How this AI founder is on track to hit $50M ARR just 2 years after launch. | Tarek Alaruri, Co-Founder of Stuut

You know, you hear a lot of investors, like seed investors, early stage investors, that they're always like, hey, you're betting on the founder. Your early customers are betting on you. And so you need to be able to start showing them progressable milestones. You got to show them week after week, hey, we're making progress here, we're building this, et cetera. And then also getting their thoughts. You know, if they're so frustrated that they're like, hey, I'm going to find this random ass dude in New York off the streets, pay him $65,000 to solve this problem for me. Clearly they're like pretty excited about trying to solve the problem. And so you really want to find people that are just like, I need to get shit done at an incredible clip. I am going to live like there is no tomorrow and I'm going to make decisions at 100 miles per hour. They might be wrong decisions, but I'll quickly make a decision to correct it. I mean, sales is fucking brutal. Like if anyone's telling you they have like a one out of five clothes right, they're full of shit. For you, when was the moment when you felt like you'd hit true product market fit? I don't think I'll ever find that moment in my life. You know, my view is that it's consistently refining. You know, the minute that we feel like we've found something or we've made something, then you know, you're kind of resting on your laurels. And there's no more dangerous place to be in the world than just kind of like letting life happen. That's product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. I called it the product market fit question. Product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. I mean, the name of the show is product market fit. Do you think the product market fit show has product market fit? Because if you do, then there's something you just have to do. You have to take out your phone. You have to leave the show five stars. It lets us reach more founders and it lets us get better guests. Thank you. Tarek, welcome to the show, man. Thanks for having me, Pablo. So looking forward to this one, man. I mean, you just came off a pretty big, pretty big series A, man, like almost $30 million from A16 late 2025 meeting series A these days, like 12 million. And that's already grown quite a bit. So congrats on the fundraising side. And maybe tell me a little bit about what you're building and then we'll kind of jump into the storyline from there. Yeah, 100%. This is the second company I've started. This one is trying to tackle a lot of problems I've saw early on my career, but I started a company called Stute, where an AI platform that helps do the receivable work instead of just assisting. So if you're not familiar with the receivables, it's like you sell something and then you need to collect the money, see if it showed up in your bank account. If there's an issue, try to triage it. So we build AI agents for that and we collect 40% more revenue by autonomously handling it versus having people handle it. So like our tagline is you work nine to five and Stute works five to nine so you can punch off and have a family life. And is it like a replacement ROI that you're selling? Like you don't need AI specialists anymore or do you like enhance? What's the positioning? Yeah, it kind of just depends on the company. So we sell the flyover state businesses. I'm from Michigan. I think like industrial manufacturing distribution, those types of companies. And we really augment teams. Some people are like, we might want to move accounts receivable back to sales. Sometimes there's people in warehouses that do it as a part-time job or even like our larger enterprises like Honeywell, they just don't have the account penetration. Think like somebody in accounts receivable can probably cover like 200 accounts a month. With AI now you're able to cover like 5,000. And so most companies actually are losing about 5% of their revenue trying to collect payments and matching up all the cash and handling with all the bullshit. And are you seeing more of one more of like, oh, I've got 10 people now I'm going to have three and you're AI or more of the like, I have 10 people now I'm just going to collect more and keep all 10. Yeah, it depends on the business, but I'd say the vast, vast majority is like we're keeping the team and we're just making everything more efficient and we're able to give more. Gotcha. When did you start this? 2024? 2024, yeah. So you started your product at the end of 24 and then the last year was our first year really selling the product and trying to find product market fit. So you mentioned this is your second start. What was the first one and kind of like, what was the outcome there? Yeah, I started a company called Fair Market with one of my former coworkers and the whole genesis of the business. The last one I started was that no two people pay the same price for anything or no company does. And so we wanted to build a better sourcing or quotation engine for large enterprises. Another like unsexy back office finance space, but I absolutely love trying to improve this kind of stuff. And so this was on the buy side, like you'd help buyers negotiate better pricing by having better visibility. Yeah, exactly. So the concept was like, you know, if you're a large company, like some of our customers would be like Amazon, BP, Boeing, Exxon, Louisville. You buy a lot of the same stuff, but you buy it from the same supplier, but you have multiple suppliers that can sell you the same thing. So like IE, if you're buying a laptop or we're a company like Amazon, you have, you know, 50 suppliers that can sell you the same laptop. They just, people at Amazon don't have the bandwidth to go out and get multiple quotes for it. And so that's what we would do using FuzzyBurt and some algorithms on top of their ERP systems. And how big did that grow? Like what was the ultimate outcome? Yeah, we grew it in six years to, you know, like I'd say low, right around like $20, $30 million in revenue. So think like SaaS business, it's still going, you know, learned a lot in the process. I was getting married in 2024, also had a kid next year. So wanted to try to knock out like a new chapter of my life and try to take what I learned and try to improve and better myself. And then, you know, people around me every day trying to do, how do you win the day and how do you take what you learned and build something new? But did you leave to start stoop? Or did you leave to think about something else that you might start? No, I left to start stoop. You know, the whole, whole concept, I think it's a, you know, my opinion was really big business, really big opportunity here. You have multiple winners in the SaaS space. You have like legacy incumbent players. They have billion dollar outcomes. No one's been like a 50, $100 million business. And now with AI, you can actually start to roll in this service component, which is about a hundred and $200 billion globally a year into the space. And so trying to hit a home run one time in my career, take something public, hopefully build a generational business. You know, somebody's got to try it. Might as well