How Alternative Funds B2B Pay-Over-Time for SaaS Vendors With a $5M Seed and a $10M Credit Facility (Interview with CEO Baxter Lanius)

Introduction and Background

Nathan Latka

00:00Hey, folks. My guest today is back just Baxter Lanius. He's the CEO and founder of alternative. Alternative drives alternate alternative drives revenue growth for SaaS companies by offering flexible b to b payment solutions for end customers and arming sales teams with an additional tool to convert customers. Previously, he was a FinTech technology investor at Apollo Global and Victory Park Capital. Baxter, are ready to take us to the top?

Baxter Lanius

00:23>> Yeah, that sounds great. Thanks for having me, Nathan.

From FinTech Investor to Operator

Nathan Latka

00:25Alright. 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?

Baxter Lanius

00:38>> A little bit. You know, it's an interesting story. I I've been following fintech over the last twelve twelve years or so. I I really started investing in fintech in 2014 and and saw the boom of the industry. At the time, I was pretty unimpressed with the platforms that that were founded in in that timeline because, ultimately, many of them were just customer acquisition, moats and strategies around websites and podcasts and news, etcetera. And there were not

01:04>> really many companies that were actually innovating in this space. So I decided to leave Victory Park actually and and start investing in technology companies at Apollo. And then I saw this whole kind of wave of fintech two point o, 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

01:26>> on b two b payments and b two b payment solutions to ultimately innovate, you know, the very antiquated process that is b two b invoicing and payment flows. And so this is our first foray into the space and 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 and still untapped.

Nathan Latka

01:51Mhmm. 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?

What Alternative Does and How It Differs from Invoicing Tools

Baxter Lanius

02:03>> Yeah. So we we see our product as really a sales enablement tool 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 $10.50 from a publicly traded software company. They said, pay by wire. I said $10.50. You'd like me to pay by wire? That's

02:34>> gonna 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 a $5,000 invoice or a $10,000 invoice, you know, there are 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 ops teams to have another flexible payment solution to allow them to

03:01>> pay over time. Now what does this create and and what does this do? It it it expands a whole new market for a lot of these companies. If you're Salesforce and you're interested in getting into the SMB space, a lot of people can't afford $80,000 upfront. 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

03:27>> an enormous amount of growth on the customer side to generate and deliver revenue for for our customers.

Nathan Latka

03:34The equivalent in the consumer space would be I'm buying a mattress for 5 or $4,000. I use the little Affirm button to pay monthly over time. That's sort of the equivalent here. Right?

Baxter Lanius

03:44>> That's that's exactly right. Affirm, Klarna, Afterpay are are the leaders in in the consumer space. One of the key differences in the b to b space is, you know, Affirm, Klarna, and Afterpay use an iframe and kind of take over that checkout experience. We view our tool as as strictly complementary to the existing workflows of the business. So we can actually get you onboarded and integrated within minutes as opposed to taking engineering hours to integrate in

04:09>> a long sales cycle. So we can have you get started, finance your customers in minutes, and we view it really as a complementary tool to expand TAM, expand market share, and close customers a lot quicker than you 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% by allowing customers to

04:35>> pay over time, it's also an amazing value add.

Nathan Latka

04:40Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders, but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 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 Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you connect

05:03your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time, you can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna

05:28get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation, private equity firm is different. If you're gonna 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

05:50not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder share with us on the show. So traction, 1,200,000 seed round, 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna 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

06:15going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll 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 dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. Alright. We're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second, but if

06:37you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link. This link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. 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. Alright. Let's jump back into the

Walking Through the Salesforce SMB Example

Nathan Latka

07:04interview. So let's use an example here. Let's stick with your Salesforce example. Okay. I'm an SMB. I really wanna use Salesforce, but I'm not paying you know, I can't and let's say my quote from Salesforce is $10,000, right, for the for one seat annually. SMB can't pay that, so I'm I'm gonna stop engaging with the Salesforce sales rep. What you're saying is a Salesforce sales rep could offer the purchaser, right, and an SMB a payment plan

07:26for that $10,000. Now what might that payment plan look like?

