[00:00:00] Lucas: Welcome to the building and growing podcast. Today we're very lucky to have Juan Andrade from Rebank with us. Welcome Juan.
[00:00:11] Juan: Hey, Hey, how's it going?
[00:00:12] Lucas: Good. Good. Thanks so much for joining us on, uh, a sunny day in London, which is a rare enough occasion.
[00:00:18] Juan: Yeah but being in a basement on a sunny day has its perks, I guess.
[00:00:23] Lucas: That's it we'll make it worthwhile. Juan, thanks so much for joining us today. Do you mind quickly introducing yourself and Rebank?
[00:00:34] Juan: Yeah, sure, so I am half of the team that started Rebank, we started back in 2018 and you know, before I started that company, I was spending a lot of time in financial services.
[00:00:52] Juan: So I started in general insurance, moved into digital cash and cards and then right before I started Rebank, I spent time on the eCommerce side, looking at checkouts and retail payments. Rebank itself, when we started it and where we are now, I mean, we've always focused on essentially the same problem.
[00:01:16] Juan: But the way that we describe it has always has changed consistently. The way we describe Rebank now is that we help companies control spend, and that means that we help them have a single point where all of their finances live so they can understand what's actually going on, and alongside that help them with their money movements.
[00:01:37] Lucas: Okay, fantastic. So it's I imagine a web based dashboard and who would you say the main user of Rebank? Would it be a CFO or a business owner?
[00:01:54] Juan: Yeah it's a web app right now and it's a self-serve product, so you can start using it in a few minutes and because of that, a lot of our customers are founders of startups, as it's one of our core targets, but we are seeing some of our best sort of users are companies where the finance team is just growing and developing and they bring us on to help them automate some stuff. So yeah, about 80 20 split between founders and finance teams.
[00:02:25] Lucas: All right, and in terms of the problems that Rebank solves for the founders verse, the finance teams, do you find them to be same or are there particularities that a founder might face versus a finance team?
[00:02:42] Juan: Well, it's all on one trajectory really of a company's development because it's finances, so finances always starts with the founder and then it evolves into the CFO, the FD and so on.
[00:02:57] Juan: So we, I guess what we've ended up doing is useful from founder that has raised money up to CFO, running a team of 20 finance people. That's sort of the window right now, and of course, depending on the company and the person using the product, there are slightly different things that we solve internally.
[00:03:24] Juan: We split it up into data problems and payment problems.
[00:03:29] Lucas: Okay and could you elaborate, let's start perhaps with the data problems.
[00:03:37] Juan: Yeah, it all goes back to how we started, I was at secret escapes, a travel startup and I was just noticing how painful it was to extract data from corporate banking, portals, like Barclays and TSB and the whole team kind of felt that as well.
[00:03:55] Juan: So one thing we've always aimed to do is basically replace the corporate banking portal for businesses so that they don't have to email relationship managers or have to download CSVs to get basic information. So yes, on the data side, it all boils down to giving you access to all of your financial banking data, no matter where it sits in a Easily searchable, reliable and, and real time manner, and that means different things. So you can send information to slack, to a private channel. You can send it to WhatsApp. You can search through five plus years of transaction history in one global transaction list, so yeah, teams use that side of it slightly differently.
[00:04:47] Lucas: Fantastic. In terms of financial metrics and data, I can probably pop off a couple of things about revenue and net income and whatnot, but what type of financial metrics or key data metrics, do you see your users calculating that previously, let's say may have been very difficult to?
[00:05:15] Juan: The big one is cash position or essentially cash balance at a point in time. So, what they normally do is some combination of using spreadsheets or just a piece of paper and writing down all of the balances, logging into each bank and writing it all down and then using that, either to share an investor update or whatever else they need to do for reporting. What we can do for them automatically, is we take all of their banks and finance apps and we're focussed on global startups, so any bank in north America and Europe, you can connect and we give them their cash balance.
[00:06:00] Juan: We do the exchanges, we show them in one currency, so do it all for them in real time. That's sort of the key thing when we speak to founders, they're like, yeah, I was doing this with Excel or whatever, now I can just check. So from that, a few things flow, if you know what your cash is, then you can work out your runway and how much you are spending and we have recently gone deeper into that question, you know, where is my money going? Essentially, we look at it that way, because every company needs to know that. So like just to give one more sort of metric other than cash and runway, it really is your, let's call it spend categories.
