Tresio

One of the main advantages for our users is the seemless integration with their existing finance tech stack. However, there are thousands of accounting tools in Europe alone (every country has multiple, I guess the states are easier), so it's impossible to integrate them all.

What we did instead, was the launch of our No-Code extension: a lot of these tools are either compatible with Zapier (which can extract data to Google Sheets), or even allow automated data-exports to for example Google Drive. With this "bridge" in the form of Google Sheets or Google Drive, we allow our users basically to connect Tresio with any accounting tool on the planet 🎉 without writing a single line of code.

As a cash flow planning solution, we had a lot of customer requests to not only integrate Stripe and accounting, but also connect their bank accounts to really get a comprehensive picture of their financial health. As a first step, we integrated with a PSD2 (European standard) connector to show the balances. Currently, we are working on the categorization of transactions.

It has been a long and bumpy journey, but it looks like we will be ending our year with 200 active customers.

The past 12 months, we were busy improving the product (managed to reduce churn from 15% to < 5 %) and the onboarding of new paying users could be more and more automated.

What we now need, is a bigger customer acquisition base and we are thus working on new integrations, to repeat the process we did (on Small scale) with bexio, but this time bigger.

We have soft-launched our Stripe extension only some weeks back and are gathering first user feedback to fine-tune the offering - we believe this will help us reaching a more international customer base.

Over the last months, we worked hard on integrating with and getting on the app marketplace of bexio, Switzerland's leading cloud accounting tool. And it proved we did the right step -within first month after launch, our customer- and revenue base doubled, and this partnership soon became our no. 1 customer acquisition channel.

One of the issues I had that time - I was still alone. I had one guy through upwork who took care of the tech part, but the collaboration was far from optimum. However, at the start it was the only option, as I simply wouldn't find anyone crazy enough to join me (business guy, never run a startup before) on this journey.

Now, with 30 paying users and a working prototype, things changed. I started looking out again and found with Roman the perfect match.

He also brought in 3 of his friends with whom he worked on previous projects, and I remember very well how amazing our first team call on Zoom felt - suddenly, there was a team around, and not longer the whole pressure on my shoulders.

The first few months in I was really busy with creating loads of content, writing guest-posts, setting up partnerships and sprading the word bout the project.

Then, covid kicked in with large parts of the daily life and businesses going into lockdown.

And whilst everyone was busy protecting their business, I had not much else to do (there was no business to protect yet...) so I started to produce content like crazy. I felt that as a cash flow planning tool, we could really have an impact on businesses' life in these days. Together with one of the bigger local accounting firms, I set up one of the very first webinars to give an in-depth overview of how to apply for governmental covid loans and all that - we had more than 400 participants with less than 4 days preparation time.

This converted into almost 30 signups 🚀 in less than 10 days. We also hit $1'000 in monthly revenues for the first time in April.

The problem was - neither the product nor our processes (we had no idea how to handle the onboarding for example) were ready for it, so we lost half of them only one month later.

But the proof was there, and we got tons of valuable feedback - we were onto something that people found useful.

I have been working in business finance for more than a decade and saw many companies going down due to poor (or, worse, non-existant!) financial planning. In the last startup where I worked we gave short-term, really expensive loans to entrepreneurs to make up for their poor planning but I thought there must be a better solution.

What I envisaged was a tool as simple as Slack, that everyone would love use and that gives entrepreneurs the tool at hand to make better informed decisions.

I tried different approaches, went down the no-code road (guess what, didn't work out) and tried to find a co-founder -that one did not work out either - I was the typical non-techie who "has an idea".

Eventually I remembered that some friends have launched a prototype who built a prototype of exactly what I was looking for (but never really pushed the idea) and I had a closer look at it. The web app was far from the ux I imagined but it was a working mvp so good enough to go, and we agreed on the set up.

That's how I got started with my first SaaS startup.