Founder's Story - Why Payments Were Broken and How One Founder Fixed It | Ep. 334 with Thomas Aronica Founder and CEO of Biller Genie

Episode Date: April 1, 2026

Daniel Robbins interviews Thomas Aronica, the Founder and CEO of Biller Genie, on what it takes to build a fintech product inside an old industry and survive the cashflow chaos that almost breaks founders. Thomas explains how his early payments career began before smartphones, how he kept seeing the same pain point across industries, and how Biller Genie evolved from “free software to drive payments” into a SaaS platform partners could distribute. They also explore how AI will reshape SaaS, why resilience matters more than vibe coded prototypes, and what keeps entrepreneurs coming back even after the near-collapse moments. Key Discussion Points Thomas explains he entered payments before iPhones, watching the industry evolve from “knuckle busters” to portals and workflow automation, but noticing core frictions stayed the same. He describes the original problem: businesses had to process a payment and then pay someone to manually input it into QuickBooks, because integrations were unreliable or “janky.” A turning point came when a small property manager friend said “if I had that in QuickBooks, that would be awesome,” sparking the realization to build a software-agnostic solution. Thomas shares the second major pivot: after early traction, PNC Bank told them they loved the product but would not sell it under a tiny brand, which forced Biller Genie to decouple payments and become a true SaaS platform. The conversation goes into founder whiplash, including attempting a friends-and-family round in early 2020, then watching it evaporate when portfolios dropped overnight. Thomas recounts being hours away from layoffs and unable to pay people on Monday until an investment hit around 3:30, a moment the team never saw. Takeaways The best fintech products often come from repeated exposure to the same pain across industries, not from a “one day I woke up” idea. Giving software away can create fast adoption, but the real leverage is turning the product into a SaaS layer that partners can distribute at scale. AI will enable micro tools and fast prototypes, but resilience and real product experience will separate “cool demo” from “business-critical platform.” Entrepreneurship is whack-a-mole, and the people who last are wired for constant uncertainty and constant rebuilding, even when they swear “ninety days from now it’ll be better.” Closing Thoughts This episode is a real founder story in the truest sense: product-market pain, a pivot forced by reality, and the near-miss moments nobody posts about. Thomas Aronica shows that in fintech, the moat is not just features, it is surviving long enough to build something that partners and customers can actually trust. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

So Thomas, you are in the payment space and you've done amazing things to really revolutionize your industry. But take me back to the moment when you realized that there's an issue and there's a problem that needed to be solved. Because I imagine the payment space, it's kind of an old space. I don't see a huge amount of technological breakthroughs coming through, you know, many companies that have been doing it for a while. but what were you doing in that moment that made you say, this is where I need to go? Yeah, you know, so I got into payments in 06. So like I got into payments before like iPhones existed. And back in the days of like the old knucklebusters where, you know, you would, you know,

have that like clack and you would slight swipe the card. So, you know, it's obviously evolved, you know, pretty quickly the pace of innovation, just in payments and technology has grown really quickly. But back in those days where, you know, my business was kind of like separated into two main sort of you know, let's call it segments, right? We had like the traditional SMBs that, you know, we were selling everything to everybody. One day was a shoe store, when there was a lawyer, when there was a, you know, web store that was, you know, wanting to take payments. And then, you know, another half of the business that was helping software companies build payment infrastructure.

So that started out in early days. It's like, you know, why was the healthcare software able to tell you that you had a $50 copay? But then the front desk person had to walk to the other side of the room to collect the payment and pull out a vanilla folder, staple receipt through paper, put it back in the final accounter, like, didn't make any sense. So in the early days, it was like, why don't we put a payout button there and just spike the card and do everything in one step, right? And I was like, you know, even through like 2015, 16, 17, we were doing some of that stuff. And that evolved into, you know, online portals and patient portals and then workflow automation.

And so over the years, like, we just kind of like, you know, built, you know, more payment infrastructure for other software companies. I was helping these guys build Biller Gene, I didn't even know it. But then all through that time, we still had thousands of SMVs that were, you know, asking us for ways to connect our online portals and our, you know, the terminals that were out of desk to QuickBooks. And why do I have to do the work twice? Why do I have to swipe a card on a terminal and then pay a CPA to go, you know, input it into my QuickBooks file? So we were trying to sell everything under the sun.

