Matt Pierce has been a tech guy for his entire 17 year career. Coming out of grad school, he started out in healthcare tech for a decade or so. Eventually, he started down the path of being an entrepreneur. He is married with 3 daughters - 2 in third grade and one that is a 2 year old. He mentioned the entrepreneurial dilemma of picking 3 of the 5 life choices - family, business, sleep, exercise and friendships - and notes that his three are family, business, and sleep.After spending nights and weekends burning the midnight oil on a healthcare tech solution, Matt sat down with a prospective client and did the best pitch ever. The client's feedback was that it didn't solve her real problem which was turnover, which boiled down to money. After chatting with the client and a mentor, Matt uncovered the best potential solution to financial stress - on demand pay.This is the creation story of Immediate.SponsorsPropelAuthSpeakeasyQA WolfSnapTradeLinksWebsite: http://joinimmediate.com/codestoryLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/piercmb/Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.com* Check out Vanta: https://vanta.com/CODESTORYSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
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We initially had thought, well, if we're going to go do this, we'll just charge a small percentage for everything you pull out. If you've earned $500 and you want to pull $200 out, then we'll just charge you 5%, right? And we'll make $10. That sounds great. Well, the problem with that is when you put percentages in there, it starts to look and feel a little more like a loan.
So we ended up going with a flat rate that is viewed more as a convenience fee. The same way as whether you pull out $100 or $200 in an ATM, it's going to be the same ATM fee. So that regulatory compliance kind of made us re-look at and adjust the way we were structuring things from a business perspective. My name is Matt Pierce, founder and CEO of Immediate.
This is Code Story, the podcast bringing you interviews with tech visionaries who share in the critical moments of what it takes to change an industry and build and lead a team that has your back. I'm your host, Noah Laubhardt, and today, how Matt Pierce created a solution to financial stress by enabling you to get paid on demand. All this and more on Code Story.
Matt Pierce has been a tech guy for his entire 17-year career. Coming out of grad school, he started out in healthcare tech for a decade or so. Eventually, he started down the path of being an entrepreneur. He's married with three daughters, two in third grade and one that is two years old.
He mentioned the entrepreneurial dilemma of picking three of the five life choices, family, business, sleep, exercise, and friendships, and notes that his three are family, business, and sleep. After spending nights and weekends burning the midnight oil on a healthcare tech solution, Matt sat down with a prospective client and did the best pitch he'd ever done.
The client's feedback was that it didn't solve her real problem, which was turnover. and which, in her opinion, boiled down to money. He realized that America is in the grip of an affordability crisis, with 230 million Americans living paycheck to paycheck, making it challenging to make ends meet, much less cover any unexpected expenses that come up.
After chatting with the client and a mentor, Matt uncovered the best potential solution for financial stress by providing a debt-free solution for employees to access earned wages and a flexible solution for employers to strengthen their workforce. This is the creation story of Immediate.
Really at its basic core, it's a financial wellness company. It's a really interesting story how we got started. This spun out of another business that I'd started working on and spent kind of nights and weekends for about 18 months building a home health and home care scheduling platform.
I'd had some negative experiences with aging family members as it pertains to having caregivers that showed up on time to take care of my family. And so I set out at I love when I hear entrepreneurs say, I had the thought there has to be a better way. And that was kind of my light bulb. Gosh, there's got to be a better way than this.
And so I started building this home health and home care scheduling system. Did that on the side for about 18 months and decided I wanted to go full time into it. And in order for me to go full time, I said, I want to land a really big customer, which essentially in my mind was trying to get to a set MRR that I can live and sustain off of.
So I can get rid of, you know, stop doing my day job and then go focus on this. And so I lined up a big prospect. I went in, I gave what was probably the best pitch I'd given on this. And I got done and the lady said, you know, this doesn't really solve my problem, right? And I said, what do you mean it doesn't solve your problem?
And she says, she goes, you know, all the things you're talking about are or just outputs of what I'm really looking at as a bigger problem. My turnover rate is so high. And I said, she goes, all your scheduling stuff isn't going to fix that. So I kind of took the old take off the sales hat, put on the consulting hat. And I said, well, how do you fix that?
She said, well, gosh, if you could figure it out, I think you'd really be on to something. And I said, well, do you have any ideas? And she said, you know, I think a lot of it comes down to money. And I said, money. So just pay your people more. And she goes, yeah, well, if I start paying more, then the costs go up and then it just creates this cycle.
She said, and eventually I kind of cap out what I can charge. And so it starts eating into my profit margins. So I said, well, just pay them more frequently. And she said, well, thanks, man. You just doubled. If I went from biweekly pay to weekly pay, you just doubled my cost for payroll. And I go, huh. And she said, so Think on it, let me know.
And I couldn't stop thinking about it for like a month. I sat down with a mentor and I kind of explained to him this problem. He goes, well, that seems like a huge issue. How many people live paycheck to paycheck in the U.S.? I looked it up and it was 78%. 160 million people in the U.S. workforce, right? It's crazy that four out of five people are living paycheck to paycheck.
