S2E14: When AI Chases Invoices Better Than You – Mihir Deo, Founder - Invoice Butler.

Yeah, that's why I always get a little confused when I see the diaspora on Twitter and even like LinkedIn sometimes. They're like, oh, everyone's using AI. And on the ground, that's not actually true. You go like, and you know, I'm doing sales day to day, right? In finance, for example, and no one's really using AI or automation. I actually think the trust isn't completely there because people are still scared of hallucinations. People are still scared about what it might say. People are are uncomfortable with it. And I think the human touch is something that is really, really important. And so the people who do pick up AI, um, frankly, they're doing it in search of a solution to a problem rather than just AI for AI's sake.

Welcome to Startups Decoded, the show that gets real about what it takes to build a successful startup. I'm Andy Walsh, 2x exited founder, strategist, and your host. Each week I talk with top founders, investors, operators to unpack the plays that drive real traction, not just headlines. If you're building something bold, this is where you'll get the honest insights to scale with clarity and confidence. Let's keep growing together. Hit subscribe and share with your community. It would mean the world to me. Startup Seedcoded is brought to you by DECO. Are you raising capital? DECO builds pitch decks investors say yes to. Designed by expert VCs. Create the deck that gets you funded. Getdecko.com. Hello and welcome back to Startups Decoded. My name is Andy Walsh, and today we're looking at AI and trust in a world where AI automation is becoming the standard. It's been implemented and introduced across the board, customer service, automation internally, and it's showing up in a way where it's becoming more human-like. So today to to unpack this a little bit, I've got me here, Dio. Welcome to the show, man.

Cool. Thanks for having me on, Andy Walsh.

I love your business, which is InvoiceButler, and we'll talk about that a little bit more. And for me, what I love about it is the automation part of it, but also side by side, the element of how people can save time in their business, but also reduce a task that is for many, or for most, I would say, not very interesting, which is chasing up accounts receivable. We were laughing before the show that some people have a real passion for chasing down money. It's almost like they have this stubborn streak and it's a real sense of pride, but I'm sure for most it's something that they don't want to have to do. So being able to build relationships with customers in a way through an agent that you're able to build, it's a really, really fascinating experience. So to kick off, I'd always love to be able to understand a bit about you, your path into startups, your history, and what led you to where you are now.

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. Yeah, my name is Behir, CEO of InvoiceButler. So my history into starting the company kind of dates back to where I was born. I was born in Cupertino, California. And so like, that's the Silicon Valley, right? And so everyone's a son or daughter of an engineer there. My high school is kind of ridiculous. You know, the co-founder of DoorDash went to my high school. The CTO of Perplexity went to my high school. Graduating class had like 4 TO Fellows. So I'm, you know, lucky to be a, just like a small part of that. And, uh, my journey really, I think it was probably that is, is kind of born into having to be in tech, right? I started early on, uh, as on the sales team at Dropbox, uh, when they were on you and I was a salesperson and I was like literally just like smiling and dialing. All day. And from that, I transitioned to starting my own company when I was 23. And so I went through Y Combinator back in 2016, and that's where I was advised by Sam Altman, which is way pre-OpenAI, and Jeff Ralston, who was the creator of Yahoo Mail. Yeah, that was a fascinating experience. 23, 24, we were like the second youngest folks in the batch at that point. A lot of, you know, journeys I can get into there. Ran that company for about 4 years, and it was a small acquisition that happened afterwards. And then I had to take a break, uh, you know, uh, and the break was joining Asana, uh, as the head of sales engineering there. Um, and so I helped scale that company from around $100 million in revenue all the way to IPO, leading the sales engineering team, and then went on to a company called Clockwise and finally started Invoice Butler because, uh, I guess you can't take the itch out of the entrepreneur. So that's where we are now. And, uh, started Invoice Butler today.

So good. And being immersed in that experience, I had an interesting conversation with Jason Schuman, who's general partner at Primary VC here in New York. And he was talking about his childhood growing up and he was around the startup world, the investment world. And for him, it was normal. It was awareness at a level. And I talked about my experience was the opposite. I'm from Tasmania in Australia, one of the most isolated places. And there was no startup scene. There was no tech companies. There was nothing. And for me, I was not even aware of that. Obviously, I saw big tech and I saw startups happen, but I didn't have that immersion. So to be in an environment where it feels like that what is around you has an influence. And I'm curious, do you think that as far as your own personality and who you are, do you think that was a product of your environment? Or do you think that was always part of you, that you're just curious and looking to create and do something that is new?

Yeah, you know what's fascinating is I always like listen to these podcasts and people are like, oh yeah, I was like selling things and like was like creating things from a young age. And really that wasn't me. Like, I often believe that, uh, you are— they say that like you're the average of your 5 best friends around me. And my 5 best friends were all into tech. Like 3 of them are startup founders. And so I definitely think it was the environment that opened my eyes. Um, and then also I went to Berkeley as well, and that opened my eyes there. There as well. And so, um, I think for me the passion was found rather than from within. The competitive spirit, I think, uh, I always played sports growing up. I was like part of the USA Under-15 team for cricket, played a lot of cricket growing up. So there's like the, I would say, the ambition side.

I could talk to you about cricket for ages as an Australian. I was, I had a moment the other day, random side note, but I was biking from a friend's house and went past this local park, and it was one of those open open park areas that has a large wall for hitting tennis.

Yep.

And there were a group of probably, I'd say, 15, 20 guys, and they had stumps set up and they were playing cricket. And it was like such a buzz, and the inner child in me just wanted to stop and go and invite myself to play. And, and I love that. It's one of the beautiful things about the US is the diversity of population. And they're actually building a huge cricket ground out in the— I think it might be in Queens, Yep. And just because of the popularity and it's, it's something that most people, like, or when I say most people, most Americans would look at and would have zero idea what is actually happening. But I think team sport, to bring it back, is really important as well, is thinking about structure and strategy and communication as well. So I think a foundation in team sport is really important when you go into creating your own business and thinking about relationships.

Yeah, totally. Yeah. And like, it informed a lot of like how I think about team building as well. Like, I don't care about me being right, to be frank. Like, it doesn't matter because when you're playing in cricket, you might go out and like get out on zero, but you still have to go for the second innings and field the entire game. So you better contribute. So that definitely like informs on how I think about teams and team building.

So to jump in the deep end, as far as the topic today, AI is obviously having a seismic impact on the world as far as jobs, the ability to create new companies. If you look at something as simple as Lovable, you're seeing a lot of provocations at the moment as far as, is the CTO role starting to die with the likes of Lovable and speed to market? And there's a lot of things that happen around it, but we, we live in a world of the bleeding edge of technology. But for mass consumers, there's still a long way to go to understand how they interact, who they're talking to or not talking to. And then human nature is it takes us a lot longer to evolve and be familiar. So to set the scene, where do you think that consumers are at with their trust in AI and how actively they're adopting that as part of their lives? Because we live in a little bubble where we assume that everyone is using it every day. Because that's who we surround ourselves with, but for the masses, I don't think we're there or even close to that yet.

Yeah, that's a great question. And that's why I always get a little confused when I see the diaspora on Twitter and even like LinkedIn sometimes, they're like, oh, everyone's using AI. And on the ground, that's not actually true. You go like, and you know, I'm doing sales day to day, right? In the finance org, for example, and no one's really using AI or automation. I actually think the trust isn't completely there because people are still scared of hallucinations. People are still scared about what it might say. People are uncomfortable with it. And I think the human touch is something that is really, really important. And so the people who do pick up AI, frankly, they're doing it in search of a solution to a problem rather than just AI for AI's sake. And that's really where we started the business too. Like we didn't, We didn't start InvoiceButler because we were like, we love AI, now let's go find a problem. It was actually the other way around where we're like, this is a massive problem, let's fix it. And if AI happens to help solve the problem, then great. But if not, that's fine. Turns out it does. It actually like really makes our, our solution pretty cost effective as well. So from a cost perspective, it's huge. We can scale the business quite well. And then I guess the AI part, candidly, finance leaders get a little bit of a win when they say, oh yeah, like we, we use AI because they're not as comfortable using it in droves yet.

And I see people being curious as far as how it can work and what it does. And obviously it's literally enabled businesses to be created. And there's, there's two lanes there, right? There's a business that couldn't exist without AI, but then there's also creating a business that's much more effective by using different platforms. To enable you to grow faster, have less people, be more profitable sooner. And it changes the dynamic as far as what a startup is and how you grow. And for some people, that means less reliance on capital, controlling more equity, having a more healthy cap table as far as ownership, through to the team members that they have and the type of skills that they need to have. And that culture within startups is shifting a lot. As far as the hype cycle in companies that are being created, because you touched on it there, and I see a lot of businesses being created that are being created for this fact that you can do it with AI that don't actually offer much value. When you were looking at InvoiceButler, did it come out of something that you observed in a previous role? Did you then look at, okay, what's the application time served? Just just take us through a little bit as far as how it started out and then how you started prototyping.

