Remarkable young entrepreneur helps small businesses manage their money: Indinero

So who are you?

I'm Jessica Ma. I'm founder and CEO of Indinero.com. yeah.

And how old are you?

I'm 20 now and my co founder is 19.

When I first met you, you were like 16.

I was 16. Crazy.

So what is this company that you started and what got you here?

Sure. So Indinero is a real time financial dashboard for businesses. And it's not accounting software. Unlike accounting software, it's like one minute setup time. No accounting rhetoric. And it just tells you how your business is doing without having to use complex accounting software.

You've already seen quite a bit of success this summer. You raised a lot of money, A good amount of money. More than a million dollars.

Right.

From a bunch of investors, a lot of whom are really significant investors. You've been on CNN Money and on TechCrunch TV. I mean I keep seeing you all over the place. So you're off to the races. But I find what you're doing is interesting. And I wonder what got you to this place. You know, tell me about. Because you've had a weird non traditional childhood.

Yeah, it's been really interesting. But everything like didn't actually start this summer. I started thinking about this for a really long time. Back when I was in middle school. I was building my first ebay store and I thought I was making a bunch of money but my margins were terrible and I didn't actually plug in the numbers and I didn't know how my money was doing. And if you're spending your entire.

Now wait a second. How did you start a business in middle school?

Well, it's like, like you see about the news.

I mean I have a 16 year old. Okay. My son, he's totally not into starting a business and thinking about this stuff.

Well, you have to start small, right? Like in ebay stores, like really easy. Like like 10 years.

What was the impulse for you to start a business in middle school? Most normal kids don't do that.

Right? Oh, it's a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun. It's like you could either do chores and make money from your parents, or you could sell stuff on ebay or start a website and something more interesting. And so that's why I started doing that. And over the years I've been pretty. I've been pretty bad at tracking my money. And I've started to think that if you're an entrepreneur and you're devoting your life towards building your business, your goal is hopefully to make money. And if you're not tracking your money religiously. That's almost criminal. So that's why we started Indinero. And funny enough, what used to be the biggest stress of my life, managing my business is money. That's now all my life revolves around. And so now we're really religious about our money.

It's fascinating. So tell me, show me around the dashboard. What does this actually do? And then we'll keep coming back to your life. And what were your parents like? What was the impulse for you to get into being an entrepreneur at such a young age?

Sure. My mom is an entrepreneur. She's been running her own business for over 20 years now.

So the rest of the family, I knew there was something going on.

Well, I hear about it from her all the time. And growing up, like, most of her stress was around the money issues too. Like, oh, my God, like, cash is really tight this month and hiring, like, I don't know if you could hire, afford to hire this person. And so I've heard all these problems growing up, and over time, it just really adds up. And so, yep, runs in the family.

Okay, so what does this do?

Sure. So this is the dashboard of in. The narrow idea is that we want to make it super easy for you to instantly know what your business's money looks like and what are the things that any entrepreneur cares about. They want to know how much longer they have to live. They want to know what their profits are like, who owes them money, who they owe money to. And then there are a lot of interesting questions that I have as a business owner. For example, I know at Indinero, we really want to know how much money we spend eating out. That's our biggest expense. Contractors. How much are we spending on contracting out stuff this month? And the list goes on and on, and oftentimes you don't have those answers. And you wanted to make that really easy.

Tell me about. You now have customers, right, who are using this. What are you learning from them?

Oh, my God. So many different things. But our first really passionate customer sells things on Etsy.com and they have their own online store and they stay at home, no other job. And they're really passionate about this because they've tried everything from QuickBooks to Cashflow to every other QuickBooks killer out there. And then they landed on us after they saw mention in Inkin magazine. So that was our first really happy paying customer we got this summer pre TechCrunch launch. So that was one of the most exciting mornings for our company. And then like last week I met an entrepreneur who runs gas stations, and he also does business consulting on the side, and he's been using Indinero and giving us all these great ideas. So it's just really cool to see all these different types of entrepreneurs and how they're using Indinero in completely different ways.

You talked about being TechCrunch. What did that do to your business? And what have you learned from that?

Well, a lot of the press has been pretty helpful for us because, hey.

You'Ve been in Read, Write, web and all sorts of.

Yeah. Venture Read and CNN Money. And like, we'll have something in, like, Wall Street Journal and Inc. Soon again. And it's. It's like once you have a product that you built and, you know, people like, you just have to spread the word. And for us, it's. It's a very clear mission. Every business owner hates their money. You just have to tell them what's out there and what exists.

