Transcription
Companies are either learning or they're dying. What is the new way of like making a sales in my mind? Like where we're at is like web AI now where like things are actionable.
So ladies and gentlemen, we have with us Daniel Katino with Just Paid. Daniel, great to have you.
Yeah. No, thank you for having me on. It's exciting to to be on. that your your work with just paid is a transactional solution making transactions and invoices more seamless and and and efficient uh for businesses. Expound upon that for us if you would and tell us about yourself and just paid as a vision as a company.
Uh, just paid is a AI financial assistant to help all businesses from small to big enable their teams to have uh a finance like operations partner in our from our platform. So you could think of it as like a a way that uh once you take a invoice or a contract you could put that into our software and essentially we will figure out what to do from that. Generally people are hired in the world to basically do these tasks across the United States and across the world and it's a very laborious task where you are trying to one make sales at a company so there's that stress when those sales are made it's making sure that you get paid for those for those sales. So there's usually a contract in place you know once that contract is signed it's kind of dead unless you have people take care of it. So, we're the AI AR, accounts receivable agent that helps collect that revenue.
Amazing. And you use the word partner. It's not just like a software. It's not something like a plug-in. You guys are a partner. You partner with businesses. And I think that's something that that really really is amazing. And just picking back up on what you said, what were some of the challenges you guys faced as a SAS company? And how did you overcome those challenges, whether it be retention, acquisition, what have you?
I think there's always challenges in every startup and every company. So for me, I I do think the world is shifting where people are becoming more distrusting of cold outreach because there's so much inbound now coming at every company. The challenge all all startups and all companies in the United States have now are how do you stand out above the crowd? You guys have this great podcast, right? So, I think this is a way that you're trying to stand out to get your brand out there and try to see who might be a good fit to work with. What's happening today is a lot of companies are trying to figure out what do they do and there's a lot of AI sales bots now. There's a lot of data tools on people now. So, there's so much inbound coming in at people. It's a challenge. And this is a challenge like I'm just bringing this one challenge up because everybody is having this challenge of like what do we do now that there's this new world where all of our information is available. I just I had a cold call today. Someone called me out of the blue and they had all of my information. Right. And it's like and that's how they want to impress you too. Like hey I got all this information on you. Exactly. So so I think what do you do in this new world of information overload? Everyone trying to sell you something. what is the new way of like making a sale.
So for me this is a challenge like we're navigating this now. It's like we're using a lot of AI tools. Our team is very very productive because of our AI tools. So like in the past I'll give you an example. We have software engineers to build our product for just paid. In the past some of the work they would do could take them a month. It takes them like less than an hour now. I'm seeing companies scale more fast than I've ever seen in my life. Last week I met a company. They were two weeks old and they had I think it was $100,000 in revenue. Yeah. What is that? A R or MR? What is that? Uh that was ARR. Just wow. Two weeks old. Two weeks. And they're building a tool and they're using AI and it's just taking off. So I think these are real companies that are building faster than I've ever seen in my life. I think the the rate of change is happening so fast, people have to keep up with it, which if you don't, you're going to be left in the dark.
That's exactly what's happening. And with Just Paid, what are some of the biggest time syncs businesses eliminate when they switch to Just Paids automation, especially compared to legacy tools and spreadsheets and whatnot?