And when you really start peeling it back, I started reading articles in Fortune magazine where there were these dual income families making over $300,000 a year that had zero savings at the end of the year because as their income grew, their costs and their living expenses grew and they're sending their kids to private school and they've got fancy cars and all the things, right?
And so it's not, people lose sight of paycheck to paycheck living is not just people that are making minimum wage. It can impact anybody and everybody. And what was even more concerning was that when people found themselves with an unexpected financial need in between paydays, they really had no place to turn. The places that they could turn were typically fairly predatory, right?
If I've got a credit card, the APR, depending on my credit score, can range from 18% to 35%. If I turn to a title or a payday loan, those rates can be as high as in states like Texas, 664% APR for a payday loan. It completely creates this cycle of debt. that unfortunately many Americans simply can't break.
And so when we look at that, we said, how can we go in and start to fix some of these issues? And what we did and essentially what I started here at Immediate as the founder of this company was, let's go in and connect with existing time tracking and payroll systems.
And if we can go in and pull out data at the end of a shift that shows us exactly how many hours have been worked and how much money has been earned since the last payday, we can give people the ability to access their own earned but unpaid wages before the next payday for a nominal transaction fee. Now we're supporting thousands and thousands of people on our platform.
And so it's really neat for me to see kind of where we went from this idea into where we are today and truly impacting people's lives and giving them a responsible alternative to those predatory lending services that I mentioned earlier.
Let's jump into the MVP then. So that first product you built, right? You thought on it for a month, you got the feedback, you thought on it for a month and you decided, okay, I'm going to go out and I'm going to attack this. Tell me about the first product. How long did it take you to build and what sort of tools did you use to bring it to life?
Well, my biggest shortcoming as a tech founder is that I don't code. So I have this great idea and I go, okay. let me go find somebody who can build this. And fortunately for me, I had a mentor, the same mentor I mentioned earlier that I had gone and talked to. And he goes, hey, man, I got two people I want to introduce you to that I think can at least help steer the ship.
And I said, before we go there, can we at least look through some things from a legal and regulatory compliance perspective? I don't want to be viewed or regulated as a lender. That seems like a huge, huge thing. So we spent from October 2018 until about
February, March 2019, really just jumping through some legal and regulatory compliance hurdles, which essentially gave us a roadmap of how we should build the MVP, which I think was really important for us. One of my favorite stories was back in the day when Reed Hastings was building Netflix. And they had this idea of mailing DVDs.
Before they went out and tried to do anything, they said, well, let's just figure out if we can actually mail DVDs with the standard, whatever it was at the time, like late 90s, 25 cent stamp. Because, hey, if we can't do that, then we're dead in the water before we get started.
So they tell this story about how they bought like five DVDs, put them in envelopes, drove outside of town to five different mailbox drops. drop them off and then mail them back to their home. And so, you know, two days later, a day later, when they come in the mail, they get all excited, go, okay, now we can go out and start to build something.
So I think about that story often when I think about our early time with, Hey, before we go out and start trying to build some lists, let me make sure that from a legal and regulatory compliance perspective, that this isn't something that's going to get us in some hot water. And so we, we kind of jumped through all those hoops. And then in March,
The conversation I began having with who's now my CTO, his name's Jason Guzdalla, started having these conversations with Jason about what we could do to build the first product. And the product is called Immediate Pay. Because he had experience building or leveraging APIs to extract data and normalize data and then be able to serve it up, that's really what we set out to do.
And the first thought was, let's build a web app and use it and do that to go out and just kind of prove this model out and prove that we could make something work. And as we started down the path a little further, I started, like any good entrepreneur and salesperson, I started selling before we had even written a line of code. And I had somebody that said, I'm in, I'm ready. When are you ready?
And I said, we'll have it ready in a couple of months, right? And so I said, well, hey, we already got, I mean, look, I sold this thing for two weeks and I already got a first customer signed up. So let's just jump right into building this thing as an app.
In hindsight, I think the better way to do it would have been to build a web app just to get going where someone could access it on their phone. Just as kind of, if I'm taking that Netflix mindset of let's just make sure that the DVDs when they mail, they actually show up.
But instead what we did was we set out with our first product that was just released in iOS and it was the immediate pay app where essentially we found out who that first customer was using from a time tracking and payroll perspective.
The really quick story on that that I think is always a fun, scrappy startup story to share is we found out that the company they were using for payroll is one of the more dated systems out there. And I'm not going to share who it is just to save face for them. But it's a payroll system that doesn't have a public API. And so I got the deal closed. I signed a contract and I go back to Jason.
I said, hey, man, it's a company that on this. And he goes, are you serious at all? payroll systems. That's the one you've got to pick for the first one. I said, well, you know, listen, we got to take care of the customers, right? And he says, he goes, all right, well, let me see what I can do, but they don't have a public API. I don't know if I can do this. And so I said, I got an idea.