I'm not going to show the house because it's pretty mess. Well, let's show something. But you guys are actually living in a house, right. And working all together. And that's sort of a Y Combinator thing. The first Y Combinator company. And we can talk about Y Combinator and the role it played in your business's development. The first Y Combinator company I've met was just like, this was a music company. Five guys in a house, all living together because it was cheap, you know, and kept expenses down.

Right. Well, you have to keep scrappy. Like, I'm scared of the day that rent is on the top of this list. And it's. It's just we want to keep lean. We know that we were very fortunate to raise over a million dollars in financing, but we have to be really cautious at the same time. Yeah, but a few of our investors are pushing, like, you got to get a real office team. Like, a reporter's gonna want to come to your office. And actually, Ali, poor Toby sent me out. And last night I'm like, ali, no one's ever asked us to come visit our office. And then you called me this morning, hey, I want to stop by your office.

So it's grow up and become real time, right?

Yeah. Right.

This is a marketing challenge for a small company, is how do you appear big? You know, when I worked at Microsoft, our marketing challenge was the opposite. Was that how. How do you appear small and nimble when you're a big, slow moving company? Right.

I mean, the difference, though, fortunately, we're not an Enterprise play. All of our business customers are pretty similar to us. They work from their living room and so they understand. And when we tell them we work out of our living room, it actually gets them excited because it reminds them of themselves. Yeah.

What's next?

A lot. Well, first of all, the way we think about our business is really long term. As you've probably seen from TechCrunch TV, we really think about this as a long term company because every business has so many problems they need to solve. From payroll to taxes, to planning to forecasting their money to getting credit and loans. And the list goes infinitely long. And what's directly next for our company is just really perfecting the core product. And then once we perfect the core product, then we could move on and conquer new territory. Yeah.

You're now doing all the stuff you hated. Right. Or maybe you like it now. Hiring exciting and building a marketing plan and trying to appear like a big company or even better yet, becoming a big company.

Well, at first we thought raising money would be really difficult and boring. But once I started getting into the groove, I thought, oh, this is actually a little fun because no matter what you're just, you're sharing stories about your company and that's really exciting for me. Yeah. And hiring, same thing. You have to sell your company, tell them why it's great. I was like, alright, I really enjoy doing that. So. So it's not that big of a deal.

What did you find that investors are looking for right now? Because you just went through that with the Y Combinator program and meeting a lot of investors.

Sure. I found that they're looking for a tangible product that people like and will pay money for. Revenue is really huge. When you say that we're making money, that's really great for investors. And then long term thinking is also really important. We see that we want to solve this problem in the long run. And making money would be a very.

How important was your team?

Team's pretty important, but that's kind of like a prerequisite. If you don't even hit that bar, then nothing happens beyond that. Yeah. So it's just assumed you have to have a good team and.

Tell me about your team.

Sure. Four of us were full time. We all met studying computer science at Berkeley. All of us have Go Bears. Go Bears. And all of us have started something before, whether it be a business or Borden, who was one of our first hires, he ran his parents Chinese restaurants. So every night he had to count up the receipts and close the books. So he Knew this problem firsthand. And so that's kind of cool.

That's very cool. It's amazing. You know, I worked in retail when I was young and it's amazing. And a couple of my co workers now, our major executives at Reuters and other places, it's amazing what that kind of work experience prepares you for in life.

Oh, so important.

I mean, we learned about advertising, market development, people skills, and all the grunge work that comes with running a business. And those are all valuable things later on in life.

Right. Clearly.

What are you going to do? You're going to be like Bill GATES in about 40 years.

Maybe, or Mark Zuckerberg. I mean, I hope this business has that much influence and that's ultimately what matters because, I mean, I don't want any business owner to be stressing about their money. And once we've done that, then we know that we're onto something.

So what was it like presenting to hundreds of investors, including Ashton Kutcher was in the audience.

Right? Yeah, I thought that was pretty funny. Well, we talked to Ashton actually, and he's like, oh, in n out is really cool. And I was just thinking, okay. He, like, I'm not sure if he'd really get our product or not. But we looked for like most of the other investors started a company before. Yeah. So they instantly got what we're working on and why it's the problem. So we talked to all of them. Yeah.

Tell me about Y Combinator. What was that? What is Y Combinator?

Y Combinator is an early stage accelerator program and they give you a little money and they take a small slice of your company and they just give you access to an incredible group of advisors, mentors and investors. And it was a really great experience for us.

And what else? What was? Raising fund. So do you have any tips for the next class that's going to go in next year? People are trying to start companies. Do you have any lessons that you've learned? Because you've done really well. You hit the ball out of the park going through this program.

