Insight
David Barrett equates celebrating venture capital funding to celebrating bank loans
“Like, to celebrate raising money is to celebrate that you took out a loan.”
Insight
Barrett: Top Companies Win via Word-of-Mouth, Which VCs Ignore
“With the exception that no business you cared about was ever built that way. Like every business, every, all the top names in the industry are built through word of mouth. And, but no one talks about that because it's not possible to be funded with capital. An…”
Opinion
David Barrett says enterprise software sucks compared to mid-market opportunities
“Enterprise sucks, man. It's just like, it's super slow sales cycles. The margins are terrible. It's super competitive. It's whatever. The real opportunity is mid-market and below.”
Insight
Barrett: User counts and conversion rates are vanity metrics compared to revenue
“Cause I would say like, I think about month, like revenue, obviously in month and month annual growth, but I would say all, everything else is just a vanity metric. Number of users you have, number of customers you have conversion numbers, all those kinds, lik…”
Insight
Barrett: Relying only on quantifiable decisions leads to startup failure
“I think the most important decisions are generally not quantified. We're not quantifiable. And so I'd say if you're running your business because you can prove with numbers that your decisions are good, you're going to fail because I mean, someone else out the…”
Disclosure
Barrett: Expensify Pays Zero Sales Commissions to Its Team
“There's no commission sales component. So no one's paid a commission at all, but we certainly have a support team that stands by because it's activity based pricing.”
Insight
David Barrett: Founders Should Stop Listening to VCs
“I would say stop listening to VCs.”
Disclosure
Barrett: Expensify does zero advertising or outbound sales
“We don't advertise. We're a hundred percent organic. There's no advertisement whatsoever. And so things like churn was like these numbers, which seems so absolutely critical to your business. They actually just don't really matter to us at least because they d…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Barrett: Expensify does not employ commissioned salespeople
“We don't have any commissioned salespeople, and so that, like, that screws up everyone's models as well.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Barrett: Expensify's support team is its primary revenue generator
“Actually, our primary revenue generator is our support team. The vast majority of our revenue comes after you've interacted once or twice with our support team, but almost never with, like, a salesperson going through a demo and things like that.”
Opinion
Barrett: Expense management SaaS is underpriced and should be 10x higher
“Candidly, I view our entire space is vastly underpriced. Like the idea that you can get full expense management, mobile apps, all this automation for nine bucks for active and a third of your company's active. It's really like three bucks for head. That's like…”
Insight
Barrett: Keeping subscription pricing low deters SaaS competitors
“It's like about dominating the space and maintaining an incredibly low price right now for the industry actually helps keep the competition out. And so yes, there will become a time where that's the most important thing, but it's just not right now.”
Opinion
Barrett: Formalized Education Is the Biggest Scam Today
“I think that formalized education is the biggest scam that we're facing right now, and I just am horrified by it, and I'm so glad that I didn't get trapped in the massive debt cycle that everyone else does.”
Insight
Barrett: Software differentiation requires business model and acquisition, not just functionality
“Cause if you're gonna differentiate, you can't differentiate through functionality alone. It has to be through acquisition, through business model.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Barrett: Expensify has 45,000 paying companies, beating top four competitors combined
“I would say like, so we think about 45,000 paying companies. So basically... So we've got more More companies is expensified than the next four expense reporting companies.”
Opinion
David Barrett argues basic internet and mobile startup ideas are exhausted
“I think right now is a really hard time to start a company because any company that just involves like the internet and mobile and things like that, it's like, it's been done. It's been done like 10 years ago. And so I think we're seeing like this whole series…”
Disclosure
Barrett: Expensify Does Zero Paid Advertising, Grown 100% Word-of-Mouth
“No, we have no advertising going on whatsoever right now. It's all a hundred percent word of mouth.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Barrett: Expensify's growth slowed only due to enterprise distraction
“The only reason We slowed down at all. It was because we got distracted by the enterprise.”
Disclosure
Barrett: Expensify does not intend to raise more capital and is profitable
“No, no, we haven't raised, we don't intend to raise anymore, I would say we're, you know, profitable, we're growing, and so we just.”
Insight
Barrett: Achieving actual profitability matters far more than predicting it
“Predictability is not nearly as important as people make it out to seem, because, like, predictability is always good until suddenly something changes and it's no longer predictable. You're fooling yourself if you think you know the future. I think it's much b…”
Insight
Barrett: Routing around decision makers is Expensify's core driver of success
“Routing around the decision maker has been our entire business model and is why we succeed.”
Opinion
Barrett: Facebook's famous 7-friends onboarding metric is likely bullshit
“Honestly I suspect Facebook's number is bullshit anyway.”
Insight
Barrett: Expensify outspends competitors on conferences by targeting brand loyalty
“Everyone else cares about the conferences for lead generation, and we don't, and so we can show up big, much bigger than anyone else, because the ROI of the lead's just not our goal. We're just viewing it, we're viewing the value of the conference very differe…”
Disclosure
Barrett: Expensify hosts an all-expenses-paid 100-person retreat in Bora Bora
“It's only a hundred people. It's invite only, and it's in Bora Bora, all expenses paid by us. And so it's basically, it's more like the Davos of accounting, if you will.”
