How Paystand CEO Jeremy Almond grew Paystand to $75M revenue and 222 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is Jeremy almond he spent the last 15 years in the tech industry as a serial entrepreneur startup advisor an occasional investor he sub dozens of b2b companies drive adoption of digital commerce and is still an active board member at a number of FinTech companies he started his career in technology as an engineer at nano tech startup digital instruments which was acquired by V Co Jeremy holds a BS in computer engineering from the University of California and Anna masters in business from the University of Massachusetts alright Jeremy are you ready to take us to the top oh I am doing well I have to ask first because you know my log cabin when I was growing up right next to the entry door we had one of these old crank phones on our wall and I'd love to mess with it and hear that ding you have a collection hanging on the wall behind you what's the significance you know I'm actually I'm sitting at one of our investors offices and so I think they built one of the first mobile payment apps this little company called PayPal and so one of the first money movements ever was beamed over the phone it was a very famous investment and so I think they memorialize that with these old phones around their office that's pretty cool so I'm gonna ask what the company does in a second but you said you're at your investors office how much have you raised to date I've raised about 12 million a date more or less okay and then break down the company for us what do you guys do how do you make money yeah so so pay stands a b2b payment network so simple way to think of us is what venmo does between consumers making payments digital we do for commercial companies so we hope b2b companies actually get their money faster cheaper and a more automated way you German can I think build calm here yeah I think so so build calm is really about automation and what we are is actually changing the payment network so so most of the money movement itself is is basically using technology before the internet most of the technologies sort of built in the 70s we actually own our own payment network we use something called the blockchain which is sort of a really new way to think about financial services in general okay so Wow at the risk of getting too technical here walk me through how a company to another company might actually might actually use this can you give a real example name the customers etc yeah so classic example would be an insurance comes with a lot of which we'd call unsexy industries where there's paper chat process so we have insurance clients for example that are normally billing their billing folks like you to to take their claims payments or whatever their monthly payments normally it's manual process you're paying by paper check the critical thing for insurance is if you don't pay it on time you don't have coverage so it's really really important for the insurance companies to get their money faster cheaper an automated insurance company has two bad choices today they either can use paper checks which means they have to wait they have to collect takes them a long time and then if they don't get the money on time basically you lose your insurance coverage for their business or they run and they take credit card payments so you know you named off one of the credit card companies problem with the credit card payment is basically it costs three percent for you to receive all credit companies cost in this way so if you're let's say we work with mid-sized companies so if you're a fifty or a hundred million dollar company just to receive your money might cost you a million dollars which is you know absolutely insanity for effectively moving ones and zeros back and forth between banks so what we do is help them move their money automatically digitally and without fees and so that's a big big deal so so I forget which chain it was maybe it was Walmart just announced they weren't taking I think Visa credit cards anymore because of how aggressive they are are they about to announce that they have fallen in love with Jeremy Allman and pasted an amazing visa yeah I mean so I honestly the the retail the retailers hate credit card fees but I think they've got a bigger challenge which is you know we as consumers we we use credit cards all the time you know I've got a cup of coffee here I swiped my credit card to do it but it's different in the commercial case so in our commercial case right these are companies that you've worked with for you know a decade you have contract terms that sales people have argued about for four years let's say I'm gonna pay on net 30 terms which means I'm when I get an invoice I'm gonna pay 30 days later so there's very very clear sort of terms that dictate how you get paid and so really what pay stands focused on is making sure that process can be automated and those don't really need to go through credit cards because you know at the end of the day I know this company I've got terms associated to it so so credit-card model just doesn't work there how do you make money if you're not taking a percentage yeah so so we kind of think of us as like the Netflix of the industry which is we're trying to move the industry from a transactional model sort of this blockbuster go in and rent something to a fixed cost SAS model and so we charge a monthly subscription amount for for a customer and it's sort of all-you-can-eat and what would you say I'm sure you have loads of different cohorts but on average what's the customer paying you per month yeah so that's on average our customers pay us about $1,500 a month they go up much higher and there's a few that's a little lower than that but and if I pay you that what am I getting is that you can go you know process up to a hundred million of transaction volume per month before we have to go to the next level yeah I mean so normally the cohorts can be you know let's say a million to ten million dollars is sort of a certain size company ten million to 250 million in certain size company so generally the cost for us is just around support so you know a company that's got five thousand employees is a little bit more support for us than a company that's I don't know five employees but and put this all on a timeline for me when did you launch the company 2014 so we've been out of about four years now you know really really early days especially when you look at blockchain we think we're sort of ending to at a very long game I'm trying to change how commercial banking it's done and how many folks how many of these commercial entities are using you today in terms of you know how many customers you're at yeah so we have about 50,000 businesses on our payment network you know if you put that into scale there's eighteen trillion dollars in commercial payments in the US alone still done paper check so we've got a really long way to go but you know I think we're we're one of the fastest growing companies that are using blockchain in a real meaningful way and so I think that's that's important and you know we're doing material volume at this point so early days but it's going okay what's material volume I mean are we talking ten billion a month a billion a month what's material in your perspective so so at this point we're doing tens of million a day right and so you know that's pretty decent okay and then if I take my math is gonna be wrong here so you can have to correct me if I take those 50,000 customers times that average price point you decide at 1,500 bucks per month that puts yes so you guys are making seventy five million a month you would be taking out to a steak dinner and we're doing be doing this interview in a penthouse if that was the case where are my numbers wrong yeah so so we have sort of two sides of the network we have a receivable side and the payable side so you again you can think about weights then though you have two people on both sides so we we basically charge for the receivable side of the product because effectively you know you as a CFO care about speeding up your time to cash getting your money quicker and at lower cost most of the b2b payment industry actually charges for the other side which is the payables side we think that's actually less important our sort of point of view is that's a vitamin problem meaning you know it's nice for full or your AP to not write a paper check but that's not super super critical for the boardroom level and so we effectively charge a very very different amount on the payable side than we do on the receivable side I see so that 50,000 number included both sides both sides yeah exactly on the receiver break that down for me on the receiver side how many are you working with so we don't publish those numbers but the receivable side you know you can think of it it's an asymmetric network right most receivable companies right like they have at least 100 customers generally so so you can kind of think about how though you know the ratios will play out yeah I'm trying to get a general sense if we're talking like your high tide hundred a hundred enterprise customers or if you're talking maybe more mid market maybe you have ten thousand folks on that side would you say you're more mature it would consider mid market so you can think of us as like mid velocity like a hub spot or in that suite size type company so more than a hundred and less than 10,000 with consumers yep fair enough on the up side and then what do you what you know you're only four...