be me. Can you tell me a little bit more about like where the idea comes from? Because it's not easy to have ideas when you're like all in running, you know, $20, $30 million business. I think that's a great question. I personally try to take notes on like things that I see are like pesky problems and keep like a running list. So like if there's a little founder is listening, feel free to email me, Tarek, it's stew, and I'm happy to send you the list over. There's a lot of things that I've like, you know, I'd love to start. I don't know if I'm the right person to start. You also, it's kind of like a lot of this is luck. So you kind of be got to be right place, right time, work your ass off, try to maximize how you like attack the day. Sometimes like not making decisions more important than just like running to make a decision. But some of the other things I was looking at is like, you know, there's no really like one medical for veterans or there's no like real good, you know, thing that's privatization. And you, you know, I have a lot of friends that have been in the service and you look at like the VA and they could definitely use some help. You know, you look at some of the things in like cyber around supply chain. There's definitely some areas of opportunity now with AI where you can get more coverage. I just thought that this problem alone and accounts receivable was like a huge pain in my ass. From my first job out of college, I was doing trucking and transportation. Then I started a company and still had a deal with receivables. So did this come from what you were seeing in Fair Market? Yeah. And then my first job, I worked at a company called Total Quality Logistics. It's a trucking business. I was a sales rep and spent probably like 40% of my time chasing down like accounts receivable there. How do you transition out by the way to starts to like, how do you make that happen? Uh, I think it's just a conversation with the other founder of like, you know, what goddess here, you know, might not get us there in the future. And then like, let's try to like round out the team, build the team and like take it to the next level of growth. And like, you know, I'm great at some things, but I would say things are starting to slow down a little bit, like reinvigorating the engine. It's also like trying to figure out like, what do you really want to do next in your life and also where you want to spend your energy. And so if you've been doing something for a long while and the long enough, like, I don't think enough people are like, Hey, I want to start something new. I'm comfortable quitting. Think Annie Duke has a really good book called quit. You know, you only have so many shots in life and you might as well try to maximize your next one. What's your first move? And when you, when you have that conversation, you're like free to go. What do you do? I'm sure a lot of founders know about this, but you got to start at the QSBS clock ticking. So register your business in Delaware. I'm not sure if you're like number one, right? I think anybody loved paying taxes on anything. So that would be the first move. And then I think it's trying to figure out this is a second company. And I think both companies taking the same approach, which is just try to talk to as many customers as seemingly possible and really have an understanding of like the space, what the problems are, are they happy? You know, I think my view is if you can find something where the customer service just absolutely sucks, it's a really good entry point. And you can look at the businesses in the world that have really good customer service. And like, I would say their products are not that differentiated, but customers are cultish around it. Like I could say, you know, Chick-fil-A is a good example. Southwest used to be a good example. There's a lot of businesses that people are like fanatical about because I mean, even Amazon, like if you have a package store and you message them, they send you the same package back again. And so a lot of these companies are just like built on good customer service. It's really shocking to me how many companies get to scale in software and their customer service, like people just don't get back to them for a couple of weeks. And so, you know, that was the resounding thing we found among like all the legacy software businesses we were trying to compete against. And so that was just like even more conviction. And so when I say like talk to customers, like, you know, I'd have like a LinkedIn automation tool just running in the background, reaching out to people, connecting with them, sending them another message. I would scrub like a list off Zoom info or Apollo and then just start like cold emailing people and even cold calling people. Because you also want to find your message market fit. So like, what's the value? What's the problem? And then also like, who is the right person to talk to? So like, I know a lot of people talk about ICP, but I also think it's important to find like persona, maybe even before ICP. What's the difference for you? I mean, CFO versus CIO is huge, you know, so who holds the budget in the businesses that we talk to? Sometimes it's the CIO, sometimes it's the CFO. You know, sometimes even talk to the CEO, but it's like, how do you craft your message for each person? And the only really way to do that is experiments. So like you might say something one time, you can kind of hear and be like, oh, that's really interesting. So that means that phrase that you said, like, hey, we help our customers do X, Y, Z, like, okay, I should use that on the next call. And so you might talk to somebody and they say, oh, wow, that's interesting. So you're like, okay, I got something here. When you're talking ICP versus persona, the difference is what ICP is like a customer profile versus like who's in who in that company is the persona. Is that how you're thinking about it? Yeah, exactly. So like, you know, ICP might be a, hey, this is a trucking company that's like 500 people versus who at that company is it? I think that's really important too, as you continue to build. Cause when you look at companies, like certain people in certain roles really don't have power, whether they want to admit it or not. But you want to make sure that you're selling to power, people have budgets, et cetera. And so it's kind of like, hey, is this space good? Is it big? Is it growing? Are the customers there happy or not? Is there opportunity for someone to come into it? And then also is do people even have money to buy your thing that you're building? And if so, how big of a problem on one to 10 scale do they think it is? But I think that helps, you know, kind of like navigate really like the maze of is this a good idea? Is this a good product or good space? Walk me through more of like the details of that. Like, did you start talking to people right away with a product idea and you're pitching them and you're trying to sell them the thing? Or was it like pure, like classic customer discovery at the beginning? How did you set it up? That's a great question. So I think a lot of people try to like, I get notes, I'm sure you do too, but you know, people will pitch you to be like, Hey, I'm starting