I spent time looking into this a couple years ago as a startup founder with this problem. We are in the finance space so I saw how bad the treasury options were with our bank, given their fee cut versus plain T-bonds at the time. I looked into which brokerages allowed us to setup self-directed accounts (many banks don't offer that for businesses at all). I found the "correct" approach. But then there would be more paperwork and back and forth to set up that new account, then manage transferring money around when we needed it, logging into a different system. On a ski trip a friend in finance told me "you're being dumb, if your bank offers you a treasury plan with a one click button, even if it's not perfect, click that button now!" So I did.
Then, the benefit of saving 1-2% extra versus spending my time trying to actually running the business and doing things with our money in the real world, has meant I have never looked back. 1-2% on millions of dollars is significant but it's not nearly as impactful as finding Product-Market-Fit in your actual business.
All this to say: I'd be in your target market but I'm simply not interested in a "marginally better" treasury system versus just going with my bank's options that make it easy for me.
That's fair. But to your point, the problem we see is that banks' treasury products take advantage of founders who (rightfully) don't want to think about their treasury yields.
That's why we designed Palus to be as simple as possible to use. If you check out our demo video, you'll see it's super straightforward. Setup takes <5 min and then you don't have to think about it anymore. We're also building out automatic sweep functionality, so then you REALLY won't have to think about it.
Given the significant increase in returns on a large treasury, we think it's worth the small amount of effort.
> Given the significant increase in returns on a large treasury, we think it's worth the small amount of effort.
Isn't that the point he was making though? It's a large treasury in aggregate, which is why it makes sense for a new entrant to come in, but it's only a 1-2% problem for founders, which is why they don't bother with it much (why fix what's not broken, etc.).
By the time founders raise significant sums of money (which is usually Series B onwards), they might be better suited to deal with a fractional CFO service which provides the full spectrum of services instead.
Even for a Series A company, putting $5M into Palus yields them an extra $50k-75k per year, just for letting their money sit in a smarter place. It's a five-minute optimization which essentially gets you half a junior engineer's annual salary for free.
This is mathematically possible, but not for certain (market performance et all). Moreover: practically -- onboarding and taking on the risk of a new system and having to manage that is definitely not worth the 1-2 weeks of the founder, or an ops person's time. That 50-75k is more like $5k/month out of what is typically a ~200-400k monthly burn, within which there are almost definitely other ways to save more than 5k if you pay a similar amount of attention (e.g. cloud costs, wrong go to market strategy wasting time, etc). But optimizing deck chair placement on a burning ship is ultimately a distraction anyways -- everything should be focused on growing revenue. Startup founders need to think in 6-month increments to get to the next rung.
I'd totally agree, if it took 1-2 weeks to onboard and manage! But it really does just take a few minutes.
And it'll get even easier once we add our auto-sweep features in the next few weeks, and you'll be able to just set it up once and truly never have to touch it again.
We certainly don't claim that Palus will transform your startup. But it's a worthwhile piece of very low-hanging fruit.
It may take 2 minutes to click the button, it definitely takes weeks to diligence your company and the offering and compare it to what else is possible through the market.
We totally agree! And that's why we specifically designed Palus to be as easy to use as possible. It's a one-time setup that takes five minutes. We optimized our UX for founders to spend as little time using it as possible, so they can focus on finding PMF instead.
Even for a Series A company, putting $5M into Palus should yield an extra $50k-75k per year, just for having your money sit in a smarter place. Put another way, it should cover six months of a junior engineer's salary for free.
For five minutes of setup, we think most founders will find it worthwhile.
Then, the benefit of saving 1-2% extra versus spending my time trying to actually running the business and doing things with our money in the real world, has meant I have never looked back. 1-2% on millions of dollars is significant but it's not nearly as impactful as finding Product-Market-Fit in your actual business.
All this to say: I'd be in your target market but I'm simply not interested in a "marginally better" treasury system versus just going with my bank's options that make it easy for me.