Jeremy Weisz 15:38
And sometimes you’re not even communicating with them.
Chase Harmer 15:40
Well, you never talk to that guy. He just shows up out of nowhere. He’s like, hey, guys ball, let me make my job important now, so this is why I get paid, you know, the big one. And so, like, there’s a lot of that going on, especially in banks. And there’s a lot of bureaucracy in a banking business. And so, people want to, like, show their worth. And how they show their worth is by, like a lawyer, like they put the red line in the contract. It’s like, you didn’t even have to do that. But you want to feel like, this is why I’m getting paid. So there’s a lot of that. You just have to know how to work the system, just like any other system is, like, you really just need to know how to weave and Bob and get through it. And get through it. And I think that was big part of the process is that I’ve done that before. Going through the gauntlet one time allows you to go through this the gauntlet much easier the second time.
Jeremy Weisz 16:30
How do you create internal champions? Because I think that’s a really interesting thing for any company. I mean, there’s a lot of when people are dealing with enterprise companies or even smaller companies, you’re usually not talking to all the decision makers.
Chase Harmer 16:46
No, that’s true. So I built a relationship with one of the guys on the banking team. And we basically had started separate conversations, and we built this relationship, and he was basically became my advocate and he started saying to me, he’s like, listen, these guys are going to come into this meeting. They don’t know you are. He’s like, blah, blah, blah. Like, this is what you need to do. So he was actually kind of prepping them and selling them for me. So when you have someone else working in there, and it’s really just about building relationships, because when you come into these relationships, for the first time, you got to, kind of, like, almost like, play the few guys, like, okay, who is it going to be like, who’s it going to be like, but you really got to, like, really focus on building the relationship with one of these people, like, who is it going to be like, who’s going to be my champion and start building the inroads to having a personal relationship with this person.
And when I say personal relationship, I don’t mean personal in the way, like, holding hands, but like more, like, building that personal relationship, having some common interest, and actually, like, being a little vulnerable to that person, so that you actually can establish this bond, that he becomes this champion for you inside the company, or he or she. And that’s what it requires to really get through the gauntlet, is to build that relationship. So you got to figure out who that’s going to be in the beginning and start working those inroads so that way you can get to where you need to go.
Jeremy Weisz 18:22
So I love that question. Chase was, who’s going to be my champion, and just figuring that out, so you’re the team, then compliance. And then I think there’s sponsorships.
Chase Harmer 18:37
Yeah. So we have card brand sponsorships. So again, like, I had gone through this process before, so MasterCard and Visa, both of those organizations are massive, so you’re like, a little flea, and as a startup, they don’t care about fleas. They’re like, listen, flea, like, we got lots of fleas. We don’t know which flea is going to be good and, like, whatever, right? So I had some clout built up from my last company, and so they knew who I was, and the guy that was leading the fintech division I had a personal relationship with already, so I was able to get in there and get a contract built that gave us exclusivity instead of a MasterCard bin.
There’s advantages and disadvantages to getting exclusive bins. And the advantages are, you get to show their brand everywhere and being a partner with MasterCard, there’s obviously advantages, because we’re issuing a MasterCard that can be used virtually anywhere on the planet. MasterCard has a bigger international presence than visa does. Visa is bigger in the US, but internationally, which, obviously we have a goal to expand internationally. They have better international rails, and we can easier flexible like over time. So that was part of the strategy was, long term, we want to be able to issue cards in all the countries, and who has better international rails and more flexible for us to do that? And that was MasterCard. And I just had some inroads, and I had done some big deals with MasterCard before, so I had some clout built up.
So even though my first fintech was a nightmare for me, I did escape out of there with a lot of solid relationships that still knew who I was and were willing to make some exceptions and get us in the back door. And we did that for less than 2 million. When I say, get us in the back door, like nobody could have built this company for less than $2 million had I not had these preexisting relationships, and these inroads, typically, to build a fintech of what we’ve accomplished, it takes millions of dollars more than what we were able to do it for.