I'll give you an example. I spoke to two accounting firms uh over the last couple of days. One of them they have they're doing taxes for businesses and they did the taxes and they basically invoice their customers and they know their customers are good for the money but they have one accounts receivable person. I'm just giving you this example of this one company and the person is not following up as much as they should be on all of the money that's due to them. They don't want to anger their customers but they want to get paid. Real life problems. Yeah. So, so the the boss, her boss, who who is the person I was talking to of the accounts receivable person was like, I just kind of check in and look at what's owed every month and I remind my accounts receivable person, these are the five clients we need to get paid from because it's a lot of money. I mean, and it's a lot of money. Like, it's not something that they should just ignore, but it shouldn't be that way. It shouldn't be like people reminding people reminding people to all make payments. And everybody wants to get paid and and I think the companies are okay paying for someone to do their taxes. It's just laborious, time consuming and like a reminder system that is antiquated. It's just people doing like reminders. They'll send an email reminder. They'll send a text reminder. They'll send a phone call reminder. Whatever. The business owner is busy. They're they're like, "I'll pay that in a month or two weeks." And they forget. and now it's four months later and it's like maybe $50,000 for a really good business that's that needed help with their taxes. The reality is that's the way that it is. And for us, like we're looking at that saying we can help alleviate some of that pressure off your accounts receivable team where you drop our AR agent in. It will look at everything that's owed, understand what's going on, and literally act like a human, and try to send polite emails out like trying to collect the revenue. And what's nice is if someone actually makes a payment, the AR agent, the AI, AR agent will back off. This is probably unlikely, but if multiple invoices are owed, so it'll like track one and not the other ones, it'll act like a human. So it'll say, "Hey, you have seven invoices that you haven't paid. Uh, would you like to make a partial payment today or would you like to figure out a payment plan or would you like to pay all of it? But we're your tax team. I'm just I'm giving you an example. We're your tax team and we did your taxes over the last, you know, several quarters and we haven't received a payment. Let us know what to do. Like those are the types of bespoke emails that you get from our product. So, it'll look at everything and if they if they an example another example is if they if someone doesn't owe any money and they do have an invoice but it's not due yet the AR agent will send it but it'll say hey you have you know 45 days to pay this just a heads up and it just sits in their inbox and then it might just nudge them at the 45day mark to make that payment but you know there's there's different parts of our product one being the reminder AI that's the one piece and then the other being the contract AI which is you sign an agreement with a company and they're supposed to pay you whatever it is 10 grand a month. When you make that, you know, when you sign that document, it's a dead document. You have to have a person invoice for that, you know, that agreement. What you do is you just drop that into our contract AI. It figures out how to parse it up and generate the invoices. So, there's the invoice generation part from our contract AI and then there is a reminder AI part. And we're not trying to remove people from their jobs. It's there are not enough accountants and finance people. And a lot of companies can't afford these accountants and finance people because they're expensive. So what we're trying to do is democratize it in a way that literally helps everyone.
Yeah, I was going to say solution based. That's really what that is. It's just taking care of the problem. And what kind of red flags or early warnings can Just Paid surface for teams that aren't digging into spreadsheets daily or or what have you? What what what kind of the uh alarms does just paid raise for its users?
I would call it like reports like when you log into our product, there is a this is how many outstanding invoices there are. This is how many are overdue. This is how many are overdue 90 days. This is how many are overdue 60 days. This is how many are overdue 30 days. So like the longer someone doesn't pay, the longer they're less likely to pay. So we have a lot of really nice insight tools that help a company and business owners and founders to see, oh, this is the state of my business cash flow in I understand what's being paid and what isn't. So it, you know, there's a lot of those types of tools. We have like in contract AI, there's a lot of tools like say you put in five contracts this week and you put it in there, you know, the AI will like parse and say there's, you know, there's 25 invoices that are going to go out. Are you good with this? And you just say yes. Um, so it's, you know, a different type of experience that I'd call it like web 2.0 is like web 1.0 0 was very simple, you know, web pages. Web 2.0 was very much like signing a document, but the document is like not smart. It doesn't do anything. It just sits. It's a PDF. Yeah. PDF doesn't do anything. In my mind, like where we're at is like web AI now where like things are actionable. You can take action on a contract that's signed between two parties. And you know this goes for like the world where like things are changing so quickly where there's you know sales SDRs. I don't know if you know what an SDR is. There's a sales SDR is a sales development rep. It's like a cold caller you know. There's there's AI to help like with robots walking like they are literally like learning how to walk. There's AI to help like with you know people's health, right? There's just all these different insights coming from AI now. And a lot of that has to do with all the investments from the infrastructure companies like Google. Yes. Open AAI, Microsoft, all these companies are investing huge amounts of money. And it's just uh we should be taking advantage of it as smaller companies.
How does just pay just paid AI help companies look ahead instead of constantly also reacting to past numbers? How does it kind of spot you know the things that are soon to happen, the things that are soon to come?
