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Strategic Communications Advisory For Visionary Founders
Actionable
Takeaways
Identify Untapped Needs in Established Markets:
Matt leveraged his experience in healthcare technology to address a widespread issue in fintech and HR tech, underscoring the value of cross-industry insights to innovate and meet unmet needs.
Prioritize Seamless User Experience:
Immediate's success in getting employees to quickly adopt its platform highlights the critical importance of designing intuitive, barrier-free experiences, especially for financial services.
Use Data to Focus Your GTM Strategy:
Immediate's targeted approach to the healthcare and hospitality sectors was data-driven, emphasizing the effectiveness of using user engagement data to refine and focus GTM efforts on the most promising verticals.
Blend Categories to Innovate:
Positioning Immediate at the intersection of fintech and HR tech demonstrates the potential for innovation at the convergence of categories, offering a new perspective on addressing traditional problems.
Build a Mission-Driven Culture:
Immediate's mission to impact the financial well-being of a million Americans by the end of 2024 not only sets a clear goal but also aligns the team and investors around a shared purpose, enhancing cohesion and focus.
Conversation
Highlights
Breaking Through the Priority Barrier: How Immediate Turned HR Skepticism Into a Six-Figure User Base
In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Matt Pierce, CEO and Founder of Immediate, shared how his financial wellness platform tackles one of the most overlooked problems in the American workforce: the gap between earning wages and accessing them. But the real story isn’t about the product itself—it’s about how Matt cracked the code on enterprise sales in a market where the biggest competitor isn’t another company.
Understanding the Real Competition
When most founders think about competition, they picture rival products or alternative solutions. Matt sees it differently. “I get asked a lot, who’s your biggest competitor?” Matt explains. “And I always say our biggest competitor is priorities.”
This insight fundamentally shaped Immediate’s entire go-to-market strategy. HR and payroll teams have been burned before. They’ve heard promises of seamless implementations that turned into eight-month ordeals. Matt recognized that winning deals wasn’t about having the best product—it was about overcoming the accumulated scar tissue from decades of failed software rollouts.
The solution? Prove it with actions, not words. Immediate designed their onboarding process to be so frictionless that employees could complete their first transaction within ten minutes of receiving the welcome email. “We’ve seen people in as little as ten minutes from the time they open that email, log in and start making their first transaction,” Matt notes. This wasn’t just good UX—it was a strategic weapon against the priority objection.
The Data-Driven Vertical Strategy
Immediate didn’t start with a vertical focus. For the first year, Matt’s team took any customer they could get. “Let’s just figure out what makes sense and let’s make sure that we’ve got a scalable platform in place,” he recalls. This shotgun approach wasn’t a mistake—it was intentional market discovery.
After collecting enough data, patterns emerged. Healthcare and hospitality weren’t just using the platform more—they were enrolling at rates double or triple other industries. “Those are places where because of reference ability, of course, we can move pretty quickly through a sales process,” Matt explains.
But here’s what made this strategy work: Matt didn’t just chase the verticals with the highest usage. He understood why they worked. Healthcare workers and hospitality employees share a common profile: 87% of Immediate’s users earn less than $60,000 annually. These are shift workers with unpredictable schedules and bills that don’t align with bi-weekly paydays. The product-market fit wasn’t accidental—it was discovered through systematic analysis of enrollment and usage data.
This focus paid dividends. In the most recent quarter, Immediate closed nearly 60 deals in 100 days. “That’s a testament to, again, having a really great product and some macroeconomic factors that we can’t control but we can participate and be a part of,” Matt says. “But also it’s a testament to the maturity of this organization.”
Weaponizing Hospitality in a Skeptical Market
Operating from Birmingham, Alabama, instead of Silicon Valley could have been a disadvantage. Matt turned it into an asset by leaning into what he calls “weaponizing hospitality.”
The retention numbers tell the story: zero customer churn. Not a single employer customer has left since launch. “Hundreds and hundreds of customers, we haven’t lost a single customer,” Matt emphasizes. “Which means we’re doing a really good job of taking care of our customers and ultimately our end users.”
