In this episode, we talk to Juan Andrade, CEO of Rebank, a company that started off life as a platform to facilitate global currency exchange and is now pivoting to solve challenges in global intercompany agreements. We learn how they managed to get into Y Combinator, how they developed their MVP, and the reasons behind choosing to pivot into a niche within their current customer base.
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Episode Transcript
Matthew Todd
My name is Matthew Todd and welcome to Inside the ScaleUp. This is the podcast for founders, executives and tech, looking to make an impact and learn from their peers within the tech business will lift the lid on tech businesses, interview leaders, and follow their journey from startup to scale-up and beyond. Covering everything from developing product market fit, funding and fundraising models to value proposition structure and growth marketing.
We learned from that journey so that you can understand how they really work, the failures, the successes, the lessons along the way, so that you can take their learnings and apply them within your own startup or scale up and join the ever-growing list of high growth UK SaaS businesses. Hey, and welcome back to the podcast really pleased today to be joined by Juan Andrade, the founder of Rebank. Great to have you on the podcast today.
Juan Andrade
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Matthew Todd
No worries, really looking forward to the conversation we talked a couple of times online, we also met at a SaaS conference as well and got a bit more background on the rebound journey.
I’m really interested to learn more today and find out some of the developments that have been going on recently as well. To kick things off by giving us a little bit of a brief intro about yourself and Rebank as well.
Juan Andrade
Yeah, of course. So, I started read bank in 2018, with Simon, my co-founder. I think what we realized back then, was that international startups were just a little bit different under the hood than like your typical startup. And that created a lot of problems much earlier in a startup’s life. So, we wanted to start fixing those we focused on how crappy banking interface has worked. And we essentially started with like building a better UI for all your banks.
That evolved to what we do now. Just on like the genesis of the company, it really was just when I first spent time in a finance team, and I just realized how manual everything was. Yeah, I wasn’t I’m not an accountant. So, I kind of looked at everything with a fresh pair of eyes. I’m like, why? Why are you doing that? So manually? And? And yeah, I think that’s how things started. My background is mostly been in financial services, insurance, creating card products, and mostly in b2c actually. And then I made the switch to b2b for re bank. And yeah, that’s it really.
Matthew Todd
Yeah. Interesting. So, I guess seeing those frustrations, then around that manual element of dealing with international payments transactions in the light. Why was that big enough, important enough? Why was there motivation for you to then naturally try and starting to build and validate a product around that?
Juan Andrade
Yeah, it was more of a desire to start my own thing. And then me kind of looking for the right problems and solutions. And why I don’t know why I wanted to start my own thing. But I felt like, I got really annoyed that I was becoming an expert at a thing that I didn’t really care about at work. Someone basically decided you have to be an expert at this and make it better. And I would do that. So yeah, I kind of got bored with that.
So, I thought, okay, what do I actually want to be an expert I have, and for some reason, I decided business banking, and international payments. Why does it interest me? That might be just because of all I’ve sort of lived in different countries. So, I’ve experienced those pains on a personal level. But it was really just watching the team watching my teammates, secret escapes a startup I used to work at just watching them suffer through, like the simplest of tasks.
I think all of those things combined to make me feel like I had enough to start a company and like looking back, I was so clueless. But at the time, I was like, Yeah, this is enough. I’ve got I’ve got it.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, you’ve got the idea that that you think is worth pursuing. So, what did that look like then with that motivation, enthusiasm in mind. How did you take things forward?
Juan Andrade
Well, I, for some reason, decided that I needed to do an MBA before I started my company, I guess I was I didn’t really have the confidence to just go out on my own. I knew that my, like financial skills were not very good. I at the time, I thought my product and ops and support skills were great and they weren’t but I just, I didn’t have full confidence in my abilities.
So, I did an MBA which I’m going to say now, if you’re thinking of starting a company, you should not do an MBA. It does give you a ton of confidence and like awareness of stuff, but it’s not. Yeah, it’s not actually that helpful. But I did that. And then partway through the Master’s, I quit my job, and I started the company.
Matthew Todd
What was that early product? Then? What did that that look like? And how did you go about building that?
