How Bill CEO Rene Lacerte grew Bill to $1.3B revenue and 470.7K customers in 2024.

this is a nut top where I interview entrepreneurs through our number one our number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base you learned how much revenue they're making what their marketing funnel looks like and how many customers they have now it's $20,000 per Tov I haven't experienced kids have bent on global domination we just bloke on a hundred thousand ship full mark and I'm your host Nathan Laska when I do webinar interviews or I give big speeches at thousands of people all over the world I usually will talk about data and sometimes fill my dashboard like my staff dashboard as I'm growing my staff company to top them box for my website dashboard which shows how I take impressions they can recommend to email leads and convert them into customers for Nathan Walker calm the funny thing is guys I build these dashboards with myself no developer and it's basically free and I use one tool to do it you can see the tool at noon a slacker com4 slash analytics I'll tell you more later in the show this is episode 668 and coming up tomorrow morning we learn from demon where the owl Steve how to do it first real estate dealers just 18 years old now he shares with me how much money is doing in total rental income here's a hint it's way above 200 grams per month tune in if you're interested in real estate good morning everybody my guest this morning is rene Lacerte he's the founder and CEO of bill.com the leading business payments company he's a fin tech industry veteran who's been working to simplify business payments since 1999 when he founded pay cycle which was later acquired by Intuit in 2009 bill comm is now working to help bridge the digital divide between banks and businesses partnering with three of the top ten US banks and 45% of the top 100 accounting firms he believes that banks play a critical role in the advancements of spin tech now while technology advancements in Silicon Valley startups are divided or driving much of the industry's change Rene believes that banks are and will remain squarely at the center of the financial universe for quite some time Rene are you ready to take us to the top you bet you bet no gravity I'm glad you're on Andy from the CEO of wealth front would disagree with that statement that he believes banks will remain square we have to send to the financial universe you know he told me his models basically look at traditional banks are doing figure out how to do it with robots and put them out of business you know I think when it comes to people's money especially this is it's just not the case I mean the average transaction we do we do close to forty billion dollars a year in money movement in the average transaction seventeen hundred to two thousand dollars and that amount of money is just the amount of money for both parties being involved and the bank's a significant factor in helping businesses actually transact in this are going to go to banks for loans and these there's ways to help thanks for choices disintermediate I think for the most part when it comes to the size of the volume that we're talking about thanks you're going to be involved now I'm going to want to go back guys in this interview and ranae and I going to talk about his first success his pay cycle 1999 woody what you still doing to it but first I want to just tease you a little bit more that's what he's currently working on so Rene describe kind of a business model at Bill comm what do you do you mentioned transaction volume and how do you make money so we we make doing business really easy so we automated back-office for businesses we automate their payables we automate their receivables and the way we do that is we kind of take all the paper we take all the workflow we take all the payment and we take all the integration with the accounting software when we put that into a simple seamless app that accessible on your phone or obviously for any web device so and what that means is we have a subscription model for businesses so depending on how many users to have their todays subscription fee and then the day's transaction fees for whether it's a date or a man because believe it or not they're still you know customer comes us 95 percent repayments our caterer base and we're able to move that you know our li thirty five to forty percent over the course of the first six to twelve months so electronically a mr. keeper that we do build later electronic payments and a securities and if i if i split out your revenue model here which one of those are bigger in terms of is it as a small making more money or the the fees yeah this description models the kind of the core revenue is all the drivers okay and just for curiosity because it will be easy compared to others in terms of fees that you take on money processed what do you take on average so the thing that's really nice about what we do and pretty helpful for businesses potala master so largest we charge 49 cents for an electronic payment period that's it is it interesting okay good so euro and we charge a dollar 49 for a major so it just kind of depends on you know whether the governor is able to get their vendors to join our network we have over two million entities that are in our network now they use us today today now when you see two million entities in your network of those two million sat keeping the excess subscribers paying you might get as customers or just users or those are probably the best way to detectives users or you know all of our businesses invite their businesses in to collaborate so it's not the paying customers it's the entities that are paying yep no I one of the things I love about thin tech space that I'm very jealous of and I'm jealous of you is that you have kind of a natural viral coefficient built in and that if someone says you know is using Bill and they're sending an invoice or whatever a check to somebody else it doesn't use you at the natural viral coefficient exactly yeah I know that grows every year and it grows very quickly settled it's nice nice part of Islam well good well let's dive and real quick actually before I dive back to more on your history is the company bootstrap every raise capital today it is not we I mean each come of the ended it started probably for the first year with money in my back pocket but then we moved to raising capital so this one we have about 110 million in venture capital in the building over the last 10 years that's a teaser let's go back now take me to 1999 how old are you 1999 I went to visit dirty - okay and that's your first shot you're stepping up to the plate that's your first swing at doing your own thing or what you know I were going into the poor hands I were there for five years I lost a couple of products and and this is there the Delinda business to carve is business that we had and available is so I had some experience of innovating products for into it which the can in and of themselves for you know businesses for company but they did what it was saying is kind of managing and running all of it on your own and doing all the waste and all the the you know the responsibility to make something happen so I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs daddy granddaddy she had multiple many businesses in their life so I grew up around that bit tell me about one of them so you know the one that the last one my grandfather had was a company that did magic data processing which district sold affected processing ATP they did things like a good landing spot which is the general Ledger's and did payroll they did a lot of the things that I've actually done in my career so I kind of grew up around that and back tonight I was born my mom was sorting much cars for the largest defense contractor in DC that was doing a payroll job so fascinating it's something I mean that the ATP stuff that your grandfather was doing was that digitized and if so he must been right at the beginning I mean because the internet was just being born yeah yeah well I say was it would have been 1960 that he started investing my grandfather you know he had a lot of businesses from farming the stores the car dealerships and the last one was really around you know this data processing so he took his frogs from doing citrus in Central Florida and threw it into data processing and in my dad opened up an account was a physicist form up in DC and that was you know the birth of what I was born into in the fifties did you go to college I did interesting I asked that because you come from a family of entrepreneurs I was curious if they kind of supported that or if you kind of just skip that entirely you know that was pretty yes Lee and then going back to college so you wouldn't work her his dad started this business in DC and eventually really developing if you did that experience say when that always got his undergraduate and got his MBA from morning and at night and so I think he always felt like we should just get education because there's just a lot of anticipation so and then proven drew yeah when you fast forward now to pay cycle there's a lot of folks that listen into this show who are in a corporate environment and are looking at spinning something out and many times they say Nathan I know the company just needs this I can't get the research to do it I should go build it myself and then flip it to him is that how you came up with the idea of pay cycle how'd it work you know it...