#202: Practical Fintech: Surviving Payment Platforms and Big Banks - Paul Hoeper · Practical Founders Podcast summary

Key takeaways

Shifting from SaaS subscriptions to embedded payments can dramatically increase revenue per customer, as seen with InvoiceASAP’s growth from $9 to over $80/month.
Controlling your own payment infrastructure offers margins, flexibility, and independence from platform dependencies, enabling custom financial products tailored to niche markets.
Avoiding venture capital in favor of debt financing can preserve founder control, prevent dilution, and align incentives for sustainable, long-term growth.
Industry-specific solutions—like short-term merchant cash advances for home service pros—are often more valuable than one-size-fits-all fintech offerings.
Developing modern, API-driven, and flexible payment rails helps navigate regulatory complexities and maintain resilience amid industry shakeouts.
Good customer acquisition can be organic through app stores, supplemented with targeted advertising, especially in specialized niches.
Building control into your infrastructure is key to differentiation, flexibility, and resilient growth in the crowded fintech and payments space.

Summary

Founders and Business Model Evolution

Paul Hoeper, founder and CEO of InvoiceASAP, shares his journey starting in 2009 to solve the pain points home service businesses faced in creating invoices and collecting payments via mobile devices. Initially launching in New Orleans, the company grew by integrating early in the mobile app era, working with platforms like Square and Clover. Over time, Paul shifted from a purely SaaS subscription model to an embedded fintech platform that significantly increased average revenue per customer—from about $9/month to roughly $80-$94/month—by offering custom payment solutions, merchant cash advances, and short-term financing tailored to home service trades' unique cash flow needs.

Control, Payment Infrastructure, and Building Own Rails

A key theme is the importance of control over payment rails, which Paul emphasizes by building his own payment infrastructure (PayFac-like) close to the legal line, but where they maintain full control. This approach allows InvoiceASAP to manage payments, fraud prevention, ID verification, and financial products like instant deposits and merchant cash advances. Comparing to competitors who rely on out-of-the-box solutions like Stripe, Paul highlights that owning payment rails offers greater margin, flexibility, and independence from platform dependencies. The company’s strategy is to develop fintech features aligned specifically with the needs of home service pros, such as short-term loans, which are not well served by traditional payment giants.

Challenges with Payment Platforms and Infrastructure

Paul recounts their long history navigating through various payment platform providers, which often fell short technologically or ethically. Many companies tried to position themselves as modern, but their infrastructure was outdated, heavily legacy, and rigid. As a result, InvoiceASAP often had to develop its own solutions, such as creating integrated payment systems and avoiding hardware-based card reading that was unreliable and hard to update. This control over their own payment infrastructure has helped them scale efficiently and stay resilient amid industry shakeouts, as they are built on modern, flexible APIs supporting instant deposits, tap-to-pay, and real-time processing.

Market Focus and Customer Acquisition Strategies

The company primarily serves North American home service trades like HVAC, plumbing, roofing, etc., with most revenue coming from payments and SaaS (now about $4.5M annually). Customer acquisition initially relied on organic app store discovery, complemented by partnerships with platforms like Square and Clover, and targeted advertising like Apple Search Ads and social media. They target small to medium-sized businesses, typically with 5-10 trucks, and emphasize that during COVID, their sales surged due to increased reliance on digital invoicing and contactless payments, showing resilience to economic downturns.

Venture Funding, Control, and Future Growth

Paul advocates for maintaining independence through debt financing rather than VC equity, citing risks of losing control, forced exits, and long-term dilution. Their cap table includes friends, angels, and some small investors, but they’ve avoided large institutional funding. The company continuously reinvests profits into growth and product development, including upcoming features like scheduling and dispatch. They aim to scale further in the US and possibly expand into Europe, although regional regulatory complexity poses challenges. Their long-term vision involves strategic exits or potential acquisitions by companies in adjacent markets like CRM or larger service software providers, always prioritizing control and sustainable growth.

Show notes

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 প্রায় 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 of doing payments and billing, you just have to use whatever products Stripe gives you. 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 customer 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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#202: Practical Fintech: Surviving Payment Platforms and Big Banks - Paul Hoeper