So, say you sign a contract and it knows like all the invoices that are going to be going out. It's kind of like a cash flow chart of the of all of the cash that'll be coming in. It's a pretty powerful experience in our product. Here you can see the actual platform right here. You can see this is our general login. But really what I was talking about is like the schedule where you can see everything that's flowing. So say you have a company called Bloom Silk, like Blooming Silk. You can see here in February there is an invoice. They've been invoiced, right? February 25. But as you have customers, you can see what you're invoicing out. You can see what was paid, what wasn't paid in a really fast snapshot. Different colors represent different things. Like that's a that's a $10 void. But let's assume like you know high numbers. the more customers you have and the bigger the customers, there's more to lose, right? And and as your like money starts flowing, you want to track all of this. So you can see it all, what was paid, what wasn't paid, that sort of thing. Like even on our home screen immediately, you can see there's 19 invoices overdue. If you want to take action, there's several ways to take action. And that's from the home screen. That's like one of the first things you see. Correct. Correct. So, and what's really nice about our product is the AI in the background will take action for you. So, you could have it handle all 19 like overdue invoices. So, it'll literally take action for you and like what you need to do. We have a lot of like really nice reports and those sorts of things. But I think where we shine also is like when you upload a contract here, I'll just show you this to you really quickly. But basically what happens is like if you sign a Dropbox sign, so Dropbox sign, docu sign, hello sign, echo sign, Adobe sign, whatever like signature product you're using. You can basically see that here. Like basically our AI will parse this, place every data point into this contract, understand what's happening, generate invoices automatically. Those invoices will go out, they'll be sent. Once they're sent out, the customer has it in their inbox. And then basically it tries to receive payment for that. If it doesn't get payment, it will just keep trying until they respond.
As far as this kind of also going back into the int intelligent dashboard which you just showed us this how does how does the the dashboard actually help business owners to make faster and more confident decisions? I know you showed us the take action one which was phenomenal. Are there any more are there any more features like that that just kind of like instantly take care of of of issues for you or the tasks I should say?
Uh, the the primary thing is when you're getting paid the money on time and it's hitting your bank account, you'll feel more confident. So days outstanding, right? So like when someone you send out an invoice, you're kind of in a a state of limbo. There's an anxiety that happens with business owners where they're like, "Are they going to pay me? When is that payment coming in?" When you see the cash flow happen, we have a reconciliation page. That's another section in the product where you'll be able to reconcile and say, "Okay, all these payments came in. We have this much in cash that just came in in this last 30 days." And if you know you made whatever it is, $200,000 in the last 30 days, you can spend some of that money because you know whatever your burn rate is. I'm giving you a hypothetical example. Say to run your business, it's $100,000, but you just made $200,000. So, you know, you have extra cash to work with. And you know, okay, these are all the outstanding invoices. So, say there's $300,000, but you, you know, to run your business is 100,000. The cash in the bank is, you know, all in is 200,000. So, you know, you're up over 100. And you know that you have, you know, $300,000 in outstanding invoices that should be collected this month. So you can see a map very quickly. There's other reports in our product like the AR aging report things like that where you can go okay I know what's in I know what's due and I know the other part is in QuickBooks and when you figure out your finances you know you know how much you're spending. So between all three pieces you can run your business really effectively and not not know where you're you stand.
takes that the complexity out of it. It really simplifies everything for you and and that's one thing like you said today that's a hallmark of successful businesses things that just runs efficiently smoothly easily but also coming back to the tools the many tools that are on the market today and I know there are many things that just paid solves but if there was a key problem that just paid solves you would say the overarching haunting problem that just paid solves would be what that's overlooked by kind of the tools that are out there on the market today.