Juan Andrade
So, I went to all of my friends, and asked them to introduce me to their finance manager in that company. Most of them said no, but I eventually spoke to enough people to form like an idea, like of like, okay, what’s the what’s the pain point? Who does it affect the most? I made sure to speak to people that I thought might not have the problem as well as have the problem to help me refine sort of target. I just started sort of whiteboarding. I just thought, well this is the information. I think this account should go here. I already have some knowledge of a new regulation that was coming into Europe called PSD 2, because I would just read a lot of white papers for my housemate.
I would walk home, I’d be walking from the tube to home and I’d have a white paper and I could print stuff off, even five years ago, you print it up, I’d be reading it. My housemate always say like, I sometimes I see people from far away. If they have a piece of paper in their hand, I know it’s you reading the white paper.
So yeah, it’s just I kind of geeked out on what was going on in payments. And then I just spoke to people and ask them what their problems were to make sure it wasn’t an isolated thing at secret escapes
Matthew Todd
From there, then how did you build that first iteration? You know, the feature set? What did that look like? And how are you able to bring those early customers on to prove that actually, that was right, that research did validate the idea?
Juan Andrade
Yeah, it was all it was all. There was wasn’t that well organized, if I think back to it, but I realized that I needed a technical co-founder. So I started looking for someone it took me ages took me six plus months of proper, like, hardcore searching, but maybe 12 months of trying to help get people to help me create a job description. But after meeting like 5060 people you use, I sort of had this almost like this gut check that I could do with someone.
So when I met Simon, yeah, like, we’ve just sort of everything kind of worked. And you know, at the time, he was also looking to start something new. And he had like four or five different founders, you know, trying to do the same. But I guess what I did that was different. I already had some external validation, because we got into some, like, regulatory sandbox thing in the UK. And, you know, I pitched him like, I would pitch an investor.
I guess that was enough for him to sort of see that I was serious about this. But yeah, we started working together. And January 21, 2018, was like the first git commit the first sort of bit of code. And yeah, just started just me and him building. The first like, six months was all about getting licenses and regulations. I was still doing my masters. I couldn’t dedicate too much time. But then I graduated in July 18 and in November, we got into YC.
Matthew Todd
What was that? Like in terms of building up to that? Obviously, the financial, and there’s lots of regulations and things that you must do. But why then go look at YC? What are you hoping to get out of that?
Juan Andrade
I’d already tried to pitch to investors and realize that that was really hard. And I didn’t know what I was doing. So I was trying to pitch to VCs, angels, family offices, and the getting into incubators, I was doing all of it. And like, really, just because I didn’t know so I just did everything. And I realized that incubators might be a good way in given our stage because we barely had an MVP.
I wasted a lot of time talking to VCs, frankly. But I applied to basically every single credible accelerator or incubator in the world, literally, and got rejected by all of them. The first time we applied to YC I’d already had like 10 Plus failed applications.
So when I wrote the application I got some help from, like an advisor friend spent like a few days writing it. And yeah, we got an interview. First time, which we, which we failed, like we actually didn’t get in first time. But yeah, that’s how we went, we went about it.
Matthew Todd
What about those failed applications was missing? What was it the proposition? Was it how you were positioning it? What did you change as you learn to develop those kind of incubator applications?
Juan Andrade
Well, this is something I now tell founders that I speak to, you know, sometimes I’ll meet early-stage founders, and they’ll ask me about fundraising. I think that it’s a very common like, fallacy. Maybe like the experts fallacy I call it I don’t know if that’s right. But when you’re an expert, and you’re thinking about it nonstop, and someone asked me your questions, you want to give them all the detail. That’s really bad with fundraising. Because most investors are more like generalists. They see companies as having maybe a few sort of leverage points that they want to understand. They don’t want to understand all the ins and outs of the second payment services directive and how the European Economic Area is going to change blah, blah, blah, blah. So, I was not succinct. Use your communication skills almost like a rubric as a test. If you can’t communicate quickly and clearly, like, you’re not going to be able to get money early.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s really good advice. I think, like you say that unexperienced founders often feel like they need to give that detail to prove they know what they’re talking about, or see the opportunity. But that ability to take a step back, and still put together a compelling pitch, or a more compelling pitch, something that will have more impacts, there is definitely a, a skill to that kind of positioning.