Baxter Lanius

07:30>> That's exactly right, Nathan. And so the easiest way to to think about it is is our existing generic plan is is is six month of payment terms. So you would break that $10,000 contract into six payments of about $1,600, And we would front the capital to Salesforce on day one. So Salesforce is ultimately able to basically close that contract on day two. So there's no not even net thirty days payables for Salesforce. They receive 95% of

08:00>> 10,000. So we'd take a 5% fee. So we'd wire them $9,500 upon closing, and then we'd collect from the customer $1,600 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 is even with really,

08:27>> 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 and l and their budget is, you know, call it negative a million and 0.5 and then zero zero zero for software spend. You know, they want to attach an ROI to that dollar spend and so that their p and l's and their budgets are are properly balanced and they're able to generate revenue

08:51>> based off of that spend.

Nathan Latka

08:52So just to be clear, I'm Salesforce. I'm using you guys. I closed a $10,000 contract that I wouldn't have closed without you because the it's a new solution for the SMB to actually be able to pay. As Salesforce, I'm gonna get a $9,500 check from you on day one, alternative pays that. Then you're gonna make is the the SMB is paying you directly?

Baxter Lanius

09:13>> SMB is paying us directly.

Nathan Latka

09:15Okay. So 1,600 for six months, right, or about nine thousand six hundred dollars Right? You fronted 9,500 to Salesforce on day one. Right? So there's two things where I'm curious where this money goes. The $100 extra that the customer pays above 9,500, where does that go? And then where does that $500 go originally that you sort of discounted the contract?

Baxter Lanius

09:33>> Yeah. So we we would think about it. We so we collect $500, right, which is 5% of the 10,000. Yeah. And so the customer's paying us, you know, in over the course of six months, 1,600, you know, it's 6 it's just over $1,600. So we ultimately earn $500 in in that transaction. What we're seeing a lot

Nathan Latka

09:57the other 100, though, from the customer? Because they're paying you 9,600 against a $9,500 advance. So you're making another 100 from the end customer. Right? The SMB?

Baxter Lanius

10:04>> So we're making $500 from the SMB.

Nathan Latka

10:08From the well, I sorry. I thought that was for Salesforce because you're only wiring Salesforce $9,500. Right?

Baxter Lanius

10:14>> We wire $9,500 to Salesforce. We then collect 10,000 from the end customer.

Nathan Latka

10:18Oh, sorry. How do you get to 10,000? 1,600 times six months is only $9,600.

Baxter Lanius

10:23>> It's it's really you're right. $1,666.67.

Nathan Latka

10:29Okay. Got it. So you are collecting the full that's what I was trying to figure out.

Baxter Lanius

10:31>> Exactly.

Nathan Latka

10:31You're not there's no you are rounding. There's no margin built in here. You're collecting full 10 k from the customer.

Baxter Lanius

10:35>> Exactly.

10:36>> And what we're seeing is is Salesforce now has the ability to just pass through that prep pay over time solution to their customers. Salesforce now has, you know, pay upfront at $10,000 or pay over time at $10,500. This way, at a net net perspective, Salesforce is still breaking even on the transaction, but they're able to now finance their customers.

Nathan Latka

10:58Okay. So the question here is, how do you write that $9,500 check to or sorry, the 10 oh, no. The $9,500 check to Salesforce on day one. What's your capital source?

Capital Structure: Debt, Equity, and the Credit Facility

Baxter Lanius

11:09>> So so we have we're we're funded with debt and equity. We've raised just under $15,000,000 A portion of that is in the credit facility. And and so we fund that transaction through our credit facility.

Nathan Latka

11:19Okay. So just to be clear, you've raised 15,000,000 together. That is the debt and the equity?

Baxter Lanius

11:23>> Exactly. Okay. And what what what?

Nathan Latka

11:255,000,000 was equity, something like that?

Baxter Lanius

11:27>> Exactly. And 10 and 10,000,000 is total committed amount on the warehouse facility, or that's how much you've already deployed?

11:34>> That's how much is drawn.