[00:06:45] Juan: So like maybe a hundred grand is spent per every month, but where is that actually going? Your accounting tool is gonna give you some crusty accounting categories, which don't really make sense to a founder, so we let you categorize those transactions in a human way.
[00:07:05] Juan: And we search once you do that, we search for them throughout like in perpetuity and historically, so you can very quickly tag AWS spend and we can go back three years and find everything. It's become personally like the most enjoyable thing. What I see in our logs, it is that it becomes a little game for early users in the first session where they will discover like auto categorization, they tag something like Uber, and then we show them like, hey, we found 300 other transactions that are like this - do you want us to categorize them? They're like, yes, and when that happens, we see them spend like most of the first few sessions just categorizing everything. So yeah, that's pretty cool.
[00:07:54] Lucas: That's excellent, wow, I mean, that's a true deep dive into the data side, and you might have seen me making some notes there because I think it's super important to know and understand that capability. So in terms of the pain point with data, it's helping companies, founders and finance teams to extract data that traditionally from corporate banking portals was difficult to extract, and then they're able to calculate different metrics like cash balance at a particular point in time, categorize things in a more effective manner. So let's say that's the data bucket, unless there's anything that you wanna add there before we dive into payments?
[00:08:45] Juan: Yeah. I mean, payments is really the core value proposition actually.
[00:08:50] Juan: Okay. So I talked about data a lot because there's just so much that banks don't do for companies that we are doing, but the payment side is, I guess, if I describe the problem that we saw originally, was the most complained about thing. When we spoke to startups and friends that would, you know, give us 20 minutes of their time before we started anything, payments always came up as the most painful, annoying thing to do in a business, sending money.
[00:09:22] Juan: What this has become now, is that with Rebank, once you verify your account and so on, you can send money to anywhere in the world, which, you know, there's nothing unique there, but you can also send batch payments or bulk payments. You can make salary payments, invoice uploads, so we really give you the ability to move money in any way that you need to instead of having to use your bank for salaries and then Wise for your contractors and then Payoneer for something else. You no longer have to use all of these different tools, it all lives in Rebank.
[00:10:06] Lucas: Okay, so you really can sort of consolidate all of the payments into one space.
[00:10:14] Lucas: When you were providing that answer just then you mentioned say, Wise and Payoneer, I know in some of the marketing videos and material you guys have produced, you've mentioned multiple different financial services providers that could be used in conjunction or separately.
[00:10:35] Lucas: What is your value proposition? And how could you use Rebank in conjunction with say Wise and Revolut?
[00:10:43] Juan: Yeah, that's where we sort of took this insight, this thing that very few people understand and we've just sort of gone with it. No one seems to be, Well, no one has tried to do the same way yet, which isn't good or bad but we essentially sit on top of all of those finance solutions.
[00:11:07] Juan: So Rebank is more useful when you have more of those, whetheryou have a bank in the US, a bank in the UK and another country, and you have Wise on top of it and PayPal, right? So we don't necessarily replace,most of those, we simplify all of those operational processes because instead of having to look at all of them and learn all of the different workflows there, you just use one, which is us. So yeah, we do integrate into all of them and they're kind of necessary for Rebank to be useful.
[00:11:46] Lucas: Fantastic, that's really good to know.
[00:11:48] Lucas: From the payment side, you consolidate, you simplify the process by sitting on top of all of the other sort of financial service providers that your clients might use. So that's really good to understand. One of the questions that I had prepared is asking you about what type of considerations a founder should take into account when it comes to international payments, as they scale their business?
[00:12:25] Juan: Well, there's different answers for Europe and the US, and then there is a different answer post COVID. What considerations, I guess don't do anything with your bank, that's it! Never send money internationally with a bank,you always look for an alternative provider because over the last 10 years, they've just, that is what has been happening in FinTech, everyone sort of specialized into one aspect of what a bank should be doing. That's all, I'd say.