We tried to productize other third-party solutions. We tried to, you know, solve that problem. People were literally asking us for it. tried to find what was out there and solve that problem. And we found that nothing worked, right? Like somebody that sent invoices we could find a solution for, but if they were at the point of sale, it didn't work, or if they were out QuickBooks Online, you know,

we were able to find a Janky solution, but, you know, QuickBooks desktop, you needed to create rocket science to try to figure out how to connect it. And, like, just nothing worked. It was like a bad experience for everybody. It was easier just to do it to work twice. And a buddy of mine, I never forget, it was like 2017, a buddy of mine,

small-time property management. had, you know, 15, 20 doors that he managed. And he was doing that at QuickBooks. And I was talking about this innovation that we had just done to this healthcare software. And he was like, man, if I had that QuickBooks, that would be awesome. I was like, doing meth in the light bulb went off. I was like, wait a second. We're ready building this infrastructure.

We're just doing it into other third-party software. Let's build it in a way that's totally agnostic and agnostic to the software, agnostic to the payment networks and payment infrastructure. And, you know, we could solve the problem that we know. people are literally asking us for, but asking us for a decade and, you know, really build something that that met the need. So it wasn't like, you know, it was a software guy that woke up one day and had a new idea for a fresh game. It was, you know, it was like played up, you know, necessity drives invention. So yeah, so it seems like you kind of had to throw spaghetti at the

ball in terms of what was your core service offering. So you, you had to get clients. You get these clients in. You kind of do the things that that you can do for them. But it's not like we're going to be this one thing yet. Because I find like a lot of entrepreneurs, they don't really always know in the beginning exactly. The exact service and offering you are is not really what you will become over time. It sounds like one of the clients had this need and then you realize like, okay, this is the thing.

So now you figured it out. Now you know what the company is. How do you then acquire the first companies? Yeah. Well, so I would even say it kind of evolved after that, right? So like that was the first light bulb. That was in 2018 or so. We dropped the first line of code.

It was like early 18. And even that was, you know, I came up with the idea on a Friday on a Monday. I put on an app for developer. The next Friday we had someone hired the next Monday we were running code. Like in hindsight, that's not the way to start the software company. But, you know, we first put the first product to market. And our first idea was let's give the software away for free so that we can help drive the payments business.

That's where, you know, I had spent the last 15 years of my career. So that was like the first, the real. real first idea was, you know, we're going to build software. We're going to solve this problem. We're going to give it away for free. And we put it out to market. We had, you know, a, you know, pretty instant following. You know, we were getting picked up by some of the big, you know, CPA firms, my colleagues and, you know, kind of like frenemies in the industry, people that were competitors, but friends that we met through conferences were, we're trying to resell it. And then the, the, the second real, you know, like a moment, which kind of turns us into what we are today and

and where the story really starts is, end of 2019, we had, we started to win a few awards and I actually met PNC, PNC Bank came over to us and so we love what we're doing. You know, there's, you know,

and obviously for this, our business customers, you know, really are, are interested in, in what you've got here, but we're not going to sell under your tiny little brand, right?

We're PNC, we know, we have our own business. So that was when the second real life went off. And it's like, wait a second, this isn't a freeware. This is a SaaS business.

And so let's, you know, let's kind of like decouple payments, decouple the payment infrastructure. So that way we can partner with any payment provider and allow them to, you know, kind of augment their own real paying strategy. So, you know, that kind of like showed us the light in early 2020, which everybody, you know, remembers what happened in early 2020. That's when we decided we're going to change a whole business model. And there's a whole, you know, story behind that. You know, we kind of, you know, deep coupled that turned it to a SaaS product and really

spent the better part of the next two years, you know, to really build the tools and solutions for, for partners who can use it to distribute and augment their own strategies. You know, that was really kind of like, that's the true birth of Bill or Janey, you know, early 2020. Yeah, it's crazy. I think it was like the six year anniversary a couple of days ago of the announcement of what happened six years ago. It's got to insane to think that was six years ago.

Everything changed. So I have this. idea and I want to understand what you think about this. So the ability to create applications with vibe coding software, Claude, it's obviously coming down to almost next to nothing, right? You can vibe code software. It doesn't mean it's 100% perfect, but you can create something that can be usable for almost next to nothing. I'm wondering how many companies have to take a similar approach that you did where their core offering is not the front end to the customer, but they provide like a free service to the customer. And then that that kind of leads the

customer then into the company or maybe they get a percentage of something on the back end like payments. But I've been thinking about this lately. Like like creating software on the front end just to get people to kind of use it and always remember your name. Or maybe that generates some sort of revenue, which seems like a similar approach that you had to take in the beginning. What do you think about that? Yeah, I think, look, AI is, I think exciting and scary at the same time. I have a few perspectives on just like vibe coding in general. But we've done it ourselves.

