How VizyPay CEO Austin Mac Nab grew VizyPay to $21.5M revenue and 13K customers in 2023.

guys viip pay.com is the POS system that rural small businesses are using uh they are powered by Clover he just spent a million bucks buying additional Clover Hardware to get installed he's got over 13,000 signed customers tens of thousand installed POS systems they did 1.85 billion in transaction Volume last year representing 35 million transactions they did about call it 22 23 million bucks of toal sorry 22 yeah about 22 million bucks of total revenue hoping to hit call it 25 million this year he's got 95 full-time folks on the team and his go to market is very unique combination of 1099 contractors that can keep and build 50% residual revenue streams for selling the vi product in their local communities and also he's now the big bet they're making is how can they get W2 full-time employees performing in a unit economic positive way he uses local bank to fund $1.5 billion of debt to keep growing the business because he has bootstrapped the entire thing imagine owning 100% or close to 100% of a 25 million business Austin has done it he's staying patient building it the right way hey folks it's if we haven't met yet my name is Nathan Latka I launched and sold my first software company back in 2015 and went on to write a book about it which you guys made a Wall Street Journal bestseller purchasing over 30,000 copies thank you so much for that after the book I launched this show and went went on to create founder path.com I raised a large fund to do non-dilutive deals with B2B software Founders so far we've invested in over 400 software Founders totaling $150 million here in 2024 we're doing three to four New Deals per week so if you're looking for Capital and don't want to give up Equity go sign up at founder path.com for free to get your offer all right let's jump into the interview hey folks my guest today is Austin McNab he's a CEO and founder of viip pay uh they're prominent provider of payment Technology Solutions for Rural small businesses all across the US he's got over 19 years of experience doing this and he's an expert in the payment processing bank card and Retail Industries in 2017 he launched the company with the goal of disrupting the start status quo of the payment space to help small businesses level up their operations and save money on processing fees Austin you ready to take us to the top yeah absolutely roll your team went out of their way in your bio to specifically say quote rural small businesses uh why is that is this a key differentiator between you and stripe say or or Square sorry yeah I mean yeah that's been kind of our differentiator since we started and that's I helped us Excel to the next level being bootstrapped from the beginning till today is we are focused strictly on you know rural American communities which we believe technology is passing them by specifically in the payment space you know big companies you can probably name them you know a couple of them that are on the stock market or not that their focus has to be in bigger cities where there's more transactions bigger population more Payment Processing because they actually have people to answer to to a certain extent right well that also leaves a lot of Ral American businesses behind technology when it comes down to making their business more efficient that's fair priced that is not that is simplistic not complicated um and that allows them to kind of go from that I always say go from that flip phone stage back in the good old days to let's get into a smartphone right um but within the payment space kind of concept so we really go into smaller communities and and that's why we have a lot of our boots on the ground across the United States so guys as you know what I love featuring on this show are founders that are quietly crushing it especially when they have big VC backed funded competitors and what I love about Austin just to summarize when he came on in February of 2023 we're recording this episode Wednesday March 13th 2024 but he launched the business in 2017 did about 100,000 bucks of Revenue that year by 2021 12 million 2022 18 million so about flat not not flat sorry 6 million in extra Revenue there and then 2023 uh I can't remember Austin if this is what you told me you were going to do over it's what you closed with but you said I think 25 to 27 is that sort of where you came in last year uh we so from 2022 to 2023 our growth is about 19% so we went from 18 million to about 21.5 million in Revenue yeah uh this year we're anticipating uh to do around 26 and a half is kind of our our Revenue projections and goals another about 23% increase we're looking to do um but you know we did jump from you know uh that 19% from 22 to 23 and which of the big big deal for us just because we don't have that BC backing we don't have that P backing and and instead of declining we actually increase by a good amount so yeah yeah well look I always appreciate how transparent and vulnerable you are so I want to dig into this because a lot of Founders in your position go through this I do remember you said last year in February when we interviewed your target for 2023 was 27 million you still grew which is fantastic especially considering your capital structure your bootstrap but you only grew to 21.5 million instead of 27 million look in my head who cares you still grew and your economics are still good but how do you manage sort of that with your team at the end of the year hey guys we wanted to do 27 good job we got to 21.5 here's what we want to do next year how do you sort of manage that Gap um that's a great question um and that's a question you know we've talked about a million times over uh just because naturally you're like well well shoot we we we fell short right now I think the biggest thing about you know starting a startup and and building it the way we've built it through bootstrap is you know we got to find a lot of positive and sometimes negative situations and one would say that hey gosh we missed the mark by a huge amount man you all suck we all suck man we let's let's close the business down right it's not going to work out we got to fire everyone right but that wasn't the case the case was we grew by 19% we went from 18 to 21 and a half and all we had to do is say all right why why was there a Gap where where did we fail but not really fail but we can learn from so we can make 2024 a better year to get closer to the goals we want to reach right um so we had to look back and we had to look back at the mistakes we made because were not perfect um I think when you're starting a company from scratch no matter which way you look at it you don't have a bunch of big wigs that can call you up and get advice from you got to figure out yourself you know um and with our company you know one of the biggest things we've done to kind of um you know start our organizations I started I have you know almost 20 years of experience now um but the nearest person next to me at an organization is at seven years which is as long as we've been around because we hired about 95% of our staff that have no industry experience whatsoever out out of almost 100 employees so naturally the creative ideas sometimes don't work you know they going to fail fa quick we're going to have to Pivot and last year we we learned a lot about you know that we launched the W2 model uh over the last 24 months um you know 22 23 we learn our gaps we learn where we made mistakes when we need to double down on you know what we need not to do which maybe we don't need to hire as many people but we need to double down on the very people we have today incentivize them get them to the next level instead of worrying about bodies and we're worrying about the bodies that are currently here and leveling them up and I that was part of the reason why we probably didn't hit our Revenue numbers is because we were getting our face slapped without knowing it until we looked at the numbers at the end of the year because you know we were still growing so it's like hey High fiving still right but nowhere near where we wanted to be and I think we just had to learn from the mistakes and some of the failures and I think that's what we did and that's why 2024 is exciting so those of you listening now a couple minutes into this interview going wait what is viip I don't know what it is yet because maybe you missed the first interview his first customer was an auto repair shop uh today he's serving folks like restaurants rural coffee shops rural mom and pop businesses he he's not it's not just software right he's got to deal with The Upfront cost of the actual Hardware of which he's got 10,000 clients that keep two to three posos sort of per client location so that's tens of thousands of pieces of Hardware there and in addition Austin then makes money after that on a on a per transaction model is processing at least about a year go over a million transactions per month and then takes 1.8 to 2.5% uh of interchange there as well as the revenue model so when you go back and look Austin and please correct me if anyone that wrong after I asked this question when you go back and look at what assumption sales you put in your in your forecast model the beginning of last year which assumptions were wrong was it really really just People based like you just said or were...