[00:13:10] Juan: I guess one thing that we are seeing post COVID is that even US companies that would never have to even think about like international, are now sort of trying to learn more about it, become aware and start using us and other products like us.
[00:13:28] Juan: I guess, yeah, I guess that's something new. So I think more and more startups are, are global by default and we've noticed that interest in the amount in our growth recently in the last few months. Uh, so yeah, don't use a bank.
[00:13:46] Lucas: Fantastic and I really like the point you made about
[00:13:51] Lucas: the US and US companies looking more global. It'll be interesting now as interest rates increase and the dollar certainly strengthens, whether US companies start to hire more remotely in say Europe and that could be another very good use case for you to help those us clients out.
[00:14:14] Juan: Yeah. I think the companies that are thinking about those trends are probably so big that they would then, you know, if they wanted to double down on a trend like that, they would then start opening offices in Europe but l our customers would be sort of up to 200 employees.
[00:14:35] Juan: I would say for our customers, they are already starting to work with international contractors or vendors, so yeah, we're just seeing more of them.
[00:14:47] Lucas: Okay, fantastic. So I wanna loop back a little bit towards the data side. At the moment, we are in a difficult economic situation and it's probably gonna get worse before it gets better. What advice would you give to founders? What key metrics should they be looking out for as time goes on?
[00:15:18] Juan: You know, this is what we do every week. We created something called roast my finance stack, where a founder or someone in a company can submit a few details and we basically roast everything about the way they do finances.
[00:15:34] Juan: We imagine if we were the CFO and we came in, what would we change or what would we do? I think to answer that, I'm gonna tell you what we are seeing on that side of things and you know to sort of qualify it, this is early stage companies that we are seeing mostly using this.
[00:15:58] Juan: What we are seeing from them is that even though there's been countless articles and content about being more finance savvy, there's all these multiples that are coming up, so we don't need to repeat them. But even though that, that everyone is saying that I don't really think people outside of a finance background really know how to do that. I mean, point in case, I think a few weeks ago, a really well known company and founder, they've just like for reasons that I don't understand, they've just gone bust. And I think this is happening all over the place where these great companies, once great companies are going bust.
[00:16:41] Juan: We think because it's because there's a disconnect between finances and the rest of the business. So what should you do?
[00:16:51] Juan: First of all do you have a disconnect with your finances? I mean, there's a quick way to tell when your forecasts look a little bit too optimistic and you're feeling sort of pumped about, even if you don't reach them, they're still optimistic.
[00:17:07] Juan: You haven't done anything to change your burn in the last few months, you haven't reacted to all the news and continuing on your sort of new projects and development without really assessing whether any of them have given you any positive ROI. Those like are the big outcomes of having a strong connection between finance and the business.
[00:17:32] Juan: So what to do? I think there's so many ways to look at this, but, companies where finance has a loud voice or a voice at the table are the ones that are gonna do well. Let's make that a bit more tangible, I think a founder's responsibility here would be to understand how they're performing against budget, how that is affecting their runway, on a week by week basis and what the escape velocity is that they need, meaning how do they get to cash flow positive without any money. If they don't see a way to get to cash flow positive with no extra funding, then alarm bills should be ringing and they should be doing difficult things. I feel like many won't take those difficult decisions, but we'll see.
[00:18:36] Lucas: Sure, so this term escape velocity: how to get to profitability without extra funding. That's one that I haven't come across before.
[00:18:48] Juan: Well, yeah, I mean, it's because it's a combination of your growth rate and you know, the cash you have left to use. Going into sort of an example with us, we're depending on the month, we're either like slightly over or just within budget in terms of our growth. So every positive month,instead of think thinking like, okay, we're like we're doing well, we're on track, let's keep this up. We're like, okay, well, this means we can now bring on another couple of thousand to reinvest. How do we put more money into this engine to speed us up? That's led to us, we've had to alter our burn, we've cut it by 30% but with continued progress with our growth we're now like, okay, how do we reinvest? How do we bring on a contractor or what is the problem that if we fix it, we'll increase our escape velocity. It's about taking risks, actually. Hopefully it doesn't come across like I'm saying don't take risks. It's actually take calculated risks.