I picked up the phone and I called the sales office and this, this local here in Birmingham. And I got one of their salespeople on the phone and I said, Hey, look, you know, I'm a one man company where we're going to be growing and I want to use your payroll service. When can I get started? They said, one person, how much do you make? What do you pay? And I said, what's minimum wage?
And they said, $7.25. I said, I make $7.25 an hour. And we're bootstrapping at this point, right? I'm like, I just need something. They said, how often do you work? I was like, I pay myself like one hour a week. So long story short, I ended up signing a contract with these guys just so we could get access to their system so we could go build the first integration.
Of course, our oldest integration to date, we now have almost 50 integrations that we've built. We designed it initially in Flutter, and Flutter essentially allows us to build out a web app iOS and Android and just kind of focus on the iOS for the first release. And that's been something that's been really good behind the scenes to help us as we scale.
Just previous experience we've seen where we've had to go and build an iOS and then build a separate version for Android and just felt like, you know, you're kind of caught up in going back and forth. And so with this, when we got started, we felt the best way to do it was to go in and design it in Flutter. And so that's how we got started. That was the MVP.
We launched our first customer in September 2019. So from April, wrote the first line of code in April and then launched the first customer in September. So, you know, nice four or five months there. And then we've just been growing steadily ever since.
You talked about choosing the antiquated payroll because that was what your first customer was using. So that's a decision and a trade-off you had to make. They're like, we're going to go target this because that's what they got.
I'm curious if any of the regulatory investigation or anything like that caused any more trade-offs and decisions that you had to make as far as how you were going to build the product.
It was interesting because it impacted us in a couple of ways. So one, just from a pricing perspective, we initially had thought, well, if we're going to go do this, we'll just charge a small percentage for everything you pull out. If you've earned $500 and you want to pull $200 out, then we'll just charge you 5%, right? And we'll make $10. That sounds great.
Well, the problem with that is when you put percentages in there, it starts to look and feel a little more like a loan. And so we ended up going with a flat rate that is viewed more as a convenience fee, the same way as, you know, whether you pull out a hundred bucks or 200 bucks in an ATM, it's going to be the same ATM fee.
So, so that regulatory compliance kind of, kind of made us relook at and adjust the way we were structuring things from a business perspective. When you take it out and look at it from a product perspective, it really showed us how important it was to get the time tracking data. early on and we thought, hey, we can just integrate with payroll systems. We can do that.
And then we can get this feed out of the payroll system. We know their hourly rate. We know whether they're employed. We've got their employee ID. We can look at previous paychecks. So we can just kind of say, well, hey, look, every paycheck on average over the past, let's just say 90 days, you're averaging $1,000 a paycheck.
So we're going to assume that so long as you're employed, you're still getting that. We can make all these assumptions. Well, we know what happens when you start to make assumptions in a highly regulated environment. It doesn't really
And so again, kind of going back to these regulatory pieces, if we want to make sure that we're not viewed or regulated as a lender, then we've got to go build these time tracking integration. So it's just interesting how things evolve early on.
We're like, we're just going to connect to every payroll system we can, and then we're going to use the data that we have to provide a really good service. But what we learned is if we can go and integrate with a time tracking system. Now it's, it's to the T you may have historically always earned a thousand dollars a pay period, but you just moved into.
a new role and now you're making $1,300 a pay period. And so with this time tracking data, we can now get this feed and we do sweeps, whether through APIs or we do automated exports at the end of a shift. You know, if it's a A Wednesday at 9 a.m. and most of the shifts clock out at 2 o'clock and 6 o'clock, then we know at 2 p.m. we're going to get that feed of data from the time tracking system.
It's going to show by employee ID everybody who clocked out in that last window, and we've got down to the dollar how much they've earned since their last payday. And so those legal regulatory reviews and diligence we did early on really helped us find ourselves in the right spot to ensure that if we didn't want to play in a gray area, let's go in and be as specific and detailed as possible.
And so it helped us from a business case perspective and then helped us in a practicality perspective.
So with the MVP, you got immediate pay. You started with an antiquated payroll, but then you started hooking up payrolls after that, pulling in feeds of information. I hear all that. What I'm curious about is how did you progress the product from there? And how did you mature it and put that kind of in a box? How did you build your roadmap?
I know the regulatory portion of it drove the initial roadmap forward. Um, but how did you decide, how did you and your team decide, okay, this is the next most important thing to build?
That's the part where it's really funny how, when you think back on some of these things and you look at it and go, this is what I think we should do, or this is what we want to do, or this is what we're thinking. And then you get out there, it's the old Mike Tyson quote, right? Everybody's got a plan until you get punched in the face, you know?
