Aleks Đekić on 90-Day Cycles, the Sales-Finance Chasm, and Why Your Billing Stack Is Holding You Back

**Alex Theuma** (0:03)
Every decade or so, the rules of software change completely. This is one of those moments. The AI Revolution Show is the intelligence podcast for B2B software founders navigating the platform shift. The founders building through it, and the founders already on the other side.
I've known the team at Recap for years now, and I've watched a good number of their customers grow into something serious. So when I talk about them here, it comes from actually seeing how this works. Something I'm noticing more and more is founders thinking carefully about their capital stack before they take on equity. Sometimes equity is the right fit. Sometimes debt makes more sense. When founders go the debt route, they tend to use it to fund growth, bridge to profitability, or hold off on an equity round until they can raise on better terms or without giving up a single share. And that's what Recap does. They provide non-dilutive funding to growth companies across the UK, Germany, and the Netherlands with tickets from 100k to 3 million. It's built for companies already earning real revenue. Their platform helps you work out how much funding and what kind would fit you best based on your actual financials and goals. So, if funding is on your mind, head to recap.com, that's recap.com.
Set up your account and get an instant fundability check. In a few minutes, you will know where the recap can fund you and how much.
Alex, good to see you. Thanks for coming on the podcast today.

**Aleks Đekić** (1:35)
Thank you for having me.

**Alex Theuma** (1:37)
So, Alguna in a sentence, for those that don't know, what is it?

**Aleks Đekić** (1:42)
Alguna helps B2B companies and AI companies with pricing, quoting and billing across their whole customer lifecycle. From the first quote they sent to a customer all the way to the last invoice. Hopefully, never the last invoice, but in the case they don't pay, we will still be able to help them to chase it.

**Alex Theuma** (1:58)
What led you to build Alguna?
Maybe what were you doing before that kind of influenced this? You woke up one night, got this, I want to fix this problem.

**Aleks Đekić** (2:09)
I wish it was just one night. It was a few months and years of painfully experiencing the same problem all over again. I haven't seen any pretty much B2B company that I've been part of, particularly a company called Dojo. I've been able to see how this can work if it's properly set up from the get-go, where your sales team can sell very flexibly and creatively without impacting downstream billing and finance, while them having also the full control on what sales team does. And then moving into my previous company, Payment Orchestrator, we have tried to launch new pricing models, we have tried to launch new features, PLG, similar things, and we've learned over time that if we were to do that properly, we need to integrate five or six different tools. And based on my experience of actually seeing this working out, one day came up and started researching the space and started talking to my now co-founder, Jamie, who I met at that company, and we decided to try it out.

**Alex Theuma** (3:07)
Well, try it out, you did. And I guess if anybody else wants to try it out, I know the barriers to entry to building a product in AI now, it's much lower, much easier. But I imagine this is not something you could do on a Sunday morning, get to a first version of products. How long is it taking you to go and get that version, which is ready for that first customer?

**Aleks Đekić** (3:31)
If it's done in isolation with a specific use case that you want to achieve, it is possible to do it on a Sunday morning.
But the problem comes to scale and flexibility over time. As soon as you add an additional person, your CEO or VP of sales, and they want to do additional discounts, or they want to do credits, and they want to do something else, suddenly that cannot be done overnight because of how long it took us to get that foundation in place to make sure that on a very technical level, whatever sales quotes billing can bill, it takes time because of how B2B specifically has evolved around discount terms, credits, products, usage-based, subscriptions, recurring, hybrid, whatever you can imagine to throw in there to get the deal over the line. But usually billing is lagging because, oh, I can always write that in a spreadsheet, or I can always have a line item on an accounting system that we can just send it as an invoice. So that's where the mode is becoming, where foundations take a lot longer than any VC would like, or any founder would like to be part of. But then if the right foundation is in place, building additional products on top of that, and we have like six to seven different modules built out as a result of that over just the last six months, comes very handy with AI.