Slash Announces $150 Million in Revenue

Slash (@slashapp) just crossed $150m in annualized revenue.24 months ago, when we pivoted from serving sole proprietors to serving businesses, we were at $2m.

We are one of the fastest-growing business banking platform of all time.¹
Four reflections on what got us here and what’s next:

Learning #1: Embrace “small” markets

Startup founders - myself included - gravitate toward wanting to work on ideas that have the potential to be massive. This leads many to cast too wide of a net too early. It’s extremely difficult to find an aggressive product-market fit / build a differentiated product if you don’t have a “niche”.

PayPal started with payment processing for eBay merchants.

Slash started by building better banking products for sneaker resellers. I don’t think you can go more niche than that. But that didn’t stop us from getting to 5m ARR in 11 months.

Our success is driven in large part by the fact that:

• Our initial traction in a small market earned us the right (and gave us the money!) to concentrically expand out of it.
• We’re still extremely willing to automate workflows and build features for industries that our competitors think are too small to worry about.

Learning #2: Revenue is oxygen

It’s oxygen in two critical senses:

• It gives you dollars that you can redeploy into the business (obvious one)
• It keeps you and your team energized (less obvious one)

Burnout does not come from working long hours. Burnout comes from working long hours and seeing no results.

I have worked 15-hour days every weekday for the last 5.5 years. I love working deeply and would not have it any other way.

The only times I have ever come close to burning out were when nothing we did seemed to be working:

• Early 2021 - a year into pivot hell, before we discovered sneaker resellers.
• Late 2022 / early 2023 - a few months into the collapse of the sneaker resale market, when it was unclear how we were going to get out of the rut that we were in.

Related to point #1, not having a defined enough niche makes it harder to get to revenue.

Learning #3: America is huge

Some investors have been hesitant to invest in Slash because we operate in a category that feels “settled” to them. Brex, Ramp, Mercury were already worth > $10bn before we got started.

The reality is that fintech is only ~3% penetrated. 97% of business deposits and corporate card spend still runs through the legacy banks. Many other markets are the same. A market can “feel” settled because there is a sexy startup that everyone’s heard about, but we all underestimate how big America is.

Learning #4: Talent is everything

My instinct has always been to “brute force” my way out of problems. I still do so on occasion because it helps me stay connected to the reality of our business, but winning - especially in a hyper-competitive industry - requires the effort of lots of talented people.

It’s hard to overstate how much more productive we’ve been as an organization when I started devoting considerably more energy to recruiting the best people.

Slash has a world-class engineering team. Because of it, we lead in terms of shipping speed in B2B fintech. This year alone, we’ve launched treasury, stablecoin payments, global USD, accounting automations, a completely new interface, and more.

Slash has a world-class GTM and ops team. Because of it, we blow our competitors out of the water when it comes to revenue / employee, payment volume / employee, and other efficiency metrics.

What’s next:

$1bn in revenue in the next 2 years.

Fintechs are going to eat legacy banks’ lunch, and Slash is going to be the largest of the fintechs.

I am going to be working on this business for the rest of my life.

Open a Slash account

You should open a Slash account if:

• You want to use the banking platform with the most delightful UI/UX in America.
• You want to be able to send and receive crypto from your banking dashboard.⁴
• You’re a non-US business owner who wants access to a USD account.
• You want higher cashback on your card spend (we give custom rates based on spend) and higher yield on your deposits.⁶