I would say we are heavily investing more and more in AI. So we hired several AI engineers and the end goal is to leverage AI as much as possible to create a human-like partner in your business where you'll rely on us to help just to collect the revenue alongside whoever else you hire. You know, I've been reading really dire statistics that people are not going into finance as much in the United States. They're not going and be getting their CPA. So, there were more CPAs coming out of, you know, a lot of these universities in the past than there are today. And a lot of it has to do with like it's not one of these fields that people are like feel like they're going to make a lot of money or whatever it is. They're just not going out, you know, going in and like graduating with a a CPA degree or a finance degree. So what you're seeing out there is like less and less I'd say battleh hardened and experienced finance people that want to work in companies or help companies or do their taxes and it creates this stressor in the United States at least where AI can solve some of these problems like not everybody wants to be an AR accounts receivable person and if they do that's great but if the revenue grows beyond just one person you don't have to make 10 hires you can use AR agents to help alleviate that stress. And you know, I see this only because every few months there's a new model coming out and our engineers are looking at the model. And what is a model? There's lang chain and langraph. I'm kind of getting into the nitty-gritty. Langraph is a new way to interact with AI that is brand new. And we're we what we're doing at our company is looking at okay you have companies like Anthropic you have Google creating Gemini you have open AI creating chat GPT Microsoft and you know what all the things Microsoft is investing in you have uh Amazon investing heavily in AI you have all these different companies pouring billions of dollars into the AI industry you have Nvidia like consistently launching new products in AI that are making it better at some point there's going to be so much delight from using AI that people are going to look at it as a true assistant and I think today you're seeing I call it glimmers of hope where it's already doing so much productive work for people but the waves are just getting stronger and stronger where people can't ignore it like for the long term like there may be a company that has you know a finance team and the team is kind of ignoring it but at some point any company that's using AI is going to run circles around companies that are just not moving as fast. I think for AI agents, it's it's, you know, for what we're doing, we're doing like that we're focusing on the finance side. It's like what can we do as finance to make your life easier, right? What would make you move to another product if the product literally spoke to you, right? And they like checked in with you and sent you a text was like, "Hey, you're going to see like insanely good experiences like that you've never seen before." You know, I I read an article today on this one company doing surveys and like uh sending out surveys like they you know, this is just an example like survey companies would survey whatever a a population of like say it's a population living in California and they're selling some widget and they want to make sure this widget is appropriate to to create and sell. you would hire that type of AI company and that AI company would send out these surveys through an AI agent which would try to collect that. Maybe it's a you know voice agent making a phone call but it's a you're just going to see so much good stuff happening out there. I mean, I'll tell you another example is I mean, this example is a really noble cause. Like, one guy invested that I spoke to in um AI that they're trying to put in um robot dogs for the blind. Instead of having like a living great, you know, I I love dogs, but you know, when people like have um they're disabled and they have needs, AI will really help them a lot. You know, I saw one that you could point your phone at an item and it AI would read what that item is and give you a description. And I'm like, this is good stuff that it's not only just helping companies become more effective. It's it's helping people with disabilities like like have better lives. You know, having like a a dog that helps service dog. Yeah. Service dog walk around to help get you out of bed and walk you around and say, "We're going to go grocery shopping together." And then it just brings you to the grocery store. This is an example for someone who lives in a city, you know, and it just Yeah. Yeah. And they just need to be a person still and they want that ability, that freedom. this that's one way to do it where like that robot dog becomes your eyes and I'm like that's a really noble cause for AI and that you know I live in Silicon Valley so I see all of these different companies doing amazing things in in what this can become so there's a lot of like hyper optimism in Silicon Valley and I think it's really exciting because you just see it everywhere and for me like I really want to democratize the finance side for companies cuz like maybe you can't have a 247 finance person right now, but now you can. It becomes a different world at that point where like every small business owner can literally have a finance team at their disposal. That was never possible before because it was too expensive. And you know, larger companies, it's the same thing where like they have the same problem. Like the company I was talking to probably had, I don't know, $300 million in revenue and they still had the same problem at that scale. It's not like they fixed it. It's just they didn't have enough people to fix and get all of their revenue for. they need to hire more people and they know it and they're just like we're trying you know it's it's always a cat and mouse in that way and you give them all their solutions in one go
I'm going to transition a bit comparing just paid the billing engine what are the what are the strengths of just paid versus someone using stripe stripe was a very developer centric product from the get and it's very API driven and I look at it from the other angle of let's try to have the best of both worlds. A beautiful, delightful product that anyone can get started and start to use right out of the gate. Also having an API, but like when you rely on developers to understand a product, not everybody has a developer and there even their support is kind of like email based, which is you guys are like live like are with them like for for any of their any issues that that arise or any questions or support. So, it's even like even though it's simpler, you're still there to lend even more support, which is really sets you guys apart.