This wasn’t luck. It was a deliberate strategy built around Southern hospitality values. “It’s taking kind of this Southern mindset, this Southern hospitality that a lot of our team brings to bear from an implementation and customer success and customer support team,” Matt explains. “I would put those teams up against anybody in the industry.”
In a market where HR teams are exhausted from vendor disappointments, Immediate’s white-glove service became a differentiator. The five-minute onboarding video, the quick two-page agreement, the seamless integration with existing time tracking and payroll systems—every touchpoint reinforced the same message: we’re different, and we’ll prove it.
The Mission-First Funding Strategy
Immediate’s funding approach defied conventional wisdom. Instead of chasing institutional capital early, Matt built the company primarily through high net worth individuals and family offices. The company has raised nearly $10 million in equity plus additional debt facilities that now exceed $20 million in available capital.
“Our mission is to positively impact the financial well being of a million Americans by the end of 2024,” Matt states. This mission became the filter for investor selection. “When we go in and we sit down with potential investors or existing investors and we talk to them about that and the track that we’re on and the path that we’re headed down, people that align with that mission and want to be a part of this are ones that we typically lean towards.”
This strategy gave Immediate two advantages: aligned investors who understood the long-term vision, and the flexibility to build sustainably without the pressure of institutional growth expectations in the early years. Now, with proven traction and six figures of eligible employees, the company plans to pursue institutional funding in 2023 to “pour gas on the fire.”
Building in a Market That’s Only 15% Penetrated
The timing couldn’t be better. “I look at the Financial Wellness earned wage access market of what we do and it’s still less than 15% penetrated,” Matt observes. “There’s 180,000,000 people in the US workforce and we’re sitting here in late 2022. I believe by 2030 every company in the US is going to be offering some form of earned wage access.”
This market reality shaped Immediate’s long-term strategy. The company isn’t just racing to capture market share—they’re positioning themselves as the category leader in an inevitable shift. The recent macroeconomic conditions (inflation, rising gas prices, post-COVID financial stress) have accelerated adoption, but Matt sees these as temporary accelerants to a permanent trend.
The proof is in the enrollment data. Immediate currently sees 24% average enrollment across all customers, with healthcare and hospitality verticals pushing 25% to 35%. These aren’t vanity metrics—they represent real people using the platform to avoid predatory payday loans and overdraft fees. One healthcare system reported that the implementation was “the easiest software that I’ve ever rolled out my entire career,” Matt shares.
The Five-Year Play: Beyond Earned Wage Access
Matt’s vision extends beyond just giving people early access to wages. “We want to help people along the way to not just get them unhooked from these predators out there, but also to give them a path to grow and start putting money aside for savings,” he explains.
This positioning as a comprehensive financial wellness platform, rather than just an earned wage access tool, sets up Immediate for expansion. The first step is breaking the cycle of predatory lending. The next steps involve savings features, retirement planning, and holistic financial health tools.
The category straddling fintech and HR tech isn’t a weakness—it’s strategic positioning. “We’re helping people from a financial perspective, but we’re also helping companies in their recruitment and retention efforts,” Matt notes. In a tight labor market, financial wellness benefits have become competitive advantages for employers, especially in high-turnover industries like healthcare and hospitality.
Lessons for B2B Founders
Matt’s journey offers several tactical insights for founders building in crowded markets. First, understand what you’re really competing against. It’s rarely just other products. Second, let data guide your vertical strategy—but give yourself time to collect that data through initial experimentation. Third, turn geographic or market position disadvantages into cultural advantages. Fourth, build retention into your DNA from day one—it compounds faster than any growth hack. And finally, choose investors who align with your mission, not just your metrics.
The result? A company that’s positioned to capture significant market share in a category that’s still in early innings, built on a foundation of zero churn and genuine customer success. As the earned wage access market moves from 15% penetration toward ubiquity, Immediate’s early focus on implementation excellence and customer service has positioned them to scale without sacrificing the hospitality that got them here.
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