How Alternative CEO Baxter Lanius grew Alternative to $4M revenue and 10 customers in 2025.

hey folks my guest today is back just baxter lanius he's a ceo and founder of alternative alternative drives uh alternate alternative drives revenue growth for sas companies by offering flexible b2b payment solutions for end customers and arming sales teams with an additional tool to convert customers previously he was at a fintech technology investor at apollo global and victory park capital baxter are you ready to take us to the top yeah that sounds great thanks for having me nathan all right there there are so many i mean as you know fintech is like hot hot hot right now so did you sort of see these evaluations multiples at apollo and victory and say i need to ditch the investor thing and jump in an operator role a little bit you know it's an interesting story i've been following fintech over the last 12 12 years or so i really started investing in fintech in 2014 and saw the boom of the industry at the time i was pretty unimpressed with the platforms that were founded in that timeline because ultimately many of them were just customer acquisition moats and strategies around websites and podcasts and news et cetera and there were not really many companies that were actually innovating in this space so i decided to leave victory park actually and start investing in technology companies at apollo and then i saw this whole kind of wave of fintech 2.0 as i'll call it where there's just a tremendous amount of innovation and opportunity in the space to really disrupt the number of banks that are currently the incumbents and we just started started to to really focus on on b2b payments and b2b payment solutions to ultimately innovate you know the very antiquated process that is b2b invoicing and payment flows and so this is our first foray into the space and first product launch which we're launching more more broadly in the in the next week or two and it's been a really really exciting journey and i think there's just so much innovation available and still untapped uh so tell tell me more i mean if people look at your website and they don't have a deep understanding of fintech they might go wait this is an invoicing tool freshbooks sort of is great here there's a lot of invoicing tools how are these guys different yeah so we we see our product as really a sales enablement tool uh to ultimately unlock customer acquisition drive and deliver flexible payment solutions to your end customers to drive revenue growth by increasing average contract values and decreasing the sales cycle so it's funny you bring this up i received a bill the other day for 10 and 50 cents from a publicly traded software company they said pay by wire i said 10 and 50 cents you'd like me to pay by wire that's going to cost me 20 to send the wire and they had no other payment solutions now that's just the tip of the iceberg in this market when you then look at you know a five thousand dollar invoice or a ten thousand dollar invoice you know they're really only two solutions pay by ach pay by wire and ultimately what we're doing is we're arming sales teams arming collections teams arming revenue ops teams to have another flexible payment solution to allow them to pay over time now what does this create and what does this do it it expands a whole new market for a lot of these companies if you're a sales force and you're interested in getting into the smb space a lot of people can't afford 80 000 up front and ultimately we offer pay overtime solutions that are fully customizable for that specific customer and it's just a really interesting interesting solution that doesn't exist today and and we've had just an enormous amount of growth on the customer side to generate and deliver revenue for for our customers the equivalent in the consumer space would be i'm buying a mattress for five thousand or four thousand bucks i use little affirm button to pay monthly over time that's sort of the equivalent here right that's that's exactly right i've affirmed killarna after pay or are the leaders in in the consumer space one of the key differences in the b2b space is you know affirm clarinet after pay use an iframe and kind of take over that checkout experience we view our tool as strictly complementary to the existing workflows of a business so we can actually get you on boarded and integrated within minutes as opposed to taking engineering hours to integrate in a long sales cycle so we can have you get started finance your customers in minutes and we view it really as a complimentary tool to expand tam expand market share and close customers a lot quicker than you you know historically were able to when you think about pricing negotiations as well as part of the sales cycle it is a significant portion of the sales cycle and if you can limit that by 50 or 20 percent by allowing customers to pay over time it's also an amazing value add oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're going to get a different valuation a vc is going to pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when i hover over here right so the teal is what a vc would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on youtube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of sas valuations than what you can get now inside of founder founderpath and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform i hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview so let's use an example here let's stick with your sales force example okay i'm an smb i really want to use salesforce but i'm not paying you know i can't and let's say my quote from salesforce is ten thousand bucks right for it for one seat annually smb can't pay that so i'm i'm going to stop engaging with the salesforce sales rep what you're saying is the salesforce sales rep could offer the purchaser right and smb the payment plan for that ten thousand dollars now what might that payment plan look like that's exactly right nathan and so the easiest way to to think about it is is our existing generic plan is is six months of payment terms so you would break that ten thousand dollar contract into six payments of about sixteen hundred dollars and we would front the capital to sales force on day one so salesforce is ultimately able to basically close that contract on day two so there's no not even net 30 days payables for salesforce they receive 95 of 10 000 so we take a five percent fee um so we'd wire them ninety five hundred dollars upon closing and then we'd collect from the customer sixteen hundred dollars over six months and that allows that small business to ultimately start to generate an roi on the salesforce crm solution and start to expand their business so now they can afford that solution they can drive revenue at growth at the same time another interesting example that you see all the time is even with really really large companies if you look at their software spend a lot of it's concentrated in january february or specific months and so their p l and their budget is you know call it negative a million and a half and then zero zero zero for software spent you know they want to attach an roi to that dollar spend and so that their p l's and their budgets are properly balanced and they're able to generate revenue based off of that spend so just to be clear i'm salesforce i'm using you guys i close a ten thousand dollar contract that i wouldn't have closed without you because the that the it's a new solution for the smb to actually be able to pay i as salesforce i'm gonna get a 9 500 check from you on day one alternative pays that um then you're gonna make is the...