Yeah, yeah, great question. So how we started out as Invoice Butler was actually something completely different, like a year, year and a half ago, where me and my co-founder were very much into the lean startup mode in the sense that we were like, we're not going to build anything until we talk to 100 people. And so because of my sales background, what we did is we put together a spreadsheet and put a bunch of heads of finance on there and systematically went and talked to like 100+ heads of finance. And we did come up with something that was essentially AI-related in the sense of like it was a dashboarding product at first, right? So the idea was that you type in something in natural language and, you know, it can output like a dashboard, right? That was like the initial idea. And then what started happening is that people like at the these companies, and we were successful in selling an enterprise contract and getting like, you know, people as design partners as well. So people were actually paying money for it. But then what started happening was that people were like, yeah, you're giving us all this data on people who aren't paying their invoices or anything like that, and like churn, but we want to do something about it. And I remember there was this period in which you hear a lot of things when you are going through being a startup founder, right? Like someone's like, you should build this, you should build this, you should build this. People have a lot of ideas, but the best feedback is if someone actually pays you money to do it. And so I remember I was trying to sell to a friend of mine, uh, and, uh, you can cite him now. His name is Akash Sharma. He's a CEO of a company called Vellum, and they just, you know, recently raised a Series A, so congrats to them. and I was talking to Akash and he's like, dude, like, yeah, the dashboards are fine, but it's really annoying chasing these invoices. Like, I just like really, really like need to like hire a contractor or something. But if you can do that, like, I'll just pay you. And I was like, really? You'll just pay me? He's like, yeah, dude, I'll just pay you. I was like, fine. So I sent him over a Stripe link. We had no product at this point, nothing. Like we just, Nothing. And he swiped his credit card the next day without us having a product. He's like, okay, can you do it? And that was like the biggest feedback that we actually needed, that, oh my God, like people are actually willing to pay for this. And it turns out that as a former salesperson, I am very, very, very good at chasing animals. And like, because like, if you think about it, like my background is not necessarily from like the CFO space. I have a lot of family and friends that are heads of finance, so I, I knew the diaspora because that's That was like the kitchen table topics all the time. But if you think about invoice chasing, it's a sales task that is given to finance managers. And who would you rather chase your invoices? Someone who knows from a sales perspective how to get across somebody to get them to pay something and they don't really want to talk to them, or the finance manager who's really better at accounting and, you know, doing the quarter close and doing the audit. Choose a salesperson every single day. So we stumbled in upon it of this sense of how to do invoice chasing and the race started from there.

It's such a rich insight. And I know from experience as a business owner and not to stereotype finance people, but typically they're not even thinking about the relationship. It's from A to B and A to B is you owe us money, pay the money. Do it now. And when your clients, I would say, fragile in this landscape right now, they more often than not, there's an alternative product that they can go to. So retaining customers is critical right now. And if they have one bad experience with a finance person that is overly aggressive or pushing in a way that doesn't reflect it, and the amount of times that I would have clients call me and just go, hey, can you get your finance person to pump the brakes a little bit? They're being pretty aggressive, like it's not even due yet, or there's other things that happen. And for me, being able to know the subtlety of the client relationship too, if you're having an issue with a client, you don't want the finance person to, at the end of the day, send an overdue invoice reminder knowing you've just had a heated conversation. So there's a lot of nuance that goes into that as far as the deadline. The status of the client, is there any volatility, et cetera. So it makes sense that there's some kind of system that can one, get money in the bank, but also retain customers.

Yeah. And to give finance managers a little bit of credit, right? Like it's like they've so much going on, like the CEO is hounding them for like, okay, this model and then this model and then this model, et cetera. And again, they're not thinking about what is the best way to get the invoice paid. So it was kind of surprising when we went went and started basically doing sales, that most of the time finance managers would just click resend invoice on QuickBooks over and over again. Then it would get to like 90 days and then they would send like a, like, demand letter and there was no in between. But the reality is, is that they were so busy, they're just like, they don't know a different way necessarily. And so that was pretty surprising and it's just a question of not having the brain space to spend on it.