I mean, I'm sitting here, you know, building tools for myself that I didn't think was possible, you know, years ago. But, you know, like there's, I think it going to be an advent of like micro solutions, right? Like you could build small little tools that help solve small little problems. and maybe that becomes, you know, you give away, you know, in our world, you give away a free invoicing tool that helps to drive, you know, visibility and drive people in. It's also problems that way they don't need to, you know, build it themselves. But, you know, I think if there's going to be a world where, you know, the need for

comprehensive SaaS solutions is going to shift perhaps a little bit more upmarket and, you know, the more sophisticated small business is going to maybe build, you know, if they just need an invoicing tool. They're going to be able to build a simple one and solves it. I mean, it solves a small little need. But what we're saying is that like the resiliency behind it is, you know, where you need the sophistication of like an engineering team, right? Like you could build a little app, but the second you change a, you know, a character from a, you know, a lowcase to an uppercase, the whole thing explodes. So like, how do you make it resilient? How do you make it like, you know, useful for the market? You know, I think that's a, you know, a whole,

a whole different story. But, you know, I do see a world where, you know, SaaS companies are offering, you know, free tools to drive visibility and bring people in. But, you know, I think that, you know, the players that are going to win are going to create experiences, like the days of just slapping on, you know, an AI, you know, we could draft an email for you. I mean, that's like table six these days. Yeah, I think be able to do financial forecasting. Like anything that's like written in a textbook, like that's going to, be disrupted, right? Like, if it's in a textbook and an AI or a human could re-from it, I could just do it faster, anybody's going to be really able to build up. But to create experiences, like, to make it real,

like, there's one thing to create an app that could send an invoice. There's another thing to log in and see, you know, Dan's face talking to you saying, like, how do you want it? What do you want it to look like? Let me help you create the invoice. Who do you want to send it to? How can I follow up with you, right? So like the experience of humanizing AI and making it more of an interactive experience, I think the people that do that really stand to win. Well, I can't wait because I use, you know, when I invoice, I have to type. But if there was an AI avatar that talked to me, I feel like I would use it. That's fascinating.

It might become my care. I think I know someone at that. I might be can I'll be with that. I'm afraid I might become my therapist. That's what fascinates me about avatar. I feel like it doesn't really matter what it's used for. People will just, as they feel they're more human-like, they will kind of move over. I was reading something.

It was saying, like, it was an app about something, but people seemed to use it as their therapist. But it's not, it's just a chat bot. But they were as they, it's like they automatically go into this like, well, you know, I'm kind of feeling down today. Let me just talk to the chat about because it feels like a human, but it's also not. human so it's not going to judge me you know how what do you think about this how we're interacting with AI it's like we really you know technology moves faster than we can adapt and we don't I don't think we can really tell what's like human or not yeah especially at the at the pace right now um you know the the

adaptation I think is also going to be generational too right like we're we're even talking about like is there a, you know, a Gen X, a millennial and Gen Z, you know, sort of interface and you interact with it a little bit differently. So I think that, you know, that's going to naturally evolve. But like, you know, the open AI is the anthropics of the world have started to already lay the foundation just in the last two years of what it's like to interact with tools like this. I think it's just an natural evolution, right? Like I think that, you know, 10 years ago, we were watching back to the future. or if you ever said that you were going to have a flying car,

people thought you were crazy and maybe we don't have flying cars, but we have a Tesla that it could drive you across the world, across the country without, you know, you haven't touched steering. So, you know, probably if you'd ask people 10, 15 years ago, if that was possible, I thought, you know, you're crazy. So, you know, if we think about what 5, 10 years from now could look like, I mean, I think the world's going to be a really different place. I was just watching Uber is just doing these promotional videos.

it's starting in Dubai, then it's coming to L.A. Then I think New York City, I could be mistaken, where it's a drone. It's like a helicopter drone that it can get you like 10 minutes would normally take two hours. It's unmanned and it's actually Uber. And they're like you'll be able to use the app to actually call this thing. And so they did a flight with it. I forget what show it was on. They were like they wanted to promote it.

So they go in, the guy goes in and it takes them somewhere. I'm like, wow. Like, what a time to be alive. Yeah, I was in Dubai a year or two ago. And they're like, they're building infrastructure into roadways to charge the cars as the cars are driving. So I can imagine just like car the Uber never stops. It's just like it's always on the road. It doesn't need to even recharge themselves.