[00:20:06] Lucas: One of the other multiples that we were discussing the other day was the burn multiple. So I've learned two, new definitions about multiples this week from you. Do you mind talking a little bit about the burn multiple and why you gave it so much importance the other day?
[00:20:26] Juan: I think it came from another saas multiple, but it was devised by the team at Craft Ventures, David Sacks, who I think was a former PayPal executive. He devised this way to just a very simple sort of no BS way to figure out how effectively you were spending.
[00:20:52] Juan: Okay. So it's a high level metric, right? So you'd need to dive into the details more once you do this. So like CAC to LTV and fully blended CAC and all of that is sort of far more granular, but at a highest level, it is your last quarter's burn compared to the quarters revenue that you gained.
[00:21:13] Juan: And what you end up with is a multiple where essentially at the early stage companies will be around three to four, and further stage companies are closer to one. That means like initially you are going to be spending so much that you only make a quarter of the revenue back, from that spend quarter of the money back and that's why your burn multiple is something like four and that's okay in the early stages. We actually put a calculator on our website so that you can know what this is, so people can check it out, but yeah, that is the burn multiple at a high level.
[00:22:00] Juan: How effectively are you burning cash to make money in the quarter?
[00:22:05] Lucas: Fantastic. So if I spend 10,000 but I only bring in 5,000, my burn multiple would be two. So escape, velocity and burn multiple two fantastic takeaways. Thank you for those Juan. Do you have any key takeaways that you'd like CFOs or founders watching the podcast to leave with?
[00:22:36] Juan: There's so much advice out there right now and I'm doing my best to sort of share what we are learning from speaking to our customers. But really now is kind of the time to shut the world out and focus on your business.
[00:22:56] Lucas: Juan, thank you so much for joining us today and talking about Rebank, how you're helping businesses to gain access to more financial data that they have, create streamlined payments as well as for the deep insights on burn metrics and escape velocity.
[00:23:24] Lucas: We're looking forward to, to welcoming you back soon to discuss the marketing aspect. I think that podcast is probably gonna be called how non marketers created a killer marketing strategy. So thank you so much for your time. Anything that you wanna add before we round up?
[00:23:46] Juan: Yeah, no, thanks, Lucas.
[00:23:47] Lucas: Thanks so much, Juan.
[00:00:11] Juan: Hey, Hey, how's it going?
[00:00:12] Lucas: Good. Good. Thanks so much for joining us on, uh, a sunny day in London, which is a rare enough occasion.
[00:00:18] Juan: Yeah but being in a basement on a sunny day has its perks, I guess.
[00:00:23] Lucas: That's it we'll make it worthwhile. Juan, thanks so much for joining us today. Do you mind quickly introducing yourself and Rebank?
[00:00:34] Juan: Yeah, sure, so I am half of the team that started Rebank, we started back in 2018 and you know, before I started that company, I was spending a lot of time in financial services.
[00:00:52] Juan: So I started in general insurance, moved into digital cash and cards and then right before I started Rebank, I spent time on the eCommerce side, looking at checkouts and retail payments. Rebank itself, when we started it and where we are now, I mean, we've always focused on essentially the same problem.
[00:01:16] Juan: But the way that we describe it has always has changed consistently. The way we describe Rebank now is that we help companies control spend, and that means that we help them have a single point where all of their finances live so they can understand what's actually going on, and alongside that help them with their money movements.
[00:01:37] Lucas: Okay, fantastic. So it's I imagine a web based dashboard and who would you say the main user of Rebank? Would it be a CFO or a business owner?
[00:01:54] Juan: Yeah it's a web app right now and it's a self-serve product, so you can start using it in a few minutes and because of that, a lot of our customers are founders of startups, as it's one of our core targets, but we are seeing some of our best sort of users are companies where the finance team is just growing and developing and they bring us on to help them automate some stuff. So yeah, about 80 20 split between founders and finance teams.
[00:02:25] Lucas: All right, and in terms of the problems that Rebank solves for the founders verse, the finance teams, do you find them to be same or are there particularities that a founder might face versus a finance team?
[00:02:42] Juan: Well, it's all on one trajectory really of a company's development because it's finances, so finances always starts with the founder and then it evolves into the CFO, the FD and so on.