Perfect segue into Invoice Butler. So tell us how it works and how companies can implement that to overcome that problem.

So what Invoice Butler is, is it's effectively a managed service. And so what that is, is that we set everything up for you, right? With our opinion, knowing what like cash collection should look like in your organization. We have like one-click integrations into QuickBooks, NetSuite, Um, like all of the invoicing systems and from the customer's end, the customer doesn't actually know that Invoice Butler exists. So it's completely white labeled. We take on an AR, accounts receivable, at domain, email domain at the customer. And then we're doing reachouts from that email domain. And so their customers think it's a person that's actually freaking out. And like, so we send emails, but then most, in most situations, if, you know, you have like an auto-donator set up, if somebody responds, then the head of finance has to like chime in and be like, okay, yeah, like thank you. And like try to take care of it. In our situation, if somebody responds, we respond back. So they say, yeah, we'll pay this next week. We respond saying, can we get an ETA on it? They say it should be in the bank account today. We monitor the bank account and 3 days later, if it's not there, we email them saying, hey, we didn't actually see it in the bank account. If they want us to fill out any supplier portals like Coupa or Ariba or any of those different systems, we can do that as well. So we literally take care of all of the back and forth. And if there's any conflicts that arise, we surface that back to the internal folks, either the head of finance or the head of AR. Now on the people side of things, and this is what we learned, right? To heads of finance internally, they get access to a person on our team. So there's a dashboard where they can see everything that's happening, but they get a person on our team to chat with as if they had an AR rep. So it's as if they hired an AR rep that has like massive superpowers that's managing everything for them. And so that's where the human touch really comes into play. What we realize that people internally at companies do really want a person to talk to. They don't necessarily want to be given like a, oh, sorry, the AI messed up, go configure the tool. There's always a human in the loop, so they feel comfortable with the situation.

So to build on that, it starts as an email exchange. How far can the product go in the sense of, say it was chat and there was back and forth through to a full voice conversation, even video, what stage are you at with that integration and conversation between customer and client?

So the email exchanges can go pretty far. Right? Because when you actually dig deeper into what is an AI response like, what is the response going to be to a customer that says, we're going to pay this soon? There's only really like 5 or 6 responses that you can actually really give to that. Right? So it's figure out tone and personalization. So email exchanges are pretty automated. Now we have classifiers on our end, so we classify the responses of like whether it's like, hey, like a promise to pay or a response that they're going to pay. But if there's some sort of response that we don't know and we're not really sure of, we surface that internally. So every message is checked by us and we check whether it's a conflict or not, and then we surface that back internally. We send texts as well. That's all automated. The one thing that is not automated yet is the phone calls that we make. Personally, I don't think voice AI is completely there yet, and that's where we have humans on our end actually making the phone calls.

And it feels inevitable that's where we're going. I've just recently built a digital twin on selfie. And because of the podcast, I'm lucky that I have hours and hours of content that I can train it on for my voice, my— how I sort of articulate certain things, my, my tone. It hasn't cracked my voice. I sound like not Australian. I kind of sound slightly British, slightly Australian, slightly American. It hasn't really nailed my voice, and that's okay. But I haven't paid for the video version yet. I'm just doing voice, but I'm about to do a promotion to do it. And it's just a fascinating experiment. Experiment as far as a cost per month that I'm paying for that subscription, but then upside to basically scale my consulting services so people can contact my digital twin and have a conversation and get advice based on my experience. And obviously it needs a lot of training and not everyone has access to that content. And for me, it's an experiment more than a money-making exercise. Like based upon what we're talking about, at what point do AI start to have a conversation? And I've dabbled, I bought is a great example. I had a play and it's actually pretty good as far as that experience. It feels quite human, but that's going to catch up really quickly. And for that, as far as the human layer versus that, like to go back to that point, as far as human psychology and trust, where do we think it's going in the sense of automation, call centers? I heard a great example the other day and I can't think what airline it was here in the US. But it was, say there was a power outage or the systems went down, et cetera. And all of a sudden you've got 100,000 people that have inquiries that they didn't forecast. So their call centers get completely overwhelmed and we've all been there. You're on hold for an hour and a half trying to get through to someone to change it. So mobilizing a suite of agents that can field calls and quickly do things But there's still blockages in that because certain things need human touch.

Yep.

So where, where do you see your product going and even bigger, like as far as an industry, at what point do you think that we're gonna have agents as call center staff 100% or will it ever be 100%?

