714: You Won't Believe What This Divorced Mom Raised $7 Million For
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Sheri Atwood. She\\u2019s the founder and CEO of SupportPay. She\\u2019s also a former Silicon Valley executive and a child of a bitter divorce who also went through her own divorce a few years ago. She\\u2019s created SupportPay when a search for a better way communicate about child support systems with her ex-husband proved totally fruitless. SupportPay is the first-ever automated child support payment platform poised to transform the complex, time-consuming & stressful process that impacts nearly 300M parents exchanging more than $900B in child support & child expenses worldwide. With SupportPay, today\\u2019s modern families can spend less time managing and arguing about child support, and more time focused on raising happy, healthy children. Prior to starting SupportPay, she was a former vice-president at Symantec and also has been named #5 of 50 Women in Tech Dominating Silicon Valley and Top 40 Under 40 Executives in Silicon Valley. She\\u2019s energetic, resourceful and lives by the motto \\u201cdon\\u2019t talk about it, be about it.\\u201d
Famous Five:
- Favorite Book? \\u2013 What Got You Here Won\\u2019t Get You There
- What CEO do you follow? \\u2013 Sheryl Sandberg, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Marc Benioff
- Favorite online tool? \\u2014 Stack Exchange
- How many hours of sleep do you get?\\u2014 4
- If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? \\u2013 \\u201cEnjoy the path, enjoy the lessons as you go\\u201d
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Time Stamped Show Notes:
- 01:23 \\u2013 Nathan introduces Sheri to the show
- 02:37 \\u2013 Sheri is going to lower the divorce rate by showing people that divorce just gets worst
- 02:49 \\u2013 Millennials aren\\u2019t getting married but are having babies
- 03:10 \\u2013 Sheri uses SupportPay and invented it because she didn\\u2019t have a solution
- 03:16 \\u2013 Child support is made up of 2 things: a base payment that covers basic daily living expenses and then there\\u2019s other additional expenses
- 03:34 \\u2013 The argument is about where the money is going and if it is enough to raise a kid
- 03:46 \\u2013 While doing an expense report in Symantec, Sheri thought of the idea of SupportPay
- 04:04 \\u2013 SupportPay started in 2011
- 04:38 \\u2013 Sheri was raised by her single mom who was an alcoholic
- 04:48 \\u2013 Sheri was one of the youngest VPs in Symantec and she was able to save money from her salary
- 04:57 \\u2013 Sheri had multiple houses, cars, boats, gave his ex-husband a house and 2 years worth of salary in the bank
- 05:24 \\u2013 Sheri bootstrapped SupportPay at first and she learned to code
- 05:40 \\u2013 SupportPay has raised $7.1M total
- 05:49 \\u2013 The series A was for $4.1M
- 05:59 \\u2013 Sheri has talked to people and there was nothing to support parents
- 06:13 \\u2013 Sheri also received calls from vendors thanking her
- 06:35 \\u2013 SupportPay is a SaaS business
- 06:40 \\u2013 Pricing starts at $9.99 a month
- 06:51 \\u2013 There\\u2019s also a free version
- 06:55 \\u2013 Each parent pays independently
- 07:05 \\u2013 Average pay is $10 a month
- 07:28 \\u2013 Sheri started hiring people in 2013
- 07:39 \\u2013 Sheri learned to code the basic html, css and php by starting her own website
- 07:50 \\u2013 Sheri self-studied from books that she found in Barnes and Nobles
- 08:08 \\u2013 Team size is 25 and they just relocated to Sacramento, California from Silicon Valley
- 08:30 \\u2013 Team has 14 engineers
- 08:39 \\u2013 After raising $3M, Sheri realized she couldn\\u2019t sustain a business in Silicon Valley
- 08:45 \\u2013 Sheri was burning $95K a month
- 09:08 \\u2013 Sheri\\u2019s equity table is a mess now because of her tech people switching to another company for a better offer
- 09:16 \\u2013 Sheri would have focused on revenue a little bit earlier
- 09:48 \\u2013 Sheri didn\\u2019t have revenue until July of 2016
- 10:08 \\u2013 SupportPay was processing $3M in child support
- 10:19 \\u2013 SupportPay currently looks at processing $4M a month in child support
- 10:30 \\u2013 SupportPay has over 43K customers with 2K paying customers
- 11:03 \\u2013 MRR is close to $100K
- 12:12 \\u2013 SupportPay has a free 30 day trial
- 12:27 \\u2013 The value of the product is the history, which can be used in court
- 12:46 \\u2013 SupportPay also provides certified report records
- 13:31 \\u2013 Churn on active users is 3% annually
- 13:57 \\u2013 Conversion rate from visitor to paid user is 12%
- 14:50 \\u2013 The bigger valuation for SupportPay is how it solves the problem of child support
- 16:00 \\u2013 After getting into fundraising, SupportPay focused on their revenue
- 16:25 \\u2013 2016 revenue
- 16:41 \\u2013 Sheri has talked to Salesforce to get them involved in SupportPay
- 17:10 \\u2013 Salesforce is trying to move government applications into the cloud
- 17:15 \\u2013 SupportPay will get Salesforce into the government space quickly
- 17:30 \\u2013 SupportPay is built on the salesforce platform
- 18:00 \\u2013 Tim Draper invested in SupportPay as he saw the value
- 18:17 \\u2013 Sheri\\u2019s goal for building SupportPay
- 20:20 \\u2013 The Famous Five
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3 Key Points:
- More millennials are having babies, but are not getting married\\u2014this leads to more parents having problems with child support.
- Having one less argument regarding child support will alleviate stress for the whole family unit.
- The divorce rate isn\\u2019t getting any better, it\\u2019s just getting worst.
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Resources Mentioned:
- The Top Inbox \\u2013 The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
- Klipfolio \\u2013 Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
- Hotjar \\u2013 Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you\\u2019re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
- Acuity Scheduling \\u2013 Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
- Host Gator\\u2013 The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
- Audible\\u2013 Nathan uses Audible when he\\u2019s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books
Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
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