Why AR has 1 million analysts and almost no software that works | Caitlin Leksana

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

How do you enter into the org?

Caitlin Leksana (0:01)

Usually, there's some sort of owner of the AR function. So we're talking about people that usually have at least five people doing accounts receivable. At that point, they have a manager or director or VP that ladders up into, say, the controller and the CFO. Part of our sales process is an education process.

SPEAKER_1 (0:15)

Is there a specific channel that you're going to really double down on in the next 12 months?

Caitlin Leksana (0:18)

Marketing. I didn't hire my first marketer until this past month. We started with a very strong opinion, which is we're going to build the best product for accounts receivable. And that's what we did, and that got us our first customer. And now it's like, we're going to build the best for you in accounts receivable.

SPEAKER_1 (0:33)

As you've scaled out the sales team, have there been any missteps that you could share with the founders listening in?

Caitlin Leksana (0:38)

So a lot of things didn't work. The way I went about it was like...

SPEAKER_1 (0:45)

Caitlin, welcome to the show.

Caitlin Leksana (0:46)

Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_1 (0:47)

Of course. Excited to jump in. So you don't come from this world. You don't come from the finance world. How'd you end up here?

Caitlin Leksana (0:52)

Yeah, it's a roundabout story, but I tell my co-founder that we had to go through everything to get where we are today. So our background, we met at Harvard Business School. It's how we know each other. I come from the world of BCG and management consulting, and then went to Harvard Business School, so very traditional path. Originally started out as a mechanical engineer. My co-founder and CTO was MIT, Computer Science Underground Masters. He then spent seven years as a nuclear sub-brain officer in the US Navy, taught cyber security at the US Naval Academy, and then got his MBA from Harvard. So he was a very unique person, but really, really brilliant.

And he convinced me while we were in business school that we should do a startup together. There's no better time to jump in to the deep end than right after business school. So that's what we did. And we started another startup before this one, which was in the crypto space. And it's funny because we assumed everyone would pay us via crypto to our wallets and all of that good stuff. And they actually wanted to negotiate complex contracts and pay us via fiat on quarterly invoicing with not 30 terms. And all of a sudden we figured out what accounts receivable was. But we didn't actually know what accounts receivable was. It was the first time I have even put an invoice together, and I was like, holy crap, this is really hard. And if it's hard for me, like maybe other people have this problem too. Maybe other startup founders have this problem.

So that sort of inspired us to start exploring the space. And that's where we really started to understand, like, what accounts receivable was, how big the problem was, how unsolved it was. And that just got us more and more excited.

So much so that we ended up pivoting to Fazeshift and the rest is history.

SPEAKER_1 (2:25)

For that first invoice, did you do what many founders do, myself included, where you make the number higher than one? Of course! You can't send one!

Caitlin Leksana (2:32)

Of course! You said, like, 56 or something, so it makes it seem like you have so many customers. That's exactly what I did. That's very funny.

SPEAKER_1 (2:40)

That's awesome. I think every founder has to do that. You look at that first invoice, this can't be the first one.

So as you started to think about going after this problem, I'm sure you were studying others who've tried to do it. Why were their efforts unsuccessful? Where did you see as you were opening in your opportunity here?

Caitlin Leksana (2:56)

Yeah, it was a very sort of like, almost like bottoms up approach to building a startup. So our first startup, we came very much of like, where we thinks there's the white space, what's missing in the market. And we realized that's how you find anti-product market fit. And I had to try to sell a product that nobody wanted to buy, and it was the hardest thing I've ever done.

And so we learned how to do a proper startup, which means you just talk to as many people that are willing to talk to you, and you just learn as much as possible. And so I wasn't sort of asking like, oh, what did the other companies miss? And all this sort of actually VC speak, it was more of like, what are the problems? How many people have this problem? And can we solve it with technology? And then we took a very early startup mindset of like, find one customer who loves what you have to offer, and just find the second one, and then the third one, and that was the approach we took. So I cold called, cold emailed, cold LinkedIn DMed, like 100 VPs, directors of finance and accounting. And I was like, I'm not selling anything, I promise you. I'm actually shutting my startup down, but I just want to learn about this. Do you have 30 minutes to teach me about this, how you do AR at your company? And they'd get in a call and they would rant at me for 30 minutes about how painful accounts receivable was. And I was like, this feels like product market fit. Like people would not even get in a call with me and they'd send me a very long, thoughtful message about all of the problems that they had. And like these people really want their problem solved. And that was the sort of pull from the market I don't think I felt at the prior startup. And I was like, this is a problem we're solving.