I'd say it's really important to start early. Just because you got into Y Combinator doesn't mean everything is happy and great. You have to work really hard before the program starts. And then as you're going through the program, you should be talking to anyone who you think will be very valuable for your company. And so we got paired up with a mentor named Kevin Hartz. He's the founder and CEO of a company called Eventbrite.com and we just got paired up with him and he helped us all through the program. And when we were ready to raise money, we went straight back to him and like, everything got lined up really quickly.

What kind of help did he give you? What kinds of things did you look to your mentor for?

So for Kevin Hart, he's really good at fundraising. Like that's his specialty. So we turn to him to help us put together our pitch, our demo, our slide deck. He introduced us to our first batch of investors and he really got us going on that. And then he helped me with how to close an investor. And it's basically just how to sell.

In the Valley, there's not very many women entrepreneurs. Do you find any roadblocks because of that or do you see it as a challenge? Do you see what? Do you see the space right now, competing with a bunch of men?

I don't think that matters at all. It's kind of boring. I mean, no one really thinks about it, so it's one of those things.

Very cool. What else do we want to know about you?

Well, I mean, I just really. I mean, I really want Indinero to do well. And I'm trying. Yeah, we're getting a lot of press and there's a lot of perceived value in our company, but I'm trying to stay away from the superficial stuff like how we raised money and, you know, how we're young and all that stuff, because that's ultimately not what matters. And I really hope that other entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and coming out of Y Combinator also understand that and focus on building a company. Yeah.

And do you have a roadmap of new features?

Yeah, sure. God, where do I start? Transactions page. We're actually building something. Oops, go back.

Yeah, why don't you actually, why don't you take me through the product a little bit and show me. So this is for small businesses?

Yeah, it's for. Well, any business size could really use it. But we found that the happiest customers sell things online. So they might be an Etsy or ebay seller, or they might be a part time web designer and they send out invoices using FreshBooks or something. Okay. And so people who sell things online, and most of them don't have anything to manage their money. I mean, maybe you'll use Excel or your bank statement or your PayPal website, but there's nothing formal you use. And it's really. Because setting up QuickBooks is a nightmare and takes hours to do. Yep. So they sign up for a service you download data from all their bank and credit card accounts and then instantly pull all that in to create a concise real time financial dashboard. And to answer your question of where we're going next, there are a few things we're really spending our time on, like the transactions page, being able to manipulate your data better, like creating rules.

So what does the transactions page show you?

Yep, right now it's just a bunch of transactions. But you could filter it by category, amount, date, date, range, account.

So this shows you bills and you know, who you're paying and all that fun stuff. Your rent and stuff like that.

Yeah, you owe money too and all that stuff. And there's just so many cool things you could do with this. And I mean like you could like we look at Gmail as a great source of inspiration because, well, email is actually pretty similar to transactions, only a few are important. So like what they're doing with Priority Inbox. Brilliant. If we could apply that to Indinero, that would be really, really interesting. Yeah, so that's one thing I'm personally working on.

Are you thinking of hooking up with like Blippi, which shows you, you know, where your credit cards go and stuff like that. But I'm thinking that by being transparent with where your money is going, you can compare to other people. Like are we actually buying the right office equipment or are we really overpaying for rent? What is our pattern of spending compared to another business? Pattern of spending?

Yeah, that's something else on our roadmap. It won't be Blippi transparent for the entire world to see, but it's something we've started to think about. And then there are other more nuanced things that like users wouldn't think about asking us. But Jessica Livingston from Y Combinator suggested like, I know personally, I think, alright, how much did we spend on this event? Or how much did we spend going on a retreat? Or how much did I spend going to Seattle on this business trip? And they're not really categories, they're events. And if you can know how much money you spent through each event, that would be incredible. Another thing that's really cool is let's say you sell things on Etsy, you have really good data on where your sales are coming in from and we could line that up against your spending for cost of goods sold so we know exactly how all your margins are on different products. That'd be really cool. And there are like 50 million things we're thinking about doing and not sure if we'll actually do them.

And can you tell the roi? Like, if I sponsor an event At Rackspace, we do this all the time. We sponsor an event. We're trying to see what was the ROI of doing that, of that expenditure, was it worth it? And there's some things that hit the bottom line. Customers come in right away. And there's some things that are intangibles. Like we got dinner with Paul Graham.

Right.

And that might be an intangible. Can you put intangibles in here and sort of track those as well?