Yeah, I actually don't see a world in which it's 100%. Um, and, um, I'm in this day to day, at least from my perspective, for us, when we get involved with the company, around 90% of the back and forths do end up being our automation, right? Because it's surprising, but most of the times why people don't pay is just because you didn't reach out and you weren't persistent enough. It's wild. And so I remember hearing a quote from somebody who was on the accounts payable end, and they said, yeah, we put the onus on our customers to reach out if we are overdue. That was just the baseline, right? And so most of the times we're able to do it, you know, with automation, but that conflicts part, that is where a human touch is needed. So inevitably, what happens when we get involved, right, we get involved, and sometimes we're doing a lot of what I call weight loss of massive AR balances. Unfortunately, people only think about solutions when it gets way out of control. So we've come into situations where they have $3 million, $4 million, $5 million in overdue accounts receivable, and we start doing reachouts. And inevitably what happens is they've never gotten reachouts before, and suddenly they're like, why do we need to pay this bill? And it leads to some disputes, it leads to some, you know, billing issues, etc. And that all comes down to to a relationship as well. Now, two things happen in that situation when the billing disputes come up. The head of finance says, hey, just tell them that they need to pay the bill, in which we— the head of finance actually becomes that second line of defense of like shielding them, or the head of finance then gets involved or the CEO gets involved in working out a payment. I think those things are from a brand perspective that automation and AI AI cannot be 100% responsible for your brand and how people feel about you. And you need to get a human involved when there's risk to your brand at stake, particularly when it comes to conflict.

Startups Decoded is brought to you by DECO. Are you raising capital? DECO builds pitch decks investors say yes to. Designed by expert VCs. It's like having a venture capital firm in your back pocket. From pre-seed to Series D, we know what works. Create the deck that gets you funded. Getdecko.com. Yeah, I agree. And I talk a lot about with my portfolio is the internal culture externalizing in every touchpoint. And it could be from social communication. It could be a call center. It could be a client interaction, but if you have a strong internal culture and it's healthy and even go as far as treating your team members as customers, so you have this respectful communication that then overflows into external. And if you have an AI that is just so focused on a solution and not thinking about the person on the other side and the relationship and the impact that it has, then you can definitely tarnish your brand. So that that balance of both. It can get to a certain point, it can save you time and help drive accounts receivable up, which is obviously important for cash flow. But then the point where it starts to get a sentiment of, okay, there's some tension here, or there's some pushback, and having human intervention to be able to overcome that feels like it's critical to retain those relationships. Yeah.

But the one thing I'll add, which is like really fascinating, is just kind of an insight I'm thinking about when you were talking is oftentimes, sometimes we get involved, there's massive AR balances that we are like brute forcing down. Um, and for a couple of our customers, they had like $1 million, $2 million, $3 million overdue, and then we got them down. And what's fascinating is after that, it never goes back up again. And the reason being is that there's this fascinating thing of The customers then end up being trained that they're going to get reachouts when this, when they get overdue. And so every new customer is always getting a reachout every 7, 10 days, et cetera. Someone's persistently following up. So they end up being essentially trained by an AI to never be late, which is just fascinating that it's not just reinforcing, but then they don't even know that they're being trained. To pay on time. And so I'm trying to think about the repercussions of that, but yeah, it's working.

It's an interesting social experiment where I know firsthand is that in times of poor cash flow in a company, you basically pay the person that screams the loudest. And if someone's not chasing, you don't pay them until they start chasing it just to hold onto cash and be able to pay the bills and keep doors open ultimately. If you are tight and managing cash flows. So it, it makes sense that people are going to delay it, but if you are coaching them on the fact that this money's owed, then they get into a routine because no one wants to get spammed per se. And that chasing's kind of like, okay, I'll do it. It's like, I know a lot of services that do it in a, in a positive way. Like say it's a car rental. I, I use Enterprise and with Enterprise they give you nice communication as far as pickup times. Drop-off times and it just feels very timely. It's like, okay, yeah, good reminder. I need to do that, but it gives you enough time and it doesn't feel too spammy. And there's a fine line with that as well.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And like when it comes down to like even our messages, right? And we work— the messages we work out with heads of finance to make sure that they're kosher, but most of the time it's very polite and like, hey, can we get an ETA? Great. Thanks so much. And it's just a normal back and forth that is just consistent. So yeah, to your point, A contract has been signed. The money is owed. People feel a weird type of way about asking for money when all of the work has already been done. And if you just take away the drama from it all, it just makes it a lot easier.

