How Everyware Reached $25M Revenue and 10,000 Customers with a Text-Based Payments Platform (Interview with Founder Larry Talley)

Introduction and Founder Background

Larry Talley

00:00Hello, everyone. I'm Larry Talley, and I am the founder of, everywhere. Everywhere is located in, Austin, Texas. So we just spent a good, past week with South by going on, and, excited to leave that and come straight here. I'm I'm here to talk to you today about really the three main phases, that we go through as we build a startup. And how many founders do we have, left in this room? I know this room is thin

Nathan Latka

00:25and out. Good chunk of us. Right? And I would say out of that, how many are in the, the early stage?

00:35Alright. How about the, the seed stage?

00:39And I'll go with the final one, the growth.

Larry Talley

00:44Alright. Still a few of us left here. And really how we apply people, product, and profit. And as a founder, I'll probably add one more p to that, which is, which is passion. I'll go ahead and, get this clicker.

What Everyware Does and How It Was Founded

Larry Talley

01:04A little bit about myself and the company. Everywhere is really formed back in 2018. Prior to that, I was, the owner and operator of another, company that has about fifteen years that built enterprise software for hotels, hotels. And if you ever stayed at Hilton and you get a text message, I invented that over fifteen years ago, mainly to to drive upsells and show that I can use real phone numbers and a bot to replace humans, and

01:32it worked and became highly successful. And during that time, I felt like, man, you know, we solved all these problems around customer service and around payment transactions. Well, to me, this looked like, well, what if Stripe and Twilio had a baby? Right? I just think that everywhere is born, you know, based on the mindset of applying, a text message conversation to a payment transaction to ultimately help companies collect faster. And throughout COVID, the company really accelerated.

Early Growth: Relocating to Austin and Revenue Milestones

Larry Talley

02:03You know, in the in the early stage, when you really, you know, I would say, have the mindset of, like, hiring folks. It's about being in the right place at the right time. So back then, I actually moved the company to Austin, Texas from Florida. And the big reason that I moved the company is really, because perception. You know, when you're building a company, you wanna wanna have the best perception as possible. So if you're in

02:25Boca Raton, Florida right away when you're trying to raise money, it was about old people or people that are traveling there or not enough talent. And that would be about zero seconds going through, you know, a VC's head or somebody's head that really didn't know much about Florida. They were in San Francisco, perhaps even in New York. But putting yourself in the right place, where opportunity exist and that perception is perceived differently, to me, that was,

02:51Austin, Texas. And so I moved my family there, and ever since then, everything really started clicking, and it really accelerated. And you can really see that because back in 2018, we barely broke a million. But after moving the company to Austin, we accelerated, very quickly over to almost, really over 3,500,000. So, today, the company is very profitable. We are on track right now to exceed, over probably about 25,000,000 in revenue this year. And a really a

Seed Stage: Hiring Strategy and Replacing Yourself

Larry Talley

03:22lot of thank you. Because it's a grind and bootstrapping it, you know, the beginning and the early days is definitely tough. So to get into that that 10,000,000 ARR, you know, really involved a lot of hard work and dedication from our from our team and our people.

03:40During that time at the, at the seed stage level and put myself in the opportunity, I had one desk in Austin, and I really didn't have any employees. I was really myself. I was a software engineer and really just trying to build things out. And, at the time, I hired another software engineer because that's typically what we do. And really, I hired this person, to be my replacement. And I felt the first thing I had to

04:01do was replace myself as an engineer and really put myself more or less in the front lines, to work in other departments, whether it was the accounting department to build that out, but it was ultimately the HR department where I spent my time. And I really leveraged, you know, my network, and I used my network to really make my first hires. And, you know, at that time, it's just about it's not like you just wanna take

04:25just about anyone, but I just really needed bodies at the time. And hiring my friends, what what I thought was the right move or potentially would lead to a disaster really turned out to be in my in my world, a really a great thing because these people were really loyal, and they spent time with me over the years. So it actually worked out well. I know it doesn't work out well for everyone else, but, you know,

Product Focus: Narrowing to Pay by Mobile

Larry Talley

04:50I really surrounded myself by what I could think about is, like, family. People I wanna hang out with, drink a beer with, and spend time with. But, ultimately, it was to really fine tune our product. Right? So hiring, more engineers, more product design folks, and really focusing now on really getting our product right. Because at the end of the day, as a software engineer, I was building too much. Because ultimately, when I went and put this

