B2C versus B2B Scaling Strategies

How would you compare the scaling or go-to-market process of Just Eat, in terms of the marketplace they have versus Receipt Bank today?

Very, very different businesses. I would say, the product is much more important at Receipt Bank. At Just Eat, it wasn’t really our technology we were selling. We were selling people food and our technology was a layer that they wanted to get through, as soon as possible, to get their food. At Receipt Bank, we’re a software as a service business. Our customers are paying us an average of £200 plus a month, for our software. It has to be very good software; it has to do what it says on the tin.

We’re bringing real time financial information to small businesses and their accountants. Historically, the cost position of a small business was a bit of a black box. How does a Just Eat restaurant owner know how much money they really have available, when they’ve got invoices from various suppliers, they’ve got their tax bill, they’ve got all these different expenses going out, they’ve got revenue coming in. It’s very hard to know, at any given point, where you stand.

What Receipt Bank is doing, is taking in all of that financial information in real time. We just put an app on the phone, of small businesses, and they scan invoices when the invoices come in and they scan receipts when they are spending money. Our software understands all of that information and categorizes it correctly. If they work with an accountant, we pass it through to their accountant, to compile into their accounts.

Previously, this was all archaeology, looking at what happened long ago, to a business’s account, for compliance purposes. Now, with machine learning, it’s able to compile all this in real time and we can make all this information come to life and make it much more useful for small businesses. That is the kind of thing that Receipt Bank is doing; we’re selling people the software that does this.

When we’re going to market, the product itself is the real thing that we are going to market with. We’re saying, here’s the product; here’s what it does; here’s how it can help you. Education about the product is a huge piece of our go-to-market at Receipt Bank, with all that that implies. There’s a lot of marketing activity associated with that. We have to have a lot of written material that tells people about our product and what it does. Whereas, when we were going to market at Just Eat, we didn’t have to write very much about the product. You order a kebab on an app; that’s it.

Would you make parallels, in terms of the go-to-market strategy? I assume you’re scaling to accountants now?

That’s right. At Receipt Bank, we want to be used by millions of small businesses around the world. The most efficient way to do that is to get their accountants to love you, because an accountant will work with hundreds of small businesses. Now, we work with around 360,000 small businesses, around the world and we’re looking to work with millions more in the future. The most effective to do that is to go to accountants. Because we enable accountants to do so much better, to work with so many more clients and, ultimately, to make so much more money, our product is incredibly popular with them.