Matt Holm: It's a bit like the checkout experience, being stuck in single player mode for 20 years. And if you're a gamer, imagine only having one control pad for 20 years and all of a sudden your mate comes over and plugs in player two and the world of gaming comes to life. Without a doubt, the most exciting direction we've taken this in is the ability for you to effectively have a buy now, pay later relationship with your friends and family. We all have good ideas every minute of the day and most of the time you think, well, I can't execute on that. But this one, we knew we could. So we did.
[Voiceover]: Welcome to Add to Cart, the podcast that Express delivers all you need to know in the fast moving world of E commerce. Every month, Nathan Bush from 12 High and an E commerce industry expert will share the news, research and insights that you need to know to keep you at the top of your game. And of course, keep your customers adding to Cart.
Nathan Bush: Hello and welcome to Add to Cart. My name is Nathan Bush, host of Add to Cart and and director at E Commerce Talent Agency E Suite. Have you ever had those ideas which you know are knock out of the park ideas but you just did?
Matt Holm: Well, nothing.
Nathan Bush: Today's guest had one of those amazing ideas on the couch when his wife was trying to buy underwear. Now, it wasn't that kind of idea, sicko. It was an idea that could significantly change online payments. And instead of doing nothing, he had a working prototype done and dusted within 48 hours. Today he secured his first round of investment. Today's guest on Add to Cart is Matt home, who's the CEO and the founder of UPay. UPay is less than a year old, but it's a really exciting concept which allows users to share their filled out checkouts including sizing variants, addresses, shipping details and then have others pay on their behalf. Think gifting for partners, buying office equipment, or authorizing kids payments. It's a great idea. And then one that seems so simple. And it was so simple that I had to ask Matt why no one else has done this before. Prior to YouPay, Matt has run a digital agency where he and his team have built over 8,000 websites and he still looked relatively sane in my opinion. He's also got a fascinating background as a proper FIFA video game nerd who got a job with EA Sports and successfully sold his gaming website. So thanks to our partners Shopify plus and Signet, here's our conversation with Matt Holm from UPay.
Nathan Bush: Matt Holm from UPay. Welcome to Add to Cart.
Matt Holm: Yeah, cheers. Nathan, great to be here. Big fan of the show. Listen every Monday night when I'm vacuuming the house. So normally I'm a big fan. Obviously the jury might be out a little bit on this week's episode. We'll have to wait and see, but just one of those habits I've formed. But yeah, definitely add to cart. Top of the list of podcasts that I listen to. So good to be here.
Nathan Bush: Thank you, mate. I'm sure it's going to be a ripper episode and I can highly recommend vacuuming and listening at the same time.
Nathan Bush: Now, we are for anyone watching the
Nathan Bush: video and we don't release a whole
Nathan Bush: bunch of videos, but we're both wearing UPAY shirts. But I feel like I've got version
Nathan Bush: one and you've got version two.
Matt Holm: Yeah, that's it. You've got the original. Actually be a collector's item now for the brief couple of weeks when we had the more corporate colors, we kind of changed. Even though I'm not displaying it now, I've got the kind of monotone version. But the UPAY logo is more fun. Which kind of better paints our, you know, our target market and the demographic that we're going after.
Nathan Bush: Beautiful. I'm going to take this off straight away after we finish this recording, put it in like a Ziploc bag and then put it away for 10 years and then cash in later.
Matt Holm: Exactly.
Nathan Bush: So for our listeners who haven't heard
Nathan Bush: of UPay, can you fill us in
Nathan Bush: on what UPAY is?
Matt Holm: Yeah, yeah, sure thing. I mean, the quick one liner for upay is that YouPay makes it easier to buy together online. It's actually incredibly simple. We've obviously got some big plans and some big goals as to what we're going to do with this technology. But effectively, UPAY is just a link that you can create at the checkout that you can then pass on to someone else to pay for your order. So a great use case is gifting. Yeah, it just makes it incredibly convenient to have someone else execute the payment at the very end of that buying
Nathan Bush: journey in the checkout, because it's a lovely concept. When you first told me about it was when I got really interested when
Nathan Bush: you said that you can go all the way through to a checkout.
Nathan Bush: You can fill out all the details, select the product, select sizes, any variants, even put your address in, your shipping details in. And at that point, there is actually no way to share that checkout or that cart. And you've created a way to share that. So someone Else can come in and finish the last step. Which is just fascinating because of every other part of the E commerce website,
Nathan Bush: we've got ways to share it.
Matt Holm: Well, that's it.
Nathan Bush: But we haven't been able to share the most valuable part.
Matt Holm: That's so true. A great analogy that I've been starting to share is the concept of almost like introducing multiplayer mode to the checkout. So it's a bit like the checkout experience being stuck in single player mode for 20 years. And if you're a gamer, imagine only having one control pad for 20 years and all of a sudden your mate comes over and plugs in player two and the world of gaming comes to life. And in many respects, yeah, we're taking the checkout out of single player mode.
Nathan Bush: Beautiful. What are we playing? Mario Kart?
Nathan Bush: Bond.
Matt Holm: I'm more of a FIFA sporting type of guy, but then again, anything, even if it was bloody Pong. I remember the first time I played against, I think it was my old man back. And this will date me like 1988 on an Atari. I said, dad, sit down and use the other control pad. Once again, it was much more exciting than playing against the computer.
Nathan Bush: So tell us how you came up with this idea. Give us a little bit about your
Nathan Bush: background and how you came up with this idea.
