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April 18, 2023

E59: Discover the Secrets of Building a Successful Business and Brand with Caleb Avery, Founder of Tilled

E59: Discover the Secrets of Building a Successful Business and Brand with Caleb Avery, Founder of Tilled

In this episode, we are joined by Caleb Avery, founder and CEO of Tilled, a successful tech company that has disrupted the payments industry. Caleb shares his journey of starting a business during the pandemic, including the challenges of fundraising and hiring. He also provides insights... See show notes at: https://www.remotestartpodcast.com/discover-the-secrets-of-building-a-successful-business-and-brand-with-caleb-avery-founder-of-tilled/#show-notes

In this episode, we are joined by Caleb Avery, founder and CEO of Tilled, a successful tech company that has disrupted the payments industry. Caleb shares his journey of starting a business during the pandemic, including the challenges of fundraising and hiring. He also provides insights on recognizing a problem and building a brand around it, even if it's not your area of expertise.

We'll explore Caleb's experiences in building his personal brand on LinkedIn and the importance of leveraging social media to grow your business. Whether you're an entrepreneur or simply interested in the world of business, this episode has something for you.

Join us as we explore the world of entrepreneurship with Caleb Avery, and learn how to start a successful business and build a brand, even during challenging times. Tune in now to Remote Start Podcast.

Learn more about Caleb Avery at:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/caleb-avery/

Website: https://tilled.com/

 

Learn more about the Remote Start Podcast at: https://www.remotestartpodcast.com/

Transcript

Jim: Remote Start Nation, on this episode, we are going to be discussing starting a business and building a brand with one entrepreneur who built his successful tech company during the pandemic. Today we're gonna be talking with Caleb Avery, founder and CEO of Tilled, the creator of PayFac as a service who's focusing on changing the payments landscape for. Some topics on today's episode are gonna be starting a business in a field you aren't an expert in already, challenges of fundraising and hiring, recognizing a problem, and starting a business from it, and building a personal brand on LinkedIn. Caleb, it's an honor to have you welcome to the Remote Start Nation.

Caleb: Awesome. Thanks for having me on the show today.

Jim: Absolutely. I'm excited to jump in. And with that said, tell me what's something about you that if I just met you on the street, I wouldn't know.

Caleb: So if you just met me on the street, haven't been following me on LinkedIn, you probably wouldn't know that I've got two little kids at home. So got a three-year-old, almost five-year-old, and a third on the way.

Jim: Congrats, man, that's a lot of work. And to be an entrepreneur, a founder, that's your fourth baby there, you got a lot on your plate.

Caleb: It's a busy life, but, I'm enjoying it mo most days. Kids are awesome, business is awesome. And for me, it's a challenge that that I'm up for.

Jim: That's awesome, man. So let's talk a little bit more about your entrepreneurial journey. Tell me what your story is, what you did before, tilt and let's start.

Caleb: Yeah, so my entrepreneurial journey started at 19 years old, going door to door selling payment processing services to small business owners as all 19 year old college kids do. And so for me, as we scaled up that first ISO business, I started getting brought in on consulting opportunities for software platforms. And so it was really through this consulting work that I saw the problem that, that became the kind of foundational element. For tiled and so little over four years ago, bid the bullet and decided to go start another company that became tiled and what we call PayFac as a service.

Jim: That's awesome. And I'm really interested in getting into, you seeing the problem, you addressing it and creating a company that's doing an incredible job solving for that problem. And we'll get into that in a minute, but I want to go back more into, what exactly does till do, and then I wanna talk about this, PayFac as a service as well.

Caleb: Sure. When I think about Tilled, we offer a turnkey white label payments infrastructure solution for vertical software companies. And so what does all that mean? We're typically targeting vertical software businesses, like a nonprofit donation management platform or a golf course management platform. Nowadays there's a seemingly a vertical software solution for every industry, and we're providing them with a set of APIs and then turnkey white label solutions to embed payment, within their platform, ultimately for the goal of monetizing all of those payments. And for that dental software platform, every time a dentist processes a payment downstream, that is now a revenue stream for that software platform. And so for us, we're making it easy for companies to switch off of providers like Stripe or Braintree, where they're just giving away the economics, embed, tilled, and ultimately monetize those payments.

