Socrata

During due diligence associated with raising capital for MessageRite, one of the members of the due diligence team remarked that the average time it takes customers to pay their invoices can be terrifying. On average our customers paid their invoices in fewer than 7 days. We had never once had a single customer take more than 23 days to pay their invoice. He asked if we had a bulldog doing A/R, hounding our customers to pay. Nope. Nobody at MessageRite has ever called a customer to remind them to pay their bill. “How are you doing it then?” he asked. I answered the question candidly “I think it’s because our invoices are orange.”

That sounds odd, I know. But our customers were all mid-sized financial services companies with dozens of invoices per month. I can envision the Accounts Payable person having this tattered stack of invoices and seeing one orange one sticking out a like a sore thumb – staring him in the face, day after day. Maybe subconsciously he wanted to pay it just to dispose of it and clean up the pile.  We haven’t even launched our service at blist yet, but I can assure you that our invoices will be orange.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 at 1:59 pm and is filed under startup anecdotes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.