Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Procurify CEO Aman Mann (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I actually know quite a bit about this space. Just yesterday, I was talking to Coupa. They have seen great adoption in the enterprise space. Could you throw some light on the level of adoption of procurement software in the midmarket?

Aman Mann: It’s accelerating because of the idea of getting to distributed teams now. You see the trend to remote and how we think about improvement in systems.

My goal is to create a simple system for organizations in the mid-tier to enable them to jump onto so that they can go up against these larger organizations that can afford these bigger systems.

We are supporting awareness and creation, but these organizations are also becoming more prevalent and more self-aware. We do see a higher adoption rate happen in the mid-market over time.

Creating beautifully simple and clear B2B software that anybody can pick up and use for complex challenging processes is not an easy thing to do, but you can’t really build for small business or midsized businesses that aren’t living in that nature.

For enterprises, you can build a system for much more complex processes. You can give way to user experience to achieve a feature or a function. But in mid-market you must build as per their use case, which is more simplistic.

Sramana Mitra: What are the metrics? How many companies are using your product?

Aman Mann: We have global companies across a wide range of industries using our product with tens of thousands of users. Their focus is to really understand how the different complexities and structures of these organizations work.

We have this mission to help forward-thinking companies and those that are moving the world in a positive way. We try to make sure we help them succeed in their missions. We want to back them with our product.

Sramana Mitra: What are we talking about? A thousand customers, five thousand customers?

Aman Mann: I can tell you we think there’s about over half a million companies that sit in midmarket today. So the penetration opportunity is quite huge.

Sramana Mitra: Right. So how many of those have you gotten so far?

Aman Mann: We’re early in our days.

Sramana Mitra: If you look at your penetration and whomever you consider your key competitors, what percentage of that half a million have chosen a solution?

Aman Mann: A small percent. 

Sramana Mitra: Under 5%?

Aman Mann: Yes, absolutely.

Sramana Mitra: You are selling a SaaS solution?

Aman Mann: We are.

Sramana Mitra: SaaS is the only revenue model? There is no transaction fee attached to this?

Aman Mann: Right now, we are focused on our SaaS model.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s switch the question to open problems. From your vantage point, what are some open problems that you would recommend new entrepreneurs to try to solve the problem and start the company?

Aman Mann: I think the back office is a very complex and wonderful space if you are somebody obsessed with operational excellence or you want to look at better processes and remove the bottlenecks inside organizations.

You can just take a look at ERP systems. They are still traditional. They’re going to be displaced over time and spliced up into different segments. There is a lot of opportunity when you look at back office and accounting systems.

Most people focus on technology companies. When we look at the general global trend of companies that are traditional, they’re still using very outdated processes to manage. If anybody was going to look into that area, there is a lot there.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Procurify CEO Aman Mann
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