05:17in front of VCs, I had an app. I had a text messaging system. I had a payments company. And what I was being told was, you have too much. These are great ideas. And I had I thought probably one of the sexiest apps out there, but it was too much for people's brains to absorb. But as an engineer, you tend to build a lot of things. But ultimately, I built it an amazing application, but the VCs

05:43and where the investment went, it went into the payments. That was really the engine and the driver. So I had to put all my other ideas and products on the sidelines and really focus it on what we like to think of as our MVP. Right? The one that we're all gonna rally behind and the one that's gonna make us the most amount of money money. And that ultimately was, a pay by mobile solution. And the pay

06:06by mobile solution was really that that solution that basically assigned a merchant account a mobile number. And what was really unique about the mobile number and how we did it is that, we used, again, like my hotel, background, real phone numbers, 10 digit numbers, and local area codes. And we used a bot and then and always personalized it. So everything was like, hi, John. This is Mary or hi, John. This is Ivy. We gave the bot

06:34a personality, but, ultimately, a real human can jump in at any time. And it was all about figuring out why somebody couldn't pay a bill or get them to pay fast. And if you think about industries like health care, nobody wants to call in to a 1800 number. They just be put on hold, or you don't wanna get a statement in the mail just to put it on a desk for somebody to get to in thirty

Visa Partnership and Pandemic Acceleration

Larry Talley

06:57days from now. Right? So being able to send that text message out to collect the money or figure out why somebody couldn't pay a bill was extremely important, and it became super relevant. What I felt it was convenience that they were after, but became contactless. We struck a deal with Visa throughout the pandemic, and it quickly accelerated to a lot of their customers, mainly in health care. Not only did a no. You don't wanna ship out

07:24and send out statements any longer, but ultimately, there was a shortage in paper. Right? There was a lot of things that were happening back then, and they really could not generate enough paper. So we stepped in and worked with some of the largest paper statement companies to start delivering this through text messaging. And guess what? They're still doing it now today. In fact, there's more text messages going out with a lot of these companies than there

07:48are pieces of paper. So I like to think that we're actually doing a good thing based on a number of trees that we're hopefully saving. But it really proved that customers and or patients at this in in health care, it wasn't about not paying a bill. It was about, like, they had a question, and it could be a simple question. Just give them the ability to text it in, get a response back. And the great thing

08:11about it, it just didn't have to be a live chat. Right? Or it didn't get it didn't happen over the over a phone call. Everyone can do and operate on their own time, and that's really was the beauty about the text message. It showed that you can communicate to someone, and nobody's gonna get pissed off to you if they didn't respond to you in zero seconds. Right? Because you're not stuck on hold. They're not stuck on

08:33the phone. So, ultimately, that that idea and that product, quickly accelerated and became very wide widely used, and even companies like T Mobile and other large enterprise companies really started adopting this as a payment method. And then we had to take it one step further and really simplify it and make it so that you didn't even have to click on a link anymore. So we partnered up again with Visa, and we came out with network tokenization.

Network Tokenization and Phone-Number Security

Larry Talley

09:02Network tokenization, if you use Google Pay or Apple Pay, you're leveraging a network token. Everywhere certified your phone number directly with the banks and the card networks, and we're able to use a network token that's shareable across merchants and across acquirers. And what that does, it actually lowers the cost of the fee, and it makes it more of a safer transaction. We proved that it's actually, much safer to do a transaction through us with a phone

09:30number than it is with a piece of plastic. And it sounds odd, but in the sense that, you know, the plastic came out, they added a chip to it. Everyone thought, okay. We can stop using driver's license. We can just now rely on this chip. We'll show that you can have tons a lot more fraud happening out there, especially online. But the phone number was really two factor authentication. It was very secure. In fact, our system

09:55showed that if you give me your phone number, I can actually repeat back to your Social Security number. And if I don't know your Social Security number, you're high risk. And it probably sounds a little scary about how much information is out there, but if you really think about it, your phone number is tied to just about everything you've done over probably over a decade. For me, I have had the same phone number for over twenty

10:19years. I know most of you in the room probably had your cell phone number for over ten years. You'd be pretty surprised how much data, including your Social Security number, your family tree is tied to it. And what we ultimately do now is we build a trust score. So we identify we have identity and payments in one, and we're able to not only collect money fast, but make sure that we're actually collecting money or getting paid

10:45from someone that actually is the correct person.

