SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
5 Kenya Customers Pay $25k/yr For this AR Management Platform, $6.5m Valuation
19 May 2022
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
John, but make it simple for us. What is MRR today? Is it about 10,000?
It's about 10,000, yes.
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Chapter 2: What is account receivables automation and why is it important?
Check it out right now at getlatka.com. Hey, folks. My guest today is John Juma. He's a CEO of Chirpy. He's an ex-banker and tech professional. After working at Citi for nine years, he rose to head of operational risk in East Africa and IT projects across sub-Saharan Africa.
He worked for several startups, including NetGuardians, a Swiss fraud management startup, and senior roles across risk and account management. Then he founded his own risk tech startup, helping cooperative unions to digitize client onboarding and loan origination, and now building Chirpy.co account receivables automation. John, you ready to take us to the top?
Absolutely. Happy to have this discussion today.
Thank you for having me. You bet. What does account receivables automation mean?
So simply, this means reconciliation for outstanding receivables from your debtors. And I'm talking about, imagine you're a business and you keep sending out invoices so that people can pay back for goods and services that you've delivered. Now, that's what you call a receivable. Now, anytime these receivables are not yet paid out there, that's what now you refer as outstanding.
So we've automated that process of as soon as you receive payment for that invoice, you're able to instantly allocate that payment and reconcile it against an outstanding invoice.
I see. And what are businesses paying you on average per month to use the technology?
So for us, we have an entry rate. fee of $24,000 per annum to just use the service. That's about $2,000 a month. That's basically the cost of an accountant as a basis because we are augmenting the tasks that an accountant spends time doing.
So as opposed to doing those manual tasks, they should be spending more time in strategic roles like budgeting, ETC, where they will provide more value to the business and just leave the mundane finance operations. to Chappie, who's an accountant that never falls sick, is always on time, and reconciles 100% of outstanding receivables.
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Chapter 3: How much do businesses typically pay for this technology?
Fair enough. So you're off to the races. You've got capital. How many folks are on your team full-time? About 14. How many engineers? About eight. Eight. And what's your approach for finding these first five customers? Are they specific to any region? You have obviously deep roots in sub-Saharan Africa and other locations, or are you more global?
We're very much a sub-Saharan Africa driven business, but breaking into the Middle East, North Africa region. But our anchor clients are all based out of Kenya. So we are talking about payment companies. We are talking about manufacturing businesses. We are talking about pension companies that are in our portfolio of customers.
Yep. And did most of those customers come from relationships you built when you were working inside of these banks?
So we have a team of two sales or three salespeople full-time. So we are doing a lot of boots on the ground. speaking to a lot of these clients. But secondly, we are also doing a lot of, and leveraging a lot of digital marketing, just having a lot of press on digital media.
Okay, that makes a ton of sense. What's next from our product? I mean, you have four. First of all, how do you know that you like to build four products? Most people can't build one product, right? Why did you spend all the time and energy and money to build four right at the start?
So reconciliation is kind of the assurance piece. of a business so we can easily know what's outstanding, what needs to get paid.
And then secondly, based on that information, we can see if a business is struggling with a long sales cycle, sorry, long outstanding day sales, what you call day sales outstanding cycle, meaning that it's taking a bit long for receivables to come in, then we can build a lending product on top of that. And so we are working with regional banks such as Trade Development Bank,
uh, who are offering us the balance sheets to now address this problem. I see. Yeah. And then, uh, so this was a completely organic products. We, we didn't have to like think out of the box. We naturally came as a solution to customers' pains.
And what's it costing you right now? What's your CAC to get a new $24,000 a year customer? Do you know?
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Chapter 4: When was Chirpy launched and what is its founding story?
Number one, what's your last book that you read?
Oh, man. It was a sales book. I forget the title. All right. It was more about, you know, how to convert technical people into sales.
Interesting. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?
Absolutely. Daddy Mo from Modern Treasury.
Modern Treasury. That's a good one. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building Chirpy?
Favorite online tool right now would be because I head up sales. So HubSpot is really interesting for me.
Number four. Yeah. Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night? Shoo.
Depends. I've had all-nighters, you know, like going all night. Average, I would say about six to seven hours.
Okay. And what's your situation, John? Married, single, kids?
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