App takes stress out of chasing debts
Debtor Daddy, one of the first tenants in Christchurch’s GreenHouse Innovation Hub, is tapping into business owners’ dislike of chasing customers for payment.
Co-founder Matt McFedries said the app automated the reminder process of collecting debts for small businesses.
Debtor Daddy is one of four inaugural tenants at the Innovation Hub opened yesterday in Christchurch, a project funded by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment and run by the Canterbury Development Corporation, the region’s economic development agency.
‘‘Business owners hate chasing their customers for money,’’ McFedries said. ‘‘It requires awkward conversations. It takes a lot of time.’’
The app did the chasing and follow-up for them.
Threequarters of the threeyear-old company’s customers were overseas.
McFedries said part of their growth came from piggy-backing on star IT company Xero.
Debtor Daddy was listed as a software add-on to Xero which had about 400 other add-on providers. The add-ons filled the gaps with services Xero did not provide.
McFedries and Mark Haussmann funded the company initially from an earlier web design business and have also had grants from government agency Callaghan Innovation and private investment from Asantha Wijeyeratne, who runs a software payroll company, SmartPayroll.
The idea of Debtor Daddy came from McFedries’ accountant at the time who was complaining about collecting money owed to him.
Software development was expensive, McFedries said. Although they did part of it themselves, they brought in contracted specialists to help them.
They were considering taking part in the Lightning Lab programme to be run at the Innovation Hub in August.
Lightning Lab provides $18,000 to each participant taking part in its 12-week ‘‘accelerator’’ programme, and asks for an 8 per cent holding in the company in return.
It selects 10 participants who have access during the programme to mentors, advisers and others. At the end of the 12 weeks the participants pitch to investors.