Every entrepreneur's got a roadmap until they get out there and the customer actually starts using it. One of the things that I really pride ourselves in is taking the time to sit down with our customers and really ask for feedback and input and trying to operate less on what we think versus what we're hearing from our customer. The interesting thing for us is
is we have multiple customers, right? We're a B2B2C platform. So I can go in and sit down with HR directors all day long and they can tell me all the things that they think we should be doing and all the things they think their team will want. And then we'll get it out into the hands of their teams and their team will think and say very different things. Because there's always this disconnect.
I can sit here in our headquarters in Birmingham, Alabama and say, well, even on a startup salary, I live a pretty good life. I'm not struggling, I'm not really living paycheck to paycheck here, but I can take the same earnings that I have here and then move me to Connecticut or put me in Silicon Valley and I'm going to have different financial needs.
For us, as opposed to our team sitting wherever they are and trying to make decisions that's going to impact people today, we have users in 46 of the 50 states and We've got a plan to get those other four locked down here in the next couple of months.
It's really important for us to regularly survey our users and also survey their employers, but make sure that we're in every update that we're doing things that are making sense for them and listening to them and taking that feedback. And so one of the things I'm excited about as we come towards the end of the year here and planning into 2022 is really putting in place end of year surveys.
We did this last year and so we put out there, can you share with us some of your input and feedback and suggestions from what you've experienced? And then as we start to build out some of our plans, we'll actually let some of our user community vote on what we're going to do next year.
That doesn't mean that they're completely dictating the roadmap because there are always regulatory compliance things. There are certain things that we have to do internally that are going to help us out. So we still have final say, but it's good to get that input.
So these surveys go out the end of every year, and we show some of the things that we're really thinking about and that we're looking into that we would like to add in the coming year on the platform and get that feedback. To me, it's always really nice when you've got a vocal and willing to share user community that can tell you and then we can take all that.
We come in, we sit down, we have regular product roadmap reviews. I, of course, meet with Jason, our CTO, every week. But then as a leadership team, we have product roadmap reviews each month where we look at where we are. We get regular feedback from sales and partnerships and CS and really make sure that we're all kind of collectively aligned on
hey, what does the next version look like and what are the things that we're doing and is that really going to add value to all of our user community and all of our customers?
Let's switch to team. So tell me about how you built your team and what did you look for in those people to indicate that they were the winning horses to join you?
It's interesting as an entrepreneur, I think one of the most important things that you can possess is self-awareness and identifying your strengths and weaknesses. And so the same that I said early on is, you know, my biggest flaw as a tech entrepreneur is I don't write code. The first thing I recognize my biggest my biggest need, my biggest weakness is to go find a technical co-founder.
And that's what I got in Jason. And Jason has done an incredible job in building out this product and helping us get to where we are and then and then building a nice roadmap for the future. When you start to grow, it really, for me, it comes down to continually looking at areas across the company. So that self-awareness evolves from just looking at yourself.
And then it starts to go into looking at the whole company. So I sat back and I said, all right, well, early on, I mean, I was, Jason was, Jason was still working a full-time job early on and he was doing nights and weekends and launched our first customers. I mentioned earlier, September, 2019, December, 2019 was when we hired our first other full-time employees.
And so I was the first full-time guy. So for the first, you know, roughly year or so, it was just me. When we launched the first couple of customers, it was me and Jason doing the launches and, uh, we were taking support calls and, uh, and we were really figuring out, unfortunately they weren't real big customers and we could kind of. navigate those waters.
But when we looked at it, like, all right, what are the things we're really good at? What are the things we need to get off our plate? And so the first, the first hire that we made was a customer support person. And she's been with us since then. She's the longest tenured outside of me. She's the longest tenured full-time employee.
She started helping us with support and she started helping us with customer success, kind of the implementations. And then, and then we went and hired another person said, all right, well, we want to move her. We're close enough deals. And at that point I was the only one selling and I'm out selling enough, closing enough deals. We need her focused just on customer success.
So we go hire a customer support person and he is still with us as well today. So we hired him. I want to say he started January 2020. And so it's just, to me, it's a continual evaluation of your team of where are you excelling and where are areas that you need some help. Of course, for us now, we've got a full leadership team. We're nearly 50 employees now.
at immediate here two years later, which is crazy when I think about December 2019, it was just me. It's just a continual evolution of finding, identifying streaks and weaknesses, and then kind of filling in some of those gaps. And then I think the other asterisk that comes by it is making sure that you're hiring as good culture fits.
And so a big thing for us is we're a mission-driven organization. We're on a mission to positively impact the financial well-being of a million Americans over the next three years. And so we're actively looking for people that are going to come in and buy into that mission. You'll notice our mission didn't say, well, we're going to build a billion-dollar company, right?
Our mission didn't say, well, we're going to go do this, we're going to do that. Our mission is really driven around creating social impact and helping people And I believe as a for-profit business, if we help people and we do it the right way and we do it responsibly, we'll generate enough revenue to be a really successful, sustainable, long-term business.
