So you always want to be a painkiller because a vitamin is like a slow drip and overall, like things are better, better for you. And so people buy vitamins because they're like, "Oh,

Hi, I'm Mike Pincus, co-founder of Connect CPA and your host at Growth Tales. Today, we have an exciting guest in Matt Himmel, who's the CEO of Harvest.

Thanks, Mike. Pleasure to be here.

I-- First of all, I really appreciate you taking the time, and, and we operate in a really similar space, so it's something that's of big interest to me.

Yeah, it's a great question. I, um, I went to business school, and one day, it's funny, the, um, the admissions person for Western Law came into our business school for, like, a lunch and learn, ended up applying to law school and, um, you know, always much more enjoyed, uh, go to business school. Um, but, you know,

Yeah

that's really what's waiting for you. And, uh, decided, oh, I gave it a good go at, at law, at law school and might as well, um, you know, kick the tires on a, on a short law career. Um,

Yeah

it was twenty fourteen or so, so a bunch of tech companies were opening, and none of them wanted me. Absolutely none of them. It was very disheartening. They're all like, "Why are we hiring a lawyer? Doesn't make any sense."

All that time in school.

Um, and I really had to reframe, I really had to reframe who I was and, you know, why I thought I could add value. And luckily, um, I got taken in by a company called Tilt,

Wow. So, a- and by the way, that's, that's I think a common story. I, I know a lot of lawyers, and I think it's similar to the accounting space where the vast majority go into industry or

Lawyers are actually horrible with their accounts receivable. We'll park that- for, for a different day. But, uh, they're very good at... Well, they're bad at getting their billings in, that's one, right? So you have to bill every hour,

Yeah

holistically. And I think they're working on it. But, uh-Yes, billing every hour sucks, and then billing a client for those hours sucks,

Mm-hmm.

And so you get to 60 or 90 days, and then all of a sudden your client's not really taking your collection efforts seriously.

Mm-hmm

company and a repeatable task. Like those two things complement AI really well. Um, and so when I was looking for a business, I knew I wanted to combine those two things, and I combined

Yeah. Of course. Yeah.

You know, it's a very popular like startup thing, right? And so you always wanna be a painkiller because a vitamin is like a slow drip

Yeah.

And when, when I know I have a really great customer is they're like, "Matt, you couldn't have come at a better time. Like we're, you know, we're knee-deep in this right now.

No, that's... I, I think that's a great description. It's, uh, I follow a lot of SaaS business gurus. I think one of them is, uh, Jason Lemkin,

One thing you'll really appreciate, Mike, 'cause I'm sure you know when you chat with founders or people that are coming to you for new business and you ask them to describe their, like,

Yeah

a hard time. But what you see isPeople say, "Oh, yeah, AR is, like, an issue, and we'd love for you to help us with this, and, you know, let's connect. And, um,

That's a great point, and I wonder how much of your go-to-market with Harvest is the education piece of, like you said, you come in, you meet, you meet a founder

It's, it's huge. It's a really good point, Mike. There's a couple of things that I'll say on a sales call, and not all of them will necessarily hit,

Mm-hmm

paying an empty AR agent to be the bad cop for them. And just having another layer to their outreach allows the finance person to no longer be the

Yeah

or bad, bad person. And then also, like, there's leverage, right? Because what's happening is if finance-- if you send an automated invoice and nobody responds, and you send another one

The whole nine, yeah

vacation and like the whole nine. And you just add, you know, we have Pat, we have Luca, we have Ruth, people I come up with names. But- you add someone, and all of a sudden you have another layer. So, you can send an automated or, you know, Ruth can reach out and then, um, then finance can come on top and say, "Hey,

Mm-hmm.

Um, can you save resources, right? Like, eighty to eighty-five percent of the emails we send can be automated.

Mm-hmm.

There's, like, no reason why somebody needs to get involved. Vast majority of emails are, "Here's your invoice," following up on your invoice, taking payment. You know, anything strategic

Mm-hmm

it's just not a, not a great task, right? Like, nobody enjoys [chuckles] ... Very rarely do I come across someone who's like, "You know what I love

Yeah, and I, I think it, I think a point you made there, which is like you can almost set it and forget it, meaning let the technology be dynamic for you. People are not disciplined,

Yeah

technology around.

Yeah.

It's not just like, hey, automation just means like a basic like we're gonna do an email out. Uh, but-I wanted to ask you the actual function itself, what percentage of companies you think

Look, you know, like as a human, we make decisions based on kind of how we feel. You don't wanna send a follow-up on a Friday afternoon. It feels like not the right time. Even

Mm-hmm

you know, should I wait, and so forth. And so you have all this kind of like human emotion, you know, put into it. W-we have the reverse, which is we're democratizing best practices,

Mm.

It knows, you know, the best subject matter to like put in the subject headlines. It knows the best buttons to push, when it needs to be pushed. Here's a,

You mentioned, Matt, uh, being a part of Simple Ventures. Obviously the big push for not only innovation in Canada with all the things going on in the world

Yes. I can't say enough amazing things about Simple. Um, obviously with Mike's leadership, Mike Katchen's leadership, um, he's, uh, created an amazing, you know, additional organization f-

Mm-hmm.

And what you get there is not only some really great people who can help them make investment decisions, 'cause they pull them in. And when I, when I, I went to investment committee,

Mm.

But we're really the first, um, kind of AI, you know, forward.

Yeah.

And we can, we can get into like what AI means for, for Harvest, but we're really the first AI forward and so, um, we really needed to find a CTO early,

Mm-hmm.

