When a company is growing quickly, its volume of purchases, invoices, and payments also spikes. Managing this situation can be tricky. Andrew Hoag joins Startup Savants to discuss his fintech startup Teampay, which offers a solution.
- Startup Savants is a business podcast that tells the stories behind up-and-coming startups.
- Andrew Hoah joins Startup Savants to discuss his fintech startup Teampay.
- Teampay is a spend management tool that streamlines procurement workflows and makes these processes easier for all of a company’s employees.
Procurement Tools for Everyone
In his interview with Startup Savants, Hoah said he noticed a pattern during a previous job as an operator/founder executive: Today, everyone in a company is in some way part of the procurement team. This differs from how it used to be, he said, when the C-suit and IT department made most or all of a company’s purchases.
“And so I saw this opportunity [to use] tools that I had in other parts of the business, whether it’s controlling your source code with tools like GitHub, controlling your cloud storage with tools like Box or Dropbox, or controlling access to software with single sign-on tools,” he said during his interview. “And I just realized really quickly, there’s no tool that controls money within a company. And it’s the only thing that a business can control.”
This realization inspired the idea for Teampay. “I built a very simple version of the product, which is still very core to our flywheel. The mission for that was to give finance the same quality of tools that other departments have,” like expense, procurement, and travel tools, he told the Startup Savants podcast. “There’s an opportunity here to bring a first-class, consumer-grade experience for the finance team. Teampay’s mission is to help companies be smarter about how they’re spending, give them more control and better visibility without slowing the business down in a modern environment.”
Helping the Finance Team Communicate
To do that, Teampay offers a simple, easy-to-use system that aims to help companies spend money more efficiently while remaining in compliance. “What we realized is a lot of companies have a communication problem between the finance team, which has all the numbers, all the information, all the policies, and the employees at the edges,” he said during his interview. “And so Teampay is really a software product that sits in the middle and brings those two parties together.”
In other words, Teampay helps employees understand where they should buy something, how they should pay for it, and what process to use. “That helps solve the employee side of it, as opposed to reading something on a Wiki when you make a purchase twice a year,” he said. “That’s really important. And then on the finance side of it, we allow them to set the rules of the road up front, put their policies in place, and then the software acts as the middleman and actually intermediates between the two parties.”
Startup Savants Podcast
The Startup Savants podcast is a business podcast created by The Really Useful Information Company (TRUiC). Listeners can hear the stories behind startups, as told by their founders who are in the midst of growing their companies.
Ethan, an entrepreneur, and Annaka, a branding expert, host the Startup Savants podcast. They bring disparate skills and life experiences to their interviews, providing listeners with important business insights and a holistic perspective on the startup ecosystem.
Hear from a variety of real startup founders from around the globe and with varying backgrounds, making their startup idea a reality. Learn from experts sharing their industry knowledge on venture capital, securing funding, and more on the Startup Savants podcast.
Final Thoughts
Andrew joins Annaka and Ethan to discuss founding Teampay, a B2B fintech startup that works to streamline company-wide purchasing. Andrew talks about other companies he founded as well, in addition to how to create company culture while remote, the decision to pursue venture capital, and how to navigate a difficult economy as a startup.
You can find the Startup Savants podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