Nathan Latka

11:36Oh, you've already drawn 10,000,000. So you've already you've I know you

Baxter Lanius

11:39>> think It's tech it's it's in the bank. It's a little bit of a different credit facility than than your normal course fintech credit facility. So we have available capital of $10,000,000, which is currently in the bank, and we draw down that as we see demand for our product. And so, you know, we will be going through that pretty quickly here in the next next handful of months.

Nathan Latka

11:59I was gonna say, so you think you can you can do $10,000,000 worth of deals over the next couple months?

Baxter Lanius

12:06>> Probably more.

Nathan Latka

12:07Probably more. Okay. That's great. What did you do last month? Do you know?

Baxter Lanius

12:11>> I'd rather not disclose because we've been in kind of this private beta period with a with a handful of customers, and now we're lawn we've started our go to market strategy over the last four weeks, and now we're launching more publicly.

Nathan Latka

12:22Okay. Well, let me I'm gonna guess here. Here. Do you think you can break a million dollars in new deals, like new loans this month in April?

Baxter Lanius

12:27>> Yes. Yes.

Nathan Latka

12:28Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Okay. There it goes. There you have it guys. Now you have a little benchmark there. Right? So, this makes sense. Now, reason most credit facilities or warehouses or fintech entrepreneurs don't draw down that 10,000,000 is because they're paying unused. Like, you're paying an interest rate no matter what, whether it's deployed or not. You just have a lot of confidence you're gonna deploy quickly. So you're okay paying your warehouse provider whatever their interest rate

12:47is.

Baxter Lanius

12:48>> And and we ultimately don't have unused fees on our on our credit facility. So, you know, we have basically a flat rate associated with deployed capital. There are no upfront unused fees and incremental spend, which I think you see in most obviously typical and traditional facilities, especially facilities that I used to invest in. So we have a little bit of a different structure and and and setup that I would say is is is preferential to both

13:12>> our end customers and and preferential to the business. Ultimately, we pass through a lot of these opportunities to to our end customers to ultimately give them better rates on these underlying transactions.

Advance Rates, Junior Tranches, and Cost of Capital

Nathan Latka

13:22You might have an advantage because of your, you know, your connections in the industry with Apollo and Victory Park, but most FinTech entrepreneurs, first timers, when they're raising their first credit facility like this, they're gonna pay something between a 10 to 13% interest rate on capital that's deployed, right? Their cost of capital. And also there's probably like warrants and some covenants and things like that in term sheet. Is your cost of capital sort of in that same range,

13:4110 to 13%?

Baxter Lanius

13:42>> It's just below that. But that's exactly right. I mean, I would actually provide the market. I mean, it's more like 10 to 18%. Typically, advance rates are between 90 and or 80 to 90% depending on your credit underwriting ability, and there's also a credit box associated with all these transactions.

Nathan Latka

14:01You got 90%?

Baxter Lanius

14:03>> Our advance rate is actually at 80% for for a number of strategic reasons. But but, yeah, we had we had we had the ability to go up to 90% if if if we

Nathan Latka

14:11Wait. Hold on. I don't understand. Most entrepreneurs are going, we want a highest advance rate possible. Otherwise, we have to come up with 20¢ on every dollar. But you're saying strategically, you wanted to keep it low. I don't I don't believe you. Why do wanna keep that low?

Baxter Lanius

14:22>> We're not providing all of the equity haircut capital. So within that 20%, we have an additional capital provider that that splits that amount. So if you you know, using round numbers, our facility call it is is $10,000,000. $8,000,000 would be the senior tranche, 2,000,000 would be the junior tranche. We're not contributing the entire $2,000,000 tranche. I also think that within any of these platforms, also do want to derisk your underlying asset quality and underwriting and ability

14:51>> to do diligence on these deals. And so taking out, you know, as much leverage as what's available to you is not always the the best strategy.

Nathan Latka

14:58Now okay. Come on. Baxter, who's the third party you stuck in here? They must be, like, very strategic. Is it Apollo or Victory? They're not gonna do a $2,000,000

Baxter Lanius

15:05>> a 2,000,000 tranche deal. Right? No. It's it's it's it's just very small institutions that we have a very strong relationship with.

