How Supportpay CEO Sheri Atwood grew Supportpay to $260.2K revenue and 2K customers in 2024.

Sher Atwood founded support B back in 2011 when she found no good solution for managing Child Care payments and other payments related to a divorce and supporting the children from both uh both of the the parents so she created support pay has ra gone under raise 7.1 million bucks most recently did a $4 million round of funding in 2016 did about c 300 or 400 Grand in Revenue now she has 2,000 paying customers paying on average 10 bucks per month for 20 grand in monthly recurring Revenue but add another 80 grand on top of that which in the form of $120 setup fees from new user she's converting into paid customers at the rate of about 12% of website visitors converting into an active user with just 3% annual churn so very sticky this is episode 714 coming up tomorrow morning you'll learn from Ryan this CEO doesn't care that his VC has him by the throat but first here's today's episode this is the top where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number to in their industry in terms of Revenue or customer base you'll learn how much revenue they're making what their marketing funnel looks like and how many customers they have I'm now at $20,000 per talk 5 and6 million he is help on global domination we just broke our 100,000 unit soul Mark and I'm your host Nathan lka hello everybody my guest today is Sher outwood she is the founder and CEO of a company called support pay she's also a former s Valley executive and a child of a bitter divorce who also went through her own divorce a few years ago she's created support pay when her search for a better way to exchange and communicate about child support system systems with her ex-husband proved totally fruitless support pay is the first ever automated child support payment platform poised to transform the complex timeconsuming and stressful process that impacts nearly 300 million parents exchanging more than 900 billion in child support and child expenses worldwide with support paid today's moderns today's modern families can spend less time managing and arguing about child support and more time focused on raising happy healthy children prior to starting support page she was a former vice president at sanch and also had been named number five of 50 women in Tech dominating Silicon Valley and top 40 under 40 executive in Silicon Valley she's energetic resourceful and lives by the model don't talk about it be about it Sher are you ready to take us to the top absolutely okay very good so my honestly the the first question that comes to my brain is you are incentivized to make sure people get divorced because you need more customers absolutely not I'm actually going to lower the divorce rate cuz I'm going to show people it doesn't get better it gets worse after a divorce so you might as well just stay married if no one gets divorced how do you make money because these Millennials these days uh actually aren't getting married anymore they're just having babies so it's actually not the divorce it's uh if people stopped having children then yeah maybe I'd have a problem uh say there exactly so tell us G again I give the bio but kind of tell us what support pay does give us a real life example maybe how when your ex-husband used it if you did or if you invented it after no we use it today I invented it uh because I didn't have a solution and uh what I found was um first child support's made up of two things one a base payment that's a usually monthly that's meant to cover only basic living expenses but then there's all these additional expenses uh education Child Care Medical extracurricular activities that parents have to share and typically what you hear is the person paying saying hey I have no problem paying I just want to know that the money is going to my kid and the person trying to get the money back is saying you know what I'm not even getting enough to financially support the kid so I was actually doing an expense report when I was working at sanch and thought wait when you do an expense report you uh enter an expense you attach a receipt why can't we do the same thing for child support so they actually see the money's going to their kid and then there's no argument about where the money's going or how much it actually really cost to raise a child yeah now uh what year did you launch this company in I started the company in 2011 uh looking for every reason to not do it uh as I say I'm the worst uh example of an entrepreneur as a woman over the age of a 30 single mom in Silicon Valley I don't have any parents I don't have a spouse I had no backup plan and I didn't have a tech degree uh so I had the idea I kept looking and trying to find people to tell me not to do it um and luckily for me and for them they said hey hey this is a great idea and not to mention much needed where were you financially at this point in your life you obviously were executive at sanch but where were you financially help us feel that yeah so I grew up super poor I was raised by a single mom who was a a drug addict alcoholic only one in my family go to college so luckily for me on my career side uh got super you know was one of the youngest VPS ever at sanch so I had saved a bunch of money from that what's a bunch Sher if you don't mind me asking I had multiple houses cars boats um I got a divorce and gave him a house to walk away I had stock and Equity um plus I had about two years of salary in the bank okay so that I mean can we say a couple hundred grand in the bank something like that yeah yeah okay and so I thought hey if I as a single mom and without a spouse or a backup plan um I can take the risk for about a year uh and and try to to work this out and so I bootstrapped uh in the beginning um and you know taught myself how to code built the first product myself and again Tred to find every reason not to do it but there was just nothing out there that was um addressing this problem and what is the I mean you mentioned you bootstrapped when you started uh have you raised Capital today and if so how much yes we've raised uh about $7.1 million we just closed our series a in December and how much was the series a for series a was for 4.1 million okay and what what made that switch for you where you went from on bootstrapping this to let me raise Capital yeah about a year into it is just I kept I've talked to over a thousand uh parents parents family law professionals judges Child Support Services uh and everybody I talked to is saying you know there's nothing out there to support all of these parents and it's something that uh I desperately needed I get calls from vendors saying either I need this or I wish I had this when I was a kid or I wish I had this when I was paying child support um so just the the sheer need uh that I would hear from people over and over again or customer saying thank you so much you've ended the the fin cial fighting that I'm having to do in front of my kids and talk to me about well this is appropriate money how do you generate Revenue so it's a subscription service so it starts at uh $9.99 a month or 10 bucks a month uh and that enables a parent to use the platform uh both parents it's more valuable both parents use it but both parents don't have to be on it and then we also have a free version so that if one parent chooses to pay and the other parent doesn't it doesn't impact the paying parent so each parent pays independently of the other and so what is the average you mentioned you have multiple plan what's the average customer paying you per month it's 10 bucks a month it averages 10 bucks a month uh that's build annually or it's 14.99 if it's build monthly I see okay so 10 bucks a month if they pay 120 bucks UPF front or $4.99 per month exactly okay very cool and so you mentioned you launched this back in 2013 right or did you say 2011 2011 I started it and I um actually started building the company or you know hiring people in 2013 many females that are your age or males for that matter if they don't know how to code probably have given up hope so you're kind of an inspiration there how did you teach yourself how to code well I started with the website so B basic HTML CSS PHP uh so building up the the website and then I it was out of necessity so where did you go was there a class you went through a website I bought books had books I had the um how to code JavaScript uh HTML CSS I went to Barnes & Noble and picked up every book could possibly find interesting very cool okay so you taught yourself the code that's impressive and then update us on your team now I assume it's not just you correct we have now 25 employees so I just hired 16 employees in the past three months uh so we're all uh we recently located to uh relocated to Sacramento California um from Silicon Valley and yeah now we have uh 25 employees made up of our development team sales and marketing how many of the 25 are Engineers uh oh that's a good question 14 okay and and why' you make the move to Sacramento from Silicon Valley I so after I raised my first um three million in capital I realized I could not sustain a business in Silicon Valley how much were you burning per month like in cash at that time I was only burning 990,000 okay a month okay but it wasn't...