Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from Canada: Fusebill CEO Tyler Eyamie (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Can you double click down on the ecosystem and the competitors, because at this point, there were other billing software products in the market. I know this market well.

What products did you look at and what did you consider as competition? What was the competitive position with which your thesis was to go into this market? 

Tyler Eyamie: Zuora, Chargify, and Recurly were all providing different answers to different customer pain points. I didn’t see one company that was laser-focused on solving what I would call mid-market SaaS company pain points. These companies have gotten to a certain point whether they are a startup with little revenue and they have used humans and a payment gateway like QuickBooks to get their invoices out.

It can also be companies in the $10 to $100 million range that have used a homegrown solution similar to Protus that have reached a point of growth where they need to start automating processes. We didn’t see anyone focusing on the midmarket or SME side of the SaaS base. You have Zuora focused on the enterprise.

Recurly and Chargify, at the time when the web 2.0 was starting, were doing a good job in solving a developer problem for recurring payments or billings platforms.

We wanted to focus on the finance problem. We had a C-level finance person fitting with our engineering and product team from day one. We based our entire platform on a general ledger.

We allow our customers the functionality and flexibility when setting up their product catalog with onboarding into Fusebill to control their revenue recognition rules. That is a big differentiator for us.

Zuora acquired a company called Leeyo to solve that problem. Chargify has acquired ProRata to try and solve that problem. We thought about it from day one because managing a large recurring revenue base with all the earned and deferred revenue proration for mid-month changes is a lot to do manually.

Our job and what we are trying to do here at Fusebill is help the finance team automate as much as possible everything to do with the invoicing, payment receipt, as well as the revenue recognition so that they could focus on growing their business. 

Sramana Mitra: You are not doing the entire accounting system right? Is it billing, revenue recognition, and invoice management but not the entire accounting system, or have you built an accounting system around these core capabilities?

Tyler Eyamie: We are not an accounting system. We are just focused on payments, billings, invoicing, and collections. We act as a subledger to be rolled up into a journal entry into products such as QuickBooks and NetSuite. We have direct integration into those platforms. 

Sramana Mitra: In 2011, how did you go into the market? What kind of customers did you use for validation and how did you acquire those customers?

Tyler Eyamie: There are a few phases there. In phase one, we were funding our business out of our own pocket. For us, it meant getting on the phone, getting on Linkedin, and using our networks to start asking folks in our network. We asked them if this thesis holds weight and if they were willing to try the software if we automate the processes. We also asked them about what problems would arise in using this software.

As we started talking to a few people and having them try the software, that was when we raised that seed round to increase the number of team members and get into product development. We also put a bit of capital into the Google machine – putting capital on keywords like subscription billing or SaaS billing to enable more of those conversations.

We kept hearing from the market that a platform like Zuora is just too big and expensive. Meanwhile, the smaller platforms like Recurly and Chargify just weren’t built to handle that B2B finance problem. 

This segment is part 3 in the series : Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from Canada: Fusebill CEO Tyler Eyamie
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