SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 505: Qwil.co Pre-Pays Contractors/Freelancers $10M in 2016 with CEO Johnny Reinsch
11 Dec 2016
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base.
Chapter 2: Why did Johnny Reinsch leave his career as an M&A attorney?
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 top. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination.
Chapter 3: What unique challenges do freelancers face in getting paid?
We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark. And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Okay, Top Tribe, this week's winner of the $100 is Rich Jones. Okay, Rich Jones, he is stuck in corporate. He wants to break free.
Chapter 4: How does Qwil facilitate instant payments for freelancers?
He's binging on the show. For your chance to win 100 bucks every Monday morning, simply subscribe to the podcast right now on iTunes and then text the word Nathan to 33444 to prove that you did it. Guys, if you want an easy tool to use to book your meetings back to back, to batch your calls, to make sure people actually show up when they schedule, you want to use Acuity Scheduling.
It's what I use for all my podcast interviews at NathanLatka.com forward slash schedule. I'll tell you more about how I use it later on in the episode.
Chapter 5: What is Qwil's business model and pricing structure?
Nathan Latke here. This is episode 505. Coming up tomorrow morning, you'll learn from Alan Willey. His company, Clipfolio, has raised $7.9 million just past 7,000 customers to help you build a smarter business dashboard. What's up, guys?
Chapter 6: What was Qwil's transaction volume in its first year?
Nathan Latke here. Our guest today is Johnny Riench, and he is the founder of Quill, which provides instant pay for the growing freelancer segment of the workforce. He's co-founder and CEO, also cryptocurrency nerd, and this is big, recovering M&A attorney. He's like on the good side now. So let's talk to Johnny.
Chapter 7: How does Qwil plan to grow its transaction volume in 2016?
Johnny, are you ready to take us to the top? Yeah, let's do it. All right, man. First off, I mean, I shouldn't have to ask this question. I think it's obvious, but why get out of the M&A attorney stuff and into your own startup?
Chapter 8: What are the advantages of using Qwil for freelancers?
I mean, it was actually a pretty simple decision. I got sort of tired of just making extremely rich people even richer by doing their M&A deals and figured that there was something better out there. As soon as I had the opportunity to jump into the cryptocurrency space and really go deep on that, it was kind of a no-brainer. So what was that, by the way? Because Quill isn't cryptocurrency, is it?
No. Yeah. Now, I worked at a high security Bitcoin storage company, and the really interesting aspect of working at a cryptocurrency company was getting into the fundamentals of what money is and took me down a massive rabbit hole on all things payment related and really brought to light the various pain points that right now I'm solving with Quill.
So what does Quill do and how do you generate revenue? Sure. We very simply solve one of the main pain points that freelancers have, and that's everything related to collections and just getting paid for the work that they've already performed. We work with freelancers all across the skill spectrum of delivery and last mile to software engineering and web development.
And the number one problem they have is simply just getting paid when they're done with their work. We make earnings available for them as soon as they've completed their work. And we do it at a very, very low price point, a flat fee that is typically competitive with even the charges that Visa or MasterCard would charge for processing a payment over with a credit card. So what is your model?
Is it SaaS or is it more marketplace-y or pay-as-you-go? Um, it's, it's all transactional. So the service is available for any independent contractor or freelancer that, um, that has an account with us. And literally we just make their earnings available as they're there.
So if somebody is waiting 30 days, um, and they would prefer not to wait, uh, those earnings are just sitting in the quill app waiting for you if you want them. And if you don't, that's cool too. So it's all a transactional based model. Okay. And, and what you're doing on the business end? Uh, we started full time on the business about a year ago. Um, I would say last summer of 2015. Yeah.
And what was, I'm sure this will be embarrassing because it was your first year, but what was your first year total transaction volume? Um, Is that the right question, by the way? That's what you care about, right? That's your key number? I think the metric that matters most is more the advance rate, but I would say transaction volume is in low seven figures for the first year.
Okay, so not a million. That's a little misleading because we haven't been live for that whole year. So that's actually transaction volume over the course of a few months. Yep, yep. Cool, makes sense. And then what are you guys on track to do in transaction volume here in 2016? Um, sky's the limit. I mean, it's growing much faster than we had anticipated, um, which is a very good problem to have.
Uh, we've been very well supported by, uh, you know, equity and debt investors in order to, um, and funding as far in funding. Uh, we're not disclosing our round right now, but it's, uh, we've been very fortunate as well. So the round's not closed. No, we have closed the round. Well, so you had to file a form D to do that, right? I mean, so it's public.
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