Any roadmap guidance for API developers? How many Wave users spend money with you?

ThinkingBudget

Do you have any big-picture guidance for us, re: areas of initial focus/greatest need--and how those areas mesh with the core Wave product roadmap?

• What I'm getting at is the hazards of developing for someone else's platform; we all accept those hazards (particularly longer-term), but we also don't want to blunder directly into immediate conflicts with the core product roadmap.

How big is this market?

• Can you share any metrics about the proportion of Wave users who use your paid services? We don't need to know your proprietary financials, but understanding how big the market here is of people with the means and propensity to spend money on the add-ons we create would be very useful.

PaulC

Hi there @ThinkingBudget !

That’s a great question, and if I were thinking about investing effort in building an integration to any software/service, I’d want to know pretty much the same things. Let me try to provide some guidance.

Big picture:

• Wave primarily focuses on smaller businesses - think freelancer up to +/- 10 employees. These businesses are often services-based, but not always.
• The primary user of our software is the business owner, as opposed to their accountancy/bookkeeping professional.
• We are committed to the model of providing free software and charging for value-added services. We operate our own card payments service in the US and Canada; we operate a Payroll service also in the US and Canada with more traditional “SaaS”-style pricing; and we provide bookkeeping services to our customers that wish us to provide those services directly.

Metrics:

Wave is a private company, and we do not publish detailed financial or customer metrics. The following may be helpful, however:

• Since launch, over 3.5m business owners have signed up to Wave.
• On a typical day, we see +/- 3,000 new signups: considerably more right now, in “tax season”.
• Wave users are located in over 180 countries globally, but over half are in North America, with additional substantial active customer bases in UK, Australia, India and South Africa.

Customer propensity to consume API / partner add-ons:

This one is really hard to answer in a meaningful way, because Wave doesn’t offer any equivalent paid products to benchmark. Whereas most “freemium” software products create arbitrary limitations (e.g # invoices sent; # customer accounts) and have a “go-premium” offer, all Wave’s core functionality is 100% free, without limitation.

The paid services that Wave does offer are really consumed according to business type, maturity, and sales model. If Wave customers want to get paid on their invoices by credit card, for example, Wave’s card processing is the most convenient and integrated solution and price competitive with all alternatives, so they almost always use it. If Wave customers in the US/Canada have employees, they have a high likelihood to consume Wave’s payroll service. What we don’t offer is “pay X to get advanced reports”, or “pay Y to get Inventory tracking”.

Wave customers are paying other people for adjacent services that could make great add-ons to Wave, but because we’ve never offered these services as a paid add-on, I can’t really give any direction about how likely they will be to consume.

Wave’s own core product roadmap:

As you comment, it’s better to create add-ons that do not overlap existing or planned Wave functionality. Our roadmaps are continually under review, adjusting to customer feedback and market opportunities and developments.

Wave provides a financial management platform for micro-businesses that includes accounting, invoicing, receipt management and reporting. This functionality is free and is regularly enhanced with additional features and functions. Wave integrates tightly into this platform fee-based payment processing, bank payments and payroll. This is part of a long term plan to help automate the cashflows of a small business owner and automatically account for these movements.

It is important to recognize that Wave drives for a ‘sweet-spot’ in terms of product sophistication. We aim to support - and abstract and automate wherever possible - the financial activities that are common to most of our customers in our target category. This means we are not attempting to take every feature to its limit of complexity and configurability, which creates a natural space for add-ons not only in areas we have not features, but also in areas where our features are intentionally limited.

Here are some examples where our business owner needs could create an opportunity for add-ons:

• Many Wave users charge and invoice their customers on the basis of time expended. Wave is quite likely to create a simple work timer, but less likely to build advanced features such as time approvals, multiple rates, burn-down against time budget, etc. An advanced time-tracking tool / integration could be a great add-on opportunity.

• We are looking at providing a more ‘customer-centric’ perspective within Wave, for example organizing invoice history onto a 'Customer Profile' page. However, we would not attempt to turn Wave into a full CRM solution. Add-ons that handle classic sales/CRM processes could be very valuable to Wave customers.

• In time, we are likely to work towards better supporting “product” businesses, for example by better handling inventory. We would be unlikely to attempt to build out POS or direct e-commerce features, however, so any integrations that support and enable retail, distribution and e-commerce - including plug-ins to established e-commerce platforms - could be extremely helpful and welcomed by our customers.

I’m sorry I haven’t been able to be super-specific, but I hope this answer gives you a framework to think about opportunities and constraints when integrating to Wave. If you would like to discuss a specific add-on idea, please feel free to reach out to me directly in a DM and we can explore it further together.

Thanks, Paul

ThinkingBudget

Thanks Paul! This is reasonable guidance, but I'm troubled by two things:

• You certainly know what proportion of Wave users are paying for payroll. One could use that metric as a baseline proxy for "Wave users with enough money to pay for add-ons" -- as imperfect as that metric would be.
• Access to the API seems to have been cut off (as many others in this general forum topic have noted). Is Wave backing away from API support?