Jim: That's incredible, man, what gave you the insight to start that? What was it that you saw that you're like, I need to start a company that solves this?

Caleb: Sure. My entire career has been in the payment space, albeit from a very different lens, and starting out door-to-door sales I really had an understanding of what the merchants were looking for out of a payment solution. And over the course of that career, the trend that I started to notice was that small business owners, merchants were no longer really just looking for a terminal to process their payments. They really wanted an integrated solution to manage their entire business, and so started to see this developing trend. Towards software led payments where these vertical software solutions were coming into every vertical that we were going out door to door speaking with. And then as I started to network into that community, I was getting brought in by CFOs and investors. In these businesses that were saying, Hey, you're the payments guy. Can you come in and take a look at our statements or take a look at what we're doing in the business and help us understand if we should be doing something differently? With our payment strategy for these software companies and some of these businesses, were doing 500 million, 800 million, a billion a year in payments volume. And hardly making any money off of all of these payments flowing through the platform, and so for some of these guys, they were leaving millions of dollars a year on the table and as I started to dig in on that problem, I started to understand why. So for a lot of these businesses, they were partnering with Striper Braintree. And they were just passing along the 2.9% and 30 cents from Stripe or Braintree onto their customers, and that begs the question like why would you give away, millions of dollars in revenue? When you look at the alternatives that existed for these businesses, okay, you can go spend the next nine to 12 months of development time going and plugging into, one of the legacy processors or you partner with a gateway and an iso and at the end of the day, you're downgrading the technology experience, you're downgrading the customer experience for signup and reporting and customer support. And for a lot of these software companies, they just weren't willing to, make those sacrifices in order to create that recurring revenue stream off of the payments. And so the general thesis. Behind Tilled, four years ago was saying, how can we make it so that these software companies don't have to compromise on the technology, on the customer experience, and still get access to that exciting recurring revenue stream that they want and oftentimes need, from the payments flowing through the platform. And so that's been the mission and the journey, here at Tilled is to these software companies the best of both worlds, and offer them that turnkey ability to embed payments and ultimately monetize the payments flowing through their platform.

Jim: Dude, that's excellent. Thank you for sharing that. I think you've got a great opportunity. It seems like there's a so many companies that could use your service.

Caleb: No doubt about it. I think just in the US you're talking, North of 10,000, these companies. And what's interesting is when you look at the kind of, macro stats today it's less than 20% of the actual like payment volume, flowing through cards here in the US. But, my personal opinion is that'll eclipse 50. Over the next five years going through, software led payments, and so order magnitude, you're talking about trillions of dollars in payment volume that will transition from the direct traditional, payment processing channels to this software led, LSV focused payment sector. And so we're focused on being that key enabler for that transition and tackling that a number of different ways. One enabling the software companies themselves to come direct to till, two, allowing the traditional ISO agent channels to actually come resell our platform. And so if they're curious about the next generation of payments, they can do that, and then more recently working with more of the traditional direct acquirers wanting to white label or license, the platform, and so we're attacking this problem, from all sides with the goal of, changing the payments landscape for the better.

Jim: That's incredible. And you said you started four years ago?

Caleb: January of 2019. So a little over four years ago at this point.

Jim: Where have you grown the company to date?

Caleb: Yeah, so over the last, four plus years it's been a pretty, pretty wild ride for us, gone from solo founder to, 50 odd people on the team.

We've raised about 34 million in outside capital. At this point in time, we partner with 83 software companies, anywhere from startups to publicly traded businesses. And it's definitely been a pretty cool journey making, making something out of, what was an idea in my head four years ago and turning it into a real business with employees and investors and, pretty sizable network of partners at this point.

Jim: So you had a background in, this type of business, you saw a problem, but you had no tech background.

Caleb: Correct.

Jim: What was like one of the first things you did? Did you lay out your model based on what you had you'd obviously seen and heard in the industry, so you had an idea of what you wanted to do, what was next?

Caleb: Yeah. So for me, I had seen this problem, consistently through the consulting work that I was doing, I was also angel investing in software businesses. And so the problem was very clear to me. What was not clear to me was how to go solve the problem. And, admittedly the kind of first instinct, was not to go build a technology business and raise money and scale it that way. Initially I was doing a lot of research as a consultant, assuming like someone has to have solved this problem before May, maybe I can partner with somebody and resell, their business. That was the first instinct and over a couple of year period doing the consulting work and investigating the other options in the market, it was pre pretty clear to me that there was not a solution that really solved this problem well. There were people trying to solve the problem, but no one that had really, effectively figured it out.

 

And so for me the process started in a brainstorming session. What would have to be true for us to launch a software company on a platform in one week? That was the kind of initial, start to the conversation and as I started to dive deeper into that, over probably a six month period, it was clear to me that there were significant regulatory and compliance hurdles. We had to find, the right partners from a banking and a processing perspective, and then there was gonna be a massive technology component. And here we are, four plus years into the build out. And I think we probably underestimated all of those, challenges as most optimistic entrepreneurs tend to do. But for me, when I started thinking about that idea of tackling that technology problem, like obviously I wasn't gonna go write the code myself. That was not, practically, how we were going to go about it. And so for me, that started with, let me go find some contract developers to just get the process started this, I feel comfortable, I can manage, this part of the process. And so that was kinda where the business started, I'm working on the payments component, the regulatory compliance component, and then managing, a team of outside develop, knowing that there's a lot of groundwork that has to be laid for us to build this out. But a key decision for us was bringing that in-house, fairly early on three plus years ago bringing on at that point a VP of engineering. But I still remember in the interview with him, he's look you don't want me writing code, you want me building a team? And that was the guy that I knew that we needed on board. He's look you're gonna write code for a couple of months, but as we continue to raise capital, you're going to build this team that's going to enable us to build this category changing, product over time. And so to kinda summarize, that really comes down to finding the right people that have the skillsets that, you know, compliment. You know what, I knew how to filled those gaps. For me and for Tilled.

Jim: So a lot of, I've talked to other entrepreneurs on here, the founders that are growing different industries and, their solution to not knowing what they were doing was to find the best business partner. Like actually bringing a partner into the company, you and I as on your own, what was, did you consider the other route or was it like, I'm doing this solo from the start?

Caleb: I think the reality is that I was looking for, the kind of technical, co-founder and just didn't find someone that I really had that connection with, that had the same kind of passion and drive, for the business. I also think that the challenge for me was that I knew that there was this significant kind of payment regulatory compliance hurdle that we needed to overcome, I was funding a lot of the business myself at that point. And for the first 11 months I was really hesitant to, to really, spend a ton of money hiring employees. We weren't really well capitalized, we hadn't raised any outside funding. And so for me, before I really invested, a significant amount of my personal capital or raised outside capital into the business, I knew that there were a couple of gates that we needed to go through, that would be the validation that would start to unlock, some of the outside capital. And so for me, I felt like I was very clear on what I needed to accomplish over that first year in the business to unlock the next couple of gates that would allow us to get to the point where we could really build and scale the engineering team. And I took the decision that was the right approach for Tilled was like, let's really focus on getting some of these other hurdles in place. And I have, these contract developers that in the meantime are building, the first version of the software. But we really leveled up the software build out once we were able to, bring in some outside capital, get through those, first couple of hurdles, and then hire on, a VP of engineering who scaled that team very quickly.

Jim: So if there's a piece of advice you can give to entrepreneurs listening right now who are looking at it from, I'm gonna do it solo, or I'm gonna find a co-founder to do it with me, what would what advice would you give them?

Caleb: Yeah, I think especially if you're gonna go about it, solo founder, you really have to make sure that you still have the support system in place. I think, oftentimes, you're going and finding a co-founder, frankly. Just make sure you can continue on in the journey and have the kind of emotional fortitude to continue on in the journey. And so if you're, especially if you're an entrepreneur considering going, the solo route, make sure that you've got other entrepreneurs that you're friends with or advisors or people you know in your network that you can lean on and turn to because you're going to have, those moments where you're questioning if this is the right thing to do, should I continue on in this business? You gotta have that support system in place to really, be able to see that journey through.

