GoCardless

Eileen Burbage is one of the best known figures in UK venture capital.

As a co-founder of Passion Capital, she backed companies including Monzo, GoCardless and Marshmallow after an earlier career spanning Apple, Yahoo and one of the first five employees at Skype.

She also spent eight years as the UK's treasury special envoy for fintech.

And now she's starting again.

Before that, John was product director for Core Data Services at King, the Swedish unicorn behind the hit game Candy Crush.

John was also head of BI at GoCardless, the British unicorn.

And recently, he joined Omni as field CTO, the BI and AI analytics platform, another unicorn.

You could say John is a serial data leader across unicorns.

I've been looking at some of the apps you use, and I'm guessing you use Stripe for credit card processing.

I know that Xero uses GoCardless for ACH payments.

What do you use to take ACH payments, if anything? Yes, I use GoCardless.

So about half of our clients do an ACH through GoCardless, and it's on autopay.

You can offer that to them.

And then The other half of our clients pay via credit card, which is through Stripe.

And most of them are also on autopay.

So either way, you can offer autopay.

So I'm about 70% built.

I've got to put Stripe and GoCardless in.

They're the two bits I've kind of left to the end a little bit because I need to sit down more than an hour, hour and a half at a time and just like add in little features and little features.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Big mind, absolutely.

You also had Tom Blomfeld, who at the time had GoCardless, then subsequently created Monzo, and he's also come back and been an ambassador and advisor into government.

So I think it's no coincidence that we've all come back in to try and do something in government to try and sort of move and tweak the system to make it capable of driving the outsized successes into for people like us and the next group of people coming through.

And I think people working together, I'm doing a little bit right now in the public market space, thinking about the fintech unicorns.

So you need to like, you really need an accounting system that's invoicing automatically every month.

I use GoCardless, which is then a direct debit system.

So effectively what happens is they fill in a little form, which is direct debit mandate.

I have zero, but other accountants do the same.

the top tip on this when you front load is the first payment should cover all of your costs associated with the contract as a minimum so if you know right we're going to charge ten thousand pounds it's going to cost me three and a half thousand pounds to deliver on this you want to make sure the first payment you get up front is your three and a half thousand pounds because then if things went really wrong on the rest of it at least you've got your costs covered now clearly that's the basics that's the lowest level but what you can do is you know as you get more established you might start charging five grand or six grand or seven grand up front so you know you've got some profit there as well as things scale and progress The next way you can prevent is you can automate.

So I'd always suggest using tools like GoCardless for payments that are regular on a monthly basis.

So for example, if you have clients that are subscription basis to you, don't have it so they have to transfer that money every single month.

Once again, it sounds obvious, but people do this where they don't assist on a standing order setup or a GoCardless setup.

So every month they send an invoice to a client, the client has to physically log on, transfer the money, look at their bank balance.

You don't want that to be a decision they have to make.

I wanted to join something that seemed like a bit more legit because there's a lot of random startups, right? And so I joined a company called Nested.

It was a second time founder, a guy called Matt Robinson, who'd previously started GoCardless.

So I thought, okay, you know, second time founder, you know, serious investors, etc.

Like, you know, hopefully I'll learn a thing or two about the startup thing.