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EAH 4.0 - June new stage

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Spark Receipt - Joel Ojala

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https://www.linkedin.com/in/joelojala/?originalSubdomain=fi⁠

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22-5-24 - discovery call

Someone else started the business, built it for themselves as small businesses, and then launched it on AppSumo

receipt hero previous to this

previous business was similar as spark receipt, but only in finish market, the previous business is doing 3M ARR.

30 accountants currently using the existing spark receipt product, wants to adapt the product for accountants

He just joined the business 2 months ago I think, but I think at one point he said he’s financing the business.

Call structure - Joel started with talking us through the software and the business as per the above.

Then Yohan took over to start explaining

Starting with which types of accountants we have which are mostly small, 10-25 employees, and then explaining why they work with us (because we’re a quality filter). Now explaining the types of businesses we work with, and what sort of value that we can add at this stage.

Questions?

At what point does a UK company bring it in house instead of using external accounting services?

Answer is that the trend is towards accounting firms wanting to do outsourced finance

Then going through the miro board to explain our process.

10-6-24 - evaluation call

No competitive moat. Main question is how/why are you different/better than competitors? Why would someone use you instead of Dext?

antii - Founder is full stack developer

Joel - in charge of commerce side, customer acquisition

samsa - founder too, in charge of marketing, they were working together before on a different business, then they transferred the IP into this new business

Structure of call

Checking if everything was clear that wwe sent over first, eg the miro board

then bit of an intro to remind them that this is valuable for the accountants

then what is the value for customers?

no good solution for small businesses for this offering. dext does expenses and income, but it’s too expensive for small businesses. wanted everything to be in one place.

What problem speicifically? solution is to replace spreadsheets - 50% of survey said they were using manual processes, and that was app sumo users.

add assumptions as you go through the process.

reviewing form to ask questions based on what they said there

What’s the competitive moat? OCR is very easy now, so on a tech side, there isn’t a moat. community is potential moat.

pricing is a competitive advantage

demo:

Fastest on OCR and categorisation compared to competitors, way faster than Dext

you can email in the receipts into spark receipt so you can set up auto rules to get the receipts to go into the program automatically.

Yohans questions are demo - where is xero integration? doing quickbooks first, seeing how that goes, and then depending on feedback from that, then going to xero. Yohan says that small clients use xero mostly.

is there a dashboard where users start the journey on the app?

Do you have an accountant portal for accountants to manage their clients on the platform? clients can use the same way that users can manage multiple accounts

Are you on board to make changes based on the feedback? do you have bandwidth to do so? Yes

Only considering UK market? are you also interested in Australia? currently USA is biggest customer base, then Canada. total around 5,000 customers, 4,500 on lifetime deal, 4000 monthly active users.

what do you think about gap in the market? built for myself and then it did really well on appsumo so now trying to figure out how big the opportunity is

How do I know how unique this is compared to dext?

Assumptions

how many accountants still use spreadsheets as a solution

do accountants have access to the customers? or are their customers too small and therefore accountants dont have them as clients?

do we need to compete with dext directly, or are we an additional solution that clients offer?

which integrations should we prioritise?

how unsatisfied accountants are with the current alternatives?

13-6-24 - second evaluation call

Need to get a bit more clarity about the founding team and see if they are a good fit for speaking with the accountants

always start by framing the call

what was the journey more clarity

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