QuickBooks

“QuickBooks is the monopoly for early States companies. And then eventually they switched to NetSuites and really these systems are monopolies. That is what everyone is using in the U S they go through that path”

“So we fully replaced QuickBooks. So the majority of our customers have no QuickBooks at all.”

“QuickBooks is not something you can vibe code. The numbers need to be accurate. The foundation needs to be robust. The properties need to be built to scale and who knows, maybe Gen AI will get better in many years, but it cannot build something with that level…”

“Because the filing cabinet couldn't think for itself. And now this is, like, the cool thing about everything that's happening in, in AI land is that, you know, the filing cabinet can do work. Like, QuickBooks can actually accomplish a task by itself versus jus…”

“Nobody's gonna get rid of QuickBooks.”

“And actually, QuickBooks, you know, they invoice people through QuickBooks. And it's actually trillions of dollars of transactions a year that are invoiced through QuickBooks.”

“I'm very, very bullish on incumbents. I hope I can say that because I don't think that, I think NetSuite is going to figure out 15 different ways to monetize with AI. I think that QuickBooks, Intuit has this goldmine on their hands where they're just gonna sta…”

“Most founders would look at a financial statement or your QuickBooks and find it completely useless, right? It's very difficult to get insight from it. What you as a founder or CEO would think about is where did my money go in what categories?”

“And in retrospect, it would have been probably a good idea to compete with QuickBooks early because that would have been actually easier to build and the market would have been larger.”

“And the way QuickBooks is set up is it just makes it really easy for you to make those mistakes, because it doesn't have all these checks built in. It's really just sort of a blank slate you can write into, and the only way to verify that the data is correct i…”

“From my payroll system, I see that a payroll ran, and then in my bank, I see that the money moved to run that payroll. We match those things together and make sure that they're consistent, and QuickBooks does not do that, but we built that from the ground up i…”

“Actually we do have a product that we call a QuickBooks backup, where if you, for whatever reason, want to do an export into QuickBooks or even keep a QuickBooks up to date, we support that. And it's a good way to get people in the door, especially we work wit…”

“QuickBooks is still not even fully cloud, which is very funny. I think, so a lot of people still use QuickBooks desktop.”

“So pilots, any of the ones we just talked about, They have hired a very large staff that is just using QuickBooks. So they did not start by building their own QuickBooks replacement. They started using QuickBooks, and they started by hiring a lot of people, an…”

“QuickBooks, it can solve for any sort of business model because it's so generic, but because of that, it's sort of just, it's like I said, a blank slate, just a little database. You can write anything into there, and because of that, it can support any busines…”

“Well, I'm building like a QuickBooks competitor right now. And I say, when I say I mean, my brother-in-law who's like a 10 X developer like an AI enabled QuickBooks competitor.”

“You know, at that time, you know, not only two hundred and fifty million, until six hundred million dollars, I run that company on QuickBooks.”

“I believe Zapier is a good place to go and find those kinds of opportunities. So if you go to Zapier and you check, for example, the most common Zapps, you will see that pair of two applications, for example, and I will have some QuickBooks and Sheets. There's…”

“When you send a personal note saying, like, hey, are you gonna get this paid, or hey, this is still outstanding, like, that's gonna convert or get that paid way quicker than an automated Stripe follow-up, or QuickBooks follow-up.”

“It's a 130,000 dollar a month AI SaaS company that built their entire business by noticing financial analysts were exporting QuickBooks data to Excel just to reorganize it for management. So they built an AI led layer that generates executive ready reports dir…”

“And I realized that, you know, QuickBooks QuickBooks users export two hundred and fifty million financial reports annually.”

“And I think that oftentimes, you know, founders and people who start businesses, they will like invest in a marketing automation system, or they'll invest in a, you know, in, in, in QuickBooks or something for accounting, which is all necessary stuff, but they…”

“We were able to close a really big partnership with QuickBooks and Allstate to distribute that into their payroll system.”

“We analyzed the data for these, and we found that about 50% of them, 40 to 50% of them didn't have integrations that already existed. So of those 4000 keywords, There were not integrations that were on QuickBooks already.”

“I think this is probably a thirty million dollar a year company. I a hundred percent think that just based off of the search volume, based off of how many users of QuickBooks there are, And based off of how many people aren't building these integrations for th…”

“750 apps. And half of them don't even have any reviews. So there's basically like 80, 70 apps that people use. It's a gold mine.”

“We typically sit between like a Salesforce and a HubSpot and a backend like a NetSuite or a QuickBooks and perhaps your own service and how to get that orchestrated and done in a good way, all the way from, you know, quoting, Dealing with the subscription over…”

“The fourth is that small businesses are generally a really bad customer base. I think agencies that serve small businesses are the worst type of agency. I think the only companies that do well by serving small businesses are what I would call electricity, mean…”

“And you start to realize that at some point in time, it's about meeting customers where they are, not trying to wow them and not trying to convince them. They convinced themselves to make the progress.”

“So there are some geographies which are time rich, but money poor, and if you sell save time there, it's not going to work. But some geographies which are money rich and time poor, then save time value proposition and messaging is going to work.”

“So if you think about traditional OG private equity and it's like, hey, we have a data room and this data room is stuffed full of like spreadsheets that have P and L's and, you know, customer concentration and personnel and salespeople and quotas and headcount…”

“Our goal, when we look at it, our goal is to be something like a QuickBooks for pricing.”

“So we already listed on Slack marketplace. We also got listed on Jira marketplace. Listen, they added QuickBooks and Zero marketplace. We get some organic audience from there.”

“You know, at that time, you know, not only two hundred and fifty million, until six hundred million dollars, I run that company on QuickBooks.”

“Okay, but how will you allocate your resources on your hiring or your marketing plan or your revenues and costs? This is not something that's provided with any of the companies that you've mentioned right now.”

“You're never going to have more data than QuickBooks. Right? Like you, you're never going to have all these other people have a flywheel here already. So it's like you either have to have a genius arbitrage mousetrap to get data faster than any incumbents so t…”

“Like QuickBooks has had an 80% market share since 1992.”

“So we scaled that from five, five to 10 freelance contributors to 40 plus contributors across SEO, social email like most of your customer facing channels across 16 markets.”

“I think QuickBooks is a really crappy piece of software, and I think most of what Intuit makes is pretty crappy”

“Another way is to go into a large space with a hated competitor. So that's what we did with Drip going against Infusionsoft. Xero did this against QuickBooks. Stripe did this against every payment gateway ever. I would say that's probably more of a step three …”

“If you want one to three integrations, go build. And there, some of them are quite easy, like QuickBooks. But if you want to normalize data within a category, so if you want any more than three in accounting, you need to have an API shop to normalize the infor…”

“It's even better if you get really big competitors, because these are way easier to compete against.”

“One of the powers of running a small company is that we have enormous amounts of options. Think about competing against the 900 pound gorilla, the slow moving, you know, whoever it is, Salesforce or QuickBooks where, you know, it's a big company and they're pl…”

“I had a company in high school, it's a landscape lighting company. And so at that Well, not a tech company. What I was trying to do is solve a real time inventory environment. So I had a garage full of inventory and I had a QuickBooks desktop computer and I wa…”

“We're still using QuickBooks.”

“What we do is allow a small business to connect all key data sources that relate to how they run their business. So it can be their banking account. It can be processing. So quick books, chase credit card, shipping, social accounting, web analytics.”

“No, I don't think so. Because they, you know, they've got a great product and a great customer base. And I mean, I, I'm not one to judge that, I guess, in the first place, but, you know, look at what, you know, QuickBooks can do with the product once it's thei…”