[00:02:57] Juan: So we, I guess what we've ended up doing is useful from founder that has raised money up to CFO, running a team of 20 finance people. That's sort of the window right now, and of course, depending on the company and the person using the product, there are slightly different things that we solve internally.
[00:03:24] Juan: We split it up into data problems and payment problems.
[00:03:29] Lucas: Okay and could you elaborate, let's start perhaps with the data problems.
[00:03:37] Juan: Yeah, it all goes back to how we started, I was at secret escapes, a travel startup and I was just noticing how painful it was to extract data from corporate banking, portals, like Barclays and TSB and the whole team kind of felt that as well.
[00:03:55] Juan: So one thing we've always aimed to do is basically replace the corporate banking portal for businesses so that they don't have to email relationship managers or have to download CSVs to get basic information. So yes, on the data side, it all boils down to giving you access to all of your financial banking data, no matter where it sits in a Easily searchable, reliable and, and real time manner, and that means different things. So you can send information to slack, to a private channel. You can send it to WhatsApp. You can search through five plus years of transaction history in one global transaction list, so yeah, teams use that side of it slightly differently.
[00:04:47] Lucas: Fantastic. In terms of financial metrics and data, I can probably pop off a couple of things about revenue and net income and whatnot, but what type of financial metrics or key data metrics, do you see your users calculating that previously, let's say may have been very difficult to?
[00:05:15] Juan: The big one is cash position or essentially cash balance at a point in time. So, what they normally do is some combination of using spreadsheets or just a piece of paper and writing down all of the balances, logging into each bank and writing it all down and then using that, either to share an investor update or whatever else they need to do for reporting. What we can do for them automatically, is we take all of their banks and finance apps and we're focussed on global startups, so any bank in north America and Europe, you can connect and we give them their cash balance.
[00:06:00] Juan: We do the exchanges, we show them in one currency, so do it all for them in real time. That's sort of the key thing when we speak to founders, they're like, yeah, I was doing this with Excel or whatever, now I can just check. So from that, a few things flow, if you know what your cash is, then you can work out your runway and how much you are spending and we have recently gone deeper into that question, you know, where is my money going? Essentially, we look at it that way, because every company needs to know that. So like just to give one more sort of metric other than cash and runway, it really is your, let's call it spend categories.
[00:06:45] Juan: So like maybe a hundred grand is spent per every month, but where is that actually going? Your accounting tool is gonna give you some crusty accounting categories, which don't really make sense to a founder, so we let you categorize those transactions in a human way.
[00:07:05] Juan: And we search once you do that, we search for them throughout like in perpetuity and historically, so you can very quickly tag AWS spend and we can go back three years and find everything. It's become personally like the most enjoyable thing. What I see in our logs, it is that it becomes a little game for early users in the first session where they will discover like auto categorization, they tag something like Uber, and then we show them like, hey, we found 300 other transactions that are like this - do you want us to categorize them? They're like, yes, and when that happens, we see them spend like most of the first few sessions just categorizing everything. So yeah, that's pretty cool.
[00:07:54] Lucas: That's excellent, wow, I mean, that's a true deep dive into the data side, and you might have seen me making some notes there because I think it's super important to know and understand that capability. So in terms of the pain point with data, it's helping companies, founders and finance teams to extract data that traditionally from corporate banking portals was difficult to extract, and then they're able to calculate different metrics like cash balance at a particular point in time, categorize things in a more effective manner. So let's say that's the data bucket, unless there's anything that you wanna add there before we dive into payments?
[00:08:45] Juan: Yeah. I mean, payments is really the core value proposition actually.
[00:08:50] Juan: Okay. So I talked about data a lot because there's just so much that banks don't do for companies that we are doing, but the payment side is, I guess, if I describe the problem that we saw originally, was the most complained about thing. When we spoke to startups and friends that would, you know, give us 20 minutes of their time before we started anything, payments always came up as the most painful, annoying thing to do in a business, sending money.
[00:09:22] Juan: What this has become now, is that with Rebank, once you verify your account and so on, you can send money to anywhere in the world, which, you know, there's nothing unique there, but you can also send batch payments or bulk payments. You can make salary payments, invoice uploads, so we really give you the ability to move money in any way that you need to instead of having to use your bank for salaries and then Wise for your contractors and then Payoneer for something else. You no longer have to use all of these different tools, it all lives in Rebank.
