The following interview is a conversation we had with Jessica Zhang, CEO & Co-Founder of Pier, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $2.5M Raised to Build the Future of Credit Infrastructure
Brett
Welcome to Category Visionaries, the show dedicated to exploring exciting visions for the future from the founders who are on the front lines building it. In each episode, we’ll speak with a visionary Founder who’s building a new category or reimagining an existing one. We’ll learn about the problem they solve, how their technology works, and unpack their vision for the future. I’m your host, Brett Stapper, CEO of Front Lines Media. Now let’s dive right into today’s episode.
Brett
Hey everyone, and welcome back to Category Visionaries. Today we’re speaking with Jessica Zhang, CEO and Co-Founder of Peer, a credit compliance platform that’s raised 2.5 million in funding. Jessica, how are you?
Jessica Zhang
I’m doing well. How are you doing, Brett?
Brett
I’m doing great and super excited for this conversation and let’s go ahead and jump right in. So talk to us about what you’re building there at Peer.
Jessica Zhang
Yeah, totally. So Peer offers an API first solution for companies to launch or scale compliant credit products to their users. So what that means is let’s say if DoorDash wants to offer their drivers loans or TikTok wants to offer its creators credit products that are very different from traditional bank like loans using proprietary data of their platforms, we are the nuts and bolts that empower all of that. And most businesses really struggle to do this because of how cumbersome and fragmented existing solutions are. We’re talking about millions of dollars every year and six to nine months of time. So we allow companies to do that very quickly, efficiently and we also have built in compliance guardrails to ensure that our customers are complying with all the state and federal regulations there.
Brett
Take us back to the founding of the company, January 2023. What was going on in your world?
Jessica Zhang
Yeah, it’s a long story to be honest. So my Co-Founder like Alex and I, we met at our last company Stilt. It was a fintech lending platform where we saw firsthand how expensive and time consuming it was for credit industry to outfit their existing tech stack to offer, you know, innovative credit products such as buy not pay later, salary advance, credit builders, merchant advance, commercial equipment financing, et cetera. And businesses, whether you’re like venture backed or brick and mortar, just really struggle to do that without costing a ton of legal compliance, finance, engineering resources. So when the last company got acquired, both Alex and I felt we had unfinished business and pretty unique insights about kind of this sector. And we wanted to build the most flexible, modular, compliant, focused stack that we’ve always wanted to have ourselves.
Jessica Zhang
And I think A call out here is that sometimes people can get their founding ideas from their experiences at previous companies. And to us, that was the case. And it doesn’t totally have to be from scratch or it doesn’t have to be like a magical single aha moment. And those unique moments gave us some pretty unfair competitive advantages into this niche that many we would consider boring, but we love it ourselves.
Brett
I feel like every industry may seem a little bit boring until you actually dig in and start diving into the industry. Then every industry seems to get fun.
Jessica Zhang
Exactly. Yeah. The boring problems for others are where we get a lot of energy from.
Brett
So you have this idea, you know, what does the first 90 days or maybe first six months look like?
Jessica Zhang
Yeah, totally. So, I mean, before that, you know, just taking a quick step back is we at the time actually had a lot of reasons why we could delay or not do this. We were well past the YC batch deadline by really far. Alex was on his honeymoon in Italy. My mom was in a surgery and I was taking calls from literally outside the operating room in the hospital. But those didn’t stop us because we knew our customers or there was demand from what were wanting to build. And then we kind of incorporated the company, receive the funding to receive the YC funding and then we’re off to the races. So for the first few weeks we from like a product build out standpoint, we kind of went back to the drawing board with a very heavy first principles approach.
Jessica Zhang
We looked at everything we knew, everything we didn’t know, every single part of the lending stack from, you know, origination, compliance, underwriting, loan management system, credit reporting, debt, capital integrations, and took it back to the very basics and fundamentals. We also talked with hundreds of players in the space and kind of combined that with our knowledge from our prior experiences, insights, and used all those insights and the first principle thinking to really drill down to the most painful and hardest parts of the lending stack, which was the compliance piece for pretty much everyone we had talked to. And that’s also where we ended up focusing heavily on as our competitive edge and wedge into standing out against alternatives out there.
Brett
How long did it take until you had your first paying customer? And tell us the story. How did you get that first deal across the line?
Jessica Zhang
Yeah, totally. We kind of really knew were onto something because we landed our first customer less than four weeks after launch. And it was pretty organic from the word of mouth. And for some context here, our contract sizes are pretty large, so typically over 80k ARR. And based on, you know, some industry benchmarks, these deals of this size typically take 83 days average sales cycle as kind of the industry benchmark. So you know, that would have been 12 weeks versus it took us four weeks. And our customers were telling us that were addressing a sharp, urgent pain they had in the sector and that they were willing to pay us quite a bit of money to solve for that.
Jessica Zhang
So that in itself, I think the product strength in itself stood out and made the sales and closing quite easy for us from the start. And in addition to that, you know, some of our customers are investors in us and their investors are also our investors and they’re really voting in favor of what we’re doing with their money.
Brett
When it comes to the market category, what is the market category? Is it credit compliance? Is it credit infrastructure? What’s the category that customers are buying?
