SnapBill co-founders Jaco van Wyk and Josh Yudaken recognised the need in their own business environment for the development of a new-generation online billing system built with adaptability and intelligent automation in mind. They also realised that if they needed it, chances were that others around the globe needed it too.
And so they developed SnapBill, a flexible, cloud-based billing system that deals with the entire process of managing a business' subscription billing - from invoicing, to payment collection and reconciliation.
The big idea
SnapBill was launched in March 2010 and Van Wyk notes that "the idea stemmed from a billing and service provisioning system we had created for our hosting company, Lusion Technologies. This was our primary business at the time and the idea was to enable any business to easily and professionally bill for recurring services."
Our main focus in comparison to the rest of the industry is on absolute flexibility.
SnapBill was nurtured in conjunction with Lusion Technologies to cater for the exact needs of that business. This also meant the system could be tested and assessed in a practical environment. "We were basically eating our own dog food," explains Van Wyk. "'Dog-fooding' is a term that stems from software development and it means that if you can consume your own product, you have something that other people will need too.
"Consuming your own product also allows you to refine the flavour, and after seven years of industry use, thorough user-testing, detailed debugging and extensive feature enhancement, we extracted the billing component from Lusion Technologies and packaged it as SnapBill. In essence, instead of every business trying to create their own billing system, we've made one that's so flexible that they wouldn't need to," he says.
We were eating our own dog food. If you can consume your own product, you have something that other people will need too.
SnapBill is now a global software as a service (SaaS) billing solutions provider that can boast users on six continents and across 60 countries. The service has more than 5 000 active users and bills in excess of R100 million a month.
A unique solution
When asked what makes SnapBill so unique in the South African market, Van Wyk replies: "SnapBill is actually unique on a global scale. Our system can be tailored to the needs of any business in any country. We support every currency in existence and allow for any tax configuration. Our main focus in comparison to the rest of the industry is on absolute flexibility. Rather than forcing our billing model onto you, we'll try to understand how you want your billing processes to work and then go about making it happen.
"SnapBill has very little competition in South Africa. We tie in with numerous local payment gateways, bureaus and banks to facilitate and automate the entire billing and payment collection process. This makes us a unique solution as many of our global competitors lack support for South Africa. We fill the local gap and beat them at support for their own target market.
"SnapBill's biggest challenge to date has been around hiring the right team," Van Wyk notes, "and not funding, like most start-ups. Lusion Technologies was profitable from day one, which helped cover some of the expenses while getting SnapBill off the ground. As founders, we put in a little money, but SnapBill was built to be cheap to run and inexpensive to scale. We decided to bootstrap the business from the start and have taken no external investment, despite heavy interest on a local and international scale.
"We're extremely proud of the fact that we offer a quality international product from South Africa. We're proud of our small-but-awesome team and we look forward to what 2013 will bring. All we can say at this point is that it will be all about growth, growth and even more growth," concludes Van Wyk.
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