Tom and I started working on Routable in early 2017. The idea was sparked while we were eating hummus in Tel Aviv. When we first met up, we had no intention of spending years of our lives trying to figure out how to make bill payments and invoicing easier. But we realized after a three hour conversation that at our two different marketplace companies we had both spent 40% of our engineering resources on building internal tooling to pay out sellers, drivers, restaurants, etc.
After we realized we'd experienced the same pain at different startups, we asked ourselves, “what did we do wrong?” Was there a solution that worked across finance, engineering, and operations that we were simply not aware of? To find out, we interviewed over 300 people - CFOs, VPs of Finance, Heads of Engineering, you name it - to understand how businesses scaled their business payouts and invoicing (think: growing from 1,000 payments per month to 400,000+ payments per month).
The two main answers we received were: (a) Like us, they'd spent thousands of hours and engineering dollars to build an in-house internal tool, on top of processors, and wrote their own custom integration to an ERP; or (b) they hired an army of overqualified individuals to run daily data entry across thousands of bill payments and invoices (which was tedious, not to mention very expensive).
These conversations confirmed what we had suspected: There was no tool for easy payments that worked across multiple departments. We realized that what we had built at our marketplace start-ups could potentially help hundreds of other companies. In 6 weeks we spun up a Routable MVP and were making money for customers. Today, we're deployed across some of the largest marketplaces and gig economy companies. We’ve focused on working with engineering and finance departments as much as possible to save them from building custom in-house solutions.
Our recent integration with NetSuite has been by far the hardest we’ve done – especially since we built it on top of a SOAP API and extended native functionality with SuiteScript – but it was worth it, because we gained a deep appreciation for how complex enterprise business payment operations can be. To make sure we “got it right,” we again did plenty of customer development interviews to best understand what data needs to go into and out of NetSuite, and made sure to record each interview so we could share their unique pain points with our engineering team.
Before we wrote the first line of code, we interviewed a bunch of NetSuite users and learned what was lacking in other NetSuite integrations out there: tools that only synced in one direction, needing to recreate fields multiple in different platforms, processes that were breaking because the workflow had changed in your ERP, but not in your AP software. The one thing we learned throughout this whole process is that once you build an integration to an ERP, you’re never really done, so we expect as a team to forever tinker on sending data back and forth with the goal of continuously improving our integration and hopefully saving our customers 30 seconds to 10 minutes of work at a time.
Thank you for reading this story - I hope it was interesting. We’d love to hear your feedback about Routable, your experiences in this space, and answer any questions you have!
by Andrey
Azimov