Sheri Atwood. She’s the founder and CEO of SupportPay. She’s also a former Silicon Valley executive and a child of a bitter divorce who also went through her own divorce a few years ago. She’s created SupportPay when a search for a better way communicate about child support systems with her ex-husband proved totally fruitless. SupportPay is the first-ever automated child support payment platform poised to transform the complex, time-consuming & stressful process that impacts nearly 300M parents exchanging more than $900B in child support & child expenses worldwide. With SupportPay, today’s modern families can spend less time managing and arguing about child support, and more time focused on raising happy, healthy children. Prior to starting SupportPay, she was a former vice-president at Symantec and also has been named #5 of 50 Women in Tech Dominating Silicon Valley and Top 40 Under 40 Executives in Silicon Valley. She’s energetic, resourceful and lives by the motto “don’t talk about it, be about it.”

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – What Got You Here Won’t Get You There
What CEO do you follow? – Sheryl Sandberg, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Marc Benioff
Favorite online tool? — Stack Exchange
How many hours of sleep do you get?— 4
If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “Enjoy the path, enjoy the lessons as you go”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

01:23 – Nathan introduces Sheri to the show
02:37 – Sheri is going to lower the divorce rate by showing people that divorce just gets worst
02:49 – Millennials aren’t getting married but are having babies
03:10 – Sheri uses SupportPay and invented it because she didn’t have a solution
03:16 – Child support is made up of 2 things: a base payment that covers basic daily living expenses and then there’s other additional expenses
03:34 – The argument is about where the money is going and if it is enough to raise a kid
03:46 – While doing an expense report in Symantec, Sheri thought of the idea of SupportPay
04:04 – SupportPay started in 2011
04:38 – Sheri was raised by her single mom who was an alcoholic
04:48 – Sheri was one of the youngest VPs in Symantec and she was able to save money from her salary
- 04:57 – Sheri had multiple houses, cars, boats, gave his ex-husband a house and 2 years worth of salary in the bank
05:24 – Sheri bootstrapped SupportPay at first and she learned to code
05:40 – SupportPay has raised $7.1M total
- 05:49 – The series A was for $4.1M
05:59 – Sheri has talked to people and there was nothing to support parents
06:13 – Sheri also received calls from vendors thanking her
06:35 – SupportPay is a SaaS business
06:40 – Pricing starts at $9.99 a month
- 06:51 – There’s also a free version
- 06:55 – Each parent pays independently
- 07:05 – Average pay is $10 a month
07:28 – Sheri started hiring people in 2013
07:39 – Sheri learned to code the basic html, css and php by starting her own website
- 07:50 – Sheri self-studied from books that she found in Barnes and Nobles
08:08 – Team size is 25 and they just relocated to Sacramento, California from Silicon Valley
08:30 – Team has 14 engineers
08:39 – After raising $3M, Sheri realized she couldn’t sustain a business in Silicon Valley
- 08:45 – Sheri was burning $95K a month
- 09:08 – Sheri’s equity table is a mess now because of her tech people switching to another company for a better offer
- 09:16 – Sheri would have focused on revenue a little bit earlier
- 09:48 – Sheri didn’t have revenue until July of 2016
- 10:08 – SupportPay was processing $3M in child support
10:19 – SupportPay currently looks at processing $4M a month in child support
10:30 – SupportPay has over 43K customers with 2K paying customers
11:03 – MRR is close to $100K
12:12 – SupportPay has a free 30 day trial
12:27 – The value of the product is the history, which can be used in court
12:46 – SupportPay also provides certified report records
13:31 – Churn on active users is 3% annually
13:57 – Conversion rate from visitor to paid user is 12%
14:50 – The bigger valuation for SupportPay is how it solves the problem of child support
16:00 – After getting into fundraising, SupportPay focused on their revenue
16:25 – 2016 revenue
16:41 – Sheri has talked to Salesforce to get them involved in SupportPay
- 17:10 – Salesforce is trying to move government applications into the cloud
- 17:15 – SupportPay will get Salesforce into the government space quickly
- 17:30 – SupportPay is built on the salesforce platform
18:00 – Tim Draper invested in SupportPay as he saw the value
18:17 – Sheri’s goal for building SupportPay
20:20 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

More millennials are having babies, but are not getting married—this leads to more parents having problems with child support.
Having one less argument regarding child support will alleviate stress for the whole family unit.
The divorce rate isn’t getting any better, it’s just getting worst.

Resources Mentioned:

The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

714: You Won't Believe What This Divorced Mom Raised $7 Million For

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders