The Challenges of a Start-Up entering a Mature Market - with Nicolas Kopp, Founder and CEO Rillet

**Ray Wright** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, Founder and CEO of BenchMarket, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of the top B2B SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, CEOs, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed and benchmark validated decisions. Now, on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. Today, we're joined by Nick Kopp, the founder and CEO of Rillet. Today, we'll be covering four main topic areas with Nick. First, the unique accounting challenges in a recurring revenue model. Second, revenue recognition. Why is this so important to get right? Third, financial performance reporting beyond the income statement and spouse sheet.
And fourth, the unique challenges of founding and leading a new startup and a very mature category. So with that backdrop, Nick, would you please take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics Measure Up podcast?

**Nicolas Kopp** (1:20)
Good to be here. Thanks for having me, Ray. Founded Rillet. We founded it roughly three years ago as a company.
My background is very much in finance and accounting. So I did a bunch of years in investment banking, working very closely with the accountants on the respective transactions we were doing. And then I helped build a fintech company out of Europe, called N26, which went from zero to 150 million in like the four and a half years I was there. So it was a very exciting time. And we implemented a lot of finance totals and accounting totals, so that inspired Rillet.

**Ray Wright** (1:49)
What did you do in that company that scaled so fast? What was your role there?

**Nicolas Kopp** (1:52)
I was, it was a mixed bag. So I was brought in to help with a lot of the business processes, operational processes, business development, some of the product work, some of the finance work. So it was very much a mixed bag, all arounder, helping the company grow in scale.

**Ray Wright** (2:06)
Well, what an amazing experience and an experience foundation for founding your own company. But I have to ask, what was the motivation to found a company that's really purpose-built to help manage accounting and finance for recurring revenue business models?

**Nicolas Kopp** (2:25)
A lot of people ask me that question, like it's a really, really hard piece of software to build. It's a little bit of a journey that led us there, actually. So as part of that previous journey that I was on with N26, we implemented a lot of finance tools. We saw firsthand how broken some of these processes were. We had brilliant people in the finance team, like some of the best people that you could imagine working with. And still they struggle pulling together the numbers.
It was a daily grind for them. They were always late with key important information for the exec meetings. So it was tough.
And what really hamstrung them was software and the software they were operating under. Then we first, I always thought it would be really interesting to build an ERP because that's sort of the core of the issue that we have. We looked at multiple softwares at the time, ended up implementing Workday Financial after a very long ERP process there. And so, but I first thought it was going to be too hard to build a company in that space. So then after some sort of ideation, we first built sort of an invoicing Revrec engine, standalone as sort of a point solution with my co-founder at the time.
That was sort of a usage Metric billing at a time. And then we realized that to really help our end buyers and users truly end to end, you had to kind of fully own the process end to end and not just be a point solution, but really own it down into the levels of your GL like NetSuite, for example. And then at some point we decided to just like go for it and build a company to the space that we initially wanted to build into and haven't looked back since then. So it's been a great journey.

**Ray Wright** (3:45)
Well, with your own experience at a company that scales up to 150 million ARR in four years, and now probably talking to a lot of your customers, finance leaders, power users, et cetera. What are some of the most common challenges you see finance professionals facing in the recurring revenue business?

**Nicolas Kopp** (4:05)
So we struggled with a bunch of things at the time, in my previous startup, and coming in here, I almost hoped we would hear very sophisticated problems and really difficult problems that people struggle with. But what we're hearing now from our customers and why Rillet kind of had the traction it had to date was like, it's a simple problems that matter. It's a very simple question of what is actually my ARR, and have a fundamental source record that I trust and I can go back to and reuse.