Nathan Latka

15:12Interesting. Okay. Is your own money in that are you an LP in that institution? Are you deploying your own personal capital through through that tranche?

Baxter Lanius

15:19>> My own personal capital is also in the junior tranche, not through the company.

Nathan Latka

15:24That's that is how you build a great company here. Right? And get like the best of both worlds on all sides. This makes total sense. Okay. Let's go back to talking about market now that I understand economics. I mean, how do you go convince Salesforce and all these guys to sort of adopt you? What's that playbook look like?

Baxter Lanius

15:38>> The playbook actually is quite simple and it's all about revenue growth, right? I mean, we're charging 5%, which some companies I mean, the way we think about it is it's really 2% above what credit card fees are. So if you're using Stripe for your payables, we're charging 2% incremental to to Stripe on on collections. And it's really all about revenue growth and the ability to cross sell, upsell, and drive price increases. So within our existing beta

Beta Customer Results and Go-to-Market Strategy

Baxter Lanius

16:05>> customer group, we've seen ACVs rise by about 25 and we've seen a sales cycle decline by about 15% driving just under 50% revenue growth. And so the opportunity is really that in a nutshell is how do you upsell, cross sell, drive price increases, and then how do you pivot from a monthly subscription strategy and plan to really upfront contracted revenue. So we also have a number of businesses who, to get started into the market, started with

16:36>> a monthly subscription plan because it's a little bit more amenable from the customer side. And now we're getting those customers to pivot to upfront contracted pricing using our pay over time flexible financing solutions as the incentive to the end customer.

Nathan Latka

16:51Baxter, how many of those end customers do you have right now? How many companies use factor at least one invoice?

Current Customer Count and Underwriting Process

Baxter Lanius

16:56>> So we have just over 10.

Nathan Latka

16:58Okay. Just over 10. And are these all B2B SaaS companies mainly?

Baxter Lanius

17:02>> B2B SaaS and services businesses.

Nathan Latka

17:04And service. Okay. Last question here. Obviously, vintages, default rates, borrowing base certificates. Right? You've gotta try and underwrite that SMB and their ability to repay that $1,666 per month. How do you handle that?

Baxter Lanius

17:16>> So we're integrated on a number of different platforms. The first integration that we use is a Plaid API. So we do a quick kind of bank account underwriting model. We underwrite them pretty quickly based off their cash balance, based off their cash burn, and their ability to repay. We also look at a number of different alternative data sets regarding software review data, investor data, etcetera, to ultimately get up to speed as quickly as possible on the

17:41>> borrower and make sure that that diligence process and that underwriting process is actually super streamlined.

Nathan Latka

17:46The backstory, like, Salesforce sales rep, though, now has to ask that SMB to connect their bank account. They might argue that's really high friction. How do you get around that?

Onboarding Speed and Borrower Confidentiality

Baxter Lanius

17:56>> Onboarding takes less than a minute, and and we can approve the invoice within an hour.

Nathan Latka

18:00So Well, it's not that from the speed. It's the confidentiality. It's the, oh my god, I have to give all my bank information to this middle party I don't know about just to do a Salesforce contract?

Baxter Lanius

18:08>> Yeah. It's it's a great question. I think that a lot of people are are much more interested in ultimately being able to finance these transactions and and be able to pay these transactions to ultimately deliver and generate an ROI attached to that dollar. And and people have continued continued to push and and been okay with sharing some of this information to get access to the capital that they need to grow. And if you think about, you

18:32>> know, what Stripe has access to, what, you know, any of these platforms have access to, I think we're a lot more amenable to sharing and that will continue that trend will continue for years to come.

Nathan Latka

18:42And, Baxter, so what do you when you put your pro formas together, right, on the fund structure, right, your blend I think you said your your blended cost capital, right, including the junior tranches on just under 10%. Right? That's blended?

Baxter Lanius

18:52>> No. So the the senior is just under 10% blended is to your point, 10 to 10 to 13.

Capital Recycling and IRR Math

Nathan Latka

18:57Ah, okay. Cool. So the junior is making a little bit more because there's more risk. They're subordinated Exactly. Under under the main tranche. What do you think you can earn on the fund? What do you think what's the projected IRR?