Juan Andrade
Yeah, it’s a language. It’s just a language that you need to pick up. There are terms that, you know, the ways that people speak that once you get it, then it’s it changes for you. But it’s still surreal. I think that and maybe it comes from I can’t I find it funny that in my previous, you know, like, roles, I couldn’t get someone to sign off on like a 20 grand tour, or 10 Grand Tour, like I couldn’t do, like, communicate well enough and write a good enough proposal to justify that.
But with a year plus of startup living, I can get someone to give me $2.8 million. And like, you think that you basically have to communicate like a corporate and you just have to do even more. But actually, it’s a completely different communication style when you want to raise to point A, so just to find 20 grand for the tool that was going to save you two hours a week or something?
Matthew Todd
What was that YC process like then for people that will definitely be interested in hearing that, you know, what did you come out of that with you perhaps didn’t enter with?
Juan Andrade
YC were the first investors to give us hope. They were the first investors I spoke to that told us what we could become in the future. Up to that point, an investor’s job is to sort of assess whether you’re going to be a 10x investment. There’s no time for them to think about the human behind that.
So, you get a lot of questions. Whereas YC, they asked the questions. They were really tough on us. But when they selected us, they were like, we think you could do this. I’ll never forget that I ended up with a partner that said that to me. He’s not at YC anymore, but I’m still in touch with him. We’re still chatting. I was chatting to him yesterday for advice, but the main thing you get is structure, focus and an insane amount of competitive spirit. What that ends up doing is it just, it just completely changes the trajectory of your company.
Matthew Todd
That’s really interesting and good for people to hear because I’ve definitely seen whether they’ve been to YC or similar or not. I’ve definitely seen so many SaaS businesses flounder because they are thinking, like far too small with too little confidence in their product, their business, but most likely themselves really. In terms of what they think their potential or ceiling could be.
Juan Andrade
Sometimes I’ll meet founders that are afraid of fundraising. I think there are good reasons to not just jump into any jump in with any investor. But if you if you ignore press, because that’s never accurate. If you look at if I look at like my founder, sort of peer group, every single one of them is able to have a much bigger impact in the industry because they can fundraise. And because they have supportive investors.
So, it’s an it’s a catalyst, you know, fundraising as a catalyst. It’s never bad unless you get into bed with the wrong people, I guess. Going to the US as well, like, you don’t think big until you spend time with Americans. That’s something that I had to like, bear out of me. The Northern European kind of style of thinking, a little bit reserved.
Matthew Todd
Do you think it is that kind of cultural reserved nature? Or do you think is kind of the geography. The sheer size and scale of things in the US as well? Or a bit of both, perhaps?
Juan Andrade
Well, I don’t know for sure. But I feel like with business, at least, you could? I don’t know, I really don’t know. I feel like most of the sort of settlers that first landed in America were themselves kind of a little bit more adventurous or risk seeking than the people that stayed in Europe. Then of those ones that went west, the furthest West were themselves the most sort of risk seeking opportunists maybe. So it could be it could go as far back as that.
Because when you when you spend time in in San Francisco and Palo Alto Mountain View, like the energy is completely different. And yeah, I’ve been lucky enough for that to rub off on me. But what is it? I really don’t know. When it comes to company, like thinking big, the US market is huge as buyer, depending on the sector, it can be five to 10 times bigger than anything you would do in Europe. So you can afford to think, much bigger. The returns are bigger. So everyone is willing to take more risks that kind of compound. Because it’s such a big market.
Matthew Todd
That’s really, really interesting perspective and definitely holds true with what I’ve seen going on. I like what you said about that perspective of the right kind of investment, being a catalyst. I think there definitely are the wrong types of investments.
Again, perhaps that might be investments that are too small, almost that then put forward even more of that kind of small thinking, like, here’s a few 10s of 1000s, or like 100k heel, or those kinds of smaller things that seems to come with more expectation yet also less ambition at the same time.
Juan Andrade
Yeah, but I think it’s the hits, like the media that we consume, that does influence us, like when I started, I thought, I’ll get money to build a thing. But what I realized now is that investors aren’t going to put money in you just because you talk, you’re articulate, or whatever, like, they need proof points, they need traction.