But for us, it's finding people that fill in some of the gaps that we need as an organization and then buy into this culture and buy into this mission and want to put their head down and get up and go to work every day to go fight and to go win and to go make sure that we're supporting our user community as best we can.
And so it's a really cool, delicate balance and continual, you know, continually refining the process and looking for places and figuring out, is this the right person in that role? We've got a couple of people that we've moved around to different roles inside the organization. We hired them for one.
We had a guy that three months ago, we hired him for a role and literally was here two weeks and we were like, that guy's in the wrong role. this is his strength and that's where he needs to be. And we start moving around. And to me, it's really when you get a team that's all rowing in the same direction and they're all sitting in the right spot and they're all contributing in the right ways.
And then obviously they're all bought into this mission. That's when you really hit a stride and you start to grow even more aggressively and more quickly than we've been growing already. And so it's been a really fun part about building this team.
You know, I hear a lot the making sure you're a culture fit, making sure that you're mission driven, and that makes sense. But I really love the way you methodically self-reflected and self-being you or self-being the company and figured out, okay, where are our gaps? Where are our weaknesses? And let's fill roles where those areas are so that we can strengthen us as a whole.
I think that's really unique. It's an incredibly brilliant approach. So kudos on that.
It's interesting. It goes back to like one of the first questions you asked about like exercise, right?
It's, I remember when I was first coming out of college and, and, um, you know, back in the days where we still had like plenty of time and, and good metabolism and, and all that. And, and I was a young single guy and I was, I was getting ready to go to the beach with, with a bunch of friends. And, And I remember like the lead up to it going, you know what? I'm going to eat really good.
I'm going to work out really hard. I'm going to do a ton of sit ups. And man, when we go on the beach, I'm going to have like six pack abs and I'm going to be just rocking and rolling. And I work so hard. And I remember like, because I was doing so much of that. And I didn't focus on other areas of my body that I end up like tweaking my back and just feeling awful the whole trip.
I don't even know if I ever took my shirt off, right? Like, and it was because I'd spent too much time working out my core, my stomach, but not spending time working on my lower back. And so, so it's kind of like, it's looking at the same thing. Like today, when I spend time doing, doing core exercises, it's not just about working
your stomach muscles, it's about working your obliques and also working your lower back.
It's the same way that you've got to look at strengths and you've got to look at the company and go, what are the things that we're doing really well and how do we make sure that if we do that too well, look, hey, I could go hire 10 killer salespeople, but if they're doing so good that it overwhelms our CS team, then we're not going to deliver a great user experience.
And it's going to stunt our growth, right? And it's going to frustrate the salespeople. And then they're going to end up bouncing because they're like, everything I close ends up getting put in this long queue and they never launch and I never get paid. And so it's one of those things where you've got to continually look at those things and figure out what makes the most sense. Where's a strength?
Where's a weakness? How can we fill those things in? It just makes so much sense when you look at it in ways like that.
Well, let's flip to scalability. And scalability can mean a lot of different things. It can mean technology, infrastructure, and even people. So did you build this thing to scale efficiently from day one, or have you been fighting this as you grow?
I was on a panel a couple weeks ago, and there was somebody else on the panel that was building more of a lifestyle business. And they make decisions very differently than we do, right? Um, we early on decided we want to build a high growth company. We're in a, what we believe to be a land grab market.
Less than 10% of companies in the U S are offering an on-demand pay solution, like what we offer. And we think this is something in the next 10 years, that'll be ubiquitous that every company in the U S will have some sort of on-demand pay solution, a financial safety net for their team. And so we made the decision early on, let's go out, let's raise money and let's scale rapidly.
It's relatively easy to make that decision early on and then you get into it and you're going, oh man, what will we get ourselves into, you know? like building a rapidly scaling company is a lot. You have to move faster to make quick decisions. You've got to always be looking for potential pitfalls.
And so it was something that when we started building the company in general, we were building it for high growth.
And so in order to do that, obviously I had to sit down with Jason and go, Hey man, how are we going to build a product that, you know, when we launch our first customer that was like 25 employees and we get our first, I think our first four customers, I'm trying to remember the exact number. I think
When we went and did our first round of outside funding, we had four customers and it was 141 total employees on the platform. You know, you're sitting there looking at an average of 35 people, right, per company. So these are small, like really, you know, easy to go out and do. And I said, is this the way you've built this? How do we get this to where we need to go?
And so it really was a conscious effort of going. Let's always make sure that we're staying ahead. you know, we're, we're usually overstaffed on our CS team, kind of like the point I just made a minute ago, where, you know, if you overstaff on sales and you outkick your coverage, then you're going to get in trouble.
And so we, we're usually overstaffed on our success team and always making sure that we've got people there to train and, and, and answer support tickets and make sure that we can take care of people. And so let's make sure that we can do the same thing for a product and make sure that this product, Hey, if we go out tomorrow and sign up a
50,000 employee company and we launched them in six weeks and we have great enrollment. What does that look like? And how much server capacity do we need to have? And how many concurrent users can be in the app at the same time? And so there's a lot of those things that we had to really look at early on and figure out. And then as we've grown in scale, just continually continually adjust.
