How Travel Rewards Turned into an Entrepreneurial Venture | Anik Khan from Max Rewards

In today’s episode, Cody and Justin bring you the creator of what we believe will be the future gold standard of Credit Card rewards accumulation, tracking, and redemption. Anik Khan started creating businesses at age 14 where he would redesign websites for thousands of dollars. He would go on to college to pick up management skills and work a few years as a management consultant before starting the rewards app called Max Rewards. The app is currently in beta but should be ready in March 2019. You can gain early access by going over to Max Rewards and hitting download. Make sure you let them know the FI Show sent you! Episode Summary Came to the U.S. when he was four through a lottery program his dad earned He grew up in New York on a low income He started looking for ways he could help contribute to the family When he was 12 he started learning HTML He actually ended up redesigning his middle school website At 14 he started up a website to launch his own business Some of these jobs would pay up to 19k for a project His mom was worried he was up to something illegal Throughout high school he got paid around $50k and $30k of that was profit This business started around 2005 He goes to his mentor to try and borrow $50k to really kick his business off but his mentor knew he wasn't ready because he didn't know management So he goes to college and interns with some medical offices He looked into starting a business to replace college learning management systems but realized it would be a very long time before it could become profitable After college, he got into management consulting Through his consulting at Accenture he started traveling a lot With a recommendation from his boss, he started looking into travel rewards From there he built models to track the best cards to use He's earned over $20k in travel rewards Sometimes he would even check in and out of hotels around a town while traveling to get more bonuses He also talks about stacking discounts and rewards This led him to his current venture called MaxRewards This app provides a much deeper analysis of which credit card is best for you than any currently offered Then the app helps you track which cards to get next, how to get the bonuses, what rewards you have left to use, and which card is best to use when He talks about the false information about opening up credit cards having sucha negative impact to credit scores In reality, it will probably help you or stay the same Anik starts talking about future phases of the apps that focus more on redemption instead of just accumulation This app is shaping up to combine many different applications into one extremely powerful rewards application They are starting to open the app up for beta testers currently The app is set to launch sometime in March You can get priority access to the app by going to Max Rewards and using The FI Show as a note when signing up The app is also completely free In the future, the reward redemption portion will be a premium feature This app has a bright future which started by winning the FinTech competition at FinCon this year Key Takeaways You may not be ready: Anik wanted to jump in head first for his first business but a mentor let him know that he needed to learn more first. There's a fine line between taking that first step and overextending ourselves. It's ok to stop and prepare so that our first big venture is a success. Listen, Learn, Iterate: I love how Anik talks about where Max Rewards is going after getting the basics solid and getting feedback. Just like agile software development, our lives should be a steady improvement with tangible outputs. Convenience is coming: One of the biggest reasons people shy away from tactics that are often associated with FI is because it's not convenient. While we could argue for and against that idea all day,