this company. I'm looking for an advisor. I'm looking for your thoughts on the space. Like, I'm not fucking replying to that. I don't know if you would, right? Like, I rather hang out with my daughter than like hear my thoughts. Right. I will do the same thing. They're like, Oh, I have a market analysis. It's like, all right, I'm not talking to you. I think my opinion is if you can go to a customer with a point of view of the problem they're trying to solve and then hear and ask questions to be like, Hey, Mr. and Mrs. CFO, like you're a pretty big company. You clearly took time out of your day because something was interesting. Why was that interesting? And you hear them out a little bit. Okay, great. How would that impact your business? If you can solve that, you kind of start to hear like the business and the outcome. And then, you know, Hey, if I was to solve this problem for you, would you pay like $200,000? And they say, Yeah, that'd be super reasonable. Then you can start kind of pitching them on the solution. My opinion is you get a lot of better feedback when you try to close. And that feedback is less squishy versus asking somebody, what do they think, et cetera. So if you have a tangible outcome and then you have a tangible product and you try to close on that, I think if the pain is big enough, people will just buy off a slide deck. Did that happen to you? The first company we found this customer called the MBTA. So at Fair Market, the first one we started. So Mass Bay Transit Authority, it's the subway system. Okay. We originally were trying to build like a glass door or a true car that shows you pricing for software. And we had a couple of customers on like $300 a month licenses. And so we cold called, I think actually my co-founder named Kevin, he cold called the MBTA and we talked to like the chief information officer. And he was just like, well, actually, like, you know, it'd be great to sign software prices, but all my purchases under $500,000. I need three quotes for it. And it is extremely manual. If you guys can solve that problem for me, we could probably save like $20 million the first year. And so they co-built the platform with us and we're off to the races. So that was Fair Market. What about in, in stute? What was the reaction like when you're, when you're pitching people the idea? Yeah. I think we got a lot of like, okay, this is extremely beneficial for our company, like meet the accounts receivable people. I'd love for you to talk to them about like how they do it, what's the process? And the resounding thing from the people are just like, this is an extremely manual, like I'm in finance. I didn't sign up for me to just be cold calling my customers. Yeah. Walk me through maybe just a day in the life, like what's going on? What are they doing in that, and then that you're automating now? Yeah. I mean, they have to handle a lot of complexity, a lot of interactions, both internally and externally, and they work across like very disconnected systems. So you have a sale system, you have a finance system. You have your bank accounts. You might have inventory systems and human beings now have to go in. So like, Pablo, if you were to call me, you'd be like, Hey, Tark, I got a question about invoice one, two, three, four. All of a sudden I have to go in. I have to look for the invoice. I have to manage all of that. I have to go into these different older software platforms. I might even have to use my phone to like use an RSA token. The ability is now AI can, we can handle these manual tasks across these data. And then we can actually start to learn over time and execute these workflows. And then even place like an AI phone call, an AI text message, or on the flip side, if somebody calls in, we can have AI just answer that question and then send what you need and then triage it from there. Whereas, you know, if you put yourself in our customer shoes, you might have like an office manager cleaning up the plant, trying to send out payroll and they're in techs arcana. And now all of a sudden, you know, there's CFO calls them and they're like, Hey, Steve, like bills are late by two, three days. And they're like, Hey, I got like all these other things, plots. I want to go see my kid soccer game tonight. You know, trying to find a problem that solves that is like a co-pilot is much better than just like going in and being like, Hey, we're trying to replace your jobs. Is that the ultimate end point though is just replaced? Like, is this just positioning? Like I wonder this with a lot of like AI products, right? Is it just like you go in, you enhance and then you replace? Or is there is a reason why you think about the workflow of a full time like AR specialist, why they would always in theory, like have a role even as AI does more and more of the job? Yeah, it's a good question. We're not trying to position this ever is like AI is going to replace your job. And I, I like to be like a glass half full guy. The world is just getting better and better. Like AI is not taking anyone's jobs. It's making people more efficient. Sure, it might like some jobs that might like move, lift and shift, but then some people are going to find new opportunities that didn't exist before. And, you know, I mean, if you look at humanity, like every year, everything in the world is getting better. Like sure, it's fine to be like, Hey, you know, right now in the moment, the stock market's down or like it's so chaotic and polyquotes, et cetera. But everything in the world is getting better. There's like, you know, better birth rates for certain countries. For what it's worth, I agree with you. Like high level, I fully agree with you. But I'm wondering specifically when it comes to the AR specialist, what do you envision like five years out? Obviously, a student gets way better. What parts do you think, you know, remain forever human sort of thing when it comes to delivering that? Yeah. I mean, all the blocking and tackling of this manual work is going to be able to automate it, right? So like think being able to collect, triage things, et cetera. There's so much more with accounts receivable you can do, whether it's financing, ensuring, understanding how your customers like where your sales team should interact with customers more instead of a reactive approach, taking something proactive, like understanding that a customer's credit might be going down so you can work with your sales team to maybe try to move pay terms, things like that, you know, is where they should be spending time and also looking at your accounts receivable or the stuff you sell as a portfolio, a financial portfolio of your business and how do you better use that for leverage to drive more sales. That's where they should be spending time, not trying to handle like, Hey, I have a $150 deduction because the truck was late. So all the little things of like reaching out, checking here, checking there, sending out an email, making a call that'll go. But all the stuff above that, whether it's escalation or analysis, that's where you think, you know, that part would be potentially always human. Yeah, absolutely. And delivering a better customer service too. If you're a company and you have, you know, your accounts receivable