10:49Our portfolio quickly grew and accelerated. Again, we leveraged the accelerator being the pandemic. Money movement was quickly shifting. Banks were quickly changing. So there was a gap in the market. We seize the opportunity. We partnered up with all the major banks. So if we use Bank of America, KeyBanc, Wells Fargo, all those banks today are our customers and leverage this platform. The card networks, Visa, and Discover leverage our platform. And ultimate ultimately, it's that pay by

Enterprise Customers and Portfolio Scale

Larry Talley

11:22mobile rail solution is what they're really after. So our portfolio has grown well over 10,000 customers today and over 18,000 users log on to our system. So very fast growing, and it quickly,

11:37expand hopefully within the next, I would say, twelve months globally where we start using our technology, in in other countries.

11:45Ultimately, it's about building brand awareness to getting the name out there. Even in a name like everywhere, it's spelled a little differently. It's spelled like software. So ultimately, that has to resonate, and that was probably the biggest challenge. But our brand today in fintech has become more or less of a household name, within that network, simply because a lot of times you see our technology or feel our technology, and you don't even know it's us. And

White-Label Strategy and Targeting Large Resellers

Larry Talley

12:12that's because a lot of the the larger customers like the BOAs and the Wells Fargo's of the world, white label our solution. We allow our solution to be white labeled. And again, as you're a young company growing, as much as I love to get my brand and be have that everywhere logo on top of, everything that we do, ultimately, we're spreading like wildfire by leveraging, merchants that have, thousands of merchants underneath them. And I would say

12:41that's probably one of the biggest things that when I was coming up building out this product, it was, do I wanna knock on a thousand doors or knock on one door that has a thousand customers already? Right? And I find that it's really about the same amount of time. So we target, larger software companies, larger enterprise companies that have the businesses to really go after. And I think that's important that, you know, each one of your

13:05stages is to leverage that.

Team Size and Organizational Changes

Larry Talley

13:09As we got into, like, I would say into and everywhere is really in between stages right now. I don't consider ourselves yet a mature growth stage company. We're at 57 employees. We're at about another 40 employees, you know, over the course of probably about the next six months. But ultimately, it was about putting people in the right seats. And that was really one of the big challenges I to reach one of these stages because it hurts

Culture and Keeping People in the Right Seats

Larry Talley

13:36sometimes when you have somebody that's been with you from the seed stage. And as you get to the maturity stage, you're like, is that really a chief marketing officer? Is that really a chief technology officer? You start kinda questioning it because you really want someone that's been there and done it before, that scale the company, and that's really, really important. That's something that I really, on January 1, even of this year, it was tough, but I

14:02had to make those decisions. And it's not about, removing them from your company, but it's ultimately about the better good for all of us. And so I moved folks around, and at the end of the day, they're much more happier now because they were able to leverage their strengths, And where I felt like their strengths were maybe weak in certain areas, they're able now to actually provide and really add a lot more value to the company.

14:27So I would say that in that maturity stage and that growth stage, as you as you get to that 10,000,000 in AR, it's really about hiring the right folks that have been there, done it before, that can scale the teams, that can, again, and, again, it's about, I think, the each one of these stages about culture. So never lose the culture at everyware. You know, I would say that we're probably one of the few companies that

14:51always have people in the office. They love coming to the office. It's a fun office. But ultimately, everyone's each other's best friend. Right? We all hang out together. And I think that that's really what it comes down to. It's about building that culture that ultimately is, you know, that, you know, your family.

Global Expansion Plans for 2023

Larry Talley

15:11The next stage as we continue to accelerate this year is really going into this new and expanding into these new sectors. You know, I I talked about global. That's a big topic in our company internally. And the reason being is that Visa, Bank of America, a lot of these larger enterprise companies operate globally. And if we wanna actually, continue to accelerate, we have to be able to keep up with some of these bigger guys. So hiring

15:38and looking at folks in other countries is something that's really hot this year for us, as we expand into these different markets. Well, thank you, everyone.