Ahead of our annual celebration of top trending startups Techboard 2016, Techboard Co-founder and Chief Startup Evangelist Peter van Bruchem talks to Brendon Ross, the founder Paytradie, winner of Last year’s highest trending unlisted startup at Techboard 2015 who took home the prize of $1000 from Eve Investments. Eve Investments is an ASX listed investment company focused on investing in technology start-ups.
What problem do you solve and why is your solution meeting tradie’s requirements?
“The number one problem that we try to solve for our tradies is cashflow. In most cases Tradies pay their suppliers upfront, then find the horrible reality that their customers donât always follow suit. Leaving the tradesman to balance the business cashflow while losing valuable time chasing down debts.
Tradies get paid faster by invoicing on the spot, right when they finish the job. By accepting cash, cheque, bank transfer or credit card it makes it easier and quicker for their customer to pay them.
We track down overdue invoices with payment reminders, so our users can sit back and focus on getting the work done and pushing out more invoices.”
What sort of feedback have you been getting from your customers
“Probably not the greatest answer; but quite often we get silence from the regular users, they just get on with it. Our support calls are minimal, itâs usually the new users who have a couple of questions while pushing out their first few invoices. Overall the feedback is quite simply that is works!”
What is your biggest win over the last 12 months
“Getting invited by CSTA (Combined Skills Training Association) to speak to their electrical contractor business class on a regular basis. We get to demo Paytradie to our exact target market each month. Itâs always a great session full of enthusiasm and fantastic questions. They are all keen to get going in their business and Paytradie is a great fit for many of them. So quite a large segment of our user base are now Electricianâs. I studied Electrical Engineering after school, so I feel at home with them.”
How have you funded the development of Paytradie?
“I spent 8 months upfront building Paytradie (www.paytradie.com), surviving off of scraps and thankfully I married a very frugal and supportive woman. Iâve always been a full stack developer (before it became a buzzword) so I am able to cover the entire skillset that is required. So there are no development costs. If I donât know something today, I will know it by tomorrow. I did also take on a couple of shareholders which gave us a healthy injection of cash to keep going. This came from actual Tradies who loved the product and believed in the good that it can do.”
What is the biggest challenge you have faced?
“Being a small Fintech that stepped right into a giant 3-way cloud accounting WAR for market share in Australia. If you try to market a simple keyword like âonline invoiceâ or anything in our space, you find that Intuit, Xero and Myob have bid the market place into the stratosphere. Digital Marketing has been a bit of a challenge.”
What are your plans for the coming year?
“After completing a massive codebase update, server infrastructure migration and website re-launch in the last two months. We will focus a little more on our digital marketing to push traction which has been on autopilot for a little too long.”
Do you have any plans to raise capital?
“No, our shareholders are happy and so am I. However as with most things in life, if the right offer did come around we would listen.”
Any big news coming up?
“Expect to see a bit more of Paytradie in the new year. We may be back to reclaim our âHighest Trending Unlisted Startup of the Yearâ title.”
Check out Paytradie’s Techboard company profile:
