investor check with Reel co-founder Alejandro Quilici.
Reel Brings Real Changes in Incentives
Reel customers receive 1% back on the money they save through the app, matching the sort of rewards you often receive with a credit card. “The whole point in our mission is to debunk this myth that debt is the only way to achieve your goals,” Daniela says.
From joinreel.co
The idea reminds me of layaway programs, but with more automation and flexibility.
Reel shoppers can always change their minds and stop saving for an item, which Daniela says happens about 15% of the time. All money stays with the customer.
The company makes money from fees paid by retailers for driving sales, and also from investing the money it’s holding for customers. (Banks work the same way — they invest your savings to make money for themselves. Surprise! Your money isn’t just sitting there gathering dust!)
Most Reel customers are women in their 20s and 30s, and two out of three are Black or Latinx women. Daniela says she didn’t set out to focus on that segment of the market, but as more of these women began to use the platform, she capitalized on the opportunity. “I do believe that Latina and Black women are not necessarily targeted when it comes to finances,” she says. Which is kinda crazy, since data suggest these women typically manage the money in their families.
Advice on Asking for a Raise from Someone Who’s Asked for Millions: “Tell Me a Story.”
Daniela has learned a lot about money since her days as a 7-year-old writing her first check, and as a 17-year-old overwhelmed by credit card payments. She now knows how to ask investors to write big checks for Reel.
She’s learned that it requires her to tell a story, a lesson she was taught by a former boss.
Before heading to graduate school, Daniela worked at a company designing packaging for merchandise. “I created packages for Hannah Montana,” she jokes. One day she discovered that her salary was only slightly higher than the hourly pay of workers cutting and putting together her prototypes.
She was furious and marched right into her boss’s office. “I was 20 years old and impulsive,” she tells me.
“We need to talk,” Daniela announced to her manager. She pointed out all of the high-level work she was doing, and she demanded a raise.
“He’s like, ‘Okay, wait a second, you have a very valid point, but let’s go over how you sell it.’” He told her to think about what she brought to the table, what salary she desired, and what kind of story she could create around that.
Then he said, “Ask me again.” She did, more calmly, and more like a story. “My salary doubled in that conversation.”
So Daniela’s advice is this: Go in prepared, keep your cool, and tell a story. Ask yourself, “How are you making your boss’s life easier, because whenever you make your boss’s life easier, then you are going to be rewarded for it… if you ask for it.”
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Cover image: Peter Dazeley/Getty Images