Jim: That's a good answer, I appreciate that. And during that, for you, did you rely on your network in the industry that you had met and focus with that or did you, were you out networking and trying to submerse yourself in the, your local culture of Hey, who's my mentor? Who could I talk to? Who can I team up with?

Caleb: I'd say it's a combination, certainly for more of the kind of payment specific things, that I needed, I leaned on, folks and connections that I had, from the payments ecosystem. I think more from a software development perspective, I was leaning on more folks from the local tech community and there was definitely an element of, networking in and say, Hey, I know this fractional CFO, hey, I'm having an issue with, I'm trying to figure out how to fundraise or how to hire, for a VP of engineering who do you know that I could talk to? And so just basically asking around saying, look, I need help. Don't be afraid to ask for help, and then, ask the people that you trust. And even if they can't solve the problem, oftentimes they're, able and willing to connect you in to people that, are able to either solve the problem directly, provide some guidance, or connect you, to the right person.

Jim: There was, before we started the podcast, you were telling me that you've really only been live for what, 15 months/

Caleb: Something like that. It took us about two and a half years of building to really get, the beta product in market and then, yeah, sub 15 months for really, full commercial launch of the platform. And so it's been a really awesome journey just to see how quickly, the industry has picked up on, what we're doing and then how quickly we've seen, ISVs and software companies looking to adopt the platform.

Jim: That's incredible growth, congratulations on that, honestly, that's,

Caleb: Thank you.

Jim: That's incredible. One question I have on that timeframe though, you, two and a half years without launching a product, there had to be times you were like, I wanna throw in the towel.

Caleb: There were definitely moments. I think, certainly early on in the pandemic was one of those times for me and, a lot of it, at that point in time we had not raised outside capital. And so I often refer to my wife as an unwilling investor in Tilled where, she believes in me, believes in what we're, building. But at the same time, we had just had our second kid, and a three week old son at home. The market's going crazy, my prior business if you were in the payment processing world around that time, you were seeing your residual income just drop because merchants were closed payments were not being, processed, and so there was a lot of uncertainty, going on in the space. But I actually used that time to go out and talk with customers and do customer discovery and speak with vertical software companies to see Hey, is this still really a business worth building? It certainly was three months ago, there's a lot of businesses that fundamentally changed, when the pandemic happened. For the good or for the bad, and my instinct was to get out there and talk to customers and understand is this still a problem? We're solving, and I think, after a couple dozen of those conversations, I was convinced that this was still a problem, we're solving and so we continued on in the journey.

Jim: I love that, how you saw a problem. You started to work on a solution and then when there was an opportunity, which for a lot of the world was a huge negative, you're like, I'm gonna take this as a chance to just make sure that I'm still on track, and who did you go to? You went to the people that you knew were gonna be your customers.

Caleb: And then we also, at that point in time, there was a dark period for venture capital investors, and then all of a sudden it was like the floodgates opened up and, venture investors were looking and saying, okay, this is a kind of brave new world that we're living in. What sectors, what opportunities are really going to be able to capitalize on this new, the new kind of reality that, that we were living in. And I certainly felt like our business was well positioned to be, a category, a sector, a brand, that could capitalize on that momentum. And we started engaging with venture investors over the summer, during Covid, and ultimately fairly quickly were able to raise, that first round of funding, which really, catapulted the business to the next level in terms of our ability to hire and product development and really, build out the business.

Jim: So you did a lot of the research, a lot of the things brought in a small team and then you guys built it together. And then once you had that opportunity, you went you went right to, go seek funding and said, Hey, here we, here's our play.

Caleb: Yeah. And so for us, at that point we were probably about 18 months in before we started approaching external investors. And so for us, we had a lot of these proof points in place, but we still weren't live in the market, and so it was largely, hey, this is the story, this is the vision, this is the vision, the mission for the business, and ultimately, that got investors excited about the prospects of what we were building. And closed that initial round and since then have closed, multiple rounds of funding over the last couple of years as we've continued to scale up and build the traction in the business.

Jim: That's great. So in the time that you've been live or even before, like what are some of the ways that you personally or even as a team, like you've been able to get in front of your customers and really connect with your community.