team and they're only able to do so much, you want them to deal with your best customers and call them instantly, solve the problems, loop in your customer success team or sales team and like help really handle things. You don't want them just like dealing with the blocking and tackling and chasing paperwork and files. And then going back to the narrative, like how many of those initial calls would you say you had? I probably had like 300 to 500 in the first couple of months. And then I also, you know, like Teaguez and some of those others did a lot of like Teaguez calls on the competition or like what the legacy software players were. What was the outcome of those, like all that kind of market research you did and the Teaguez stuff? Like what was the conclusion, let's say, or some of the insights of the findings? Yeah. So it's a good question. You know, the world of accounts receivable, there's really like five core pillars. So it's credit, collections, cash application, deductions and disputes. Obviously you did not enter this call knowing anything about accounts receivable probably, but it allowed us to understand like, here's a good wedge in, which we started with collections and then allowed us to understand how to sequence the product. It allowed us the insights on like, what is the ICP we should go after to start, including the business size. And then what does the sequence look like of expansion from there? And what about those calls made you confident that this is like a product worth building and that like people will buy this thing? It's a great question. It made me so confident that like, I would say they probably had a one out of five customer satisfaction. And there's just pure, I don't know who that is, but they're pure software, I assume like they're probably not an AI first company. I don't believe they're kicking down. Notice I say kicking down, not kicking up, but yeah. Yeah. So over in main nameless, but you know, I could fall heartedly say it's a, you know, business with over a billion dollar valuation. That's like a legacy software incumbent that their customers can't hear a response back for three weeks. Tool takes 24 minutes to implement. You know, if you can't beat that, then you should probably not be competing in the game anyway. And I assume it's like, as you said, legacy. So it's probably more like a system of record than something that goes out and like actively replaces manual work. Yeah, exactly. And it's the fundamental difference of like these older software tools. They're essential. You know, we view them essentially as like dashboards that do some workflow automation, but they at least show you what's going on in this process. And, you know, really where like AI is going now is like, Hey, how do we automate this process completely? And then humans handle the exceptions where the process isn't automated. When did you raise like the first money for, for stoop? I was going to bootstrap the business and then I found it really hard to hire engineers. Like I have some technical, like I've taught myself how to do some coding, et cetera. I was a chemistry major in college. So, you know, math and science was always relatively easy. So I thought myself some Python, especially with AI now, you can code pretty much anything, but found it really hard to find like credible engineers that didn't think you were crazy. And so raised on like a memo from Coastal Aventures and Active and Capital. And then some of my, some friends and people I know that I raised from before their seed funds. How much did you raise in this room? Three million dollars, roughly. When was it? Beginning of 2024. So I'd say like February, March. What do you do after that? Like what's kind of the first, what's like the MVP, like V1 of what you built that that's like shippable? Yeah. First, since it was mainly myself was like starting to hire and recruit people and selling on a dream. And then it's also like while you're doing that, trying to sell to some customers and then also trying to like start hacking together front end, or at least like wire frames of the platform so you can show customers that you're progressing towards what you told them you would do. Did you sell ahead of product? Did you pre-sell or did you get like design partners? Pre-sell. What kind of contracts? What kind of ACVs? First contract was $65,000 a year. Okay. So sizable? Decent. I mean sizable, but the problem that we're solving is if we were able to reduce their overdue invoices, they're going to free up $500 million in the first year of cash. How do you get them to like sign up ahead of time? Like the ROI is clear, but how do you get away from the objection of like, yeah, like I'd love this, like when you build it, let me know, I'll happily pay you, you know, a hundred K at that point. It's an amazing question. The biggest thing that early on, it's, you know, you hear a lot of investors, like seed investors, early stage investors, that they're always like, Hey, you're betting on the founder. Your early customers are betting on you. And so you need to be able to start showing them progressable milestones of what they want to solve and how it's getting better. You know, they're also blinding in on how you're going to solve this problem for them. You got to show them like week after week, Hey, we're making progress here. We're building this, et cetera. And then also getting their thoughts because they want to invent, you know, if they're so frustrated that they're like, Hey, I'm going to find this random ass dude in New York off the streets, pay him $65,000 to solve this problem for me. Clearly they're like pretty excited about trying to solve the problem. And so you just want to start showing them like these milestones along the way of like, Hey, how we're building this, how we're solving this, how we're thinking about it, what's your thoughts? Does this automate this process for you? And that's really like the fun part of competing an early stage company. Did you go all in on this one customer? Did you get like five or 10 of them pre sold? I'm a huge believer in that, like you need at least five or 10, maybe 20. You need like different stages of a pipeline. So you maybe want like three to four. Cause I, you know, the one thing you don't want to do is just build someone a science project. I also am very cognizant. I think there's a fine line between, you know, most of my background, all my background's been in B2B sales. There's a fine line between growing after like your fortune 100s and building something for them versus like lower enterprise or mid market. My opinion is it's much better to start in like the lower mid market because it's more repeatable. There's more volume, et cetera. And also have a couple of conversations with large enterprise to make sure that like it validates for them as well. So how many customers did you have like sign pre sold as, as we're building? I'd say like six to eight, all in that kind of 10 to 100 K ECV. Yeah, right. It was more of 50 to start. So I'd say like, you know, approaching six figures, because the pain we're trying to solve is a pretty big outcome. You know, my view is in like back office finance or just businesses in general. There's kind of two processes, which