How Boss Insights CEO Keren Moynihan grew Boss Insights to $2.1M revenue and 5 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is Karen moan she is the a former banker and second time founder and currently is CEO and co-founder of Boss insights the company offers business data as a service their single API enables easy access to hundreds of sources like QuickBooks Salesforce stripe bridging data gaps between Banks and business customers in under one minute Karen you ready to take us to the top let's do it all right so I mean walk us through this first is this sort of a pay as you go number of API requests per month deal or is it or is it more pure play SAS it's it's pure SAS and we're actually not charging by data because then we're a cost center we're actually charging when we make the lenders win so we charge per borrower they make money we make money so tell me more about that are you working you know exclusive with banks and lenders and connecting the two or what's it look like well there's the tech side of Boss insights and then there's the market play and The Lending Group is the first it's the beach head customer such a huge need $5 trillion do and that was pre for business lending that that's where we dipped our toe in the market and we work with banks credit unions and private lenders but that's not all we do banks credit unions and private lenders okay can so can you maybe just because this is a little bit in the weeds you come from banking so this is your world but but dumb it down for me right can you give me an example of someone who uses you yeah absolutely okr Financial just today released uh statement saying that they're working with boss insights because they want to be customer first and their customer is the small and medium business or the startup company they want to give people alternatives to equity and so they're already active and sponsoring in the ecosystem and they wanted a way to be Tech first so that's why we're working with them interesting is this like sort of a Cabbage sort of platform yeah yeah it would be interesting okay so my audience definitely knows sort of cabbage model okr Financial so if oare Financial is trying to do and provide sort of credit scoring algorithms to verify you know smb's historical cohort data and then give them a loan against that where does your API come into play so we offer there's hundreds of sources of information on business customers so let's just keep it super simple there are two main categories that lenders want right now they're either traditional lenders and what they want is accounting information because the second to business says I want money they say give me two years of financials or they're an alternative lender and then what they want is Commerce and cash FL information and what they're doing is some rendition of I want a couple months or 12 months of the revenues you're bringing in the door and I'm going to give you one month or let's say if you're above the crowd I can't think of a company who might be doing this they might give you three months who does that do you know what anyone founder path I mean our thing I mean we could be a customer of this oh well then how meta let's do it yeah yeah well no I'm asking you because because you you don't know I you probably don't know founder paath well I'm learning about boss insights but it sounds like we could be a customer of you yeah I in preparation for this chat I looked at your website I have to say your messaging is spoton and and absolutely we could be working together what we'd be giving you is a real-time view on the business and then you can either lend to them yourself or you can match them with some of the other lenders that you're working with that's the idea that you're you're getting away from the manual data connections and the manual collection of information which can only be summarized as somebody telling someone else to go clean their room I cannot tell you how often we were trained at RBC you know this is an opportunity for a discussion no it's not it's annoying let's get away from it and let's actually have some fun when you know what's going on with the business real time you can do some crazy things like give them an answer real time so really compelling and so someone like me or okr financial or your average customer what are they paying you per month to use this technology you've built it really depends we have economy of scale pricing if you we have ways for people to test this out if they have one to 10 borrowers let's say but The Sweet Spot really happens when you get to a couple hundred and then it is under $20 we have pricing that goes down to even a dollar per borrower so really this is change on the table you can just you can actually it's Pennies on the dollar to what lenders are making if you look at those sort of your total revenue divided by your total amount of customers what's the average customer currently paying you per month would you say some of it's a little proprietary so I can't exactly get into it because we are servicing some of the largest lenders so for example CIBC was just on a panel with us they're a top five Canadian bank and and then we're serving some billion- dollar Banks so the Community Banks the one who are rolling up their sleeves and out there so it really is a little bit proprietary but the idea is if you're thinking about their loan book what happens when they're using boss insights uh a recent quote we got from C bank for example is that in 30 to 60 days they got access to two to three years worth of leads they decreased the amount of time they were spending by 80% so that's what we Showcase in Market okay um talk any more about the history here when did you launch the platform 2017 okay 2017 and how did you fund the growth Did you sort of raise immediately or what not exactly this is a tech fin company what I mean by that is I the former Banker am not the first com the first person here it's actually someone scaled Amazon and in 20133 he saw that you need insights in order to win the market and sure enough Amazon is in lending yep he started mining Litecoin the first money in Boss insights was mined in a basement and and still yet we haven't diluted we have we've essentially raised a seed round almost a million dollars but we haven't diluted at all so just to be clear you guys did an i a Litecoin token offering back in 2013 to fund the business no we mined our own Litecoin money we basically justed the money and so it was just free honestly to be fair it house rates energy resources y yeah yeah and so we had that we're we're Canadian companies selling into the US market so Canadian economy has a lot of funds available for startups so if you're a compelling story and what that means is if you're promising to hire more people into your company and you continue to grow they will give you grants to help you get there that's part of how we've grown our company but we also have some debt financing secured as well I see I see okay so how I'm talking I'm sure you're probably talking about like shred and things like this how how many grants or or funds related to Grants where you're not having a sale Equity have you raised from the Canadian government it's um it's quite substantial um it's it's a it's a healthy seed round it's okay so I mean I would put healthy seed somewhere between like two and six million bucks is that a fair range no it's less than that less than that okay okay got it so less than two you you funded the growth to date with less than $2 million in Grants or non-dilutive Capital um does that include the debt you raised probably from CIBC orimar from BDC and yes it does um and then also just the sales are actually helping to let us grow that's the best fundraising right is C is customers paying you up front which is great um okay so 2017 so so just to be clear the partner that you started working with who is X Amazon you guys founded the company together you have equity in the business in 2017 you launched yes so he started in 2017 joined at the beginning of 2018 and we are that the cap table is really healthy there's no investors on it so if any investors wanted to come in it's a very easy thing to get on to we've grown since then and we actually just hired our first non-founder salesp person we nowes yeah that's great so just to be clear the cap table really is you plus your your co-founder yep that's great did you guys split it 5050 or did you say listen I'm I'm I'm the boss 60% 5149 okay but you get 51 I got 51 um congratul that's great oh gosh I love that he's gonna listen to this and go oh my why did I that one% difference okay so I love that you mentioned you just hired your first non- sales rep so how many people on the team today so we're eight people at the moment we're actually hiring so we're looking for bdrs and we're looking for front end software developers so if anyone's out there please reach out but the we're really excited about our VPS sales name is Jordan Cohen I haven't even the person who founded the company was Luke moan he scaled three tech companies and he started coding at 14 he really is one of those savants in his own field and so he's the one who's responsible for all this Cohen yeah he's he's really incredible I'd love to tell you his latest analogy about what's going to happen in lending but let's leave that as the open loop give us to that before we end so eight people on the team how...