Caleb: Yeah, I think LinkedIn has really been an important part of the journey for us. I was on the phone earlier today with C-Suite executive from big payments company, and he, this is me meeting him for the first time. He's dude, you're like the Kevin Bacon of payments. He's I literally can't, avoid you on LinkedIn. He's you're just everywhere on LinkedIn, and I think for us, that wasn't necessarily the strategy from day one. It started out as a very small part of the go to market, but we started probably well over a year before we actually launched, the platform. And so we started to build the audience and build the content and build up, blogs and just educational materials for clients, and at this point in time, inbound organic is, is almost half of our lead flow into the business. And so it's been incredible for us where, we don't have to have this enormous budget to go spend on, paid ads or social campaigns ‘cause we've really built a community on LinkedIn, which has been you know, a really cool experience and certainly been, incredibly impactful for our business.

Jim: So did you build it? You built out your Tilled profile on LinkedIn, your company page? And that's where you're pushing content and educational information.

Caleb: My personal, primarily.

Jim: Actually on your personal.

Caleb: So yeah, so my personal LinkedIn probably has four or five x the reach of till the company which also is not necessarily, the plan from day one, but I think for a lot of folks they resonate with hearing just the authentic, journey. It's there are good days, there are bad days, there are days, where I've been up all night with toddlers and that's just, that's the real me, that's the real, experience that I'm going through as an entrepreneur. And so I think, for me, I've really used that as a platform to tell my story and share the good, bad and ugly of the experience of building a business, and I think for me, at least it's been a really rewarding, part of the journey and certainly I think our marketing team appreciates the lead flow, that we get from it. But now we're focused on building up the company page as well and starting to see more results from that, but for a while we were, primarily focused on my personal brand on LinkedIn.

Jim: And was it something that you said, okay, I'm just gonna start posting every day. I'm starting it today, I'm doing it, this is what I'm doing or was it more, like certain things started to come out, you realized some traction, you're like, I need to do this more, what was your starting point?

Caleb: Yeah. For me, the starting point was really early on in Covid trying to figure out like what are the different ways that we could theoretically go to market with this business, and at that point in time I was spending, more time on LinkedIn, just lurking on LinkedIn, scrolling through the feed. And for me, I started to see some B2B businesses that were, talking about the success that they were having through, inbound, organic, via LinkedIn. For me, it didn't start with this, Hey, I'm gonna post every day and I'm gonna write, 5,000 word blogs. That was not the starting point in the journey. It started, Hey, I'm gonna go interact, I'm gonna and I'm gonna comment on posts, and then I started taking kind of relevant industry articles. Hey, visa made a big announcement, or, Neve made a big announcement and I'm gonna post that article that someone else wrote with my thoughts, and so it started out nice, very low, very light touch, and then, started to see, people wanting to follow me, to follow my, payment insights. And then when it really started to build was when we started putting out more kind of educational content ourselves, and so I hired a ghost writer and started putting out I think at that point we were doing like weekly blogs and, posting, consistent educational content. Here's what it means to, to be a PayFac. Here's, five reasons why you might be ready to leave strife, and so we started putting out, this content. And then I also started sharing more about my personal journey and the personal, experience from my entrepreneurial lens. Not just, hey, here's a promotional piece about Tilled. It's hey, here's, how my day went. And for me, I've never held myself to the standard of I have to go. Every day, I think that's an unrealistic expectation and an easy way to get burnout on something, I think for me. Look, if I post five times a week, that's great. If I post two times a week, that's great, if I do post seven times a week, fantastic. But that's not, the standard that I held myself to. It's more, when do I feel like I actually have something that's worth sharing be it, content or something, from a personal perspective and try to put out, good content that, that people enjoy and react to.

Jim: When you were, when you hired the ghost writer and you were publishing once a week on educational content or things people should know that are following you, did you post that on Tilled's platform for, or page first and then push it to your personal, or did you just, were you pushing publishing it?

Caleb: So sometimes we were doing it as just like a LinkedIn article, like from me, personally. But after a while we started building up a, like a blog page on the tilled website. But mind you, like we, we didn't have a website for a lot of this period of time. We had a countdown time on our website when we raised our first round of funding, and so for a lot of this period of time, like the kind of asset and the kinda medium that we had available, was my personal LinkedIn, and so we leveraged that for kind of all it was worth to get us to where we needed to be.