Jeremy Weisz 20:53
Probably much longer timeline.
Chase Harmer 20:56
Well, yeah, like, because I knew exactly how to do it, and I knew all the loopholes to, you know, we all knew how to take all these necessary steps to get it to where it was. It’s kind of ingrained, niche knowledge that allowed me to do this as quickly as we did, and for the amount of money that we did. A company like PayPal could put a million people in a room and say, hey, here’s a million dollars and go fix this problem, or go solve this problem. Like, as a startup, you don’t have that kind of capital and you don’t have that kind of time. So, yeah.
Jeremy Weisz 21:28
You mentioned Chase, previously, a nightmare situation. What were you referring to?
Chase Harmer 21:35
Yeah, well, I mean, I was a non tech founder, it’s like, hey, listen, I’ve never doubted myself for one minute in any circumstance. I’ve always been like, yeah, dude, I could solve that. Get the deal, and then figure it out later. And then all of a sudden, I raised $30 million I was like, crap. Like, we got to fix this. We got to figure out this deal. Like, I built a prototype. It was super wobbly, and this was a ProfitPay. And then we had $30 million to figure that out. But essentially, when you build a house on sticks, and then you keep building the Tower, right? Eventually the tower gets super tall and heavy, and you’re like, dude, like, this is crazy, right? So, but that’s because I didn’t know what engineers to get. I didn’t know, I started with an engineer. I thought, oh, engineers are engineers, right? They’re all the same. I had no idea that you need to build the foundation.
Just like when you build a house, you got to build the foundation solid. That requires a DevOps engineer that can actually build that foundation. I didn’t know that, you know. So I just got an engineer, no that that ended up biting me in the ass later. And then we had to tear down the tower of Pisa and rebuild it. And part of that problem was also that we didn’t document code. So, you don’t document code, because I didn’t know, oh, document code. I just assumed, like it was all there. But when you have 120 engineers, or 150, we had 150 at one point. I mean, just insane, right? This is spider web of stuff going on in there. And then you fire 10 of these guys, or you get rid of 10 of these guys, because, of whatever. Hey, go finish Jack’s work. Like, what the hell is Jack doing? I don’t know. Like, it’s like a spiderweb over there. And then, it something breaks, for example, something breaks like, dude, go find that break. Like, oh, where did like, it takes days to weeks to figure out where that break happened, and if you’re scaled, and you have massive transactions going through, you know, being, being incapable of fixing problems within days or weeks is detrimental to the business.
So, these are all things that you learn that you don’t necessarily, as a non tech founder, fortunately, there’s no book on how to build a tech company as a non tech founder because you’re going 100 miles an hour and putting the wheels on the bus. And the wheels on the bus, if they’re not the right size, you got, like, the wrong size tire on the right back wheel, and everything else is going like full speed ahead at 100 miles an hour, It’s not going to be a smooth ride, and those are the things that you figure out, and you’re just like, man, but again, those are the things you don’t repeat, right? Because, like, those mistakes kill you. They kill time, they kill capital. And you learn to not repeat those types of mistakes. And so I’m grateful for those mistakes, because I never made them again, right? I did this all with my own capital, and it made that all happen.
Jeremy Weisz 24:49
Let’s walk through, Chase, some of the I mean, obviously ProfitPay was very successful and grew to an amazing amount in business. But let’s walk through some of the mistakes and that you aren’t repeating in Wishes. One of them we were talking before hit record is you built a team over 200 people. Yeah. And that’s not easy to do. So what were some of the hiring or building a team mistakes that now you learn from and bring to Wishes, those lessons?
