Company Overview
Julia Delin is CEO and Co-Founder at Cheque, a company that gives you early payout offers on invoices, without changing the way your clients pay. It lets you avoid follow ups all together and keeps your client relationships strong. Cheque takes over collections, so you can focus on growing your business. Learn more at https://www.chequepay.co/.
Can you tell us a little about your background before starting at your company?
Before founding Cheque, I spent seven years running a startup accelerator for the Stockholm School of Economics, one of Europe’s leading accelerators. I had studied business there myself, and founded a startup right out of school, so when I came to work at the accelerator, I built exactly what I wish I had as a founder.
I coached over 150 founders through fundraising and early growth, and raised a $10M+ venture fund to invest in them.
Being an investor was fun, but I missed being a founder. So, together with my partner at the accelerator, we started Cheque, and quickly got onboard one of the best CTOs in our programs at the time as our third co-founder.
Now I live in New York since a year back to scale Cheque in the US.
How did you start at your company? What were the first steps you took to get it off the ground and how did you identify the need for your product/service in the market?
The idea for Cheque came from us being frustrated with how we had to do invoicing at the accelerator, and seeing how money movement between businesses is slowed down by long net terms and clunky processes.
Other business owners we spoke to felt the same frustration. We kept hearing the same phrase over and over, “I hate being a bank to my customers”. They were also frustrated with the time and effort they were spending on chasing customers, tracking who’s late and who’s paid, sending reminders, and everything else you have to do to actually get the money you’ve already earned. So we started designing for how we could move money faster between companies.
After that, we started pitching the product and iterated until we had something people pulled out of our hands. Cheque today offers early payment on invoices so businesses get paid instantly and never again have to worry about what happens after they send the invoice.
We access capital by incentivizing clients to pay early on their invoices, meaning we can better allocate the money already in transit in the financial system, without introducing any new credit or debt.
What innovations or unique features set your company apart from others in the industry?
By sitting between the demand and supply of invoice payments, we can price capital at a market rate for each invoice, rather than using a flat fixed rate.
Using invoice, payment and platform data, we’re also much better at pricing risk in real-time.
Most factoring is one-size-fits-all and opaque, with capped access to capital. We’re the transparent version of that, and can scale our capital base as we grow the user base.
What has been the most effective strategy for scaling your business?
We did a lot of discovery calls, but it mostly led to just that – discovery and learning. What actually led to sales was trying to get the product into people’s hands and understanding why they wouldn’t buy if they didn’t. Once we found our case-study client, we could model everything off of them and find similar businesses with the same need, and that’s when it clicked for us.
We’ve always been good at keeping the initial scope and ICP very narrow, and only build what people would pay for.
Looking ahead, what are your goals for the future of your company?
Our vision is to accelerate the movement of money between businesses, unlocking the trillions of dollars stuck in payables across US companies alone. It’s an incredible opportunity, where our next short-term goal is raising a pre-seed later this year.