Jim: That's awesome. I think I've seen LinkedIn, I've been a lot more active on LinkedIn and I think it's such a powerful tool for small business owners.

Caleb: Couldn't agree more.

Jim: Let's talk, you've grown to around 50 employees. How has that been building the culture and, in instilling your own personal values into the brand and everything the brand is, stands for?

Caleb: Yeah, I think for us, when you think about the timeline and when, we've built this out when Covid started, I think we had four employees on the team at the, or actually three, I think at the start of covid. So you know, three to three to 50 employees all during Covid were remote first organization. I think that the challenge that comes with being a remote first organization, scaling quickly, you really have to be intentional about, what is the mission, what are the values, what is the vision, for the organization? And I think practically speaking, that wasn't something that, was necessarily intentional from, day one when we made the fourth and the fifth hire. As we started to get, 10, 15 employees on the team, it was like, okay, we really need to think about the culture that we want to establish in the business. Because when you're five employees, everybody interacts with me, the founder on a day-to-day basis, and so they're seeing, the values that I'm trying to instill in the business, you start to get to, 10, 15, 20 employees and all of a sudden you're not on, team calls with everybody in the business. Every day you're not, for a while we had, three, four of us in the office and it's like when you start to build that remote first organization and it starts to scale, you have to be intentional about what it is that the business stands for. And I think my personal view is that comes from the founder, the values that are important to me, the vision that I have for the organization, the mission that I am, passionate about that is, Till it stands for, at least at this point, in the company's lifecycle. And so you have to build that into the hiring and the firing process and make sure that, you're searching for, and recruiting and interviewing for not only the skills that you need, but the values that you find to be, important to the organization. So I think for us, the things that we did that were, the most impactful were one focusing on the values of the organization that we thought were important. And then really thinking about, how we built out the organization from an organizational design perspective. What are the roles, how do we wanna structure the departments? And even with all of that, you're still going to make mistakes, and so you have to be willing to reevaluate, over time the decisions that you've made, both on the hiring side as well as the organizational structure. Especially, as we started to get, closer to 50 employees, like there are, ultimately changes that you need to make and you have to be willing to react quickly and make those changes to continue the organization moving forward.

Jim: That's awesome. So the brand is built off of you and your values, but when you had like that small team, like four of you, I think you said did you include them in all of these decisions and how is that, how did that process go for you?

Caleb: Yeah I would say certainly in the early days, there was a lot of collaboration, across the entire team. I think as we started to scale and get to, 25, 30 employees and we were starting to build out the leadership team, I think the shift at that point in time was, it wasn't necessarily Hey, let's go get 35 people in a room and talk through the values of the organization. It was more for me, thinking about it, and saying, look the transition at that point in time in the business is that you're starting to bring on, folks onto the leadership team who are then themselves going and becoming hiring managers. And so for me, at that point in time, I may be, two, three layers removed from the individual contributors in the organization. And so the focus for me was making sure that the leadership team. That I had around me really was crystal clear on kind of mission, vision, values of the organization, because ultimately they are the hiring and firing managers and the evangelists for those values. And as much as you know me on the kind of monthly all hands meeting is gonna, share that message out like day to day in, in the trenches, it's the leaders you know around me that they really are responsible, conveying that message and building, upon the foundation that I set up, and so I think that was the transition as we got to that, 30 odd employee mark, where it went from me being the solo evangelist to really focusing on empowering the leaders around me to also, evangelize the kind of mission, vision values of the organization.

Jim: That's huge. And I think it's so important that when you get to that point to understand it and put guidelines and systems in place where people can follow it and they understand it, and that's my agency. That's a lot of what we do is we help brands get to that stage of not everybody needs a brand guideline to start a business. But when you get to that point, when you're gonna scale and the founder isn't involved in the day-to-day and doesn't get those touchpoints, and with customer service and how you would handle it and outreach and everything else, it's so important to have that brand guide that just takes the rest of the company and says, this is what we're about, this is who we are.