Chase Harmer 25:27
Well, I had a very good mentor. His name is Walter O’Brien, one of the smartest guys in the world. And he was actually though he’s like, the fourth highest IQ ever recorded, I think. And he tried to tell me a lot of things during our mentorship for two years. But I just couldn’t listen to anything because my mind was so like, God, got to go, got to go. Like, but after all that stuff, I was like, man, Walter was right about so many things. You know, he actually told me, you know, he’s the guy that told me, dude, you got to, like, you need to have all this code documented. I was just, like, documented. What do you mean? Like, because he’s, like, this engineering genius, like, he’s part of that guy that made all these things happen. I think the biggest mistake that we did when we were hiring, first of all, you can’t have a guy like me going, yep, he’s hired, you know, because I don’t know anything about code, like, so you actually have to have, like, some sort of test that these guys do to actually show that they actually know what they’re doing, and that test has got to be put together by someone that’s pretty brilliant, or someone that actually really has their stuff down.
And that’s for each specific like job level. So DevOps, back end, front end, UI, like all of the specific jobs have different tests, not the same test, because they’re all different jobs. People say, oh, I’m full stack engineer. Full Stack engineer don’t exist. Sorry. So like somebody says they could do back and front end, typically, those guys can do one of those jobs very, very well. The other job they can kind of get by, right? So full stack is just not really a thing you need. You need senior engineers at each level, right? Not half-assed front end and then mazing it back in. The other thing is that we had the platform site like so, like the engineering department was completely siloed from the rest of the company, right? And so I think that was a huge issue, because we really never knew what was truly happening. And again, Walter came in, and he’s like, Dude, you need to know. You need to understand engineering to the point where you’re dangerous. You don’t have to know how to code, but you need to know, like, enough that you can speak intelligently about this stuff.
You can’t just pretend that these guys are doing what you need to do. And I think that was really a hard lesson, but also one of the things that I mean learn now I know I’m pretty dangerous, like I can’t develop myself, but I know all the things that I need to in order to run an effective company and be an effective leader. And I think you can’t do that without actually understanding enough. And I was kind of just like, well, I don’t need to know that, right? It’s like, no, you actually do. And that’s one of the things that I would recommend to anyone that’s running a tech company that’s not a tech person, is that you need to understand, because people will just bullshit you, and you just really, you’ll get the wool over your eyes. Okay, it’s getting done. It’s like, no, it’s not, you need to be able to double check and actually understand and have some accountability. And if you don’t understand anything, you can’t make people accountable. And I think that’s a huge lesson that I learned, for sure.
Jeremy Weisz 28:43
So from the mistakes, maybe testing hires and making sure there’s some knowledge there, and then siloing, which then you go to Wishes, and you have Mitch and Alex heading up dev team, and you have a whole, basically people heading this up, and a whole team around it from the beginning. Yeah, go ahead.
Chase Harmer 29:05
Well, yeah, part of it is like, you know, before we were like, oh, we have slack. But slack doesn’t solve the problem. So we have our weekly team meetings. We go through what was done last week, we go through what the initiatives are this week, where the problems are what we need to work on, but we’re always in communication on Slack. But before we had slack too, that’s not the final answer, right? Slack is a communication channel, but if you have siloed departments, you really don’t know what’s going on, you’re basically just saying, Hey, why do we have a problem here? It’s like, I don’t know. Let me check it’s like, if that’s the only way that you’re communicating as a non tech founder, or I could say, like, we had the front side of the office, like, where Customer Success lives and the executive team lives, and then you had this part of the business where we really didn’t know what’s going on, but we would ask questions when there was problems.
That’s not really communication, like you should be working through the issues together, you should be having weekly team meetings that review what was accomplished last week. We know what is going on this week and what the priorities are. And so if that’s happening on a weekly basis, and then you have a communication channel where everyone’s actively working together, not hey, what the hell is the problem here? Why is this not working? Because, typically, a non tech founder, we’ll distance ourselves from the Tech because we don’t really understand it, right? And then we’re just like, dude, what’s up? Why is this word not working? But that’s not the way to communicate. So I think an open line of communication, but ultimately an understanding and being able to spot check and make people accountable is what keeps it together.
