The most popular payment platforms usually don’t offer the flexibility and differentiation that make your product uniquely valuable to customers—and your company more valuable, too.
Paul Hoeper founded InvoiceASAP after spotting a simple but painful problem in 2009: home service businesses couldn’t easily create invoices or collect payments from the field using mobile devices.
He started in New Orleans, launched during the earliest days of mobile apps, and built one of the first mobile invoicing products integrated with both Square and Clover.
Today, InvoiceASAP serves about 23,000 paying home service businesses and roughly 400,000 total users across HVAC, plumbing, roofing, landscaping, and other field service trades.
The company generates just under $5M in annual revenue with only 12 employees, growing 20–40% annually through a mix of SaaS and embedded fintech revenue.
They suffered through multiple well-known payment providers that overpromised and underdelivered (putting it nicely), so they built most of their payment technology themselves and leveraged the Adyen payments platform.
Now InvoiceASAP is growing steadily again with a differentiated product and a more profitable business model.
“Most of our competitors are on Stripe; we’re just exceptionally technically proficient. So we built out our own entire PayFac infrastructure as close to the line as you can get, but where we control basically all the payment rails.
“Stripe is an out-of-the-box product. So if you’re looking for a different way to handle payments and billing, you just have to use whatever products Stripe offers. That’s it.
“And when you build it the way that we built our product and payments platform, we can do a lot–for our customers and our business model. We have the flexibility to develop instant deposits, merchant cash advances, and a wide range of products. “
Paul shares why he shifted from a pure SaaS subscription model to embedded payments, increasing average revenue per customer from roughly $9/month to $80–$94/month.
He also explains why he avoided VC funding despite operating in fintech, choosing debt financing instead to preserve control, protect optionality, and keep building on his own terms.
Check out this amazing interview with Paul Hoeper on the Practical Founders Podcast.