And it's, when it comes to money, it feels so much more serious than it actually is. And I think through years of experience, I've got no qualms in asking for any of those things, but that takes confidence and time served. To be able to understand and appreciate that human part of it. It's like, yeah, we've done it. And it's like, yeah, we're a small business. We rely on this capital to keep doors open, pay our team members, and you can humanize it a little bit. So for you, when you're training the InvoiceButler per client, I assume that you're looking at tone of voice as far as their personality and trying to get a sense that it feels like it is coming from someone, but it also reflects the larger brand strategy and how they like to articulate themselves.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And like the, the frank of the matter is that the tone is pretty much the same across all of our customers. And it's, it's really like the first message that is edited, more edited than most, right? Where it's like, hey, like, what is the initial message that they get? Because again, I will reiterate, when someone responds that they're going to pay something or they're, it's on its way or something like that, there's only 3 or 4 responses that that you can really actually respond with. The difficult part is when it does get later and later and later. And that, I would say, we don't do that without an approval process. And so, so for example, we have the ability to send collections demand letters. And so that is very much like a, whoever presses the button of go, that's not going to be us, that's going to be the head of finance. And so the I would say the harder parts about this business is really that, uh, the, the, the tone doesn't adjust by itself because we need the approval from a head of finance. And this is my unique insight of, uh, companies are just not there yet to let the tone determine itself. If there's any sort of extreme situation, they're not going to accept like, oh, based on the context of the situation, we thought that we would use really extreme language here. That's a surefire way to get you booted out of the organization. But if it was done with approval, then that means you've got the blessing to do it. So that's really how we, how we manage it. We tried selling in the past, when we first started, like, oh, would you like an agent to just like run on its own? Nobody said yes. And that's going to say that we're not completely there yet to let agents run loose across all of your customers, at least yet.

And that reflects and mirrors what we were talking about earlier as far as human trust and we're not there yet. And however long that takes to get to a point where you trust 100% in Awesome Code to represent you in the right way and just some of that nuance that we make in the moment as human beings that allow us to maintain relationships, which are much bigger and more important. I look at something within that too. Like I had a client and they went into a Chapter 11 when I had my business and they owed us about $125,000. And with that, like another layer too is the company that owes you money, trying to get a sense of where they're at. Because for me, if maybe I chased that invoice sooner and we may have got paid before they started pausing payments, et cetera, and we went through this laborious process of trying to get some money back and we got a tiny portion of what was owed to us as they closed out their Chapter 11. And I think understanding market conditions as well, like there's a lot of layers that you can put into that to not only make sure you get paid, but make sure that your prioritization for who you chase allows you to get money in because the flow-on effect is significant, right? If you're a company, maybe you're publicly listed or even you're going through an exit or a fundraise, debt within the company, as far as money owed to you, can actually bring valuations down because it's a liability on, on what you're doing. So it's not just money owed, it actually has a bigger flow-on effect. Being able to show, I would assume, historical data where it's like your maximum money owed was $5 million. We've got that down now to where it's never goes above $1 million and your payment times have gone from 90 days to 45 days. You could actually track and show quantitatively the difference that your product has made on a small investment per month.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, again, bring it back to the Invoice Butler here. We've been in those situations where there were no reachouts being done by a customer and then suddenly it went like 90, 100 days overdue. This very vividly, actually, it was $100,000 that was outstanding from a big, from a big public corporation. And what our service does is if we can't get in contact with the AP person, we go and find a contact that's higher up at that company. So we take— again, the salesperson DNA is here, right? Like, we're constantly, you know, looking for other contacts. And we got the CEO's approval saying, hey, we're gonna send this email asking them to pay to this VP of Finance. He's like, you know what, go for it. It's been 90, 100 days. 24 hours later, the CEO gets an email from a different director of finance being like, hey, we got your note. Yeah, we're really— we're going to pay this bill. But like, next time, can you not email my boss? And so what happened on the other end was this— the CFO got wind that someone on the AP end isn't doing their job. Alerts were sounded. The CEO got an email from a VP of finance he'd never heard of before. So it actually worked. But it caused this like tension and sometimes things don't get done without tension. But the reality is, is, um, at the end they worked out a payment plan, you know, $60K instead of $100K. If that CEO that we were working with had a system to begin with, he would've gotten that entire $100K and we didn't have to go through all of that. And so that's just like a fun story, uh, to share where on their end they did see it as debt and liability that all of a sudden they need to go and change their financials. Okay. Suddenly gone.