Caleb: Yeah. The way that I think about the values of the organization is that they're a lens through which you can make decisions, because I think that the way that I feel is like for the organization to scale, you have to empower people throughout the organizations to make decisions that the way that, I would think through that decision making process. And so if you can help them understand here's what these values, mean to me use this as a lens to say, Hey, am I being fair? Am I being transparent in this, decision or the communication around this key decision, that I'm making? And so I think it's been impactful for us and certainly something that I would encourage other founders to really focus on.

Jim: Yeah, that's a good point, thank you for sharing that. We're coming to an end. Before we go, I wanna know where can people find you.

Caleb: So I think at this point, probably pretty obvious that LinkedIn is definitely a good place, to follow me. So come follow me, Caleb Avery on LinkedIn, certainly follow tilled the company on LinkedIn as well. I've got a minor presence on, on Twitter, Tilled has an Instagram, I think my mom's probably our best follower on there. Certainly the Tilled website, so Tilled.com is a great place to go, read the blog and get up to speed. And so if there are, software companies out there wanting to learn more about monetizing their payments, please reach out and we'd love to help you guys.

Jim: Awesome. Kayla, I have one more question for you. If there's one thing you wanna make sure entrepreneurs that are listening today leave with, what would it be?

Caleb: Yeah, one thing would be don't sleep on the power of your personal brand. I think for a lot of entrepreneurs they're hesitant to put themselves out there. But it really can be an incredibly powerful tool for both you in your future business endeavors, but also for whatever the current company is that you're building. It really is an incredibly powerful tool that you have at your disposal. You just have to take the leap and dive in.

Jim: Would you recommend. LinkedIn for everybody, or would you say really try to figure out what, who your audience is and then choose that platform?

Caleb: Absolutely. Depends on where your audience is spending their time. I think for us, it was very clear that LinkedIn, was the place for that. But depending on what business you're building, it could be TikTok, Instagram, Twitter and definitely do some research, figure out where your customers are hanging out and then go all in on whatever that platform.

Jim: Awesome. Caleb, it's been fun. I appreciate you hanging out with us today and, it's been great.

Caleb: Awesome. Really appreciate the opportunity to tell my story. Thanks for having me on the show today.

Jim: Absolutely. Well, Remote Start Nation, I hope you learned as much as I did from Caleb, and I hope you could put some of what you learned into work for you from the bottom of my heart. Thank you all for joining us on this journey as we help you to start a business, grow your brand, and create your desired lifestyle. Remember to leave a comment, subscribe and share this episode with your community who you think can learn from what you heard. Until next time, go start something, start it today and go build a lifestyle you desire.

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Jim Doyon

Entrepreneur

My name is Jim Doyon. I'm a father to three awesome kids, husband to an incredible wife and the oldest sibling to a large split family.I'm currently on a mission and I can't wait to share with you. We sold our house back in 2020, and we've been traveling this beautiful country in a 42-foot Travel trailer ever since. We visited 34 states, and are about to embark on our second loop around the country, stopping at some of our favorite spots again, but also getting to see new areas that the US has to offer.We are trying to experience this life to its fullest spending quality time together. I'm running a business and building brands along the road. We've been fortunate enough on this journey to meet new friends, catch up with old friends and family on many of our stops. We love exploring each City from downtown's to the natural resources it has to offer. I'm passionate about mountain biking and it's not only in my way to get out and explore but to exercise, clear my head, think, and strategize.

Caleb AveryProfile Photo

Caleb Avery

CEO / Founder

As someone who has worked in the payments industry for more than a decade, Caleb is often asked to help software companies who are looking to monetize their payments. Unable to find a solution that didn’t require his clients to compromise on either technology, user experience, or economics, he decided that he needed to build his own solution. That led him to build Tilled and create what they call PayFac-as-a-Service 💳
He first started working in the payments industry while he was in college, co-founding a credit card processing independent sales organization, or ISO, with a few of his friends. Beginning with very traditional credit card processing customers including restaurants, salons, liquor stores, and other brick and mortar businesses, Merchant Services Done Right later expanded into processing services for e-commerce businesses, software companies, and now operates in 22+ states across the country.