is one, I need to buy stuff for the business. And the other ones I need to sell stuff for the business. So cash going out the door or cash going in the door. First one was cash was going out the door. So it's mainly like you're only selling against cost savings. I always wanted to tackle cash going out the door or generating more revenue for businesses. So it's a much easier conversation. So I had found when you're cash, you know, coming in the door and how do you generate more cash for the business? Because you're, I mean, it's collections. Like your, your core ROI is I'm just going to collect more than you're already collecting. And so literally you're bringing cash into the business. Yeah, exactly. I've never sold in sales tax because it's a very competitive space. And it seems like everything changes over every like five to 10 years. But I feel like anything you build in that space has to just, once you find product market fit, I'm sure like, you know, like you look at Gong or you look at like sales lock back in the day or outreach. Like it seems like when you find something like that, it's just because it generates more money, it just takes off. We have tens of thousands of people who have followed the show. Are you one of those people? You want to be a part of the group. You want to be a part of those tens of thousands of followers. So hit the follow button. By the way, you talked about like hiring. Curious to get your thoughts on hiring. Obviously, like these days, there's so many low hanging fruit in terms of products you can build. If only you have like the best people to build them and honestly, every space that like shows promise gets really competitive and then really becomes about teams. So like the first few people you hire, like who were they? How did you get them? What's what's your thinking on just like getting, you know, A level talent? Yeah, I would say talent changes over time based on the stage of the business you're on. And early on, I can't say this enough. Like other founders, I know we'll always talk about this. There's so much noise and like vultureism in early stage businesses, especially when you're getting off the ground as a founder, whether it's lawyers. I mean, VCs, like if you're not a tier one or two or two VC, like a lot of those are just like trying to take advantage of people. They want your time. They're essentially like vampires, in my opinion. And there's tons of these people that like they don't really work. They've never really like worked a hard earnest day in their life, but they want to advise startups. It's really hard when you're a founder, you know, they might be like, Hey, I got a friend who's great just to start a business, blah, blah. You start talking to the person. Turns out they worked at Cisco for 10 years. Like that's not a great person for you to hire. And so you really want to find people that are just like, I need to get shit done at an incredible clip. I am going to live like there is no tomorrow and I'm going to make decisions at 100 miles per hour. They might be wrong decisions, but I'll quickly make a decision to correct it. Because when you're starting a business, the market, the product, the space, it's a one way door decision, but it's only a temporary one way door decision. So there's a lot of two way door decisions that can be made. And so you want to try to run these experiments and make these decisions as quick as possible. And so you're really looking for people that can find that. And that's really hard. And I think the easiest way to do it is like, you know, collaboratively work with people, test people out, but also, you know, you can't be afraid to let people go. Do you care about like, especially those first five, 10 cars, do you care about like pedigree experience? Like whether they were founders before you hiring people like extremely junior, especially now with AI, like where were you most focused on? I think one of the biggest challenges from tier one and tier two venture capital firms is they're always looking for people that check a box on paper. Usually the people that check a box on paper aren't the people that start generational companies. And so you want to find the people that are a little rough around the edges, a little crazy, like, you know, might not have that pedigree. And so that's also probably because I might be one of those people. Like I went to a great school, you know, grew up with a single mom in Michigan, like, you know, I didn't grow up with a trust fund. I didn't like, you know, stuff like that. So I think you want to find people that better fit your personality. And that doesn't mean that those types of people that are not like me are going to be successful. I think it just is like the people that are like you and work well with you become successful. So it's also a company fit founders fit and working fit. Only you can find those people. You can try to build something iconic. So back to narrative, you've got now like whatever six or so customers are pretty sold. What is V1? Like what is the first version that's a full product that you're like, this is good enough to put in somebody's hands and then we'll build from here? Great question. Our V1 was really around like audio AI. I can't speak high, like more highly. I think there's a really big gap right now between audio AI and then just companies and B2B space. I think it's a real big unlock from what we've seen for our customers. So our V1 was just basic outreach with audio AI and then following up with emails, like voice AI, like calling customers to collect. Yeah. Okay. Calling customers to collect, following it up automatically with an email or then being able to like triage stuff. And so the last business started, you know, we sat on top of the RP systems. So, you know, very familiar with the SAPs, oracles, etc. of the world. And so that gave us, I think a leg up to start our company is because we can deal with these more, you know, monolithic platforms or multiple fragmented platform for bigger businesses and we're able to navigate them very quickly. And so that's been kind of a hack or a superpower of ours compared to, you know, competitors we might have. So we were able to find value very quickly on top of these legacy systems and just being able to collect via audio AI or emails, etc. and automate a lot of that process for these people. Because the calling out is like the easy piece. And there's a lot of voice AI companies. The harder part, I assume, was knowing not just who to call, but what to say and what you're supposed to collect and making sure that all that stuff is accurate. Because obviously if you call a customer and you tell them they owe something they don't know, it's going to be a big problem. Yeah, I think that was just when, you know, RAG was starting to, RAG was already around, but nobody was really applying RAG architecture in the space. And so we, you know, hopped on that. And then we started obviously fine tuning and trying to take the step after that to like more customize the larger datasets. It's a good point. Like just throwing a horizontal like AI model on it won't work. But the good thing is it's not like we're dealing with like heart surgery here, or like very technical life-saving