Jeremy Weisz 30:41
What else did you learn from, from ProfitPay that you’ve taken in Wishes?
Chase Harmer 30:47
Well, I think there was just so many lessons. I think the biggest lesson that I learned, probably, is that when we built a pretty innovative model that allowed us to that was centered around advertisers and e-commerce merchants that allowed them to because we found that most e-commerce merchants were the small mom and pop shop. But when I say small mom and pop shop, most of these, a lot of these guys are doing 50 to 100,000 to $200,000 a month. That’s not necessarily small, right, but they were using their debit card to pay for the marketing and advertising. They’re not getting any cash back. There’s lots of issues of that you can only run one campaign, and so we solved the problem by issuing virtual cards so they can actually manage multiple ad accounts and earn 2% cash back on all the spend. So that was kind of the thing. But I think where we really, so it scaled very fast, and we didn’t have…
Jeremy Weisz 31:45
How did you get customers at that point?
Chase Harmer 31:48
Yeah, well, social media, and then we were part of a lot of advertising groups, so we had just a ton of people coming to this and I was speaking at events but advertising events specifically with like, 1000s of people and on stages. So I kind of weave myself into the fabric of that advertising matrix where, like the Affiliate Summit and like places like this, where there was just 1000s of people, and I was talking on stages. So I became like an authority figure in this space. And I weaved myself in there through the back door again, but then I became this authority in this space, and I was talking on stages, and so that’s how we were getting a lot of clients. But what I was going to say is, we didn’t really have processes in place, so we actually scaled very fast.
I mean, I remember we threw $50,000 at a social media campaign, and it like, it just, it was on fire, right? And it’s like, Dude, we had no way to support all the opportunity that came in. And it sounds like a simple like, well, duh. Like, you know, you have to have processes to do this. Well, I mean, we honestly, yeah, we just were like, hey, listen, we need to get money through the door. We need to get these people in the platform. And it seems knuckleheaded, but it’s just one of those things that we didn’t have processes in place for that type of scale. And so those were hard lessons that we had to learn. And I think you can’t actually scale a company of any size and actually build a massive company without process. Processes is literally everything. And if you have a product that you can get market and rev market share with process is everything, it is everything.
Jeremy Weisz 33:32
There’s an episode I did with Adi Klevit, and it’s interesting. She’s an actual business, which she is done for you SOPs. So she goes into a company, and she helps them document process. And it was a great episode, because I geek out on that stuff, and also we just talked about our favorite productivity tool. So I encourage everyone check out the one I did with Adi Klevit, where that’s literally all she does all day long for companies. So it was very instructive episode. What about lessons from the acquisition?
Chase Harmer 34:04
Yeah, I mean, I think you have to build something that somebody can just come in and take over. And I think that goes back to processes again, right? If you don’t have duplicatable processes where Jeremy can come into my business, if he has the money, and he’s like, listen, I don’t need you Chase. I mean, maybe I want you on for a little bit, because I like you or whatever. But you need to build a business that’s self-sustainable, that doesn’t require Jeremy to learn all the things that the business. Because people want to buy a business, they don’t want to learn the business and be in the business necessarily. And I think it’s a box, right?
So you got to build a box that someone could just buy. I want this box, and I don’t want to know nothing about nothing other than, how does this box make money? And it’s just duplicatable. And, like, that’s really the biggest thing you know, that I learned is that you it’s got to be easy, and this company’s gonna be able to just step in there and take it over.
Jeremy Weisz 35:06
What about the acquisition process itself? Like eventually someone’s gonna probably offer to buy Wishes. And what do you wish you knew when you sold? ProfitPay?