Baxter Lanius

19:08>> So we'll be able to earn probably mid mid mid twenties. And so our spread on our business is, you know, call it in a conservative manner about 10%.

Nathan Latka

19:18So how do you do that? People are gonna hear you charge 5 percent, but then they're gonna go, wait, how does he earn 25% IRR? How does that work?

Baxter Lanius

19:25>> So the goal is in terms of recycling capital. So each one of these transactions, if you take out $9,500, take out $10,000, you're, you know, you're paying just over $1,600 for that invoice. We then receive that payment and then lend that out again. And so we're able to earn multiple fees on every single deal that we have outstanding. And it's the way in which a lot of these lending platforms work. And ultimately, goal is really to

19:51>> return that to our end borrower and the ability to decrease the cost of funds and able to pay upfront for, you know, these large software purchases that they wouldn't be able to afford previously.

Nathan Latka

20:03Guys, are you following along? This is a very smart fintech guy. Knows all the numbers, understand it comes from it. So just to the math very easy, right? If you've a $10,000,000 facility, he's got a great product going to market that makes everyone's lives easier on both sides. If he can deploy $10,000,000 at a blended cost of 12%, he's able to earn 25% by recycling that capital quickly as the monthly payments come back, It's effectively yield

20:22of almost 12 to 13% on 10,000,000 or about a 1.2 to $1,300,000 run rate. Right, Baxter?

Baxter Lanius

20:28>> That that that that's exactly right, Nathan. I think he may be smarter than I am.

Nathan Latka

20:32No. Hell no. But the question is, right, can you keep redeploying all those payments as they come back? As your fund grows to a 100,000,000 and 1,000,000,000, you're gonna be getting payments back monthly that are 1,000,000 and then 10,000,000. And, like, can you get them out quick enough? Right?

Baxter Lanius

20:42>> That's exactly right. Cap capital efficiency in any of these lending businesses and and and fintech models is super important. And I think the core of the product, which is even more important, is how do you drive value for your partners and end customers? And that's really what we're more focused on as opposed to capital efficiency in these early days, is how can we create a software solution that drives value and is a win win solution for

21:05>> both Salesforce and their end customer. We're doing it today, but the goal is to keep that up, keep the innovation, keep the technology machine moving, and really advance the B2B payment space, which as we all know is very antiquated.

Seed Round Details and Founder Equity

Nathan Latka

21:19Couple rapid fire stuff here. We're out of time, but I because I got I love this business model, so I lost track of time. But quick stuff here. You did you you raised equity that 5,000,000 you raised last year?

Baxter Lanius

21:28>> We raised that in in q three of last year.

Nathan Latka

21:30Q three last year. Okay. Cool. And that that's your I mean, that was your first capital in. Right? That's your only capital in equity sidewise?

Baxter Lanius

21:36>> Yeah. I I invested a little bit of money, but personally, in in the business to really get it off the ground, but that was our kinda first, you know, call it third party institutional raise.

Nathan Latka

21:45Okay. Are you the sole cofounder or sole founder?

Baxter Lanius

21:48>> Yes.

Nathan Latka

21:49Okay. We love that. So he knows he's onto something big. He says, I'm gonna risk my own capital. I wanna keep a 100 percent. I'm gonna be very manage the cap table here. That's great. Now, Baxter, was that money you initially put in? Did you structure it as a loan or was that real equity?

Baxter Lanius

22:01>> That was real equity.

Nathan Latka

22:02I was gonna say the real extreme example was, but you loan your own company that money, you raise the 5,000,000, you take that back, you got in the junior tranche, like you're on all sides of this thing, which is great. Okay, but it's your own money. So 5,000,000 raised last year, seed round, We'll see what happens next. Just to be clear, you haven't deployed 10,000,000 yet, so you're under a $1,200,000 run rate, but you think you

22:19can break that fairly quickly if you deploy the capital.