We're a data-driven organization and we've got, I've got them on my tabs right now. We've got leadership dashboards where every Monday our leadership team goes in and updates in each department where they are and some of the KPIs. And so at any point I could go in and I can look and I can see, well, this is how many transactions we did last week. This is how many enrolled users.
This is how many has been invited, but have not yet enrolled. I can figure out all that data. I've got it at my fingertips. One of the things that we've been really fortunate in the way that our business model is, is It's not a mission critical kind of thing, right? Like coming from the healthcare technology world where we're using electronic health records, that's mission critical.
If your EHR drops when your doctor's at the point of care with a patient and they got to go back to using paper, that's a major issue, right? And so you've got to make sure that you can have a number of concurrent users in the system at the same time. With us, if you get a thousand employees, we're usually seeing 20% of employees will enroll
and use our solution each pay period, which is really interesting, right? I mean, we talk about 78% of the population living paycheck to paycheck, but only about one in five are using our solution each pay period, but they're regularly using it, right? It's interesting when we see that we go, all right, we get it.
You know, we sign up 50,000 employee company where we're going to have 10,000 people that are using this. Those 10,000 people aren't all going to log in on Wednesday at 5 p.m. It's going to be because different people have different financial needs. They're going to log in at different times.
And so it's been really neat for us to be able to build out a platform that allows for, you know, tens or hundreds of thousands of concurrent users and us never coming anywhere close to having that many concurrent users in the platform at the same time. It's always something that we're keeping our eyes on and we're always checking on and always kind of preparing.
And it's really great the way our sales team reports out to CS and to our product and R&D team on what the pipeline looks like. So we make sure that we're prepared and able to scale as we need to. But we've done a really good job, in my opinion, of kind of getting out in front of that, planning, making sure we build out the right plan for it, and then being able to adjust as we continue to grow.
Well, as you step out on the balcony and you look across all that you've built, what are you most proud of?
You know, the thing that I'm most proud of is when I go back to that early conversation I had at the light bulb moment. And then I spend like a month just thinking about this and then fast forwarding to where we are today. and knowing the impact that we're creating across this country, like I said earlier, 46 States, tens of thousands of people that are using this all the time.
Um, it's, you know, we, we, we've got about 175 companies that are on our platform today, which is really awesome. And so to think about, to think about the impact that we're having, I, I tell our team a lot, um, you know, this isn't necessarily something that you're going to see in an investor update or, uh, or something that, uh,
A VC is going to sit down and give you the good thumbs up and a high five on. But it's something that I really hold near and dear to my heart is I believe that one of the biggest outputs of this company is going to be something that we never see. And I believe one of the biggest success stories of this company is going to be something that we never see. It's going to create generational change.
And that's what I think is so cool. When you think about tens of thousands of people that you're able to go in and impact their lives financially. And you take a mom who's used to going to get a payday loan one Friday morning every month. And her children watch her walk out and go down the store to the quick loan place and comes back with cash. And they see them stop doing that.
And they ask them a question about it. And they say, well, my company started offering this awesome This awesome product called Immediate Pay where I get to use my own money instead of having to borrow from the guys down the street. And it takes me weeks or months or years to pay off those loans. And now you've got children that are seeing their parents manage their money in a different way.
I think things like that, like I said, you're not going to see that in an investor update. We'll never see the actual, and that's something we can never really gauge. But I just think it's really cool to think about the impact that we're having and helping people find and sustain financial happiness. And so that's probably what I'm most proud of.
I would say the part B to that would be that this team that we've built of people that believe in that same mission. And when we get together and
and we do every every monday morning we do we do team meetings and most of those are over zoom we've got the whole company coming in for a meeting in the next couple weeks so we'll all be in the same room but i know when i share things sometimes or we'll have somebody from our customer success team read off
A support ticket or which the support tickets, a lot of cases for us are like praise tickets, like thank you for this because of this. We read those off and I just watch the smiles light up on my screen of all the people that are here that believe in what we're doing and they get to see that and hear that. It makes me incredibly proud and humbled to be able to do this.
Let's flip the script a little bit. So tell me about a mistake you made and how you and your team responded to it.
It's interesting because one of the questions you asked earlier was about the roadmap and some of the things that we've done. I think some of the I think a lot of that is kind of based off of while we did we did. We've always done a good job from early on of asking questions. You know, we've made some mistakes along the way of like putting something out that we thought was cool.
And and then, you know, nobody uses it or very few people use it. And we kind of go, well, was that really do we should we should we have done that or should we spend more time working on something else? And so I think that a lot of it, especially as an early stage company, a lot of it, and not to say that that's only happened in the product space, it's happened in partnerships.
