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. He also suffered through several payment platform providers who never lived up to their sales pitches.
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.
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.
Key Takeaways
- Revenue Shift — Moving from SaaS subscriptions to embedded payments increased average revenue per customer 10x, from $9 to $80–94 monthly.
- Control Matters — Owning payment rails gave InvoiceASAP more margin, product flexibility, fraud control, and freedom from platform dependency.
- Debt Over VC — Paul chose debt instead of institutional equity to preserve board control and avoid forced exits or founder dilution.
- Vertical Focus — Home service businesses have highly specific cash flow needs that generic payment platforms often misunderstand or ignore.
- Fintech Reality — Payments infrastructure remains messy, legacy-heavy, and full of poor actors despite modern APIs and slick branding.
Quote from Paul Hoeper, Founder and CEO of InvoiceASAP
“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 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 deposit, merchant cash advances and all different types of products.”
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