So like going back to, when I go back to London Business School and chapter students there, every, nearly every pitch is like so we’ll raise 500k to build the product and quit our jobs. No, that’s not how it works. You have to prove to an investor that, that, that 500k is going to return like at least 10x. You’re not going to do that whilst you’re still at your cushy, corporate job, just like pontificating about, like what a startup might be, like. So yeah, I think people have got it all wrong, but it’s not their fault. It’s just no one is teaching us the way that you know that they’re teaching them in the US.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, that’s really interesting, I think in terms of the right kind of investment as you say. Of course, they will need to see those signals, those indicators that as a business, it is going to work they want to see the likelihood that they are going to get that kind of return on their investment they have to in order to make that model work in the first place.
So, you know for every bank then What were some of the things that you managed to achieve to demonstrate traction that enabled you then to go on and fundraise.
Juan Andrade
When you’re early on, good investors invest in the team, and the market, and whatever traction you have in the early days, so by going through something like Y Combinator, the team aspect of that calculation is partly validated. If you are a TechStars, EF, YC Founder, you’re gonna get a different kind of conversation with investors than if you’re not. Works for any accelerator incubator, most of them. So that was that was basically it.
The hardest thing about going to Harvard is like getting into it. But once you’re into it, they don’t want to throw you out, like, it’s probably harder to get thrown out than it is to get in. So yeah, once you’re in one of those accelerators, like that already opens a ton of doors. We built an MVP really quickly, with a very small team. Just by talking to our users, and just like, shipping a lot. During YC, we added a bunch of new features. We got like 55 companies in a couple of weeks. That was enough.
But I think, on the fundraising side, there are the sort of logical, that’s the logical argument to invest in a young or early team. Then there’s the sort of irrational side and I think we got lucky with the irrational side, meaning we managed to build FOMO in our fundraising process, which is, it’s not easy to engineer, frankly, because I tried it afterwards. It kind of worked, but not as well. When someone is thinking about putting in 2 million plus into you. It’s not they don’t do it. rationally. There’s always like an irrational element to that decision. So, you need to fed that part of their brain as well. Which, which we did.
Matthew Todd
So that that kind of fear of missing out definitely played into part of closing those rounds then.
Juan Andrade
Also held that it was it was a crazy time, you know, now, like you can’t raise for shit, it’s, it was so hard to fundraise. Now the bar is just way higher. So, 2019 was good. Not as good as 21. But yeah, 2019 was good.
Matthew Todd
So, bring us up to speed then on where Rebank is at the moment. How has it grown since you started getting that, that this first signs of traction investment first groups of customers on board?
Juan Andrade
For the first 12 or so months, very little happened, we kept the team small, we were doing a lot of research. Just trying to discover like the right path for us to build the product, because we would, we wanted to do something different, where we, we kind of we aggregated your banks, but also let you move money, and no one was doing that.
So we thought, okay, let’s spend some time researching. So the first year very little, then 21, leading into 22, we started growing, and the growth really accelerated and 21 towards 22. Where we so in the last year we’ve we grew our revenue 10x our usage, so how much money our customers send through us went from basically, like under a million to 10 million plus per month.
So we had a huge, huge, huge 1218 months recently. I used that to raise again, a small seed extension but after doing that I started thinking and planning for 2023. That’s where we’ve actually made some changes.
Matthew Todd
Before we get into those changes, just so people understand how the business works, from a revenue perspective, am I right in saying that is largely based on transaction fees for moving that money? Or there are other kind of elements to how you charge?
Juan Andrade
Companies use Rebank to send money abroad to pay for things internationally, and to connect the international banks into one dashboard. So, if you’re a founder that has entities in the US and another country, Rebank is perfect for you.
Juan Andrade
Yeah, there are two parts. So, you know, to clarify, companies use Rebank to send money abroad to pay for things internationally. To connect the international banks into one dashboard. So, if you’re a founder that has entities in the US and another country Rebank is perfect for you.
The way we make money is by charging a subscription. By usage fees, by your payment volume fees. What we charge is still you still save money versus wise and even up to 90% versus your banks, because your banks will charge you maybe up to 5% for a foreign transaction fee. We charge you 30 base points, right? So, way, way less.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, those fees can definitely surprise a lot of people trying to deal with international payments, whether it’s good services, people, whatever it may be.
Juan Andrade
Exactly. COVID helped. With COVID, more and more companies went international. More and more companies started as international by default, because they had employees in different countries, contractors and so on.
Matthew Todd
I guess then when it comes to the, the changes you alluded to, then, you know, it seems like that was all going very well, some pretty decent growth, and as you say, kind of accelerated by some of the changes in working patterns as well. So what was some of the maybe challenges then that you started to see towards the end of last year?
Juan Andrade
Yeah, we looked. So, after I’d finished fundraising, actually whilst it was going on, we use December almost like to sharpen our swords. We looked at what was the makeup of our revenue? Who are our high value customers? What’s your what’s common about them and not?
That was all going on, whilst I was just wrapping up fundraising then wrapped up and we looked at the data. The first question I asked myself was, we grew 10x. I want to grow 10x in 23. Do I think I can do that? Just as a gut check? Do I think I can do that? My first my answer was no. Because we worked insane hours, doing three jobs, three roles each to get to 10x. We worked so hard, just for, like, $100 subscription a month.
The data that came back was telling me that most of our customers were really interested in this little add on that we created. So, I started digging into there. But yeah, that’s basically it. I just asked myself, like, do I think based on the last year that we’ve had, that we can grow 10x and keep the team relatively stable. Money is not cheap anymore. So, assuming the team has to stay as it is, can we 10x? Absolutely not was my answer.
Matthew Todd
Was that cost of acquisition? Or was it just the lifetime value was – I guess the relationship between the two I suppose it was too low?
Juan Andrade
Yeah, it was. So, our retention was really good. Once you start sending money that like our retention is like 90%. After six months, right? That was always great. The sales cycle, because we started moving further up into bigger companies, sales cycles are a bit longer.
The requirements that these companies needed, were a bit more complex. We had an engineering team of two, basically. We could just see that, like, the product was just growing beyond what two three engineers could do. It wasn’t obvious that we could easily just hire three more engineers.
But that helped, that constraint helped us think more clearly. Because what we realized is that we essentially built three products, which is really, really bad. We made a, like a strategic, kind of faux pas, early on, where we weren’t specific enough about which path which sort of route we wanted to take, or we wanted to focus on.
So anyway, all of this running through my head, and then looking at all of our revenue, actually, most of our revenue comes from this little add on. So we spent January, just really going into validating two or three, potentially new products. That’s, that’s what sort of, that’s what led us to this change that we’ve now made.
Matthew Todd
So that’s interesting. I think it’s a level of kind of self-awareness and analytical perspective that I don’t see as being, you know, massively common, at least not as common as it as it should be. And I think it sounds like it comes from the ambition that you’ve got, rather than saying, oh, yes, stuff is kind of working, we can just keep things ticking along incremental growth.
Because you have a place that you’re trying to get the business to, then you are doing that analysis, as you say, based on that gut feel of actually, does it make sense that I can get to where I want to be, where things are at the moment.
Juan Andrade
If you don’t want to grow your company very quickly, don’t get venture backed.
Juan Andrade
Yeah. I didn’t, you know, in the early days, I didn’t allow anyone to create budgets or forecasts. I was like, budgets are useless. So, it’s because I’ve made those mistakes myself. We started doing budgets, and I realized, oh, God, like this just it’s so clear now when we’re having a good month and not a good month. If you’re in venture you need to hold yourself to a high bar in terms of your growth by if you’re not growing. You don’t if you don’t want to grow your company very quickly, don’t get venture backed.
Maybe one more thing is, is that I spent maybe six months fundraising in 2022, because it was so hard. I failed the first time to raise anything. So, you know, I took a pause. We were doing really, really well. And then once we got to a point, I was like, okay, we should have the metrics now. There are all things that happen there.
But essentially, like, I had pitched to, like another 100 investors, and I already pitched maybe 100 plus, by pitch, like, almost every day and I created this sort of story like the end goal. I was like, okay, you’ve pitched it 100 times, do you believe in it? Based on all the feedback that you’ve just had? Do you still believe this yourself?
Given the data, given my ambition to get to 10x? Yeah, I’m like, no, no, something needs to change. So yeah, I guess yeah, awareness was definitely, awareness is painful.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, I guess you’ve always balancing the conviction and confidence that you held previously, and the rejections that you have before knowing that sometimes actually, you do need to just persevere and push through that. But also, other times you need to adjust either how you’re presenting it, as you talked about before, or indeed what you’re presenting.
I think it can be a hard thing for many founders to call, you know, to make a call on which of those is the right thing to do. But also, I think it can be incredibly difficult for any founder to admit that some of what they’ve done, or some of the products that they may be quite attached to, is not the thing that’s going to take them to where they actually do want things to be. I think it’s being attached more to the vision of the business than for the particular vehicle, i.e., the solution, the products in the way it’s, you know, takes format, any current moment in time.
Juan Andrade
I could speak to the sort of early founder, Juan. I would shake him and say, even though you think you’re not wedded to your idea, you really are. You need to stop that because it’s going to hurt you. You can’t you can’t blame us, like, you have no frame of reference for what it means to be wedded to an idea. Because I was like, no, I’m not. I’m not. I’m looking at the numbers and looking at the data. But that wasn’t quite true.
So yeah, it’s hard. You think you’re being customer focused, but then someone shows you how you’re not. You think you’re being objective with like, the value proposition, and then someone shows you you’re not. So I guess, as long as you’re always willing to look for that feedback, and take it in, then you will kind of get a snap out of all of that. You kind of protect yourself, maybe.
Matthew Todd
It’s healthy as well, I always tell people to hold, you know, confidence in their conviction and go all in on something, but be willing to listen and change the thing that you’re going all in on. If that’s what you’re hearing from the market as well. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have confidence or whatever it is you’re trying to achieve any anytime, right? With that kind of learning, then with that change in perspective, you know, what does that mean for Rebank going forward. How is the product changing? How do you see yourself kind of making that transition?
Juan Andrade
So we committed to one of the hypothesis because it was, we got some validation really early on from it, meaning that customers were willing to pay us almost 10 times more than they paid us for the previous product. It’s theirs. From a business perspective, margins are much healthier. The competitive landscape is it’s not so red ocean, it’s more blue ocean. It’s kind of like a niche thing that we think we can build up.
So what we’ve ended up focusing on is helping startups that have multiple entities, set up those entities in in an automated way. So there’s a ton of tax documentation that like no one has a clue about that we we’ve automated for startups. So we had a bunch of customers that we were already doing that for and now we’ve doubled down, we’re going from much bigger companies. So we automate the intercompany agreements, which is really weird tax term, which I never thought I’d get into. It certainly sounds very niche, I guess I’m trying to visualize the type of companies that have that problem. It can be anywhere from like a two person startup up to a multinational.
So one of the things that’s happened recently is that more and more companies are international by default, or their default global because of COVID. Either they hire a lot of people in one country through someone ideal remote.com. They eventually realize, oh, it’s better if we have our own entity, their point, you need to have this tax thing in place. If you don’t, you can get fined retrospectively, you can be fined a percentage of your revenue.
So right now, startups are two options. You have like, talk to your accountant that which is cheap and mostly wrong, because they don’t understand the nuances of international tax law speak to a consultant, which is like correct, but expensive. It’s sort of tailored to multinationals. Where so we’re coming in with like, we understand startups, we know you don’t want to be, like, burdened with unnecessary meetings with five different people. You can automate this, we just need a few inputs. We’re that happy middle.
Matthew Todd
Sounds fascinating. It really does.
Juan Andrade
Oh, yeah. Global tax global tax, it can be fascinating once you, but you have to think about it the other way. It’s so boring and unnecessary. That to solve it for everyone. That’s exciting.
Matthew Todd
I don’t mean an international tax exciting. I don’t think any form of tax is exciting in any way, shape or form. But I think the opportunity and the need for what you’re describing is very exciting, because as you say, more and more companies are international by default.
As you say, with a lot of startups, I know from, you know, my own businesses, as well as from people that we advise that, you always start off on the freelancer, the contractor route. Maybe you’ll go to some of those agencies that are out there that help you put together remote teams and all the rest of it. But you soon realize that you, you do want your own people, and then it starts to get very complicated when you even try and scratch the surface of this area, which scares many people off. So where are you at now then in terms of bringing that vision to life?
Juan Andrade
We already have paying customers. We have an MVP for them. But we’re adding more to the product. We look at it as like there’s the sort of create your documents, but then also help you distribute those documents to the people that need to see them, the IRS, HMRC, your accountants.
Now, you basically just get the receive the document from us with our you know, we take the liability, you sign it, and then we send it to everyone that needs to take care of it. That’s it. So that’s that second part is like what we’re building up now.
But we already have the MVP. Where in the past, you would have to learn about this tax thing, liaise with accountants in all your entities. Maybe speak to a lawyer or consultant, and then do the filings and confirm the documents and like check that you’re happy with it and sign everything.
Matthew Todd
Sounds like a really well thought out, well validated change of direction. I can certainly, as I say understand the problem that you’re solving and the need for it. I can understand future demand growing as you’re working patterns and the way companies do work changes and evolves.
But what is it then about this, that gives you confidence. Not that, yes, you can get paying customers on board, but what is it about this that you think it’s going to let you get that level of growth that you’re looking for, for the business?
Juan Andrade
There’s a few things but when we when we speak to finance managers or founders, the conversation when it comes to this problem, like it’s completely different, it’s closer to can you just please fix it? I’m kind of stuck because people are telling me different things. Whereas with other you know, when people come in for like payments or something else, it’s like, okay, I’ve checked Wise I’ve checked Revolut I want to check you guys out. I’m comparing you against all of this.
So, I think there’s that side where it just feels like a much bigger sort of hair on fire problem. Then I kind of hinted at the business justification where healthier margins compared to the previous product. It is an area that we think is trending upwards now. You can’t, you can’t mitigate all the risks, right? There’s still a lot of questions that we need to answer. But we are compared to the start of Rebank. It’s like night and day,
Matthew Todd
I can see that and how you, you get to that conclusion and kind of think looking at, you know, Rebank site before and in discussions before as well, it seemed like, you were offering something of value. But there was always that, you know, cheaper than wise, cheaper than doing it by your bank, you know, there’s always that cheaper van, rather than, you know, a genuinely unique solution to some, you know, burning problems that have to be solved. Both are fine. But it depends on what your ambitions are and what you’re trying to build.
Thank you for sharing that. I think it’s something that a lot of founders should listen to and take away and hopefully apply that kind of thinking to their own businesses in terms of what problems I really solving for customers, the VC, the Venture Fund, as well, I think is interesting.
Because, as you say, if you do start to take on that investment, then there are there are growth expectations, and there have to be in order for them to get a return. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If you’re looking to create a business at scale that has a lot of impacts. Then, if you truly are trying to do that, then your interests are aligned.
Juan Andrade
There’s a lot a lot of pieces, a lot of constituents to please. Once you spend enough time, like in this space, you kind of build your little support network. That’s also really important.
Matthew Todd
Is that network, part of what gives you that confidence in your ability to execute? Is that you know, is that a sounding board helpful, I imagine.
Juan Andrade
Always, in anything that you do, it isn’t just about being a founder, or if you’re a venture capitalist, like if you can, you know, go for a meal, go to the pub with five other people that are founders, who are slightly earlier slightly later. You have the best conversations. I spent some time in the US last year for YC reunion. It was amazing. It was the best week, like in in a long time. Because you’re just talking about all the problems. All the stuff that like, you can’t really talk to other people about your friend or family. They don’t get it.
So all the problems and you know how VCs are annoying. Joking around. Because VCs also find founders annoying, I’m sure. The support network is something that you can build with the right people around you, or just by going for something like Y Combinator TechStars, any of those?
Matthew Todd
A fair point, like you say, it’s not the kind of things you can talk to friends and family about. They probably won’t get the problems faced, the solution space, or what it means to try and build that type of company. Any of those things are so many steps removed from almost where their thinking is that. It’s too much of a leap to make that a useful conversation, I guess.
Juan Andrade
I always appreciate it. But if I talk to you about having to make redundancy decisions and this that and the other like, there’s only so much your dad or mom can say about that.
Matthew Todd
Probably a little bit biased, depending on what their professional experiences are. Thank you for sharing it. As I say, it’s a really interesting perspective. I look forward to finding out how this change in direction goes for Rebank. So, I hope we do have a follow up conversation. I’ll definitely be following. So that’ll be interesting to find out more from a number of different perspectives.
Juan Andrade
Yeah, always happy. Always happy to help. Yeah, thanks, Matt.
Matthew Todd
For anyone interested in finding out more, we’ll obviously include links to Rebank in the show notes. Thank you for taking the time today.
Thank you for joining me on this episode of Inside the Scaleup. Remember for the show notes and in depth resources from today’s guest, you can find these on the website inside the scale app.com. You can also leave feedback on today’s episode, as well as suggest guests and companies you’d like to hear from. Thank you for listening.