Founder's Story - How Prop Firms Really Pay Traders (And When They Don’t) | Ep. 325 with Martin Jensen and John Ramos CEOand CTO of Prop Firm Match

Episode Date: March 18, 2026

Daniel Robbins interviews Martin and John about Prop Firm Match, a platform that compares prop firms across categories like forex, futures, crypto, and stocks. The episode covers why most traders use prop firms to access larger capital pools, the dangers of unreliable firms, and how Prop Firm Match vets providers and uses verified trader reviews to create transparency in a fast-growing part of the trading world. Key Discussion Points:Martin explains that prop firms let skilled traders trade with more capital than they personally have, making it possible to earn meaningful income without massive starting funds. Both founders emphasize that payout reliability is the number one risk, because a trader can pass a challenge and still get stiffed by an untrustworthy firm. John shares the practical appeal: paying a relatively small fee or subscription to attempt a challenge is far less destructive than blowing up a large personal account while still learning. They explain how Prop Firm Match stays credible by using objective metrics, strict vetting, and manual verification of reviews so only real traders who used the firm can rate it. Takeaways:Prop firms can be a smart tool for traders who have skill but not enough capital, but only if the firm is reputable and pays reliably. A good prop firm is not just about pricing or rules, it is about trust, transparency, and a clear path from challenge to payout. Prop Firm Match grew by building credibility first, including a creative Twitter championship campaign before launch and scaling to an eight-person team while adding processes that reduce dependence on the founders. The long-term edge in prop trading platforms will come from verified data, community trust, and tools that help traders compare firms based on real outcomes instead of hype. Closing Thoughts:Founder’s Story captures a fast-growing corner of the trading world that most people still don’t understand, and why transparency matters when real money is on the line. Martin Jensen and John Ramos leave listeners with a clear message: prop trading can unlock opportunity, but only if you choose the right firm and protect yourself from the payout risk. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

So I'm excited today to talk through something that I don't really know much about. And I'm an avid trader in the sense of I've been trading different things from stocks to crypto to other things throughout my lifetime. I remember when I was in elementary school and my teacher gave me, here's some fake money, put it into some stocks. And then we had a contest. I in turn 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 Proffermatch is a platform that compares prop firms. For those not familiar with prop firms, prop firms is a kind of company that lets traders trade with more capital than they have on their own. So it's a way for profitable traders to leverage their skills and trade with notably more capital than what they have access to on their own.

PropFep match compares the best prop firms and have a strict vetting process to ensure that the prop firm is solid, that it has to write backing, both in terms of the team and the funding, and do comprehensive vetting of the firm before we decide if we're going to list it or not. so traders know that they find only the best prop firms and can compare to find 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 prop firms that you have Forex prop firms, you have futures prop firms, your crypto prop firms, you have stocks prop firms. So regardless of what kind of.

of assets you trade, there is prop firms and that fits. And what is the importance of having a prop firm? 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 you have 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 depends on you. There are traders who have a lot of capital 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 problems let you go in with less capital. And if you have the skills, this is 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 payout reliability. You have to know that if you follow the rules and you receive or you accomplish a payout, you are actually getting that payout. And that's not a given with prop firms that are not verified, that are not, solid. So that's where PropFAM match ensures that we vet the prop firms