[00:10:06] Lucas: Okay, so you really can sort of consolidate all of the payments into one space.
[00:10:14] Lucas: When you were providing that answer just then you mentioned say, Wise and Payoneer, I know in some of the marketing videos and material you guys have produced, you've mentioned multiple different financial services providers that could be used in conjunction or separately.
[00:10:35] Lucas: What is your value proposition? And how could you use Rebank in conjunction with say Wise and Revolut?
[00:10:43] Juan: Yeah, that's where we sort of took this insight, this thing that very few people understand and we've just sort of gone with it. No one seems to be, Well, no one has tried to do the same way yet, which isn't good or bad but we essentially sit on top of all of those finance solutions.
[00:11:07] Juan: So Rebank is more useful when you have more of those, whetheryou have a bank in the US, a bank in the UK and another country, and you have Wise on top of it and PayPal, right? So we don't necessarily replace,most of those, we simplify all of those operational processes because instead of having to look at all of them and learn all of the different workflows there, you just use one, which is us. So yeah, we do integrate into all of them and they're kind of necessary for Rebank to be useful.
[00:11:46] Lucas: Fantastic, that's really good to know.
[00:11:48] Lucas: From the payment side, you consolidate, you simplify the process by sitting on top of all of the other sort of financial service providers that your clients might use. So that's really good to understand. One of the questions that I had prepared is asking you about what type of considerations a founder should take into account when it comes to international payments, as they scale their business?
[00:12:25] Juan: Well, there's different answers for Europe and the US, and then there is a different answer post COVID. What considerations, I guess don't do anything with your bank, that's it! Never send money internationally with a bank,you always look for an alternative provider because over the last 10 years, they've just, that is what has been happening in FinTech, everyone sort of specialized into one aspect of what a bank should be doing. That's all, I'd say.
[00:13:10] Juan: I guess one thing that we are seeing post COVID is that even US companies that would never have to even think about like international, are now sort of trying to learn more about it, become aware and start using us and other products like us.
[00:13:28] Juan: I guess, yeah, I guess that's something new. So I think more and more startups are, are global by default and we've noticed that interest in the amount in our growth recently in the last few months. Uh, so yeah, don't use a bank.
[00:13:46] Lucas: Fantastic and I really like the point you made about
[00:13:51] Lucas: the US and US companies looking more global. It'll be interesting now as interest rates increase and the dollar certainly strengthens, whether US companies start to hire more remotely in say Europe and that could be another very good use case for you to help those us clients out.
[00:14:14] Juan: Yeah. I think the companies that are thinking about those trends are probably so big that they would then, you know, if they wanted to double down on a trend like that, they would then start opening offices in Europe but l our customers would be sort of up to 200 employees.
[00:14:35] Juan: I would say for our customers, they are already starting to work with international contractors or vendors, so yeah, we're just seeing more of them.
[00:14:47] Lucas: Okay, fantastic. So I wanna loop back a little bit towards the data side. At the moment, we are in a difficult economic situation and it's probably gonna get worse before it gets better. What advice would you give to founders? What key metrics should they be looking out for as time goes on?
[00:15:18] Juan: You know, this is what we do every week. We created something called roast my finance stack, where a founder or someone in a company can submit a few details and we basically roast everything about the way they do finances.
[00:15:34] Juan: We imagine if we were the CFO and we came in, what would we change or what would we do? I think to answer that, I'm gonna tell you what we are seeing on that side of things and you know to sort of qualify it, this is early stage companies that we are seeing mostly using this.
[00:15:58] Juan: What we are seeing from them is that even though there's been countless articles and content about being more finance savvy, there's all these multiples that are coming up, so we don't need to repeat them. But even though that, that everyone is saying that I don't really think people outside of a finance background really know how to do that. I mean, point in case, I think a few weeks ago, a really well known company and founder, they've just like for reasons that I don't understand, they've just gone bust. And I think this is happening all over the place where these great companies, once great companies are going bust.
[00:16:41] Juan: We think because it's because there's a disconnect between finances and the rest of the business. So what should you do?