Yeah, if it's tangible, like if it actually leads to sales, then yeah, you'll know how you're actually doing and if it's working out for you. But obviously, like, some things, like if I spent money on a billboard on like 101, like, that's like, you can't register that. Yeah. Same with online advertising. I know. And I saw the Singa billboard right across the highway.

Yeah.

And I was really thinking, how do you measure that? Because there's no way to measure that.

Is there ego gratification in your. Because a lot of that's ego gratification. Right. You know, it's like, oh, I saw, you know, my employees see the board and think that we're, you know, part of a bigger company again.

Right. It's a total ego boost.

Yeah.

But like scrappy startups, you don't really think about that. It's really. What. What's the immediate impact? And so, like, for example, every time we do something with the press, we instantly track our sales and we see. Alright, did we see any noticeable bump in sales today? Yeah.

Have you?

Oh, absolutely.

So, you know, who's the best? Is it TechCrunch or is it CNN Money?

Which.

Which one are you gonna spend all your effort trying to get on again?

I mean, like, TechCrunch was really helpful the first time around. CNN Money was really helpful. And I guess pretty much all the publications that target a bunch of people who sell things online, like business owners. And it's perfect for them. Yeah. And pretty much all of them have business owners reading them. Yeah.

Well, I would think something like Inc Magazine would make more sense maybe than a tech. TechCrunch gets people like me to try that. Right. Which are people who like new technology, new games.

A lot of them are business owners. So that's why TechCrunch has been helpful. But Inc Magazine, when that article comes out, I'd be really interested to see how helpful that is.

It'll be fun to watch. What other services are you Hooking. So can I hook into my bank account like at Wells Fargo or something, and that gets hooked in here and that reports into here?

Yep. Any of the major bank and credit cards, even a lot of the smaller credit unions, we support PayPal. We integrate with a company called FreshBooks. They're the easiest way to send invoices online. Better than Microsoft Word and your email. And there are a few other services we're thinking of integrating with, like Shopify and Etsy. And I visited the Etsy headquarters last week, and I'm like, wow, this is such a cool place. And they're really excited about what they're working on for their API, and I think we'll be an early adopter of that, too.

Okay, well, we'll be watching them. They have covers on their air ducts and all sorts of fun stuff that they've made.

It's beautiful in there. And hopefully, like, whenever I go to these offices, I think, okay, how do I apply that to Indinero? Since right now, when you're working out of your living room, it's really easy. But moving to a real office, you have to be conscious about it.

Think about your culture and think about the people you're hiring. And how are you going to filter out assholes? I talked to Paul Graham about that. Right. He specifically doesn't want people who aren't going to fit into his culture. He tries not to invest in them.

Right.

So you must have passed that test. Right.

He's really good at that.

How does he test you?

No one actually knows to this day. I really want to ask Paul, why did he invest in us? And it's more like an intuitive thing. I don't even think he understands.

But anyways, Paul Graham was telling me at bootcamp that he invests in companies to try to learn from them. He told me one story. He invested in a company that was started by husband and wife because he had never done that before, and he wanted to see what the outcome would be there so that he would know whether to do it again, whether it worked out. And then also, if he does do it again, what's the mentoring he would give the next company who has that same thing?

That's a great philosophy. Yeah. For us. I think he's really fascinated because we're probably the youngest diners that he's invested in who've actually graduated from college, because everyone who's 19 and 20, they had a drop at, but we didn't. And then the second thing was, he hasn't invested in many companies. That deal with money and finances. It's pretty much.

So you've graduated from college already?

Yeah.

With a computer science degree.

Yes. Wow.

At age 20. I always still try. It's running a camera store, trying to figure out what I was going to do with the rest of my life. Just like I'm holding the camera. And you already got funded for a million dollars.

Well, you could start your own company just as easily.

I don't know. I'm too old. I have kids and a mortgage. It's really hard to start a company when you do that.

It's just a little tough. But, yeah, we're one of the few really innovative money companies out there, and he's really intrigued by that. And he told us at our interview we'll either be really big or we'll just fail. And hopefully we'll be really big.

Very cool. Well, cool. Where do we find you on the web?

Sure. Indinero.com is our website and I also have a blog, jessicama.com and anyone can email me. It's jessicamaachdonero.com and I love talking to other entrepreneurs and new business owners.

Very cool. And you're on Twitter as well?

Yep. Twitter slash Jessicama.

Bespoke jessicama and twitter.com indinero, right?

Yep.

And Facebook too.

I'm not sure if we got around to that one.

Well, cool. Thank you very much.

Cool. Thanks, Robert. Sam.