Chase Harmer 35:20
Well, I think once you start scaling, you need to start that process. Like, there’s a process that you can do to start feeding in, like, with the potential buyers. And so one of my mentors, with Wishes, this is one of the things that he does with big companies like Amazon and Facebook and stuff like this, is he’ll start talking to the people internally. You can’t just go to a Facebook later when you’re ready, be like, yo, like, we’re here. It’s like, that’s a process. But if you start talking to them early and like, hey, listen, we’re doing this thing want to just put it on your radar. Like, that type of stuff early, when you start to be able to get some scale, then they start, but you continue to poke them over time, every quarter stuff like this, that actually, then all of a sudden, like, boom, you’re on the map.
They’re like, hey, listen, we need to look at this. You know what I mean? Because going to them at that time, like, when you already scaled, like, it’s a harder conversation if they’re already kind of look, if you already have somebody like, kind of looking at you and like, hey, listen, we just want to keep you abreast of what we’re doing. Hey, this is what we’re doing. Like, then you actually become an acquisition target, instead of actually trying to do it all at once, saying, hey, like, look at me. It’s like, no. Like, that’s a process, you got to get into the right people. You got to have them start looking at you. And I think that is one of the things that’s super important is, just start that process earlier than later, once you start scaling the business, and when I say scale, once it start launching, and you’re doing some transactional revenue, and everything works as expected, and you’re solving a big problem in the market, you can start having this conversation.
Hey, we want to let you know about what we’re doing. Hey, look at us, like type of thing. And then as you start really kind of in scaling the business more, continue those conversations, and then you will become an actual, real acquisition target quicker.
Jeremy Weisz 37:11
So back to Wishes for a second Chase. So we talked about compliance, we talked about building the team, we talked about sponsorships, and we haven’t even got to creating demand and waitlist. So how do you set out to do that?
Chase Harmer 37:29
Yeah, so our marketplace brings together donors that really want to understand what their dollars are. This is the thirst in the market. Pretty much everyone’s jaded, everyone sees everyone’s gone to the grocery store and seen how they ask you for $1 on every single purchase, no matter what it is, but nobody understands where that money goes. And the reality is that grocery stores taking a huge tax write off for millions of dollars that consumers are putting in there, which in itself, is kind of like annoying, but I think that’s a jaded marketplace. Donors want to understand. I’ve talked to 1000s of donors, and they all actually want to understand what goes to admin, what goes to impact. Why do nonprofits want to get on the platform?
We help them raise money, and we’re actually opening up them to 1000s of new donors that they never would have had an opportunity to speak with before. So I think our marketplace allows donors to always understand, no matter where they’re donating, right? So if all things being created equal as a donor, if you’re able to get rewards, tax deductibility and instant transparency on any donation that you give, and it doesn’t cost you anything like duh, why aren’t you doing it right? Because you can actually house all your tax receipts in one place, easily send it over to your CPA did the years downloadable, and you can donate to any charity that you want to at any time, any cause at any time, and always be it the safe place to understand that your money will never go to anything nefarious, right, or something that’s not me, that’s not real.
We have to validate every single nonprofit on the platform, so we’re attached to candid, so we can always understand that these nonprofits are real. But I think, as a nonprofit, what is the real reason they come on? Is because we help them raise dollars. And we help them raise dollars by being transparent. Because if you’re on the platform and you’re being transparent about the way you’re raising dollars and spending dollars donors want to help you and support your cause. And if you’re a new nonprofit, and you’ve never raised money before, and you’re brand new to the market, guess what, it’s a doggy dog world out there, it’s hard to raise dollars. So it’s not easy. And if you have no experience and you have no credibility because you’ve never done it before, Wishes is a platform that helps you raise those dollars and puts you in the light that people understand that you’re transparent and they’ll give you a shot.
And then we’re also opening up to thousands of donors that didn’t know they existed, right? Because as a nonprofit, you have a small circle of world that you live in. You might have a hosted. And you have a payment form there. But how do you actually get seen by the public if you’re a small nonprofit that doesn’t have a budget to market, well, we actually provide a marketplace full of donors that want to actually try to make an impact, so it is easier for them to raise dollars on a platform like ours. And so I think we kind of have a niche where we’re helping the nonprofits, but also ensuring that the donors can always understand those dollars are going to the right place. And I think that’s how we’re really attacking the market.
