René Lacerte. He’s the founder and CEO of Bill.com, the leading business payments company. He’s a fintech industry vettor and has been working to simplify business payments since 1999, when he founded PayCycle, which was later acquired by Intuit in 2009. Bill.com is now working to help bridge the digital divide between banks and businesses by partnering with 3 of the top US banks and 45% of the top hundred accounting firms. He believes that banks play a critical role in the advancement of fintech. While technology advancement since Silicon startups are divided by or driving much of the industry change, René believes that banks are and will remain the center of the financial universe for quite some time.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – The Advantage
What CEO do you follow? – Pete Kight
Favorite online tool? — Dropbox
How many hours of sleep do you get?— 6-7
If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “Don’t stress over the hard decisions”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

01:22 – Nathan introduces René to the show
02:07 – Andy from Wealthfront disagrees that banks will remain to be the center of the universe
02:27 – Bill.com makes close to $40B a year
- 02:32 – The average transaction is $1700 to $2000
03:16 – “We make doing business really easy”
03:17 – Bill.com automates the back office of businesses
- 03:24 – They take all the paperwork, workflow, payments and integration with the accounting software
03:40 – Bill.com charges per seat, per subscription and transaction fees
04:15 – The subscription model is their main revenue stream
04:36 – Bill.com charges .49 cents for every electronic payment and $1.49 for paper
05:30 – The fintech space is a natural viral coefficient space
06:00 – Bill.com had $110M from venture capital
06:12 – René was 32 when he started PayCycle, in 1999
06:20 – René worked in Intuit prior to PayCycle and stayed there for 5 years
06:34 – René had some experience innovating products from Intuit
06:54 – René grew up in a family of entrepreneurs
- 07:04 – One of René’s grandfather’s businesses is an automatic data processing company
- 08:26 – René’s father went back to college to understand more about business
09:16 – The idea of Bill.com is that there’s a better way to take advantage of technology to make payroll easier
09:58 – Bill.com helps define and automate the back office
10:06 – PayScale does online payroll and started with household payroll, which Intuit doesn’t want to do
- 10:47 – PayScale raised $150K
- 11:23 – PayScale was acquired by Intuit for $170M
12:21 – Average number of paying customers of Bill.com
13:16 – “If we get customers active and get them using it, they don’t churn”
- 13:26 – They’re active when they already have paid for Bill.com
- 14:04 – Average customer pay per month is $100
- 14:15 – You can try it for the first month, for free
- 15:00 – Bill.com automates some of their tools to make the customer feel that they need the product
- 15:18 – Bill.com does A/B testing to check how they can get their customers engaged
- 15:52 – Bill.com is adding thousands of new businesses a month
16:56 – René tracks how many months the payback will be when it comes to CAC
- 17:23 – Payback target is 10-13 months
18:07 – LTV is around 5 years
18:48 – René has raised $50M
19:39 – René’s strategy is to maintain a strong relationship with VC
19:53 – Team size is 225
20:10 – Bill.com was launched in 2008
21:07 – Bill.com isn’t selling anything and not partnered with anybody, today
22:45 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

It is important to engage your customers.
Banks are and will remain to be the center of the financial universe.
Hard decisions and their consequences will pass, so don’t let them bother you too much.

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
Organifi – The juice was Nathan’s life saver during his trip in Southeast Asia
Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
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
Freshbooks – Nathan doesn’t waste time so he uses Freshbooks to send out invoices and collect his money. Get your free month NOW

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

668: Will Bill.com and Intuit Lead Small Business FinTech Space?

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders