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What are the increasing returns to scale for customers using Pilot for multiple services, and what new markets could Pilot target?

Pete Belknap

Former Engineering Manager at Pilot

The tax was an interesting example. When I interviewed the company I was like, "Why are you already doing tax? That's dumb. You should be way more focused on bookkeeping." Their answer was, "Our customers will actually churn if we won't do their taxes, because they just expect to get both of these things from us." I was like, "Okay, that's a good answer." 

That's not true of most of the rest of the stuff though that you could think about cross-selling into. Tax is probably a special case and although it might be true for R&D credit, you might expect to get that from the same company that does your taxes.

I think the bigger theme that I personally am a big believer in is, especially all the stuff nobody wants to have to do for themselves and nobody wants to have to think about. You have a good right to win that market if they trust you. 

The relationship you have with your bookkeeper, it's like every month you're talking to each other about your business multiple times. They produce an artifact for you at the end of the month that you find to be a useful distillation of your financial metrics. They're doing your taxes for you, you know how important your taxes are. So, that trust that you've built up over time provides a really great springboard for doing lots of other things. 

I really believed, and still do, that the market that they're addressing is probably measured in the trillions of dollars because it's like a lot of these financial grunt-work types of things.

With regard to opportunities they should be going after, I don't remember if they were looking at access to capital or not. That would certainly be one. Help me cut costs, I'm sure, is something that they're working on now. Spend, I forget how that worked actually when I was at Pilot but you want your customers to be spending money in a very digital way that's connected well with your books too.

Find this answer in Pete Belknap, ex-engineering manager at Pilot, on gross margin in software-enabled services
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