Jeremy Weisz 40:35
Let me just walk through a couple scenarios. So if you’re listening to the audio, there’s a video component we’re on wishes.inc here. Let’s talk about the wisher scenario, the nonprofit scenario and the donor scenario, and how it works on your platform. So how does it work with the wisher?
Chase Harmer 40:57
Yeah, so a wisher and the nonprofit, they come in in the same way. The only difference for a nonprofit is that we validate their nonprofit status with through candid instantaneously before they can post a story and actually raise funds. So they can’t just raise money as a nonprofit and actually not be a real nonprofit, right? So that’s number one. Wishers and nonprofits are really kind of the same category. But what they do is they create a story. They can put up a video, they can put up a picture. They can say what’s going to admin, what’s going to impact. For anything admin related, they can attach their bank account.
Those dollars flow directly into the bank account for anything mission related, that’s product or services related, they get issued a virtual MasterCard for those and then they could spend inside of the shopping portal, which is attached to pretty much every major category that they could potentially raise money for health, pets, clothing, all the groceries, all the things that they want to do and so and as a donor, when they come into the platform, what are the main things they can donate to any charity that they want to if there’s not a charity inside of the platform that we’re connected to currently, they can request the charity so that way we can connect to them, and then they can create a story, and then they can start taking those dollars. But as a donor, you can earn cash back on every single purchase or every single donation that you do. You can send prayers and messages to people in our causes inside of the platform, which is not something that’s not a feature that anyone else has, you’re able to also earn rewards.
Jeremy Weisz 42:32
Talk about the cash back and rewards for a second, because that’s not typical.
Chase Harmer 42:37
Yeah. So, as a payments guy, what we did is we thought about like the Maui fire situation, where somebody loses their house and you want to help them get a hotel room tonight, or an airfare line ticket out of there because they have no place to stay, or groceries for their family because they have no food. You can actually donate to a category like that, and then they get issued a virtual MasterCard, and they could spend inside of the grocery category or hotel category. But what does that mean for the donor? Well, typically, most donors on their own credit card, if you buy airline ticket or if you buy a hotel or if you buy groceries, you typically get cash back and rewarded for that and your grocery, your actual card issuer will see it as a hotel purchase, or they’ll see it as a grocery purchase or a restaurant purchase or a rideshare purchase, you’ll be able to earn cash back and rewards on your own credit card, and then, as an ambassador in our platform, you earn an additional 1% on any donation you make.
You can send those person messages. So we kind of built in the cash back and rewards for any donor because we wanted to just, hey, listen, all things being created equal. Most donors, like most donors, don’t do it for the cash back and rewards. But hey, if all things being created equal, if you could actually get rewards and cash back on a donation, why not? Right? So we built that feature in. Because, why not? I feel like the only category, one of the main categories, that people donate to, they donate to charity. There is no category that gives you cash back on those purchases. But what if there was, and welcome to Wishes, so we actually do that, because I thought that, why not? And we can, because our nonprofit owns 11 LLCs, and those LLCs are all specifically categorized for the bonus categories on your credit card.
So Wishes hotel, Wishes groceries, Wishes restaurant, Wishes, so when you donate to a category, specific cause or crisis or charity specific thing that’s raising money for a food bank, whatever you can actually help them with directly with what they need, and actually earn cash backs on your own credit card directly. It’s pretty cool.
Jeremy Weisz 44:46
Chase, I want to be the first one to thank you. Thank you for sharing your lessons, your journey. There’s so much to dig in here. It’s a little time, but I want to encourage people to check out wishes.inc to learn more and share and spread the word and the love and Chase thanks so much.
Chase Harmer 45:05
Hey. Thank you. Jeremy. Appreciate it.