Jessica Zhang
Yeah, it’s a combination of credit compliance and infra and we’re mostly more redefining an existing category.
Brett
And what’s the existing category then? Is it those options there or what’s the existing category?
Jessica Zhang
Yeah, so for some context, you know, credit is a living, breathing creature. It involves over a much longer period of time. Unlike banking payments, which are more one time events, we think of like credit and loan as an ongoing dynamic process that evolves through each loan’s life cycle. So the existing category is there’s a lot of solutions and vendors today that address a single part of the credit stack. For example, there are a lot of PyC vendors, there’s tools for underwriting, there’s loan management systems, but it’s fragmented. And even just stitching all those solutions together can take the team a lot of time and resources. So for us, the category or kind of what we are differentiating here is the end to end component of all of those pieces combined with a focus on compliance.
Brett
Just looking through the angels and the investors that you have, I see obviously y Combinator, Airbnb, OpenAI, Experian, Morgan Stanley, you know, just naming a few of them on that list. What do you think they saw in you and your Co-Founder to really give you the funding that you needed to get this idea off the ground?
Jessica Zhang
It could be a lot of factors. I think we had really strong customer love, we had high contract sizes, we had a very large tam, even just in the US unsecured lending market alone. And also when you take a step back, credit is kind of the foundation of economies. Credit existed way before there was payments, whereas the concept of currency. So you’re really looking into kind of the fundamentals of the economies and that plus I think our Founder backgrounds probably stood out to them as well. You know, Alex and I were each other’s counterparts. At our last company I reported to the CEO, he reported to the cto. We’ve worked together before in very complimentary styles and decide to work together again. So there is a lot of those components combined, I would say.
Brett
What about the marketing strategy? How did the marketing strategy begin and then how has it evolved? What does it look like?
Jessica Zhang
Today it’s been mostly inbound via word of mouth across our customers, investors, vendors. We’ve quite a bit of customer love. So some of our customers have just been asking, knowing similar companies in their space and referring them to us. We currently don’t have like a sales or marketing team so it’s been all Founder led. That is mostly my time. Recently we started going to conferences so embracing more genuine in person conversations over cold or outbound emails. For example, at Like Money 2020 this year we met with a lot of prospects. I was in back to back meetings with them and I’ll be speaking at a fintech conference next year and also doing some guest lecturing at Cornell.
Brett
As you begin to think about building out that go to market team and bringing on some marketing and sales folks, what’s top of mind and the reason I ask you, a lot of founders obviously struggle with that. So what’s your thinking as you do you begin to think about building out those teams?
Jessica Zhang
Yeah, that’s a great question and I can see how a lot of founders can learn from this part. We really focus on customers who are the best or top of each of their respective categories. So for example, our customers who are consumer apps have over a four and a Half star rating out of five on the App Store. We really embrace on working with high quality teams and products that really make a difference in this and that makes our job easier in terms of selling and also in terms of the success of our execution and partnerships. So by high quality, I mean, you know, products that are growing a lot year over year, outpacing its competitors, really focusing on quality over quantity. And we use that work to establish what we call the golden standard.
Jessica Zhang
So when you work with the top company of each category or vertical, which could be credit builder, which could be, you know, buy now, pay later, which can be wedding, which could be remittance or travel or construction, once this golden standard is established, are selling to other companies in similar space becomes so much easier because you essentially have a playbook that you can repeat and reuse and have much thorough understandings of the pain points in those vertical specific use cases.
Brett
What about top priorities for 2025? So we’re depressingly somehow all the way through 2024 already as we gear up 2025, what do the plans look like?
Jessica Zhang
Yeah, we’re continuing to move upstream, focusing on more enterprise deals, always, you know, expanding product features. With any venture backed, fast growing company, it’s the ongoing prioritization of roadmaps, features, empowering, growing the team repeats and you just keep repeating that over and over.
Brett
And final question for you, let’s zoom out into the future. So three to five years from today paint a picture for us. What does the company look like? What does the impact look like?
Jessica Zhang
Yeah, I hope we can by then, you know, really take our mission of democratizing access to credit to the next new level. We see a future where consumers and businesses no longer go to banks or credit unions for their financial access or credit needs, but instead their favorite brands. Now, whether that’s your Apple, Costco, Walmart or Teslas of the world, brands that can really take advantage of this opportunity will ultimately win in the long term. And we’re the engine that secretly sits underneath the hood to empower this entire process.
Brett
Amazing. I love the vision. I really love this conversation. We’re going to wrap here. Before we do, if there’s any founders that are listening in, where should we send them?
Jessica Zhang
Yeah, totally. If they’re looking to connect, they can check out our website or book a demo with us. If you or someone that is thinking would be a great prospect for us, definitely reach out. You can find me on LinkedIn.
Brett
Amazing. I love it. And I really hope you don’t end up just getting endless spam from sharing your email address there.
Jessica Zhang
I hope so as well.
Brett
Thanks a lot, Jessica. Appreciate it.
Jessica Zhang
Great. Thank you.
Brett
This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast producers production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io Podcast and for the latest episode, search for Category Visioners on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
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