Baxter Lanius

22:22>> Yeah. We we should be able to hit that pretty quickly. I I think the, you know, the goal is continuing to go to market and continue to get our value prop out there. I ultimately think that B2B payments is a trillion dollar industry and every single B2B company, whether it's software services, will have flexible pricing solutions. We can't live in a world in which pay by ACH and pay by wire are the only two solutions for

22:47>> checking out for a $10,000 payment or a $2 payment. And there's just gonna be a tremendous amount of innovation in this space, and it's a really, really excited space to be in.

Team Size and Engineers

Nathan Latka

22:55Team size today, how many people?

Baxter Lanius

22:57>> 13.

Nathan Latka

22:58And how many engineers?

Baxter Lanius

23:00>> Nine.

23:01>> Nine. Okay. There it goes.

Famous Five Rapid Fire

Nathan Latka

23:02So when he says there's tech behind it, there's tech behind it. There's nine engineers. There you go. That's proof is in the pudding. Right? Very cool. Baxter, let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, favorite book?

Baxter Lanius

23:11>> Shoe Dog.

Nathan Latka

23:12Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Baxter Lanius

23:15>> Frank Slootman.

Nathan Latka

23:17No. Okay. That's a hell of a business. Can you do this on utility based pricing? I mean, Snowflake really I would argue is not SaaS. It's actually utility based pricing. It changes every month.

Baxter Lanius

23:26>> Utility based pricing is a really, really interesting model. I think Snowflake's perfected it just given their ability to innovate and market positioning in the space. For our specific business model, I think you may be able to, but it'll be challenging.

Nathan Latka

23:40Yeah. And maybe that's the future. Who knows? Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building alternative?

Baxter Lanius

23:46>> Notion.

Nathan Latka

23:47Number four, how many hours of sleep do get every night?

Baxter Lanius

23:51>> Six to seven.

Nathan Latka

23:52And what's your situation? Married, single, kids?

Baxter Lanius

23:55>> Fiance, getting married in August.

Nathan Latka

23:57Oh, very exciting. Okay. But no kids, right?

Baxter Lanius

23:59>> No kids.

Nathan Latka

24:00All right. And how old are you Baxter?

Baxter Lanius

24:02>> I'm 32.

Nathan Latka

24:03Last question, something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Baxter Lanius

24:08>> Try everything that's in front of you. I think there's a continued push to really, you know, broaden your horizons and take advantage of all the opportunities. Think especially on on the entrepreneurship side, you know, you really need to, you know, start the business you don't think you can and and go for the stars and and get that experience even if it doesn't turn into something because, you know, the future is bright.

Closing Summary

Nathan Latka

24:32Guys, he cut his teeth at Victory Park and Apollo launched last year in 2020. He said there's gotta be a better way if you're SMB and wanna use Salesforce and can't pay 10 k upfront. There's gotta be a better way to do it. That's what he's built with alternative dot co. He's funded himself by raising a $5,000,000 equity round last year in addition to $10,000,000 of debt. He's deploying that capital, that debt at cost capital to

24:52him about 12% to 13%. If he can lend it, keep the waterfall going, keep recycling that money and earn 25%, the yield there is about 12% to 13%, about a $1,200,000 run rate as it continues to scale. We'll see what happens. 10 enterprise B2B SaaS companies and service companies using him to help give their customers more payment options, which helps them grow their own revenue faster. Team of thirteen today, we'll see what happens next. Baxter, thanks

25:13for taking us to the top.

Baxter Lanius

25:14>> Thanks so much. Really appreciate it, Nathan.

Nathan Latka

25:18One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. We call it deal or bust. One founder comes on, three hungry buyers. They try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards, their expenses, their revenue, ARPU CAC, LTV, you name it, they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live. It is fun to watch every Thursday one

25:42p. M. Central. Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at two p. M. Central to make sure you don't miss any of that. Make sure you click the subscribe button below here on YouTube, the big red button, and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live. I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SaaS world, whether it's

26:04an acquisition, a big fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or something else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if you wanna take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS founders. You wanna get in there. We've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing. You can go in there and quickly search and see what people are

26:26saying. Sign up for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode. And if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those

26:46people. We got to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. Alright, I'll be in the comments. See you.