stuff. It's like, Hey, you didn't pay. We think it's because of XYZ. Can you clarify yes or no and we'll release the funds? Like, yeah, great. What was the result by the way? So you put this out with some customers. What kind of like results are they seeing in terms of ROI? Yeah, it's crazy. We see a 40% reduction in overdue invoices in the first six months of deployment. That was our first year. Now we're seeing a 40%. It's called DSL or days of sales outstanding. We're seeing a 40% reduction in DSO in the first two and a half months of deploying STU and we get deployed in about 3.5 days. And this is independent of whether they already have AR specialists like full. Like I understand where you're talking about, you know, manufacturing plan, person's doing on the side of their desk. And I've got a full time AI agent doing 24 seven, no brainer. You should get lift. But when you go into somewhere that has 5, 10 AR specialists already doing this full time, do you still see similar amounts of lift? And if so, why do you know what I mean? Like, where does that come from? Oh, yeah, we see even better results. So the larger enterprises might teams with 700 people, a couple thousand. You know, you look at some of our larger businesses, like company called Perkin Elmer. It's a medical device company out of Waltham, Massachusetts. The first year they collected $350 million with the platform. And they had a team of about 50 people in Krakow, Poland. They've used that $350 million to buy two businesses. Why does your AI outperform those 50 humans? If you think about a human being, you probably can cover 200 to 500 accounts, like if your own customers and all the work that's associated with that, you got to think that 20% of a business's revenue probably makes up 80% of the work. And so that's where we start. We tackle this long tail of revenue and we work our way up through the value chain for our clients. So all the smaller accounts that are just not getting as many calls or not getting as many touch points, all of a sudden they're getting calls or getting emails and you're recovering. Well, just think about this too, is like you're somebody in accounts receivable. And you also have to see if the bill was paid, which is called cash application, which we do. So that's like the other part is like if a bill was paid, you don't want to just continually follow up with the person. Like that's crazy. So that's why we tie everything together. Then if the bill was paid, but it was paid less than it's supposed to be paid, you have to go out and find why not. And that's called deductions, which we also handle with AI. And then if the customer is not happy and doesn't want to pay, that's called a dispute, which we handle as well. So being able to have context across all of that is what we've built now and we have live with our clients. But when we just started in collections and cash application, those were the first two things we started. Biggest thing is you might be able to, if you're a human being, tackle 200 accounts and you might not be able to get the cash application done, or you might only be able to get the cash application done. Now we can allow a user to do 2000 to 5000 account coverage. You can do the cash application. You can do the deductions. And if somebody's disputing and not happy, that's where you should spend your time. But we will get you the evidence, the bills of lading, like the PO's. We'll get you all that documentation, summarize it for you in a nice email so that you can call the customer, just read off of it and just click send after. So that's the real money. When did you launch this V1? We launched the V1 in November of 2024. And did you raise, like, I think you raised another seed round right around that time? We took like $3 million on UncappedSafe. On top of the 3 million that you'd closed before? Okay. Actually, I had like 6 million in total. Let's talk go-to-market for a second. So you've got the product that's slaving people's hands. You're seeing the ROI, you're seeing the results. What do you do on the go-to-market side to really ramp up? Like, what are some of the tactics, especially in 2025, that really work for you? Yeah, I got to give Mark Roberge. If you know who that is, he's like the former CRO at HubSpot. He just released a book, I think it's called Scaling Scientifically. Something like that. Anyway, his most recent book, I got to say, it's probably the best product market fit sales book I've read in a long time. Because it talks about the three stages, which is like finding product market fit. How do you actually like scientifically describe product market fit? Which I think no one does really well, but he does a great job of it. And then how do you find go-to-market fit? And then how do you get to scale? And then how does everything tie around? You know, he talks about is our sales leader, he worked with me on my past company, but his name is Dylan Rush. You got to kind of find somebody who's good at sales that can IC sell, but also really has an eye for product. And like understands, hey, this is a big build. This is a small build, et cetera. And then also isn't afraid to just be like, Hey, I'm going to get my engineers on the call. Can we scope this out and can we build it for you? If so, what's the impact? If we build this, we pay us X or would you pay us Y? So finding someone like that, other than the founder, myself or Ben, who co-founded the company with us. And then one of our other co-founders, Adam, we had another co-founder named Mirage too. So like, how do we all work together to start doing this and scaling this and like starting to spread it out? And so I think that's a really strategic hire that you need to get right. The other option that I don't think enough people do is hire a couple of BDRs. So like, you know, early call callers reaching out people and having them do a lot of the prospecting, but you as a founder, do more of the sales, the scoping and the product work. And then naturally those BDRs are just going to start learning from you and eventually we'll be the people leading your sales team later on as you scale as a company. What's been like your inbound outbound split and through 2025? We've spent little money on marketing until last year. Like I would say the summer of last year when we raised the series A. So our first thing was just to do brand, but our number one source right now is referrals by a long shot. So we get 50% of customers right now from referrals. Wow. Would drive somebody to refer you and what's driving referrals you think? Yeah. One of our biggest channels is like partnerships, private equity funds. You know, you do well for one CFO. They're going to tell somebody else. So, you know, some of our earlier customers, they'll take any type of call. And so, you know, I have a 30 minute sales call with a company and I'm just like, Hey, do you want to talk to our two customers after that? And they're like, yeah, sure. Like there's nobody better selling you in the world than your customers. And so we lean on them very heavily. How do you get their time? Actually, that's a great technique. But like, how do you, how do you get that other customer to spend 30 minutes with? I mean, it's one thing for them to tell their