How AI Can Enhance Financial Management for Companies with Daniel Kivatinos, CEO of JustPaid.io

[00:00:03] Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Outcomes Rocket podcast. Saul Marquez here and thanks so much for tuning back in. We talked to a lot of entrepreneurs in the space and as you all know it, ventures are successful. Some of them don't work.

[00:00:18] Today I have the privilege of having an entrepreneur that's had success in his previous venture. I am talking to Daniel Kivatinos on the podcast today, and he is the CEO of JustPaid.io. I'm excited to share that several years ago we had his co-founder of

[00:00:36] his previous company, Dr. Crono. They were acquired and now Daniel is onto his new venture, JustPaid.io. So we're going to unpack what they're doing there, share some history, and just have a great conversation for you to benefit from. So Daniel, thanks so much for joining me today.

[00:00:53] Thank you so much for having me on. This is exciting to be on the podcast. Yeah, it's exciting to have you on. You know, back in like 2018, 2019 we had Michael, your co-founder on. So just for the sake of our listeners, talk to us, you know, lessons learned

[00:01:09] from that Dr. Crono journey and things that you would recommend anybody looking to make moves like that to eventually sell their company. Yeah, I think being an entrepreneur is a long endeavor and a long journey.

[00:01:21] And I think if you really want to make a significant impact, it will take time. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs go into this thinking it's going to be a quick flip. I can flip this in two years and three years, four years, five years.

[00:01:33] I actually think it's longer than that. I think it's going to be a 10 year journey to actually see significant impact happen in a startup. So if you go into it with the mindset, I'm going to be working on this 10 to 15 years.

[00:01:44] I think that's a better place to be. And for me, the first time around, I went into it with that mindset. I did not think it was going to be an easy journey. I understood that there were a lot of competitors in the space.

[00:01:55] I understood that health care takes a long time to do something impactful. And I wanted to go into it with my eyes wide open. And again, the journey, it was a long journey. And that is expected in health care, you to do that, but also in any industry.

[00:02:10] So if you're going to do something even outside of health care, it's the same expectation you should have. That's one tip right there. I love it. No, it's such a great tip. And I think a good reminder, we often underestimate how long things will take.

[00:02:23] And when you approach it with that 10 to 15 years in mind, you level set, right? You become more realistic and you could plan better. Exactly right. Exactly right. But also it's realizing like how much you should spend.

[00:02:35] So like how much money you should raise from investors or if you're going to do it with your own life savings, like you have to realize it's going to take a while to like get something off the ground.

[00:02:42] So like for me personally, my first company, I only had so much life savings and I said, okay, without investors, without actual users, like how long can I live? And you have to ask yourself that question, whether you have a family or mortgage, all these other responsibilities.

[00:02:56] I think it's important to realize how long can you go before the company will fail? So like every dollar you spend is actually really important. Even when you pull in investors, every dollar you spend is extremely, extremely important to extend the life of the company.

[00:03:08] And you're seeing that now in the industry where a lot of health care companies are doing layoffs because they spent way too much money. They were overextending themselves. And you know, there's a lot of like hot startups out there that are out there

[00:03:20] that raised all this money and they're privately held and whatnot, and they're doing layoffs. And part of the reason is they got overzealous in that zero interest zone where we had that like really great period.

[00:03:31] Now I think profitability is so much more important and hyper focusing on that creates a sustainable company for the long term. So you've seen companies just kind of flame out when they just run out of money

[00:03:41] and investors feel like the valuations are too high and they don't want to put more money into it. And it just, it creates this dark period. So going into it with your life savings and saying, how long can I take this?

[00:03:50] Or going into it with like some investors and them believing in you, how long can you go? How long can you do that? Yeah, no, that's fantastic man. And you know, personally in July, you know, left my full time job and thinking

[00:04:02] about what you're saying with my company. So true. And we're very focused on driving value to our customers revenue and being very smart about that. And I love the reminder, you know, I'm taking it internally, right?

[00:04:14] Your reminder of that 10 to 15 years, because yeah, like that five-year mark for some reason is like, I feel like what a lot of people think about, you know, including myself. And so great reminder and awesome that you went there and folks, something for you to think about.

[00:04:28] What are you thinking? Are you thinking longterm enough? And you're in healthcare if you're listening to this most likely. So definitely great tips from Daniel here today. Hey, so let's shift. Let's talk about your new venture. It's just paid.io.

[00:04:41] What are you guys doing and why is it cool and important? Yeah. So, you know, my first company was a huge success. So Dr. Crono was a huge success. I saw a lot of the scaling issues in that company and scaling meaning like good problems to have. Yeah.

[00:04:54] I think when you have customers and you have revenue, real revenue, you see a lot of the complexities of what's happening out there. And for me, I realized other startups are having the same issue.

[00:05:05] And how do you tackle this problem where as a company scales, how do you make it easier for the company to collect revenue? And, you know, there's a lot of really successful healthcare companies out there

[00:05:15] that are doing really well and they hire vast, huge amounts of team members to like make sure that the revenue is appropriately accounted for and they're collecting the right amount of revenue. If you have 5,000, 10,000, 20,000 customers, this is a good problem to have,

[00:05:29] but also a complex problem to have. So this new company just paid.io is really looking at that and saying, how do we help with a no code solution? That means not having developers, a no code solution to allow any company,

[00:05:41] startup healthcare, to collect revenue in a really simple way where the finance team can just, or not, or just the founders can just click, click, set up the revenues and AI will also help take care of collecting that revenue.

[00:05:54] So analyzing things, making sure like, Hey, this customer hasn't paid you in four months, just a heads up. They generally pay on time. Here's a report on the 17 people that you really should go after and just talk to about what's happening.

[00:06:05] Here's seven customers who their contracts are expiring. The AI will give you a heads up there and say, Hey, this is what you should be doing with these customers. So big vision, it's like revenue management in healthcare and outside of healthcare. That's great.

[00:06:19] So what comes to mind, and I'm sure what's coming to mind to a lot of the listeners and viewers right now is, Oh, so like, is this like a bill.com meets Stripe meets QuickBooks? Clarify my thinking. I think you're right.

[00:06:34] I think bill.com is more where we started with. So yeah, I think a bill.com is a really good starter point for this type of thing that we're building, but we want AI to actually be part of like your team member.

[00:06:48] So I think of it as like a bill.com with an AI layered in that helps you collect revenue. Now, Stripe is a little more complex because generally there's developers involved and developers cost money and you don't have to have the developer,

[00:06:59] like think about like, how do I collect the revenue? What API's do I use? Exactly. What do I, we're trying to avoid that and making it like dead simple. So like just a non developer can like use this product though you can connect

[00:07:12] into Stripe and you actually can connect it to bill.com with our product if you're using those. And then we'll like layer in our AI on top of it and plug it on top. That's super fascinating.

[00:07:20] By the way, like literally five hours ago, I was on a call with my accountant and I was just talking to her and I'm like, okay, QuickBooks is not matching bill.com and you know, I'm sending you an Excel file with payments to make sure that we reconcile.

[00:07:35] And I think very timely. So I may need to do a demo with you, Daniel. I mean, that's exactly what we work on. So I think like the problem that you have, everybody has with their accounting

[00:07:45] team, you sit down once a month, once every two weeks, if there's a lot of transactions that may be weekly or monthly or quarterly, but what you're experiencing, every company experiences the same problem.

[00:07:56] And if AI can help in some way to save you time and your accountant time, that's like the overall goal of like what we're trying to accomplish with the software. All right. So we're definitely going to do a demo. Awesome.

[00:08:09] And folks, by the way, like you're probably like, dang, I have that problem too. In the show notes, we'll leave a link for you to explore more, learn more. And if you want a demo, we could definitely do that.

[00:08:21] I'm sure Daniel and team would be very happy to accommodate that. Am I right, Daniel? Yeah. Happy to. Very, very happy to. Cool. All right. So we'll leave that out there. Check the show note. It's there. Okay. So talk to us a little bit more, right?

[00:08:33] You know, there's a lot of forms of AI. There's gen AI, there's machine learning. There's a lot of things out there. Help us understand the type of AI you guys are using. Yeah. So I think the world is changing and I think that it's a new paradigm shift

[00:08:47] that's happening. So when you think about when the iPhone came out, it was a paradigm shift where people didn't really understand how big and how helpful it would be. And it created a lot of new industry around us that we really didn't think would ever be possible.

[00:09:01] An example is like Lyft or Uber. If you think about health care in general, like if someone has to go to the doctor and you know when you go to the doctor, maybe you're having like a surgery and they're putting you under for a little bit.

[00:09:12] Generally in the past, you used to have to call a taxi, right? And a taxi would come and you'd have to organize that and then they'd have to come pick you up because of the iPhone.

[00:09:19] And because of like what it has done for us, it created geolocation and you can track yourself. And then on top of that, you can layer it in Uber or Lyft app. Suddenly someone going to get a surgery done and them having to go pick

[00:09:31] themselves up and being dropped off. It's not an issue. It's a non-issue. I think a paradigm shift is happening so quickly in front of us. I think people don't realize how much it's going to change health care, how much

[00:09:43] it's going to change payments, how much it's going to change like a lot of different industries. And if health care, I'll talk about it because your listeners are a health care industry. If they're not moving on and looking into this, they're going to be competitors

[00:09:56] moving faster than them. So if it's like two founders creating a scheduling company, if they're not using AI today, I think they've already lost. And it's the same thing in the payments industry where AI is going to assist in so many different ways.

[00:10:09] And what I mean by that is as money is moving from point A to point B, how do you know you're moving the correct amount of money? Like yesterday I spoke to one person and they said someone in their company

[00:10:19] actually got fired for moving $200,000 to the wrong account and they couldn't get the money back. It blows my mind that this is happening today, but can't AI help protect us and have rails to say you're doing something that's abnormal? Be aware. This is a warning.

[00:10:34] We recommend you don't send the money. If you had somebody helping you with that and everyone says it's not going to happen to me until it happens to you. And I think that's where this happened to this one individual and they got fired

[00:10:45] from their job and true story, like talking about it with the CEO yesterday. And I'm like, this is horrible. And it's crazy that we live in this world where money can just move from one place to another very, very quickly.

[00:10:55] And you're not thinking you're like, yes, of course you're confident. You're trying to be a fiduciary responsible, but somehow money can just move to the wrong place. And for me, same thing with healthcare. You could miss a cancer, right?

[00:11:05] You have like a radiologist and they're looking at hundreds of screenings per day. If AI can detect abnormalities at a faster rate, people will be able to like, they'll have better care in general and the cost of like that screening will go down.

[00:11:19] So I think AI is going to really just change the world. I agree. And it's moving so fast and patients are screaming for change. Physicians are screaming for change. And now we have technology that's there to help us. So I couldn't agree with you more, Daniel.

[00:11:36] Talk to us a little bit more about some of the opportunities that people have with JustPaid, like break it down for us. What does the platform do? And maybe peel back the layers a little bit to help us be more interested in it.

[00:11:48] Yeah, so I think I kind of spoke about this a little bit, but revenue collections is where we're hyper focused. And what that means is if a company really truly wants to scale, say you want 10,000 customers, say you want 5,000 customers, you can use a stripe.

[00:12:01] You can use, you know, there's a lot of different options out there, but we're looking to build a no code solution, kind of like a bill.com that allows you to collect revenue with that AI assistant. Now, can it be used in health care? Of course.

[00:12:13] You know, I spoke to one sales lead today. He runs a health care company and he was asking about like, how do I do revenue collections appropriately from patients? And I'm like, you know, there's possibly a way to do this through our software, but

[00:12:25] also making payments so you can make payments through our software. So there's a lot of different ways to like move money. You know, you mentioned QuickBooks. We connect directly into QuickBooks. So the transactions are placed into there and you don't have to worry about that.

[00:12:36] And your accountant can see that. That's really cool. Well, well, look, we oftentimes learn more from our setbacks than our wins. Talk to us about a major setback you've run into, whether it's with your current company or previous ones and how that's made you better.

[00:12:52] I mean, setbacks are just a part of running a business. And I think understanding that as the nature of doing a startup, just having that mindset is critically important. What's a good example of a setback? Getting excited if an investor wants to invest and they don't invest, right?

[00:13:08] Just be prepared for that. And I think having a pragmatic view that things are less likely to happen than they are really helps me. And when they don't happen, it doesn't like break my heart. Right?

[00:13:18] So say you want to hire somebody and you're like, oh, this is the person, they're the perfect person for the job and you just can't get them. You can't hire them. Being pragmatic and always have like a BATNA, best alternative to like what you

[00:13:29] originally wanted is really good. So I think that's a strategy I've always taken. Generally, there's going to be more failure. You're going to get more news. So just be mentally prepared for that. That's just the nature of like doing a startup, right?

[00:13:41] There's going to be a lot more news. Totally, man. Yup. Yup. As said from a weathered entrepreneur over here, look, it's the raw truth and I appreciate you serving it. We're all here to receive it. So Daniel, look, I appreciate this opportunity to connect with you.

[00:13:59] Learn more about justpaid.io. What call to action would you leave our listeners with today and best place for them to reach out? Yeah, I think you just mentioned it. So you can go to justpaid.io and then just book a demo.

[00:14:12] Happy to hop on with you and the sales team will hop on also. And we can just give you a quick tour of what we're building and see if it's a good fit for your company. Outstanding.

[00:14:20] Daniel, thank you so much for being with us and listeners take advantage of the opportunity to use this AI assisted collections platform payables in there too, but a new way to do it. So if you're not using AI, your competitors will and they will crush you.

[00:14:36] So make sure you do it. So thank you all for tuning in, Daniel. Thanks for being with us. Thank you so much. This was great.