[00:16:51] Juan: First of all do you have a disconnect with your finances? I mean, there's a quick way to tell when your forecasts look a little bit too optimistic and you're feeling sort of pumped about, even if you don't reach them, they're still optimistic.
[00:17:07] Juan: You haven't done anything to change your burn in the last few months, you haven't reacted to all the news and continuing on your sort of new projects and development without really assessing whether any of them have given you any positive ROI. Those like are the big outcomes of having a strong connection between finance and the business.
[00:17:32] Juan: So what to do? I think there's so many ways to look at this, but, companies where finance has a loud voice or a voice at the table are the ones that are gonna do well. Let's make that a bit more tangible, I think a founder's responsibility here would be to understand how they're performing against budget, how that is affecting their runway, on a week by week basis and what the escape velocity is that they need, meaning how do they get to cash flow positive without any money. If they don't see a way to get to cash flow positive with no extra funding, then alarm bills should be ringing and they should be doing difficult things. I feel like many won't take those difficult decisions, but we'll see.
[00:18:36] Lucas: Sure, so this term escape velocity: how to get to profitability without extra funding. That's one that I haven't come across before.
[00:18:48] Juan: Well, yeah, I mean, it's because it's a combination of your growth rate and you know, the cash you have left to use. Going into sort of an example with us, we're depending on the month, we're either like slightly over or just within budget in terms of our growth. So every positive month,instead of think thinking like, okay, we're like we're doing well, we're on track, let's keep this up. We're like, okay, well, this means we can now bring on another couple of thousand to reinvest. How do we put more money into this engine to speed us up? That's led to us, we've had to alter our burn, we've cut it by 30% but with continued progress with our growth we're now like, okay, how do we reinvest? How do we bring on a contractor or what is the problem that if we fix it, we'll increase our escape velocity. It's about taking risks, actually. Hopefully it doesn't come across like I'm saying don't take risks. It's actually take calculated risks.
[00:20:06] Lucas: One of the other multiples that we were discussing the other day was the burn multiple. So I've learned two, new definitions about multiples this week from you. Do you mind talking a little bit about the burn multiple and why you gave it so much importance the other day?
[00:20:26] Juan: I think it came from another saas multiple, but it was devised by the team at Craft Ventures, David Sacks, who I think was a former PayPal executive. He devised this way to just a very simple sort of no BS way to figure out how effectively you were spending.
[00:20:52] Juan: Okay. So it's a high level metric, right? So you'd need to dive into the details more once you do this. So like CAC to LTV and fully blended CAC and all of that is sort of far more granular, but at a highest level, it is your last quarter's burn compared to the quarters revenue that you gained.
[00:21:13] Juan: And what you end up with is a multiple where essentially at the early stage companies will be around three to four, and further stage companies are closer to one. That means like initially you are going to be spending so much that you only make a quarter of the revenue back, from that spend quarter of the money back and that's why your burn multiple is something like four and that's okay in the early stages. We actually put a calculator on our website so that you can know what this is, so people can check it out, but yeah, that is the burn multiple at a high level.
[00:22:00] Juan: How effectively are you burning cash to make money in the quarter?
[00:22:05] Lucas: Fantastic. So if I spend 10,000 but I only bring in 5,000, my burn multiple would be two. So escape, velocity and burn multiple two fantastic takeaways. Thank you for those Juan. Do you have any key takeaways that you'd like CFOs or founders watching the podcast to leave with?
[00:22:36] Juan: There's so much advice out there right now and I'm doing my best to sort of share what we are learning from speaking to our customers. But really now is kind of the time to shut the world out and focus on your business.
[00:22:56] Lucas: Juan, thank you so much for joining us today and talking about Rebank, how you're helping businesses to gain access to more financial data that they have, create streamlined payments as well as for the deep insights on burn metrics and escape velocity.
[00:23:24] Lucas: We're looking forward to, to welcoming you back soon to discuss the marketing aspect. I think that podcast is probably gonna be called how non marketers created a killer marketing strategy. So thank you so much for your time. Anything that you wanna add before we round up?
[00:23:46] Juan: Yeah, no, thanks, Lucas.
[00:23:47] Lucas: Thanks so much, Juan.