We've formed partnerships with companies like, oh man, this would be great partnership. Let's go get this thing. And they'll bring us a bunch of leads and we invest a bunch of time and energy. And then we literally never get a single lead out of it. And you kind of go, ah, gosh, that's just part of doing business, right? You figure those things out. So
I'm a big believer, and our team hears me say this a lot, I'm a big believer that life happens for you, not to you.
And if you take an approach of that, that when these negative things happen or when something goes out that didn't take off the way we expected it to take off, or a partnership that didn't have the success we thought it was going to have, or maybe it's an individual that we hired that we thought would be a great fit and just unfortunately didn't.
didn't work out, I look at those things and go, well, let's, let's do a post-mortem and let's figure out what, what went wrong. And then let's try to figure out how we can make sure we don't make that same mistake in the future. So, you know, the example that pops to mind is, yeah, we, we pushed out a product that, uh, we pushed out a product enhancement that nobody really, really used, but.
Hey, look, if we learn from that, that's a really good mistake to make because it's going to make sure that in the future, what we've done now, going back to that earlier question, is we're going to do a much better job of going in with product roadmap and making sure that the things that we're putting out are things that our customers are asking for.
So that led to us doing this annual survey of, hey, here's five things that we're thinking about doing next year. What do you guys think? So it's really cool to me when you see some of the negatives turn into a positive in ways like that.
Well, what does the future look like for the product and for your team?
Well, as we fast forward into the new year, we're trending this year towards about 600% year-over-year growth. And so when I think about 2022, I'm expecting and hoping to match that or outperform that, which just obviously gets harder and harder to do that each year. Two years ago, we grew some ridiculous number, like 8,000%.
And it's like, well, yeah, it's easy to do that when you start the year with 100%.
with 140 people right sure and then you grow and then you go wait a second now gosh we can't get to four figures this year but maybe we can get high high triple digits so you know when i look at the company i i'm i'm so bullish on 2022 and i'm bullish for a variety of reasons one because because as we've talked about this awesome product this awesome team that we've built but also because the conversations we're starting to have in the market are very different than they were two three years ago right early on i would say you know this is
We do on-demand pay and they go, what do you mean? People get paid on demand. How does that work? I literally felt like the first 15 minutes of most of our sales calls early on were me just trying to explain what we do to people. Versus now, we get inbound leads every single day. One of our sales people just forwarded something to me earlier and said, hey, do you know this company?
They just inbounded. And, um, and it's, so it's, it's cool because people are coming to us and going, Hey, we see what you're doing. We think it's going to help with our recruitment and retention efforts. And, uh, or we, we have people that will come to us. I had somebody that stopped me. Uh, I was at like a barbecue or something this summer.
And, uh, this, this guy stopped me and said, Hey man, I, I heard about what you guys are doing and I never realized how big of an issue this was for, um, for a lot of our hourly employees. And I don't know if he had listened to me on a podcast or he watched one of our videos. We put a lot of videos out on social, just to try to educate people.
And, and he was like, this is something I think you need to come in. I want you to come in and meet with our HR team. And it turned into a great opportunity for us. And so it's cool to me is when I look into 2022, I look at. There's going to be there's a lot more companies out there that are recognizing the value of offering a solution like this.
It's easy for me because I'm an optimist and I started this company. Right. It's easy for me to go, well, this is a no brainer. It costs the company nothing. It's minimally impactful to your business and your existing processes. And it's going to help your people out. Like, why wouldn't you do it? Right.
But I understand that as a company, you've built processes and procedures in place for a reason. And so it's really cool for me when I start to see companies that are recognizing that this is something that is really a value add and it is a way that they're going to differentiate in 2022.
So when I think about next year, like what's coming up is really excitement around the way that we can continue to grow this company and the things that we can do to impact lives.
Let's switch to you, Matt. Who influences the way that you work? Name a person that you look up to and why.
You know, what's really interesting for me is, especially in this role where my role obviously evolves on a regular basis. And as a CEO, I really look to leaders, right? I think back to when I was a kid, I never really liked reading fiction books. I always liked reading biographies.
because I wanted to look for successful people and I wanted to go, how can I learn from somebody who's done something really incredible, like becoming the president of the United States or somebody who's started a company or I remember writing a paper on Henry Ford when I was a kid, like somebody who started automobiles, like look at where they are today, you know?
So it's hard for me to narrow it down to one person, to be really honest. I'm just such a big fan of leadership in general. And I watch it, I see it with people like Tom Brady on a football field and the way that he commands his team and he leads them. And then I watch when he gives a speech after they won the Super Bowl and I hear people from the crowd and I hear him
calling people by name, people that I had no clue who they were, offensive linemen, people in defense, he's calling them by name in the crowd about how they contributed to the team's success. Like that to me is leadership, right? If we're sticking with football, even though I'm an Auburn grad, I have so much respect for Nick Saban.