comprehensively to ensure that the traders can be safe 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 make and so on. So without going to much into the details. There is a lot of variations between the firms and also the solidity of the firms that we try best to cover very comprehensively on our platform. To give my take on prop firms and why someone would want to use a prop firm. So I remember when I first started 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 $100 to get access to a specific amount of capital, or you pay, you know, a subscription fee. Personally, 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. 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 were to go into the market with $25,000 and I'm not a good trade. And I'm not a good trader yet, I could essentially risk that 25,000 and, you know, doing things like overtrading or, you know, things that are, the traders are susceptible to, which, you know, revenge trading or going on tilt, trading emotionally, all those, those things. But if you, if you pay a one-time fee and, you know, you know, 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 pro firms. You know, you put a little bit of investment. It tests your skills. And if you pass the test, you pass the challenge. You get access to a lot more capital to make profit off that that kind of leveraged capital that you get. Got it. 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 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 for match exists. For traders that put their hard time, 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 for 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 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 20,000, not being a good trader and then losing it all. So, you know, proff firms is a very, in the trading world, the trading industry, prop firms are, I'd say they're growing because 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 we do know, we do know which. which take us and instruments people trade and currently gold is the most popular pair in the in the industry gold this is heavily traded we have now had a lot of volatility in in oil the recent days so traders go after after volatility so whatever moves you will see you will see increased

the trading activity in. And in addition to the pairs that are always well-traded, such as the NQ and the Euro and so on, commodities and medals are traded heavily these days. When you all got started, what was the thing that sparked when you, when you're like, we have to do this. What was it? What happened in your life? that steered you toward this and why did you co-founded together?

Yeah. So what happened was that both John and me were full-time traders. At that point, I had been trading 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 make a living, but not enough to scale up my trading. And one of the fascinating things with trading is that what you do 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 clicking of buttons and strategy can be just the same, just with much more skin in the gym. So I got over the concept. I heard about the concept of prop films and were really intrigued by that on a personal level to scale up my own trading. So I reached out to do John who had the same passion for it. And when we were looking for prop firms, they were really difficult to find out which problems that were reliable, which were confident would pay out and so on, also to know which firms that suited our style.

There were no such tool. So we decided to build it, knowing that there had to be. be a lot more traders than just the two of us 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 use that to base their decision on. So that's that's where it all started. Yeah. Yeah, Martin, we were part of the same trading community and we met there and 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 still am a lot of traders in our community were using prop firms. So yeah, it was kind of a no-brainer for me and I had the technology to build kind of the initial site and a lot of the other 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'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 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. And how, as you've grown in scale, have you consistently tried to also uphold those things at the same time? So, as you're saying yourself, the trust and transparency is key for us. So when we launched in 2023, one of the things that made us different from the sites that were around comparing. prop firms was that what we put on the site were only based on objective metrics. And that model is something we have hold steady since then.

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 pay themselves to a good rating or anything like that. So we showcase the objective facts, what it costs, what the profit targets are and so on. And then instead of us doing any kind of reviews, we let trade us through 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 ratings. 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 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 trading is a bit of a passion it's something that I 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 and providing that transparency in the industry. When you look at the marketing that you've had to do in order to get to, I mean, 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 be seen in gain 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 a way into the industry where we made a fun competition between various prop firms. We made it like a championship where prop firms battled against each other. And we compare 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 a flying start when we did launch a few months after. So I think that's important to be creative and find out how you can, can stand out and how you can make a mark especially 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 that as we have grown from studying out with

just John and I to now being about 80 people team in two and a half 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 not, it's not so big that 8 billion people on the planet know about it, but it was a major problem that you solved that no one really had solved before. And I think it's hard.

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, 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 that's a great story. What has had to change in the two of you?

I mean, your co-founders, so obviously there's, you know, amazing parts and complexities 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 had to do this as you've gotten 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 quickly so what we when we started out and also with a small team 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 to relate to we have we need processes for what we do to 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 be able to move quick we want to have the fun

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 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 still move fairly quickly, but it is with more people, there's more communication. More people need to know things. So 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. You might have investors you have to think about. 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 processes and procedures. That is something I think a lot of entrepreneurs were like driving 100 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, then they can just easily pick it up. 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 propfamatch.com. That's where you can find out more about both the team as a whole. But most importantly for the traders watching, the information about propham problems as a whole and the various proffms that we list. We also have accounts on X, on Instagram, YouTube, every social media that is out there. We post a lot of valuable content for prop firm traders with details around prop trading as a whole and also various prop films. 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 Founders Story. Thank you. Thank you for having us.