Matt Holm: Yeah, I mean, it was only very, very recently. So in my background in technology starts way back when I was a kid, which I'll get into in a second. But to talk more about upay, it was about June or July last year. Kind of a classic Covid idea, I guess you could say. So what actually happened was I said to my wife, I'll buy you a gift. And so she said, yeah, sure thing. I'll pick something out for you. And she actually picked out a bra and undies set from a merchant called Bimbi and Roy. And they're on there on Shopify. Naturally, it wasn't a store that I frequented. And basically she wanted to do all the shopping. So she wanted to pick out the size, the style, populate her cart. And then she actually said, you know, why don't I just share my cart with you? And being from that technical background, I understood that wasn't possible. And basically, even though we were sitting in the same room and all I wanted to do was make the payment at the end, and she was very happy to do the shopping. She basically had to pass her phone over to me for me to Input the specific MasterCard that I wanted to use at that point in time. And then, yeah, it just dawned on us that, you know, she's an active shopper as we all are and she hadn't seen anything like this. And I've been building E commerce websites at my web design agency here in Springwood in Queensland for the past close to 12 years now and there wasn't anything like this on the market. And we knew that we had the resources in house and the technical know how to make it happen. I remember that weekend calling our senior systems architect Clara and saying to her, you know, is this possible? And within basically 48 hours she had kind of a prototype spun up. We were able to demonstrate that the technology worked and then would have been less than about four weeks. We had an MVP out there running on a, on a, a client of ours, website Appliance Central. So you could go ahead and buy white goods pretty much within a month. So yeah, it was just one of those ideas that, you know, we all have good ideas every minute of the day and most of the time you think, well I can't execute on that. But this one we knew we could so we did.
Nathan Bush: It's amazing. Why has no one done it before?
Matt Holm: Well, it does exist in. There's basically Alibaba as we know, little company called Alibaba has Alipay and WeChat, et cetera. So actually good story because about two weeks into the journey kind of putting together pitch decks, et cetera and just playing around with the technology, a colleague of mine, Jeff, whose family is originally from Taiwan, he's got a lot of connections in China, comes by my desk and says, oh Matt, it's going to be huge. I use it all the time with my friends in China and I'm like, oh wait on has this well and truly been done? I've completely missed it. But basically from my understanding with Alibaba and Alipay etcetera, You've got to have a Chinese bank account. The kind of cultural way that E commerce works over there is they're, they don't want to input their credit card directly into a computer. So effectively they'll generate a QR code at the very end of the buying journey, take that QR code or to a machine and then input the cash or the card into a machine. And basically it's a two step peer to peer payment method. And Jeff at my office uses it because he doesn't have a Chinese bank account. So he will actually shop at the Chinese websites and then share the QR code with his mate who does have it. So he's basically doing this whole peer to peer shopping things. So it's certainly very, very embraced in that part of the world. But no, it simply did not exist in Shopify, didn't exist in Woocommerce, and certainly didn't exist over here in Australia.
Nathan Bush: Stationary brand Milligram are the prodigal sons of Shopify. Starting life 10 years ago as a Shopify store before packing their bags for an adventure with another platform. Milligram are back over to Shopify Plus. Milligram now have over 100 employees and four physical stores. So they needed a platform that had integrated content and commerce, reduced technical debt, the ability to have promos live immediately and most of all be reliable in peak season. As an added bonus, they were able to optimize their search bar conversion rate from 4% to almost 8% with Shopify Plus.
Nathan Bush: Now that's something to write home to mum about.
Nathan Bush: To read more of Milligrams story and to see other case studies, visit the customer section on shopify.com auplus. You mentioned there that the idea started
Nathan Bush: with gifting at its core. So being able to share baskets and have other people transact on your account. Where have your most popular use cases come from since then?
Matt Holm: Yeah, I mean that's where we're at because you know, we only are still very new and it's exciting and there's so many opportunities for us to learn from our customers and literally see them using it every day and new use cases popping up. So yes, certainly you're seeing what you'd classify as classic gifting. Certainly on our biggest merchant being appliance central, I'm seeing people basically almost use Upay as a way of saving the cart at the very, very end and probably I'm assuming might even be going home to measure the space that might be sitting at the desk at work going, yeah, I need a new washing machine, but just not 100% sure that this particular one's going to fit in the space. So they'll generate themselves a upay link, which is something I never really thought of when we came up with it. So they're generating upay links and then going home that evening and then executing the payment to basically finish it off. Maybe they're getting a second opinion from a partner or, you know, a roommate or something like that. We're also seeing it being used a lot in a professional sense. So we've seen a couple of orders come through clearly where someone in Sydney has placed the order for a TV and then clearly that link's been sent back to a UK Email address. So effectively it looks like the head office is giving like the all clear. And that really has taken us down the path of helping us define our target markets, which the good news is we've basically come up with what we say is four Ps, we've got partners, which is the classic gifting example. We've got parents, which is another big sector I'll talk about in a second and the way that parents can help their kids shop online while approving the orders. And we've got professionals, which is the kind of work from home situation as well. With such a diverse spread out system now of people working from home, it used to be that you could place the officeworks order, basically drop a big box of stationery in the middle of the office and say hey everybody, go and grab your pens and pencils and post its etc. But now of course we need to do if you've got a team of 17, effectively you have to do 17 different orders. That's where you pay can be used there. Then the final P is purpose, which is another big focus for us of the whole charitable nature of charities being able to populate carts and then disperse those links out for donors to execute the payment. So yeah, just constantly, every day kind of seeing new use cases pop up.