friend. It's another thing for them to just spend 50 minutes on the phone with some other customer they don't know. Why are they doing it? Yeah, I'm sure it's pretty annoying, but like back to the, you know, the comment I made of like, you know, a lot of these companies are betting on you and betting on the team to build and solve something for them, especially if they're just finding some random dude off the street to solve a form or some random lady off the street to solve it for them. And so try to have a great relationship with them and they're more than happy to do it. I'm sure it's pretty annoying at some point and hopefully they'll push back. But, you know, I think one thing my mom was great at growing up was just, you know, you always got to ask. And if you don't ask, you don't know. And so always asking is great. I think one other thing that a lot of early stage founders forget is like, when you're closing a deal or signing someone up, there's nothing better to be like, hey, I will give you a discount if you can introduce me to five colleagues of yours that this would be beneficial for. Does that work for you? 100%. Even before, I mean, it's one thing to do a referral after they use it, but your people are referring you to get the discount even before they've closed, even before they've used the product. Yeah. You know, I think when you're buying something, you're excited. And so when you're, when you're really excited to buy something, like obviously you want people to try to capitalize on that. It's like, you know, I live in New York, so I don't really drive a car. But last time I bought a car, I was like really excited I bought a car. If you asked me three weeks later, I'm not really excited I bought a car. I was just like, yeah, it's all. But in the moment, I'm like, oh, this autonomous driving, like I got to try it, blah, blah, blah. But then like it fades. You're kind of like, oh, what's next? So, you know, I think there's no better time like the president to ask customers for it. Makes sense. Then going back just to the first six months of selling, because referrals obviously comes in later, like first six months, I assume it's mainly cold calling, mainly outbound. What's that kind of funnel look like? What's the SQL to close demo to close? Like what were some of the early signals that you had something in those first kind of six months of sales? I mean, sales is fucking brutal. Like if anyone's telling you they have like a one out of five clothes right there full of shit, I would say it's, you know, at least me, maybe I'm just not that smart, but it's definitely like, you had talked to like at least a hundred people to get like some kind of semblance of a deal. And so, you know, it's a numbers game. I'm a little maybe a little bit different. Like I think everybody has kind of their shtick. I love cold calling. I love cold outreaching. Like I still do it. I'll probably hop on with some of our BDRs today and knock out some cold calls. Like there's no better way to lead from the front. You know, and I think if you can try to get somebody, you know, if you just call somebody like an average cold call and you're like, Hey, I'm here to help. But instead, if you pick up the phone and somebody hits you with a hilarious line, like, Hey, Chris, you know, I was thinking about you last night, you'd be like, What the heck? And so that'll start like such a better relationship with a customer. If you have a little like humor in life. And so, or you take an opinionated view on a business and you send them a LinkedIn note to be like, Hey, I've noticed your CIO has talked about AI, but I've looked, there's nothing in finance, XYZ put a little humor in it and just be like, you want to make sure you have a job in six months or something cheeky. You know, some people respond really well to that. Some people don't, but you want to find the people that want to buy from you and connect with you. And so it's definitely a numbers game. It's not easy. What about once they're fully qualified to get them to a demo? What's that demo to close rate for you guys? I think it's going to get better and better over time. Like early on, it's definitely not going to be great. You know, as you start to build a product and the product scales and it's sustainable, like ours is much better. I think it's above the industry standard. So I'd say probably like 20% of our demos turn into deals, but like early on, it's probably like one in a thousand. You know, if you're lucky, like, if you find really good space, good product, like maybe it's better, but you know, I have a friend who started a company. He's a good friend of mine. His name is Jeff Rodman, but he always says if it's easy, everybody would do it. Or like it ain't easy, which is very true. And so, you know, you've got to be okay with it. And you also have to understand that like, if you over promise to a customer, you're losing their trust. And so if you're like, Hey, it's going to get better. Also this button might not work, by the way, and make a joke out of it. They might respect it. And so the more you build, the better it's going to get. And so, you know, you want to see to your, the question you're asking is like, how does that conversion rate get better? Like you want to see that conversion rate get better and better as you build a better product. And that's mainly a product thing. I think less of a sales thing. The part where it does matter is like, obviously, if your, if your ACV is really low and your close rate is really low, like the spend is at some point is just kind of going to, it's going to break. But your ACV was what, like 50, 100 K or was it more like a 10 K ACV even like back then? No, it's more in the like the high six figures. Okay. That's a big difference. Cause if you're selling $10,000 a year licenses, like you've got to close at 30, 40% if you want, you know, that velocity, just because if you think about a sales rep, you know, it doesn't make any sense. But I really think you have to think of it as like an inverted funnel. Sorry to use my hands, but like you have to find the message market fit at the top. And then you kind of have to find like the pain or like the value statement. And then from there, you have to understand like, does this resonate with the pain statement? And one of the things that I do a lot and like I'm guilty of is you try to compress all this stuff into one, whether it's like pricing and a message market fit, like you try to look at everything holistically, but like when you can really break this funnel out in different layers of a cake and treat them as independent experiments or tests, then you can start to really like isolate and go back continuously and try to improve things through the life of the business. Is the other thing that a lot of people don't clock about is like, you want to also optimize the bottom part of this pyramid on the top of the funnel. So if you think about an hourglass, you want to be able to start to like really double down and improve how quickly your customers find value from like the minute you connect, because if you can find that time to first value and you continue to iterate on that, that aha moment. Yeah. How fast is that for you guys? It's usually like seven