Green Apple Pay Revenue & Funding (2025)

Introduction hello everyone my guest today is chris tufford he's the founder and ceo of green apple pay he left college after two years to start his first business and has successfully and and has had success in a variety of unrelated markets from telecom to igaming including the largest amateur poker league in canada the world poker tour amateur poker league chris you're ready to take us to the top sure all right you're under the gun you're under the gun you've got ace king off suit the guy to your right or gow to your right is a pretty aggressive player you're putting them on pocket queens they've just shoved all in pre-flopped you call it ace king unsuited under the gun well that's a bit of a situational call isn't it it's uh are you on the bubble for the money because if you're on the bubble for the money you might actually fold that hand yeah yeah there are there are certain times when you will fold aces yep so it's actually situational but normally normally you're calling i love that all right green apple pay what are you working on so green apple pay is a digital fundraising platform for organizations like uh charities and non-profits and other community organizations schools churches other things like that to help them generate steady recurring revenue by making it seamless for their stakeholders to give back through their normal everyday spending sort of like a cash back reward program for organization and how do you what's the revenue model for you pure software players a percent of gmv as well yeah i know so we're we're primarily actually just doing a rev share so there's there's no upfront cost there's no setup no monthly or annual fees we just we just do a rev share with the organizations i see i see Currently serving 0 customers okay so so what does the average organization do through you in a year in terms of volume well we're just launching we're literally just going to be launching a pilot uh next week or the week after with another organizations to do a bit of a closed beta for a couple of months and then uh more of an opa beta to get us through sort of probably end of september and then more of a commercial launch in october well you're in a heck of a moment then i mean this is the launch time for you so you know fill in some of the backstory here what got you into this in the first place well a lot of it sort of stemmed from the fact that watching um my son does high level sport karate um and so his his uh his team fund raised through a lot of old school stuff right that a lot of the parents are organizing they were doing use electronics and use clothing drives and fundraising barbecues and raffle ticket sales and t-shirts sales all the old school stuff right that people do and between that and the fundraising stuff that is happens at a school you realize that there's there was a better way if we could create a digital platform to help these organizations i know these types of platforms exist for the individual um you know there's there's spare change roundups by companies that help you invest in your retirement like acorns and milo and there's companies that help you do earn cashback rewards from your spending like drop and amply and pay me but nobody's doing this kind of stuff with the organizational level where you know a whole group of dozens or hundreds or thousands of people can pool their spare change in cash back rewards and send it to an organization and i mean it sounds like you're having a lot of fun playing poker you've been involved with a lot of other things why dedicate your time to this like what are you doing now to pay the bills um well my wife's got a good job at a hospital so that helps because i'm actually going uh i'm working putting my time in for free right now to make sure other members of the team can get paid Raised did you raise did you put it on your own capital to get this going we're we have we've raised some uh we did a family of um friends and family how much we've raised a total of about half a million but wow the majority of that actually came from a number of different government programs i've made sure not to leave any free money on the table so i think like a good like a good poker like a good poker player that's right how much of the 500k was grant money that you don't have to worry about a return on uh about half of it almost okay interesting so you raise about 250k from friends and family on like a safe or something the rest is grand money yeah well some of it's death oh and debt okay well how did you raise debt there's nothing there's no there's nothing to put hold debt against it's a new company well one of the one of the first institutions that put some money in was called verge capital and they put money into uh organizations that have a social purpose so because of the fact that we're helping organizations with fundraising there's a real social focus there to what we're doing and so they put the money in as debt so i see and is it just it's just a term loan over what period of time yeah oh five years five years interesting and what are they doing do they give you like rock bottom rates five six percent or yeah prime plus two oh that's not bad at all yeah that's really good as a matter of fact we're talking to them about their they're looking to re-up and put some more money yeah interesting why do they want to put more money in you don't have any attraction yet well because they can see where we're heading i mean we didn't even have a product when they put the first money in so now that we're about to launch a pilot with a product they can see where we're headed they believe in what we're doing one of the other things that's interesting about that is the interconnected with them is is a connection with a their parent organization which is pillar non-profit in ontario in southwestern ontario which is sort of an umbrella group that um is a group that represents other charities and nonprofits and and so we're sort of using them as a great way to provide some uh warm introductions um into those that member uh membership organization i see i see how many people sales lead to yeah how many folks do you have on your team right now nine how many engineers