Nathan Bush: Awesome. And I noticed that on your site you talk a lot about this being an alternative for Buy Now, Pay Later. What do you mean by that?
Matt Holm: Yeah, absolutely. And that in itself right there is really what we're focusing on now, the exciting part of where we're at. Because what we realized is that we've created this really handy tool at the checkout when it made gifting easier. But it was in many respects just a handy checkout tool. But what's happened over the last couple of months, if we've realized what our mission really is and to explain that, what I'll say is that I'm not anti Buy Now Pay Later. I think Buy Now Pay later is a terrific piece of technology. What I am anti is anti debt. So by saying that what we're really focusing on here is fixing the problem where there's basically an entire generation of consumers coming through where the only form of external payment at the checkout is to effectively take a short term loan from a financial institution. And as a parent myself with three young kids and of course as a consumer, that doesn't sit all that well with me. So basically what we're building into upay and without a doubt the most exciting direction we've taken this in is the ability for you to effectively have a buy now, pay later relationship with your friends and family, to kind of taking the bank of Mum and Dad and rebranding it as the bank of family and friends. Like the new expanded version of letting other people help you. So as an example of maybe I was doing it tough or bit short on cash one week and I said, hey, Nathan, can you please effectively buy me this, this particular product? It might be a hundred dollars, you might be keen to help me out. At the end of the day, you might be like, matt, you kind of got to pay me back, mate. I'm not a charity here. So what you could do there, through the you Pay app that we're actively developing, is effectively click the you Pay me back button, which says, matt, yeah, I'll buy this product for you, but you've got to pay me back in four installments of $25 every fortnight, which I'm familiar with because I've been exposed to buy now, pay Later. But I'm pretty confident that the bank of Nathan isn't going to come with any late fees if I ever miss a repayment.
Nathan Bush: You don't know me that well.
Matt Holm: That's it. Well, fingers crossed you're not going to report me to any credit agencies or you're not going to impact my credit score or have the debt collectors knocking on my door. Which of course is not always the case with Buy Now Pay Later. But some of the statistics that are coming out from ASIC, like 20% of the people that get into Buy Now, Pay later struggle with repayments. And, you know, upay, I think is signing up. Sorry, not upay, I wish. But afterpay, are signing up about 27,000 people a day because that's, you know, do the quick math on that. One's about four to five thousand people a day who statistically are going to struggle to repay their afterpay. So it's almost like before you go into debt with a financial institution, why don't you just do the old fashioned thing of asking a friend?
Nathan Bush: Yep, absolutely.
Matt Holm: Okay.
Nathan Bush: So we can see that there's.
Matt Holm: It's a pretty.
Nathan Bush: Not a simple idea, but the idea
Nathan Bush: you're able to get to MVP within four weeks. So we're not talking, you know, a huge building. You've been able to move really fast in what you've developed. It was only late last year that we were talking in the really early stages. And you can see there's so many uses of it from, you know, gifting to parents, being able to transact on behalf to people being able to loan money between themselves to professionals in the workplace. So that's all, all fantastic.
Nathan Bush: Can we dive into a little bit
Nathan Bush: around the practicalities of how this works from an E commerce perspective?
Matt Holm: Yeah. The great thing is that it's so simple to start with. It really is an app. So if you're a like right now, we're live. And if you've got a WooCommerce website, if you've got an open cart website, the two most popular open source pieces of technology in the e commerce space, you can go to the WordPress Marketplace and download the Upay plugin, install it in your WooCommerce, click a few buttons to register, hook up a payment gateway. And that's the cool thing about it as well, is that what we're introducing here is not necessarily a new payment provider. We're effectively just a payment connector. So if you're a merchant using WooCommerce and you take your transactions via PayPal, you'll just hook up PayPal to your UPay checkout and just see the upay link is an external checkout. So just in the same way you click on the PayPal button to be taken to a PayPal screen to execute a PayPal payment in a WooCommerce environment, that same flow exists for a payer. It just allows for you to separate the shopper from the payer, which has ironically always been there in the checkout. You know, you have the shipping details and the billing detail. We all just, even if you are borrowing a credit card, you kind of get lazy and just tick that box to say the shipping and billing details are the same. We're actually just kind of doing it properly where we're saying, look, here are the shipping details and we'll bring in the billing details later when we connect you with a payer.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, beautiful. So let's look at both sides of that. So from an E commerce platform you mentioned there that you're on WooCommerce at the moment, is there any plans to expand out of that into platforms like Shopify or Magento or Salesforce?
Matt Holm: Yeah, yeah, definitely. The reality is we actually have working Big Commerce and Shopify integrations. BigCommerce, we're just in the process of effectively just getting that approved to be in the App Store. And that's the great thing about Those platforms like BigCommerce and Shopify is that, you know, the closed nature of them is in many respects one of their greatest features. Because it just makes sure that of course you're not going to have a clunky plugin come into play or an app coming to play in the bigcommerce and Shopify world that might break your store. So yeah, just going through the kind of due diligence process of getting to big commerce Shopify probably at mid year as you're probably well aware that they're rebuilding their whole shopping payments kind of ecosystem really to redo that around their whole shop pay interface which is of course an incredibly cool solution that I use every day. So it's just a case of kind of many respects kind of waiting and getting into that process which all going to plan including according to my mates that Shopify should be about the end of Q2. So yeah, really keen. We do have it working as like a private app in Shopify, but we see Shopify as hopefully at one point in time will be one of our main partners. So we don't want to kind of go in the back door and hack you pay into Shopify. What will do it right when the time's right at the middle of the year.
Nathan Bush: Beautiful. And can you implement it as a custom integration if you've got a custom build as well?
Matt Holm: Yeah, absolutely, yeah. So that's more. And we are building a Magento plugin. But yeah, some of that especially like commerce cloud Salesforce, that's a big one and that's more of a custom integration. And yeah, that's, that's a great thing from our perspective. And where I'm sitting right now is as I mentioned briefly earlier, this is my web design agency I started back in 2009 and all we've done for the last. What's that now, 12 years is just build literally thousands of websites. So we've literally built 8,000 websites here over that last 12 year period of which probably about 1 to 2000 have been e commerce. So that was why when we came up with Upay, we're like, we can do this because we do this kind of cool stuff every day for other clients. Why don't we do something cool for ourselves this time? Ended up building an entire new company in the process. So quickly got a bit out of
Nathan Bush: control and then you're not allowed to have any more ideas.
Matt Holm: Okay, not yet.
Nathan Bush: And then so if we take it forward to the payment side and so if I'm a retailer at the moment running a site and I've got credit cards, PayPal and say Afterpay running, how does can Upay connect into any of those options when someone passes on their cart to A partner or a boss or someone like that. Can you still use any of those options that are native in the website?
Matt Holm: Yeah, yeah. So right now as we speak, you could be able to hook up PayPal. The cool thing about PayPal is because we've formed a partnership with PayPal Australia, we were actually got a bit of a revenue share agreement in place. And not to go into too much detail, but the cool thing there is if you were to hook up PayPal and someone pays a UPayLink via PayPal, you just pay your regular fees and part of those fees are shared with us. That's how we generate our revenue. So there's actually zero out of pocket cost to offer PayPal as a payment option inside upay and receive payments. So that's a really compelling reason to kind of position upay as a bit of a no brainer for a merchant. We do have stripe integrations, so we charge 3% for a stripe transaction and you know, that's where we're at. Like I said, it's still very early on. It's only eight months into our journey. So we're constantly effectively just integrating ey other ways of payments and eventually going down the buy now, pay later path. But that's the kind of fork in the road that we're facing now, especially with the app that we're developing. Because really our goal with the entire message of what we're conveying, and certainly that target demographic as well of the younger generation who should be encouraged to be turning to mum or dad or family or friends before going into debt, is that we're more likely to before we integrate after pay to effectively build our own buy now, pay later solution. With that angle I was talking about earlier with using your family and friends as your source of funding before you go down the path of getting loans with financial institutions.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, beautiful. So if you've got upay on the site and you're accepting payments via PayPal, with you pay, there's actually no cost to the merchant.
Matt Holm: No, that's right. And that's why, and I've always found myself, is that PayPal's always the entry level payment option, isn't it? You know, first time you ever start off your first little e commerce store, you always throw PayPal in there. That's a great way for us to say to merchants that, you know, yeah, we are new, this is a bit different. We think it's going to work for you. We're actually positive it will work. But look, even if it doesn't, you're not going to be out of pocket. And when it does, actually it's just like another sale, just going to be another deposit into your PayPal account, it's going to be another transaction in your WooCommerce store that'll be sitting there as pending. And then once that payment comes through via PayPal, regular fees come out and that order changes to processing and the shopper gets a notification that their products now being dispensed.
Nathan Bush: Do you have in the communication to customers on this, if someone sent a you pay link to someone, is there a series of automated messages which might follow up if that recipient of the link hasn't actioned anything? Is there kind of like an almost like an abandoned cart kind of message sequence?
Matt Holm: Yeah, yeah, that's effectively what we've done there is. Because of course one of the key learnings we've taken away from speaking to merchants is the fact that of course some merchants are fine with a upay link sitting there for a week, others are selling out of these items quickly and maybe want to put an expiration date on a upay link. Which makes complete sense that we built that feature in where you can define yourself as a merchant, how long a upay link can last for. But then what that becomes is effectively like a sense of urgency because, you know, if I've sent dad a upay link and I get a notification one hour before it's about to expire that dad still hasn't paid for my order, you're going to have effectively your customers acting as your marketing department, effectively sending a series of, you know, almost like an email marketing campaign is going to go out from your customers to your dad, saying, come on dad, pay for this link because it's about to expire. Another really cool feature of UPay is that the merchants are being exposed to two customers for the price of one, which is very unique. They're getting to learn about how their shoppers shop and how the people pay, which is a statistic that really hasn't been revealed. Just to give you a quick insight onto that statistic, I was speaking to one of a data scientist from one of the. I won't go into too much detail, it's just for privacy purposes, but a really major retailer and they asked their bank to kind of delve into some of the transactional data to just try and figure out which age group they were growing in the best. And so even though this is a fashion retailer really targeting probably 20 to 30 year old, they basically came back and said, you're growing out of control in the 55 year old male demographic. That makes no sense. We don't sell any. None of our customers are in that demographic. But what they realized is that was in many respects it would have been that the fathers or basically the payers executing the payments, which was a sector there, they really didn't have any idea existed, but clearly does exist because that's what the data that's coming back from the bank was telling them.
Nathan Bush: That's awesome. So you pass both sets of data back to merchants.
Matt Holm: Yeah, obviously in an appropriate way from a privacy perspective. But they do, they get insights into effectively how a shopper shops and a payer pays.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, brilliant. Now I expect that there's going to be a level of trust that you've got to build here with consumers. Anything to do with the checkout usually does take a little while to build up trust.
Nathan Bush: How are you going to go about
Nathan Bush: making sure that when people see that you pay button within the checkout that one, they understand what upay is and two, that they trust it because even though you're not actually, you know, accepting the transactions on their behalf, it's still in that real security conscious zone, right?
Matt Holm: Oh absolutely. And you know, that's the challenge right now. And that's where we're at is building up brand awareness. You know, in many respects that's why I'm here today. And that's, that's about educating the consumers that there is now another way to pay before they go into the buying journey. Because in many respects you're right. If they first discover the you pay option at the checkout at the very end, they've already decided that hey, I've, I've got the money myself. Because why else would you be adding a product to your cart if you didn't think you were going to be able to afford to buy it? So of course, you know, and afterpay and all of the buy now pay later providers have done this very well with that little link that sits below the price that says, you know, $100 now or four easy installments of $25 with Afterpay. So we kind of come in there with a little bit of a creative line that says, oh, you pay $0 and let someone else pay for you with you pay. So that's kind of our job there, is to really get ourselves out there and help educate the consumers that yeah, there is another alternative. And that's why, you know, kind of the buy now pay later angle as well is really a big push for us too because Especially that younger demographic that's just getting exposed to that on a daily basis to effectively say that YouPay can be used with that same buy now, pay later mindset, but it's just a better and more responsible way of executing a buy now, pay later transaction. That's going to be quite a powerful message. But yeah, just good old fashioned advertising and brand awareness and exposing as many consumers as possible to the UPay messaging is the goal over the next 12 months.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, absolutely. And in terms of getting market traction,
Matt Holm: more T shirts,
Nathan Bush: this is a collectible. No one's getting this one. In terms of getting market traction. I still remember in the early days of afterpay. I was a super retail group at the time and I was lucky enough that it was so early that Nick Molnar was still doing the door to door sales on afterpay. And I met him three times, I think, and each time I was like, yeah, it's interesting, but you know, the list of priorities was so long. We were replatforming all that sort of stuff. And it was only on the third time that he came in and he showed me a list of all the customers who are actually demanding it. So from a business sense, first couple of times was all about, you know, it makes sense financially because we're seeing conversion rates like this. And then I feel like afterpay changed tact a little bit and they were like, actually, no, it doesn't matter anyway because your customers are demanding it. And if you don't offer this, then your customers will go elsewhere. And that kind of changed that conversation. How are you going about building that market share for UPay? Are you coming at it from a retail first perspective or from a customer first perspective?
Matt Holm: Definitely customer first. I'll explain that in a second. Got to say, you got to get Nick back on your show. Hey. Because that'll be an. I'm sitting here listening, going, wow, tell me more because that's awesome. Get them in to tell that story and expand on that because that's really insightful. I'll definitely tune in for that episode. But yeah, 100% customers. And then we're building that kind of flywheel effect. The way we see it is customers, of course, they want to buy things. That's a given. And there's lots of customers out there. And we know that speaking to customers too, the concept of UPAY resonates extremely well. They all go, wow, yeah, that's so simple. That's cool. What a great idea. I'm totally going to use that. Where Do I download the app from? So we're quickly building an app, going to get it out there in July. The way we see it as customers generate payers. Right. So here's a couple. As a payer, what does a payer do? It generates revenue. Revenue goes to the merchants. The merchants are then exposed to upay. And then what do merchants do better than anything? Create customers. So that's the ecosystem, the growth mechanism, the wheel we need to get turning. And you're right, it starts with customers. And yeah, that's that great story, which, like I said, I'd love to hear the founders of these buy now, pay later solutions expand on further. But yeah, as I understand, it was all about the customers using it at one retailer, then basically going across to the next retailer and say, hey, do you have that zip or afterpay thing? Because I just used it over there. And if you did, I'd buy a bunch more stuff. And I go, well, I better go get zip and afterpay. And that's ultimately the you pay effect that we want to have ourselves as we get those customers on board.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, Nick just keeps messaging me and calling me and email me going, when can I come on the show bushing?
Nathan Bush: And I'm just like, Nick, just, you
Nathan Bush: know, wait till you've proven afterpay and then we'll. We'll talk about it.
Matt Holm: Yeah, that's so true. Got to get Matt on there first with you pay. He's six months into his journey. We need to get him on first before you.
Nathan Bush: Exactly, exactly what has been the most
Nathan Bush: surprising thing for you now that you've
Nathan Bush: got this live, you've got merchants on board?
Nathan Bush: Has there been anything that's come out of this that's really surprised you from where you were initially getting upay up to what you've discovered once it's been in the real world?
Matt Holm: Yeah, it's almost been. And I keep harping back to it. It is this focus of fixing the debt problem and that much bigger picture of our mission statement. And I guess that cliched figuring out the why. It all starts with why and kind of people don't buy what you do. They buy why you do it. So we had the what Very, very early on. It's a cool little thing at the checkout. And I got to say, you would have noticed this when I first talked to you about it. And I was talking to a lot of people and they tell me about you paying. That all have that moment. I get it. That's cool. But we didn't really have that why we were doing it and that to me has just taken us from a glorified plugin to a proper company very quickly and that has really, really sped up the type of reception, the interest, the signups, the number of customers using it and it's still very early on but I'm starting to see that wheel spinning. Yeah, extremely exciting and yeah, I just can't wait to get that app out there, you know just to give a bit of, a bit of a teaser. We're building in functionality that will allow you to use you paying every merchant online and offline even if they don't offer upay which is cool. So I just can't wait to see it in customers hands. Yeah, so good.
Nathan Bush: Just speaking about getting that wheel turning, you've taken on your first round of venture and investment.
Nathan Bush: Tell us about that process and why
Nathan Bush: you went down that path.
Matt Holm: Yeah, yeah, I mean it was, you know I was, I was lucky enough to that you know this isn't my first rodeo in the sense of running a digital company. So over the years I've built up a really good network of supporters and partners you could say. And, and actually that that very first journey of that partnership started with would have been me back in 2009 still just starting my web design agency working out of my parents real estate office. Just a little desk there that they said why don't you sit there and in park maybe help around the office with the real estate. You know if you never know if this website thing takes off maybe you can you know, hire a few more people. So sat there and then a good mate, Reese Ferner dropped in one day from reload.
Nathan Bush: We've had Reisi on, that's it.
Matt Holm: Yeah. So early days of building up a partnership network within the Brisbane digital community and said hey, you know, I see you do really affordable websites for small businesses. We do affordable SEO, we should partner up. Why don't you build the websites and we'll do the SEO. And so off we went and started building websites and feeding them over to the team at Reload. And Reece's boss, one of the founders in conjunction with Craig was obviously Lou jurey. And now 12 years later Lou has a venture capital group called Sprint vc. And naturally of course when I came up with upay as I did ultimately with yourself mate, I started telling people about it and the very first person I told about it was Lou. And I remember telling Lou in the morning and he was like mate, I'm going to come by this afternoon to learn more about this and he was the first person in the office, gave me that reassurance that I wasn't just raving mad and that this really was something. And then early on when I'm lucky enough to have quite a few people who would be interested in investing, it's about taking smart money and that's absolutely what Lou's group represents. So it's just a perfect type of deal to get us this to us next step, get this app out the door, get the product market fit, learn more about our customers with obviously that trust that I've built up over 12 years of doing business with Lou and the people he's associated with.
Nathan Bush: And is the biggest value in that, is it the capital injection to allow you to move quicker or is it the network or is there something else?
Matt Holm: It's a combination of both and it's just about getting just the right amount of funding necessary to take us to where we need to be over this next six to 12 months because we know of the potential and what that will achieve and where their valuation will be and the type of response we should get if we get to that next milestone. And it is, it's also just the right type of people in that network that Lou represents. Beautiful exposure to the in particular for us because obviously if we're doing a fintech, which we are, I'm more of the tech than the fintech, you know, basic payment understanding and working with payment gateways day in, day out for 12 years. But I'm not from the financial sector and Lou's group certainly represents that too. So that was something we definitely needed going into this space.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, absolutely. So we've alluded to it a few times. You've got a fascinating background and it was dropped very early on about being a single player verse multiplayer game. In the research, I found a photo of you on the courier mail from September 11th. Oh no, that was the first. Was that September 11th?
Matt Holm: It's literally the morning of September 11th, 2001. Because of course being here in Australia, those tragic events all transpired about 11 o' clock at night. So that the morning of September 11th, Australian time, my young 19 year old face was on the front page next to 9-11-2001 of the Courier Mail. So if you ever go back in time and see what was happening on that historic day, you get my ugly mug.
Nathan Bush: Wow. I don't know is that good timing or bad timing?
Matt Holm: Well, it was, it was just a real eye opener. So yeah, back then it ages me, but it would be 20 years to go today. So I was 19 and yeah, I was on the front cover with a bit of a profile about my, my website that I'd started actually four years earlier. But yeah, it was a real eye opener to be on, be on the front cover. But yeah, just to delve into that whole story, I started a website. It was a website based on a video game I was really into as a 15 year old. So I had a terrible Google ranking because it was 1997 and it was two years before Google was invented. But it was a website called Soccer Gaming. So it was all about the FIFA video game. I was a big fan and just a bunch of nerdy mates at school all starting a bit of coding and doing things. And at the time there was a website called geocities. A whopping two megabytes of free space and you could start a website and ironically you could also even start a business and a whole career with two megabytes of free space back in those days. And that's exactly what I did. So I started soccer gaming.com it was a fan site around FIFA. For those of you who are gamers and like FIFA way back then. The great thing about FIFA right now is all their licenses. So if you're playing as Manchester United, you wear the authentic Manchester United kit with the right logos and right sponsors, etc. But back then EA didn't have all the licenses so Manu would run out with a red jersey. That was it. So what my website did was let people effectively mod FIFA and go in and create bitmaps of the real Man U jersey. So you'd go to soccer gaming.com and download the real authentic Man U jersey and patch your PC version of FIFA 98 and you'd have a more authentic. Probably a little bit, you know, no fees going to the clubs or to the sponsors, but you were able to get all the authentic sponsorship and proper kits and players into the game.
Nathan Bush: Beautiful. And so that's PC gaming we're talking back then. And is that things like when FIFA didn't own the rights, they'd have like David Beckham lookalike in there, but they'd call him like David Buckman or something like that.
Matt Holm: Yeah, those were the days. I think they might have just gotten what they call the. Just kind of delving into my background knowledge of how it works. But the FIF Pro license would come with the names. They might have just got the names, but yeah, didn't have the independent leagues or the clubs on board at that point in time. But yeah, that's classic video games. And from a sporting sense, isn't it those names that you can tell who they are but they've just got one or two characters wrong. They're almost, you know, they're fun, most humorous to read, aren't they?
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Nathan Bush: I understand that that journey led you to actually join the FIFA production team over in Canada.
Nathan Bush: How did all that link up?
Matt Holm: Yeah, and that was, it was just now looking back now, I just couldn't, can't really believe it, but just a dream come true for young fellows. So yeah, I'd run these websites and in essence, I guess looking back, I created the first ever FIFA community. And a couple of smart people, I mean shout out to a bloke by the name of Matt Bilby, who was young guy on the marketing team and I think he's like the executive, he's in charge of marketing at EA now, but he was the first person to kind of reach out and realize that this community actually had a genuine voice, that they actually were coming up with some good ideas and that was a great way to connect with real people playing the games. So I got to know Matt and he started talking to me a bit about what do people want to see in the next iteration of FIFA? As opposed to seeing these requests as almost like a nuisance of complaints. He said, oh wait, this could actually be really constructive. And of course these days the community drives everything there is to do with everything, in particular video games. But Matt was the first to embrace that. So I got to know the team over in Canada, they fly me over to E3, the kind of the big conventions from time to time to showcase the game to me, realizing that I could go back to the community and talk up effectively the FIFA 99, FIFA 2000 was coming down the pipe and over time got to meet a few of the team in the production group and I guess they saw something in a young 22 year old that thought they could add a little bit of value. Very green. I must say, looking back myself at the time of what I delivered. But naturally it meant that they were getting some kind of genuine ground level ideas coming in. So they flew me over there, over to Vancouver in Canada and would have been 2004 to join the team and yeah, became part of the group behind a few iterations of FIFA over about a four year period, which was terrific exposure for myself. Not just to be part of that group, but then just great exposure from a business sense to learn what it was like to work at a big corporate group. Really helped me as well with delivering on milestones. Of course, being a publicly listed company, got to say there's a huge amount of pressure or certainly back in those days at EA to deliver. You can't tell Wall street that FIFA is not coming out on time and that EA's miss their Q3 earnings by billion dollars. So you've got to get FIFA out the door on time. So I really learned the pros and cons of how to deliver on a real tight time frame, which was great exposure at a young age.
Nathan Bush: And now looking at where E Gaming has gone and are you kind of,
Nathan Bush: are you still in that world?
Nathan Bush: Are you out of that world?
Nathan Bush: How do you feel about where eGaming has evolved in those 15 to 20 years since?
Matt Holm: Yeah, no, it's terrific and almost a little bit humbling and reassuring that I was onto something. I didn't know what it was. And I guess smarter people than myself have embraced it further and taken in that correct direction to create an entire massive industry off of this little nucleus of fan sites and forums and communities and grown them into this massive, massive beast of an entire industry. So I'm still connected. Like this website eventually branched out to another whole website called Operation Sports that I ran for a number of years as well. That was the biggest independent sports video. It's almost like the next evolution of just being about soccer video games. I was part of a group that built an entire network around sports video games as a whole, which was extremely exciting. That particular website got acquired by a rather large esports company called Enthusiast Gaming, who I really just knocking it out of the park. And if you want to, I don't know, buy some shares in a company with their share prices just taking off, not quite doing a GameStop, but they're going okay, and they're, they're, they're right in esports. They've got 300 million, you know, connected users, they've got their bought esports teams and they're building apps and yeah, so I mean, in part, you know, I own some shares in that company through the sale of One of my. So I remain connected and, you know, hopefully you can see in what we're doing with Upay and that whole mindset of the, you know, the checkout being stuck in single player mode and us introducing multiplayer shopping, that type of gamer still the fire still burning inside me. For sure.
Nathan Bush: I like the connection. Are you still playing games?
Nathan Bush: Do you have time to play games?
Matt Holm: I try to. It's more me walking past my boy's room, he's 11. And watching him play Fortnite and. And realizing that I've lost it. So it's still just FIFA. That's the only one that I can still hold my head up high and say that I can probably give them a run for them as money. But yeah, I've lost connection with the Fortnite world. But then again, it's exciting because of that little bit of a connection back to enthusiast gaming still, my boy will come out. I was watching Locky Stream and all these guys, I'm like, oh, cool. I kind of know who these people are. I'm seeing them mentioned in press releases from this esports company. I've got some ownership and so, yeah, it's actually really cool to see my, my boy kind of move into this next generation of gaming and almost a very similar age group to when that I was when I first got exposed to it.
Nathan Bush: And then do you use the thing? Like he'll be after a new game and he'll send you a you pay link to buy his next game and you go, mate, you've got to let me win a game first and then I'll buy it for you.
Matt Holm: Well, I was thinking, let me tell you that the one retailer that I want to get up into would be Sony and Epic Games, because it is a pain in the bloody ass to have your PayPal account hooked up to your son's Sony account. Because then every now and then I'll get this email saying that someone's bought some V bucks and like, what's happened here, mate? Oh, oops. I think I accidentally pressed a button. So what I then need to do is disconnect my PayPal account to make sure that doesn't happen. And then. But then when I do decide, okay, it's cool, mate, you can buy a few V bucks. I'm going to go back in and connect the bloody thing, which on a Sony PlayStation controller takes a week. So let me tell you, if you pay was integrated into Epic Games, that'd be a dream come true for me. You could send me a YouPay link until the cows come home. I'd say no to half of them. But eventually, if he's had a good week at school, I might click pay and he'll get some V bucks. So hopefully someone from Epics, he'll learn after a while.