I mean, just year after year, the guy just produces and his coaches will turn over, his coaches go somewhere else and start to, you know, go coach somewhere else and come back and try to compete with him and they still can't beat him. You know, it's like, It's like this guy just knows how to lead and inspire and get the most out of people. And so I look at people like that.
And then obviously in the business world, there's so much good that you can glean from people like Tim Cook and people like Elon Musk. And you can just learn so much from leaders. So I really look at, as opposed to looking at like one person that I really look up to and learn a ton from, I really look out and go, who are people that are leaders?
that I can learn from and I can take some nuggets and take those and try to implement those to be a better leader myself as a fast-growing organization.
Well, we talked about a mistake earlier, but a little bit different spin. If you could go back to the beginning, what would you do differently? Or where would you consider taking a different approach?
This isn't something I've ever really thought about, if I could do things differently. I think initially we probably could have gone like web apps.
versus actually building out an ios app and and largely just because it's it's less there's less hoops to jump through to get that first version out there and and so when i when i go back to that netflix story like that would have been the path of least resistance to get something out there test it see if it works see if people actually use it and then really start investing more the other thing that i think we would have done a little bit differently just from a growth perspective is
is I held on to the reins pretty tightly for a long time from a sales perspective. I mean, like, I guess it was 2020. I can't remember how many deals we closed, but I closed literally like 96% of them. It's like we were starting to build a sales team, but I was still going in there, like driving a lot of deals.
And then this year it's, you know, I've closed like maybe single digit percentage of them because I'm not selling directly as much. I think in hindsight, I could have done a better job of relinquishing some of that control earlier on and moved more into a leadership role and kind of like producing leaders and helping them grow.
And that's what I think I've done a better job of this year with the team that we have in place, just from a growth sales partnership and marketing perspective.
Well, last question, Matt. So you're getting on a plane and you're sitting next to a young entrepreneur who's built the next big thing. They're jazzed about it. They can't wait to show it off to the world. Can't wait to show it off to you right there on the plane. What advice do you give that person having gone down this road a bit?
I usually like to give the advice to potential entrepreneurs not to do it. And I know that that sounds like really contradictory because here I am. But I say it for a couple of reasons. If people tell me, if somebody's already started, I'm going to try to be supportive, right? If somebody's like, man, I'm thinking about going to do this. I'll be, yeah, you shouldn't. And they'll go, what?
Oh, you don't think my idea is good? No, it doesn't have anything to do with your idea. Do you think your idea is good? It really, what it is, it's challenging them to really do the work and really put in the effort and thought and preparation for what's about to come because, man, the startup journey is not easy.
And I mean, you know, it's funny, I'll still have conversations with my wife where she's like, you know, when I was first getting this started, I had somebody that approached me for a really, really good corporate job and it would have paid me really well. And been a lot less stressful than what I'm, what I chose to do.
And obviously we know the path I took and she'll go, you still think you made the right decision? You know, and she'll say that every now and again, when I'm pulling my hair out over something and, and I was like, heck yeah, I made the right decision. You know, it's because this is something that for me, this is like, you know, I, I have, um, I have a high risk tolerance.
I'm willing to take, I'm willing to take a leap I believe in something. I want to go do it. But I didn't do that overnight, right? That took me time to grow into it and get comfortable with this and comfort in the uncomfortable situations and stability and stable times. And so it's early on when you talk to somebody, if they're really early on, they're trying to figure out, should I go do this?
Hey, you shouldn't do it. Because what you want to do is you shouldn't do it until you're 100% that you can do this and that you're okay with failings. And that you're going to be okay with success. There's a great quote, and I don't recall who said it first. The person I heard say it was Will Smith. And it's, don't let success go to your head or failure go to your heart.
And I think that's such a strong word of advice that most companies are not going to work out. Or they're going to have to pivot. Or they're going to fail in general. Or they're going to be successful. But when you're successful... You've got to understand, like I can sit here and look and go, man, this, this company immediate has been wildly successful.
It's all because of me, which is not at all the case, right? I have very little to do with it. I started it. And then I hired people that were smarter than me and that filled in my weaknesses that are making this what it's becoming and what it will be. And so I think it's really important that whether you're successful or you're not successful, that you understand that.
things can go a variety of different ways. So when you're really early on, if somebody's thinking about doing this and you tell them not to do it, then they're going to really have to convince themselves that it's really worth doing. Or they're going to go, yeah, maybe this isn't that good of an idea. And they're going to be better off for it because you'd rather them quit and give up now
before they get into it, quit their job and throw away a bunch of money and then get six months into it and figure out this wasn't really that good of an idea. So I usually give that and say, look, but look, Hey, if you, if you do decide to do it, I'll be here to support you. You let me know what I can do. So that's usually my advice.
That's a great challenge. I love that. Well, Matt, thank you for being on the show today. Thank you for telling the creation story of immediate.
Absolutely. So glad to be here. Thanks for having me.
Thank you.