Part 3----
Financial chat is 100x bigger than expense reports.

Most people are surprised to hear that Expensify was never intended to be a pure expense management system. Nor was it intended to be exclusively a back office tool -- or even a business tool.

In fact, 99% of our users are not accountants: they are individual employees just trying to GSD, in both their professional and personal lives. This is no accident. QuickBooks Online, the most popular cloud accounting tool in the world, only has 5 million users… and we already have 10 million. Personal payment tools like Venmo and Square Cash have gotten to tens of millions -- and it's clear a hundred million is within striking distance.

But there's no way any of those will get to a billion users: they just aren't solving a problem experienced by a billion people. There's only one use case that unites every single person, and that's chat. And there are many examples of billion-user chat networks: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, WeChat, Twitter, etc.

Accordingly, even though we look like a narrowly focused expense management tool on the surface targeting accountants and business travelers -- what we've actually been building under the hood is the foundation of a much, much larger system more akin to a social network than an enterprise system. So we are much closer to the start of our "S-curve" journey than the end.

(If you're not familiar with the classic "S-curve" followed by nearly every VC-backed company, it works like this:

Things grow very slowly while they build their product and figure out market fit. During this period they raise "seed" or "early stage" funding to pay the bills before they start making money.
Once things start to work, they tend to accelerate very rapidly as they establish their position, and then raise a bunch of "growth capital" -- dumping it all immediately into customer acquisition, generally at a significant loss (ie, "growth at all costs") because they are competing against other VC-backed companies in the same space, using the exact same strategy. So the only way to "differentiate" is to raise and spend more wantonly than your competition in a kind of "prisoner's dilemma" (or even, a game of "chicken") where everyone loses, but you hope others lose more.
Eventually you run out of "low-hanging fruit" (even though that fruit is kind of rotten in the first place seeing as how you are losing money on every customer), and growth decelerates. At this time you raise "late-stage capital" and focus on tiny incremental improvements -- scraping the bottom of the barrel harder and harder -- basically just accepting that your glory days are behind you, and wherever you are is pretty much all you're going to have. The $100MM ARR mark is a common threshold for when VC's lose interest in sinking money into an unprofitable company, and are starting to look to sell. This is typically the point when the founders and VCs (but rarely the employees -- they are usually diluted to nothing from all the fundraising) "exit" by going public or getting acquired, with employees sticking around as long as their "golden handcuffs" keep them from leaving.
Every company differs in the details, but almost all of them follow that path -- there are literally thousands of VC backed companies that follow this path quietly, in obscurity, making VCs and founders rich, but achieving very little real world traction, and inevitably being vacuumed up by one of the mega-companies that acquire and digest these startups by the dozens.)

So given that we're a VC-backed "unicorn" startup crossing the $100MM threshold, you might assume we're entering that third stage, and that the future of Expensify is going to just be more of the same.

You'd be wrong.

The reality is we're still in that first stage, still researching the market, building the core platform, and perfecting product market fit. The way we see it, we haven't even begun our "growth stage". Rather, we've been steadily checking off the boxes for our core financial functionality, and are only just now starting to put serious effort toward mass customer acquisition. That's where Expensify.cash comes in.

In a way, you can think of Expensify like a startup developing an experimental COVID vaccine -- but selling a highly profitable cough medication to pay the bills. No matter how good that cough medicine business might seem on the outside, it's nothing compared to the potential value of eradicating COVID. Expensify.com is our cough medicine, and Expensify.cash is our vaccine -- going into human trials, right now.

And "human trials" isn't much of an exaggeration: at the moment Expensify.cash feels like a standalone chat application, that you sign into using your standard Expensify login. You can chat, send pictures, the basics. But under the hood, it's a complete rewrite of the Expensify front end, built on a radical new React Native platform that uses the same codebase across not just iOS and Android, but also web and desktop. That means Expensify.cash works exactly the same whether you open it up with a laptop browser, your mobile browser, or install the mobile app, or even install our standalone desktop app. I could be wrong, but I think we're the first company to even attempt this at any significant scale.

So even though what Expensify.cash does is pretty familiar, how it does it is very novel: it's pretty bleeding edge stuff. Not only is it built using the absolute latest React Native capabilities, but it's using our own Onyx platform to enable it to work seamlessly offline and on (so you can read and write chats while offline and it'll "catch up" the next time it connects online). There are still a lot of kinks to work out -- and we'd love your help doing it.

For this reason, we're initially limiting access to Expensify.cash to developers (and anyone they invite): go to https://Expensify.cash to sign in and provide your GitHub handle, then go to https://github.com/Expensify/Expensify.cash to check out the code (open sourced using the MIT license).

Additionally, we've intentionally left a bunch of small bugs unfixed to create some easy ways to get involved -- and are paying top dollar to fix them. Check out our list of Upwork jobs if you're looking for some side income over this holiday season, and we intend to funnel every issue we can there to create steady opportunities going forward.

It's an exciting time, as this launch has been a very long time coming, and officially kicks off the start of our "growth stage" in the S-curve. It's the start of something really special, and it would be our honor to have you help us test and build it!

-david
Founder and CEO of Expensify
Ask me anything at @dbarrett on Twitter!