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 many Engineers we it's it's half and half half marketing half Engineers okay okay and no quota caring sales reps now but you have one joining imminently we have one now that just joined and that's Jordan Cohen was running VP Partnerships at on De and now he's working at boss Insight so if I come from banking he comes from alternative lending it was the perfect match that's great and so over the past three years how many total customers have you guys scaled to using the platform so we're we're somewhere in the thousands of of borrowers on the platform at the moment and we're just GR I mean we're how many lenders well we're hoping now to on board somewhere between four and seven before the end of this calendar year okay so still right now less than two or three no no no we have more than that but we're hoping to get we're hoping to cross the threshold of 10 customers by the end of this year oh I see I see got it so you have like four or five now you want to get four or five more before the end of the year um you when I asked you how many customers you use the word borrowers but the borrowers don't really pay you right the lenders are who and alternative financers are the ones paying you right that's true guess I've been engineered to answer the question from an investor point of VI perspective yeah no but that's fine that's fine I just want to make sure I understand clearly so so yeah so you've got four or five lenders or alternative financers using you today who touch and use your API to enrich thousands of borrower accounts yes and some of them are they let us use their name so for example we can now say that we're proudly working with CIBC we're working with vbridge with okr CC Bank there's a few others we can't actually say so then we when we're ask the numbers we don't really divulge them y um but there are we're on boarding at the moment three more so it's just an it's an ongoing data is the Hot Topic this year so yeah so when do you I mean something go are early on you're hustling you have some early traction really incredible team it sounds like when do you guys break like a million or2 million dollar run rate I mean do you think you can hit that next year yes okay yes got it that we love that now now if you do I mean once you have a little Revenue scale you can start to tell a valuation story and go raise Equity to fuel growth more I mean you think you'll be raising in q1 Q2 next year I look we I don't know how to answer this other than to just answer it there are people who have raised that don't even have any product or deliverables in market and we already have that we're proven and we're trusted we have case studies released we have are we've doubled our Revenue so we're open we have we always say we would raise a million and a half we already have the product build but what we're looking for is not just Capital we want strategic we want to work with with lenders who really see that the market is changing and you need to be ahead of the game to Delight your customers no I love that so 2017 was your first year in business did you have any real Revenue in 2017 do you remember first year Revenue no and we started at the end of 2017 so we just crossed the three-year Mark we really went into Market in 2019 so all the sales I'm talking about happened in 2019 and then we doubled it in 2020 and we're looking to Triple that in the next few months that's great so what 2019 you finished like 100 Grand 200 Grand of Revenue something like that you're very you're like a surgeon with this Precision well you have to ask I mean I'm just backing right if you're not at a million dollar run rate yet and you doubled from 2019 to 2020 you could have been doing like 200 Grand in 2019 you double you're not far off yeah like the numbers are pretty close yeah yeah obviously you can't divulge what big customers like CIBC are paying you but we can sort of do back then afan math here and congratulations I mean right scaling that without having to get have any Equity dilution is is a really important thing and a lot of people haven't done that yet so give us the prediction what's your partner think's going to happen to fintech and next year so here's the thing what we need to do as an industry is collaborate we we keep thinking of this as a competitive game and yes it's a competitive game but if we don't collaborate we're all going to fail the the analogy that we're giving is you know we have Banks here and we have fex holding on to their products like this because they think that they have to have the best product what actually has to happen is a little bit more of what Amazon did at one time they were selling books and now if you look at what they're earn earning profits from it is not their own product it's by creating an infrastructure that invites everybody to use it and that's what we need to do as an ecosystem we need to have the banks who are lifting up the regulatory burden that none of us really want to lift up have this infrastructure that gets the latest in fintech that's our prediction for what needs to happen in the future and we're already seeing that the most Innovative of banks are looking for best inclass so boss Insight separates ourselves from all the competitors by being the easiest to adopt you don't have to code anything at all if if you don't want to it is like signing up to LinkedIn and also it is the most flexible to use so it doesn't matter what lending model you want to operate on we have the data to support it and last question um why does someone need to use boss insights instead of just like doing what we did at founder which is just build an API connection with with stripe QuickBooks zero all these plaid all these sort of data sources well if you're going to it's the number one question we're getting this year why buy you and not build you and the answer is if you want one to three Integrations go build and they're some of them are quite easy like QuickBooks but if you want to normalize data within a category so if you want any more than three in accounting you need to have an API shop to normalize the information if you want to go outside of accounting into Commerce Stripes Square whatnot you know charge B then you're really getting into the nitty-gritty and that's when you need to have somebody dedicated on the data side we have hundreds of different sources and you're going to see very quickly that we're going to move outside of accounting to Commerce compare it with Banking and then move over to sales have you you have on your website 800 applications you support are all those actually already built or if people hit and say they want a mement integration on your website you then quickly build it because it was inbound driven by CIBC no all those were actually built what we're adding now is is collaboration of our own so if a bank doesn't have a pla integration or a Yodi integration and that's what they wanted there are some of those that we've already built in place they don't become a Dev shop deciding on should I have an API to this accounting provider and this payroll provider and this banking transaction provider we want to be able to give them one place to go to and it gives them access to lower level pricing so that's how we've uh approached it very cool Karen let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite Business book oh okay I'm just gonna answer favorite book not favorite Business book okay Victor Frankle man search for meaning because that is what we need Above All Else number two is there a CEO you're following or studying Elon Musk number three what's your favorite online tool for building boss oh God there's so many we're using 20 I'm not kidding around slack is is very helpful I have to say LinkedIn is the best we are using we just switched I am so sorry HubSpot we just switched from you to Salesforce because we needed a lead gen tool um you know and then there's a bunch of other ones we use Confluence atlassian is an incredible company how many hours of sleep are you getting every night four and four That's not healthy three kids one startup fair fair enough okay are you married yes okay married three kids can I ask how old you are no that's just rude I'm 20 I just have a lot of years experience of being 20 well the reason I asked that question is because I I want to ask the question now now take us back to your 20-year-old so take us back zero years what do you wish your 20-year-old self knew oh wait the fun part's coming what does that mean it means that when you're when you're enthusiastic about what you're doing when you're doing something that's meaningful the you know the seat at the table that's always ignored in our industry is the customers and that's what keeps me going that there's going to be a point in time where we can measure business owners on their Merit not their collateral we keep saying you're a business and this is how I value you but no one's valued on collateral it's what you bring to the table so that's that's the best part that's a sweet spot for me because I know we're so close as an industry guys boss insights real-time financial data for lenders they have four or five customers now hoping to add four or five new ones in the next one to two months ideally double Revenue break a million dollar run rate next year they've done all this incredibly Capital efficiently they've leveraged grants and basically non-dilutive capital from the Canadian government to drive growth so far as they look to really play a major role in the future of fintech Karen thank you for taking us to the top thank you one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1 p.m. central it's called Shark Tank for SAS we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares backend 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 1:00 p.m. central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on YouTube every day at 2 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 SAS World whether it's an acquisition a big fund raise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else I don't 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