Nathan Bush: Get dad on a Friday afternoon and they all get approved.
Matt Holm: That's right. Now he's already using that tactic. Don't. Don't worry about that.
Nathan Bush: All right, so what's next for yourself?
Nathan Bush: And you pay, Obviously, you've got a lot in the pipeline that we talked about today. We've got Shopify releasing mid year. We've just had the venture capital raised and we've got the app coming out for consumers soon. What's your focus area?
Matt Holm: You've said it perfectly. It's exactly that. I mean, it's obviously from a straight up development perspective, it's launching on Shopify, it's building the app, getting into the customer's hands to begin that flywheel effect I've mentioned. But at a more higher level, it's really defining that product market fit. Because you and I have already talked about, you know, probably 20 different directions that you pay can be taken. And so it's all about, of course, getting more customers on board, more merchants on board, listening to them and figuring out which direction we're going to take this and of the many directions that we could take upay in. So it's just about, you know, making sure that we realize that I was given, you know, two ears and only one mouth for a reason, so I got to listen twice as much that then I speak. So a lot of listening at the moment and learning and refining our approach based off of the feedback we get from both customers and retailers.
Nathan Bush: Brilliant. Now, if anyone's listening to this and wants to get in touch, what are the kind of conversations that you want to have and how can people get in touch?
Matt Holm: Yeah, I mean, just connect with me on LinkedIn or the email address is simply matpayai. Haven't got upay.com just yet. Might have to fork out a bit for that one. I think it's for sale. But yeah, MatPay AI or certainly just find me on LinkedIn. You know, I just love to. I'd love to speak to anybody relating to this space, but in particular, of course, retailers are the big ones. So, you know, the more retailers that straight out of the blocks offer Upay fully integrated, the more chances we have of customers being able to get exposure to it and use it. So very open to all types of conversations. Especially from people connected to the whole fintech and payments space. But in particular any retailer big or small that may wish to offer an alternate checkout option, please reach out.
Nathan Bush: Beautiful Matt.
Matt Holm: It's very exciting.
Nathan Bush: I love the idea and can't wait to follow it. And it's even better that it's out of Brisbane. So congratulations and look forward to seeing further success.
Matt Holm: Yeah, thanks so much Nathan. Awesome,
Nathan Bush: Inspired, Intrigued, Jealous. Yep, I feel you and I feel all those emotions as well. What a brilliant idea and a fascinating, fascinating ride that Matt and his team are going on. But I really think there's an interesting discussion to be had here around function versus Purpose. So when Matt first told me about the idea last year, I absolutely loved
Nathan Bush: the story of his wife buying online
Nathan Bush: and then passing her checkout over to him to simplify the gift giving experience. And maybe that says more about my
Nathan Bush: bad gift giving experiences than anything else,
Nathan Bush: but I think it really holds up. Whether it's authorizing video games for kids or signing off purchases for team members, it is simple and it just makes sense. So I was surprised when in talking to Matt that YouPay are lifting this story up from function to be more purpose driven. And the purpose that Matt was talking about is about being a safe payment option for future generations who have had easy credit made available to them for me. And in this case I think the use case rather than the purpose is the thing that gets me excited. But it's a good challenge right on whether we always need to be purpose led or whether sometimes a good idea is just a bloody good idea. So I'd love to hear your thoughts. Shoot me an email on whether you think we can go to market with just function or whether we really do need that purpose.
Nathan Bush: Purpose behind us.
Nathan Bush: Email through nathanadtocart.com love to hear what you think. Before we go today I want to give a shout out to Sasha and Fiona who dropped me a note via email to say that they've been listening to Add to Cart from the start. Thank you and have successfully launched their new business Sand Dune Sunsets. What they've created is beautiful wicker picnic baskets which they sell via a Shopify store. Thank you sponsors. Over on sand dunesunsets.com make sure you check them out and throw them some love if you're in the market for a wedding gift or just something beautiful put in the back of your car to make the most of these beach days before winter hits. Thanks for listening guys. I'm so pumped for you and the sand. June Sunsets Team Hope you smash it
Nathan Bush: out of the park.
Nathan Bush: To finish up, I have three resources for you. Firstly, if you're a first time listener about to cart and you want to stay up to date with new episodes, head over to addtocart.com and you can sign up for our weekly newsletter. We'll let you know every time a new episode drops, as well as giving you my three takeaways from each episode and a link to the transcripts so you can know that this is an episode that you want to dive straight into. Secondly, if you want a weekly roundup of the best e commerce case studies tools and research, sign up to the Hi5 Friday newsletter which is delivered to inboxes at 8am every Friday morning. I read all the e commerce news and send you the bits that I think you can take action from. Sign up at 12 high 12h I g h.com au high 5 and the last thing if you are looking to explore your next e commerce opportunity, head over to esweettalent.com we are a dedicated e commerce talent agency connecting the best e commerce talent with the fastest growing brands. Check it out. Sign up to the email and get in touch with me if you want to discuss your next move. Until next time, thanks for listening and keep those customers adding to car.
