Steve Grace: Nick, welcome to the show. You’ve got a mysterious background there.

Nick Glynn: Thanks for having me, Steve. Yeah, let’s leave it a mystery.

Steve Grace: Tell us about QuickaPay and where you’re at in the journey.

Nick Glynn: Sure. So QuickaPay is a buy now pay later provider. Our entire goal is to look at what people are already doing, learn from that, and allow traditionally underserved sectors like legal, accounting, and training organisations a way to offer simple finance or buy now pay later to their customers.

Steve Grace: So you’re focused on professional services rather than retail?

Nick Glynn: That’s the focus for us right now. We actually started in the tradie space. Sydney tradies, lucrative opportunity. Turns out most tradies have a lot of cash coming in and if you start talking about instalment plans there are plenty of other places they could be spending their time. So we found a number of opportunities and now we’re looking at that legal and accounting space. We recently announced our legal now pay later offering which has garnered a lot of interest.

Steve Grace: When did QuickaPay start and where are you at in terms of the business?

Nick Glynn: So QuickaPay started in 2019. My co-founder Nate and I found each other in the very first Antler Sydney cohort. My background is in technology and product in the finance space. I’ve built products at Spaceship, Commonwealth Bank, and a couple of other finance providers here. We came across this idea that tradies were spending about 40 hours a month chasing invoices. So we resonated around that, looked at what we could do, and QuickaPay was born from that. As we got more clarity on the market and the product, it became QuickaPay.

Steve Grace: Antler was instrumental then?

Nick Glynn: Absolutely. Antler helped us think about strategy, how to take things to market, and the path to capital. We raised initial investment from Antler themselves and through introductions they made to angel investors here in Sydney. That funded us for almost a year and a half. We literally tried to build a finance company on a shoestring budget.

Steve Grace: Let’s talk about your journey. How did you end up in this space?

Nick Glynn: As you can probably tell from my accent, I’m English. My background in the UK was consultancies, building products. I worked on some interesting early projects, things like GPS-enabled ice cream machines for a European chain that had a problem with people stealing the machines not the ice creams. And a Bluetooth-enabled horseshoe for the Hong Kong Jockey Club to track horses sent to Dubai. That was one of my earliest jobs.

Steve Grace: I’ve never heard of a Bluetooth horseshoe. That’s extraordinary.

Nick Glynn: I’d love to think it’s still being used. From there I jumped into consulting and training work, HP, Intel, Qualcomm, ARM. Then I decided I wanted somewhere better than the UK, ended up in New Zealand on the South Island for about a year, started a consultancy and an online coffee company there, neither went anywhere. Got headhunted by Freelancer.com, came to Sydney, then Campaign Monitor, then Spaceship where I led the build and launch of Spaceship Voyager. After Spaceship I did some consulting work at larger companies and realised how much I missed the pace of early-stage. That fed into finding Antler.

Steve Grace: What was it about Spaceship specifically that changed your perspective?

Nick Glynn: We went from outsourcing almost everything to building entirely in-house, very small team, very focused. And you realise how an incredibly motivated, aligned team can achieve things that companies 20 times the size can’t. After that, going back to a larger organisation where it takes a committee with subcommittees to press a button to release something… I missed that pace.

Steve Grace: What’s been the hardest thing in the QuickaPay journey?

Nick Glynn: Not knowing all the answers. Co-founding a business was the first time I’d truly co-founded something. Previously if I didn’t know something I just figured it out. Trusting and leaning on another person was a different dynamic. But the biggest mistake was wasting time trying to scale sales and marketing before we’d really validated the market. Every time you change sector you’re essentially back to day one. You’ve got to have those early conversations in the new market first. Every time we’ve done that we’ve had our biggest insights.

Steve Grace: COVID hit just as you were building. How did that affect things?

Nick Glynn: COVID sucks. We were trying to build a finance company on a shoestring budget during a global pandemic. Our early customers were having a really hard time. We built features that let us pause instalment plans and reinstate them later, which other lending systems don’t have. Some of our customers folded, some re-emerged and came back to QuickaPay. We ended up doing over 100 interviews with customers to understand what was still valuable. It turned out they were less worried about invoice chasing and more worried about payments and finance flexibility. So we launched payment links, an API, webhooks. COVID actually forced us to look clearly at what the industry needed.

Steve Grace: How have you maintained culture while remote?

Nick Glynn: Your early hires set your culture. As long as the founders and the first few team members are the steel thread that underpins the business, you carry that culture forward. It is really hard doing everything remotely though. You have to make it clear to your team that if they’re having a hard time, they shouldn’t just push harder. They need to step back and say I need a mental health day. Everything’s not normal, everything’s weird right now, and as business leaders you have to appreciate that.

Steve Grace: Why should someone choose QuickaPay over one of the big BNPL players?

Nick Glynn: QuickaPay is solving a different problem than those other companies. The nice thing about working here is that we’re small and driven and you see the direct effects of your actions. We ship our product multiple times a day. Our team can deploy code, talk to customers, help on support, and actually solve problems. If you’re a big company fan, QuickaPay is probably not for you. But if you want to get in at the early doors, shape the direction, and see how things are actually built, that’s what we offer.

Steve Grace: Nick, thanks for coming on the show.

Nick Glynn: Thanks so much Steve, appreciate it.