And I would assume that that's going to iron out some creases on the, on the client side, as far as problems that they have in managing their own payment system and cash flow and accounts payable. And for me, it feels, and I don't know if I'm letting or going too far with the idea, but I see a state with InvoiceButler where it also syncs up with accounts payable, where you're able to look at cash balances but within a company. So it's doing both. So from a cash flow perspective, you almost have a system that's allowing you to manage your own company's cash flow and receivables and payables and syncing those up. And it's attached to both.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's definitely like one thing that's in the long-term vision as well, right? Like looking at the accounts payable side. And actually I do see a world in which you know, AR and AP end up being like completely automated, in the sense that, you know, on one end there's automated invoices being sent out, and from an AP end on the other side that there's, these don't need to be people at the end of the day, unless there's a conflict or there's no contract in place. And so it makes no sense that, candidly, that these jobs really exist, right? Why is someone sending out an unpaid invoice email and reminding someone to pay? And why is someone looking at the invoice, checking a contract, seeing if they're a customer, and then actually paying the bill? That seems that that can be entirely systems can actually do it. The difficulty right now is that we're just focusing on AR because AP is a bunch of people. And so you're working with a bunch of disjointed systems. So you got to start where you can.

Yeah, absolutely. I would love for you to be able to talk a little bit as far as what you're working on now, your target customer, and the type of people that that you would love to have conversations with?

Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for that. Yeah. I would say as opposed to like painting this like really, really broad vision of like changing the future of B2B payments, you know, the reality is, is that staying focused is one thing that is really important to our company. We are entirely focused on making sure that the AR problem is solved. This is a problem that has a massive, massive market. AR is a problem everywhere. If you get to $1 million or $2 million in revenue, then you have to start putting people behind it. You have to start putting like heads behind it, and it just becomes something that shouldn't be a job, frankly, of anybody. And so our current vision is to revolutionize AR, right? Starting with that and then going backwards into what we see is grunt work for heads of finance, right? No one really wants to chase unpaid invoices. Right? No one should actually be doing that job. No one should be reading contracts and then putting that into invoices, right? And then on the AP side, no one should be like checking contracts and seeing if they're actually customers or not. There's all of these— this minute gut-wrenching work that AI should solve as opposed to, in my opinion, like, oh yeah, like replace an entire software engineer with AI, right? Like, sure. Like, I don't— I don't know if people are like clamoring for that yet. And that's my, that's my hot take. And so if you're a business out there and you're making like at least a million or two in revenue, you have a lean finance team and you're stressed out heads of finance that's not going to be able to add much headcount, talk to us. We'll be able to do this at a fraction of a cost than hiring someone to actually do it.

So valuable. And I think about my growth and I, I had a lot of roles and a lot of hats as most founders do, but I inherited the operations, finance, tax, legal, you know, all the engine behind the machine. And for me, thinking about financial health and understanding the big numbers, I didn't want to spend too much time in the weeds. I needed to make sure that the big things around churn and cash flow pipeline, all the things that gave me confidence that we could keep doors open and pay team members ultimately was critical. So having something that takes the churn work, the just repetitive nature would've been valuable for me. So I, I think that you're going to find significant growth and it feels like a no-brainer for a lot of founders to get a subscription rather than employ someone to do what is very unrewarding work.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And like, we've been pretty lucky that like we have like customers and we've collected at this point, like last quarter we collected like $20 million in cash. So definitely the future of finance and the future of workings is going to be lean teams. We're seeing that people aren't hiring in the finance org really much, if at all, because you can automate a lot of the work around it. So that's what I see on the ground.

Fascinating to see what happens. Obviously, we'll be in touch, and I'd love to check in, in a year and see the adoption curve as far as people generally, but also your business. So let's Make sure we do that. But for today, thank you for joining me here. Cool.

Thanks for having me, Andy. Really appreciate it.

Thanks for listening to Startups Decoded. If today's conversation helped you think differently, share it with the founder in your network. And don't forget to subscribe for real-world startup insights every week. We really value your support. If you're interested in partnering with us, email hello@startupdecoded.com. Startupsdecoded.com. I'm Andy Walsh. I'll see you next week.