And in the middle is like, you know, a little bit of tension about like, you can't just, you know, vibe code your way to a product, um, you know, from this side and be like, well, you don't need,

Mm-hmm

tech debt and things that are important to building a company, but also on this side, you know, embracing new technologies and, uh, being able to build really quickly

Yeah. I think that's e-especially the challenges of being a Canadian business, [clears throat] they can't be understated, and I think it's such a powerful thing

I think, like, when you're, you're non-technical and you're hiring a technical resource, you have to rely on other people to, to, like-

Mm-hmm

vet their technical skills, right? So again, leveraged a couple people through a relationship with Simple. Um, there's a couple LPs that have, "Yeah, he's awesome. Like, he's technically sound," right? So y- I think, I think people can do that and, um, you know, you don't have to rely on yourself to, like,

Mm-hmm

you know, they're amazing at building, and, you know, they solve problems and, you know, build amazing platforms," great. Okay, great. Like, that's, that's like baseline. I need that.

Yep.

So, you know, on a daily basis, it's just the two of us working back and forth. Um, and, uh, it, it like, you couldn't make a bigger mistake if you tried to hire someone that you, you know,

Mm-hmm

and I had the pleasure working with Darren Fung at, uh, Drop. He's incredible, um, CTO and just engineer, and you get to learn, you know,

Mm-hmm.

Right? And then our client comes in and says, "Yeah, this is kind of like what I asked for, but like you didn't think about these eight things, and it's just like,

For sure. And you've got the CTO now. You've got funding figured out. A mission-critical, I guess, problem you're solving in the sense that I think like right now Intuit

It's a very good question. When we, when we first started to ideate for Harvest, we reached out, or I reached out to a whole bunch of friendlies and said, "Hey, like, And then they would give me their, like, hardest collections and basically be like, "Here's ten, you know. I haven't heard from those clients in three years. Like, have at it," right? And you're like, "Oh, this is so great." Like, everyone's willing to give you, you know, work to do, and they're willing to pay you and, like, what a great idea for a business. And, uh, you go out, Like what... Like, you have to build something, and so it takes time. And then you start to learn things, right? Like to your point about QuickBooks and Xero,

Mm-hmm

some templates that can be sent out. They're probably investing in AI, you know, across the entire platform. So what does that mean? It means we need to, A,

Mm-hmm.

So like, okay, so we've got a leg up there because this is like a human. It's AI, but it feels like it's a human sending the invoice, following up with you, and that's better than,

Yeah

invoice submission to a supplier portal, right?

Yes, yes.

Like, so we're not... We don't do that.

Yeah, yeah.

So you can just turn that client off, right? But we work for your other eighty percent of clients. In this case, we were only doing like thirty percent, so I messaged them being like, "Hey, um,

That's right

hundreds of invoices a month." So I went to Poorya and I was like, "We've gotta be able to figure this out." And, um, Poorya came up with some, um, you don't know what you're gonna build until your clients, you know, tell you and if... as long as you're listening. Um, but that's a good example of like something that QuickBooks

Yeah.

It's gonna be a challenge for sure. But there's, there's lots of SMBs out there. There's lots of clients of QuickBooks and Xero that, you know, need help where they are,

I think it makes a lot of sense, and I think your vision, Matt, is like if you look at, if you look at Intuit, you look at Xero, like we were, we were speaking, uh,

Melio. Yeah.

Yep. And, and so all these, these applications, they're-- because it's an OpenAPI environment, it's such a brilliant way for tech- the best debris technology to win. And, uh,

I wanna think about how I, how I answer this. In, in the short term, you know, like, just like Airbnb, right? People, people are like,

Yeah.

Like, that's crazy. And then obviously that turned out to be- not the case. And it's like, there's no way I would get in anyone's car-

Uber

to drive me around, right? Um, and we, we heard a lot of people, and I still talk to like law firms who are more established, like, you know,

Of course.

"So what they're doing effectively is taking invoice number, amount owed, and whatever, and then dropping that into ChatGPT, spinning up an email and saying, 'This

Yeah. Yeah.

Like, "Actually, no. It's, it's Michael P." "Oh, wow. I, I don't know why I have it wrong, but I will send it to you," and, and off it goes. And you're like, how many hours and money did

Sure.

I get a text, be like, "Hey, you forgot to pay this like bill. It's outstanding. You're a deadbeat." Like-

Phone's always with you

double tap your phone and pay on A- on like Apple Pay. Like it's so much easier than me having to... I have to find the bill on my, on my desk.

Mm-hmm

you know, like accounts receivables, and there's all this stuff. And if you're an SMB startup... Like one of the biggest pain points I talk to SMBs, they're like, "You know what the worst part

Yeah

you know, egregious SMB o- like loan offers. And can we improve that? Can we say, "Hey, with Harvest there, they've improved their collections. Cash flow is much more consistent. You know,

That's amazing. And, uh, yeah, Matt, that's, that's a vision of something I wasn't even thinking about, the partnerships with,

That's, that's the plan. You think about like, um, your insurance company gives you a bit of a discount for having an alarm system, right?

Right.

Um, and so can like Harvis play the alarm system on your, you know, receivables or your overdue collections just to make sure, hey, there's something there, it's monitoring,

Yeah. It's amazing. Well, Matt, thank you so much for joining me. I'm really excited about what you're building,

Thank you. And, and I'll, I'll plug you back just because, uh, not that you've, you haven't paid me to, but I'm- really impressed with the, uh, Connect CPA team, and it's been, uh, much like Harvis, it's one of those things where like you wanna be focused on, um, you know, your core competencies,

Yeah. Really appreciate it, Matt. Thanks so much.

Thanks, Mike. [outro music]