two two engineers so what do the other seven do well that's including me and so i mean some of them are part-time like our cto is part-time when i need him and our ceo is part-time when i need him he's darren's been around from the very beginning um and then we've got a product consultant that's helping train up manny who's the product manager and tomorrow is doing the lead dev and cc is doing um the front end development and are you so founded do you have 100 equity i have the vast majority of it darren's that darren's the next largest shareholder and i'm and he's less than 10 percent and he's your seat effectively your cto oh yeah ceo he's got a lot of experience he brought a lot of the team members together for us because he's worked with them in the past at some previous uh um businesses so he sort of brought these guys in so that's how we knew they were good and how do you i mean how do you get your first hundred customers on this thing well it's it's a it's a relatively easy sale you would you you you can understand that if you're a small and mid-sized charity or non-profit right now you've been hurt pretty hard by the pandemic right a lot of these organizations not that different from my son's karate team did a lot of their fundraising through offline in-person events right they ran walk run bike-a-thons and charity golf tournaments and charity auctions and all this type of stuff that they haven't been able to run and do anymore so the idea that we're bringing to them something that's that's fully digital that they can they can sort of pivot to and adopt not only now to help them solve the the ongoing problem they're having with fundraising but then as an augmented new digital revenue stream for the future is pretty compelling and i mean how do you make money on this if a company puts a million dollars through you raises a million through in a year how much will you take that uh we start the rev share at 80 20 um but we give them an opportunity to grow their rev share up to 95 through various different metrics hitting hitting activation targets and time on the platform so that's the cost right you're making the bet that your your software is so valuable that they can raise more money than using other platforms so that if they put a million through you and you take 200 grand or 20 they go it's worth it so i guess that's the question right is who else are you competing with in the space and do they will they take a lower percent yeah well potentially um but what we're helping them do of course is this is going to be found money to them right in a lot of ways um i mean the micro donations from the spare change transaction roundups or you know or practically found money to people because it's just spare change but once we start rolling in the cash back rewards through connecting into um affiliate programs that's literally found money right it's just organizations that'll pay us a commission on track spending by sending people to go shop either online or in their bricks and order um stores or what have you and are you you mentioned you're looking at raising potentially more debt capital are you looking raising any more equity capital currently yeah we're going to open a seed round in march how much do you hope to raise on that and at what valuation a million i think a million at five and give me the sales pitch someone says well how do you get a 5 million evaluation chris you're crazy there's no customers yet yeah well that's that's really sort of there's it's it's more uh it's not really a science is it um valuations on a pre-revenue tech company but um i would say a a five million dollar valuation this probably tends to be a bit on the lower side if you're looking at companies that are raising from vcs well yeah but i mean just because you're trying to raise from vc doesn't mean you magically have a five million dollar company that would be crazy but it is a sales pitch it is a story and it sounds like an interesting story starting with the need you saw with your sons with your son's team yeah so listen we're rooting for you come back on a year give us an update chris in the meantime let's wrap up with the famous five number one favorite business book business book uh the making of a blockbuster by wayne hazenga number two is there a ceo you're following or studying i've read a few books over the last few months about elon musk and jeff basics they were both they were really really good and uh mark benioff [Music] number three what's your favorite online tool for building the business wow um i'm really starting to uh dig into using i haven't i never used a crm before so i i've i'm i'm digging in and building out of the crm streak that connects into our google mail number four how many hours of sleep are you getting every night not enough how many hours do you think well i'm seven maybe 70. and what's your situation married single kids i only have one kid married one son okay how old are you uh 53 53 monday oh congrats happy late birthday take us home here what do you wish you knew when you were 20. what uh i'm sorry what did i what something you wishing you knew when you were 20. oh lord um everything takes longer than you think guys there you have it green apple pay betting that he can help nonprofits raise more capital new found money by rounding up credit crime transactions and things of that nature they raised about 500 000 to date 250 000 of which was basically free money the other was an angel around raising now a million on a 5 million valuation to keep growing the business nine people on the team he's got about 90 equity so i'll call it the ceo has about under 10 percent they're looking to scale and onboard their first customers here quickly revenue model is taking percent of this new found donation money and we'll see if it scales chris thanks for taking us to the top thanks nathan really enjoyed talking to you one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm 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 back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltd you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 pm 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 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