I mean, that's exactly right. I we're just we're taking a very different approach. I think it's it very modern. I think that if you're a developer, it has some of the best APIs in the world. I also just want to complement Stripe. So, like our product is a layer on top of Stripe when you want to use it that way. So we have this section in our product where you just connect your Stripe and think of us as just a wrapper top of it. Wanted to use Stripe. So we built integrations directly into Stripe. Then anyone with a Stripe account can layer us on top of it. So when they have a contract that's signed, you just can have our AI parse it, understand what's owed, and then we place that inside of Stripe if someone wants to do that.
In this rapid evolving industry, how does just paid help companies stay nimble, stay ab bre stay a breast of you know the the new trends, the new discoveries, the new the the trajectory of of what's happening in in the here and now and so and you made a beautiful point or in one of your in one of your other podcasts you said that these some of these companies become exploding stars. How does just paid prevent them from that from that ultimate destination? by exploding star meaning like it it dies. In that talk you were referencing um companies that kind of uh disintegrate but then are picked up by other investors and things of that nature. Oh, got it.
Fundamentally, like there's really two functions in a company to get it off the ground. Function one is sales, function two is product, right? And it's okay if you're just if you're a services business, like you need sales and the services need to be amazing. But if you're a product business, you need the two functions which are the sales side and you need to have a really good product. I mean what we're just looking at on our end is okay let's assume that you have your sales team in place. Let's assume you built your product. There shouldn't be any other friction like you should have a CRM. You should have like something for your you know to track your accounting but you need to collect your revenue. So like there's different legs of the stool that are needed. you know, a lot of people in the industry like they don't realize they need all of those pieces. And you know, we're looking at that one leg of the stool, which is you need revenue, right? And I think you also need sales and you also need like a phenomenal service or a phenomenal product. So, you know, between those pieces, we're looking at just that one leg of the stool, which is how do we help collect the revenue for the other team members in a company to run itself appropriately. But companies die. I mean, if they're not learning, they will die. Like looking into this actually with uh Chat GPT and with Perplexity the last few days, which was, you know, how long is a company on the S&P 500? S&P 500 is like the 500 best companies in the United States. Think of them as like the best football teams, best sports teams. Yes. Yes. The best companies in the world. the S&P 500 is rotating at a faster and faster rate, meaning some of these businesses are not able to like keep themselves fit and sharp. You know, I think that the world moves in a different way than it ever has with technology and with what's happening out there. So, you just see a rotation of companies coming in and out faster. And, you know, that's that's from just better, sharper teams coming in building better, sharper products, and some like products are they go away fast. Like it sounds so silly, but there was a company called Sears. I don't know if you know them. Sears was this big big company and it was a big retail store. I can tell you when they were around years ago in the 80s and '7s, people imagine them as a like fortress of protected like this will never change. It will never go away. The fact of the matter is like Amazon and all of these other vendors are just changing the dynamic so quickly. Sears couldn't see it and it just is it destroyed their business very very quickly where they're not who they may or may not I don't know if they went bankrupt but they're just not around anywhere as much as they were in the past. I think exploding stars if companies are like going away if that's like the analogy it's it's happening faster than before with AI you need to like learn it or your business will possibly be in jeopardy and I talk about a K curve a lot which is companies are either learning or they're dying and a K curve is like a K you know like the letter K yes some companies are going up and exploring and learning and becoming better faster with AI others are going downwards and it's losing losing business very very quickly because they're not adopting as fast as they should be. And you'd be surprised it's happening everywhere. Like companies are thriving and other companies are dying. Like the company that's 2 weeks old that has $100,000 in revenue, they're using AI to the nth degree. They're using it for everything. And like it's a small team of people that literally are generating revenue from a really good idea using AI. And I've just I haven't seen that happen before. like it's just happening faster and faster where I'm seeing companies come with smaller teams.
Daniel, what what is your vision for Just Paid over the next couple years, next few years?
My vision of Just Paid over the next several years is leveraging as much of the best technology out there to create the best AI AR agent possible. So, it feels like AGI. AGI is basically like artificial intelligence. Can we create an artificial intelligence accounts receivable product where you feel like it's a person helping you collect your revenue? That's the like long-term goal of of the company.
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