days. They start to find like at least some ROI or some success. Usually in the first week, the product pays for itself. What about in the demo? Because I find with AI a lot of times you can take it, you can take a demo pretty far and just like show what's possible and kind of have that eyes light up moment. What are you able to do or show in a demo that you found is really triggered kind of that lean in moment. Yeah. So now it's a little different than it was to start. But on the collection side, this concept of AI audio is crazy for people, like fully mind blowing. Like you would show people a year ago, somebody calling like an AI calling and just what it would say. I would just call you Pablo. I'd be like, Hey, what's your phone number? Let me give you a call and it picks up and it speaks in local dialects of Spanish. Gotcha. And you're just like, you know, it would be like holy smokes and then it populates in the dashboard, holds out an invoice out of their ERP system, like an SAP on premise, you know, ECC six and the customers like this is wild. And so that's kind of like an aha moment for them. But as we've continued to scale, now that we do disputes, deductions and also cash application, huge for a lot of our customers is actually being able to see the cash match. So, Hey, did the money that's in my bank account actually get remitted and pay? And you can actually see that starting to match in anusly, you know, a lot of CFOs are like, that's crazy. How fast did you hit a millionaire? It was a couple months, but I might be a little different than some founders you have on the pot or some founders you see on Twitter. You know, my view is kind of like the customers that we sell these flyover state businesses, I think it's better to take your time to get to a million dollars in revenue or like tap on the spigot and really like double down, making sure you're solving a problem. Because now a lot of investors are just judging you so much on growth rate. And I think like anything in life that's really worth doing takes a lot of time, whether it's like a relationship, a marriage, like, you know, being a great parent, building a company, playing sports, like, you know, it's not overnight success. And if it is, that's not always a good thing. And so I think there's this like huge hustle culture right now around like trying to get to a million, trying to get to a hundred, where it's really like, can you solve this problem or every single of your first customers, whether it's 10, 100, they're just so happy that they'll refer you to other customers and how do you get to a thousand raving lunatic fans? How do you get to a hundred thousand? And so that's really our goal as a company. First is trying to chase like a revenue milestone. It's like, we've never lost a customer to date. And like our goal as a company is to just never lose a customer and that every customer tells two of friends of theirs about the product. I hear you. But in spite of that, you hit a million in like two months. So, you know, it's not, it's not like it's slow. It was a couple months, but we were also like working with customers, you know, and like finding product, building the product. So it wasn't like, hey, all of a sudden people are just like raving to get this brand new product. Like the space exists, the product exists. You know, sales exist. It's not like overnight. So it's kind of like the story we tell investors, but also like, how do we ramp it up and find value for customers? The thing I'm the most proud of is like the benefits that our customers find and our early customers and how you've seen like a couple of them have gotten promoted. You know, one of our champions at one of our first customers has gone from a manager and accounts receivable to another VP in finance. And that's what's like really exciting for me. But then this focus on like product value deliveries that is that like mean maybe not as focused as like going, you know, now that you're at one or when you hit one, like going from one to 10 in a year is not really like a top of mind thing for you. Well, it takes care of itself. And so like, you know, we'll we'll finish the year probably, I think, hopefully around like 30 to 50, depending on how things shake. Who knows. Wow. Crazy. That comes if it's from a great product. And so like we want to build the product in the world and then it becomes easy because that first product experience is so magical. If you can get it right for customers. And so we want to build that and that is the mission and that comes from hiring world-class engineers, a world-class team, and then just executing like an absolute dog. Perfect. Well, let me stop it there and ask the last three questions we always end on. When for you, when was the moment when you felt like you'd hit true product market fit? I don't think I'll ever find that moment in my life. You know, my view is that it's consistently refining and that, you know, the minute that we feel like we found something or we've made something, then, you know, you're kind of resting on your laurels and there's no more dangerous place to be in the world than just kind of like letting life happen instead of trying to like win the day. Has there ever been a moment where you doubted if student would really work? Like maybe you might fail every single day, every single day, but then you got to wake up and bet on yourself. You know, there's always going to be moments of doubt. Always going to be like, hey, I'm not the right person for this role. Hey, I'm not the right person to sell to this customer. Hey, we might lose the deal. You know, the book by Andy Grove, only the paranoid survive. Like you have to be paranoid of yourself, paranoid of the company, paranoid of the space, but that's the fun part of doing this is like building the conviction to continuously bet on your team and bet on yourself and try to, you know, be the best version of yourself every single instance that you can. And then last question, what would be like a top piece of advice that you'd give an early stage founder that's still kind of like looking for product market fit? Yeah, it's a great question. I would go back to the original advice. I just think there's a lot of noise and a lot of like vulture is in these days in early stage companies. And one of our investors, Vinod Kosala says it the best, but like, you know, I think he says like, what, like 95% of advice out there you shouldn't take. And it's really like, hey, the best advice is just like customer advice, customer feedback, solving a problem, understanding that, you know, delivers revenue for the business or it helps them save costs. And so I would just be careful with who you associate and be careful of the advice you take. Awesome. Tark, thanks so much for jumping on the show, dude. It's been great. Thank you, sir. Anytime and let me know if you're in New York anytime soon. Appreciate you. Wow. What an episode. You're probably in awe. You're an absolute shock. You're like, that helped me so much. So guess what? Now it's your turn to help someone else share the episode in the WhatsApp group you have with founders, share it on that Slack channel, send it to your founder friends and help them out. Trust me, they will love you for it.