It's pretty wild, the world that we're that we're living in. I know. The only thing is we move so fast that I don't know if we're recharging, right? That's the thing as human is like we, I need to be healthier, sleep. better. I need to recharge myself because I get too wrapped up in things. But let's go to the, I think we've all had those scary moments as entrepreneurs where like you start to get momentum and then boom, the rug is pulled out. Something happens. It seemed, I mean, that could be like in every other day things sometimes. But was there a moment for you where you were like,

everything with you're cruising up, everything was great. Rug got pulled and you're like, I don't know if I even want to do this anymore. Man, so many over the years. I mean, more than I can, you know, more than I can kind of remember, I think it all, you know, my, my story starts similar years where it's, you know, I was in a, I remember my, my first business in, in 06 was in my closet of my two-bedroom apartment in Miami. I ripped the walls down and that was, I had a CRT monitor and that was my first, you know, office. But, you know, look, you know, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we were starting to, like, think about how we erase some money. Do we, you know, do we do a C-Dose?

round. Probably 2020, like January, February, we had like a little seed round that we were trying to raise for. It was all friends and family. Like, it was a little of my college buddies that were, you know, going to put, you know, 10 grand here, 20 grand there and, you know, try to raise some money that way. And then, you know, that Monday hit in March and boom, like everybody lost 50% of their, you know, portfolios overnight. It was like, Tom, like the last thing we could do is keep you money right now. So imagine, like, we started to try to, you know, raise a time that, was just like, you know, it's just an impossibility. So we went from, you know, man, we got this run cover. We did this in two weeks. This is awesome. We're going to be able to run to like, boom,

the next day is like, holy shit. We have no money. How are we going to, you know, grow the business? And, you know, that happened, you know, a few times over those next few years. I mean, I remember, you know, we, I'm very proud to say we never laid off anybody. We never had a riff. We, you know, kind of held a couple little breaks that that helped us along the way. So we were able to like kind of maintain our growth. But there were a few times. I remember there was one, like there was one Friday in particular where we were, you know, hoping to have an investment come in. And we were, I mean, we were down to, we were down to, there was no gas left in the tank. Like, there was no money to pull from. Like, I had no money left. My business partner had no money. Like, there was just no money to

pull from. We were, you know, we were basically like hours away from having to lay off at the staff. Like we had the letters written. We had like all the payrolls. Like, you know, we had everything ready to go. And if we didn't get an investment in like, we think two hours, you know, like we said at Friday, five o'clock, if we can't, you know, if we don't have money, and like we can't pay people on Monday. Then, you know, fortunately, you know, we had an investment hit at like free 30. I mean, like, I don't think our staff knew that it was like 90 minutes away from having to change the entire business and turning into a lifestyle business. You know, and that happened, you know, a few times throughout the time I remember calling, you know, a buddy

of mine, you know, midway, probably through like 21 being like, I can't make care of them on they're like, can you spot me 50 grand? So that way I can, you know, keep the doors open because otherwise, what do I do? You know, there's, there's been a lot of stories like that where, you know, so Tom, so what do you think? I mean, because if you tell, if you took somebody, if you took Tom, you said, hey, Tom, you're going to start this business. It's going to be going great. shit's going to hit the fit. Everything's going to fall apart. 90 minutes before, you're going to be saved.

If you told somebody how the roller coaster was going to be, do you think you would still continue to be an entrepreneur? And if so, like, what is the drive? Like, what do you think keeps people in it? Do you think it's the ignorance of not knowing what's going to happen? Or it's just because, you know, you just love pain? Yeah, as I was going to say, gluttony. you know I I don't know sometimes like I'm like I scratch my head and like look I don't I don't think

I'm employable at this point like I think I would drive anybody crazy that that's you know try to try to employ me but I think that there's some just inherent drive to want to achieve you know it's like there's some there's some thrill in the chaos like we you know we call it whackamol like I feel like every day I'm just like fighting to fight and I'm trying to like solve problems and as soon as I plug one hole it's like five more holes spring open and And, you know, even like I, you know, I talked to my, my therapist. And I'm like, you know, and she's like, you've been saying every 90 days, it's going to get better for the last five years. You know, like it's like 90 days from now to be better.

90 days to be better. Just 90 days, there's more problems. You know, so, you know, I think that there's a perspective where the, the thrill in the constant change and the constant movement and the fast pace, like some people love it. Some people are terrified by it. I mean, like, I naturally, you know, enjoy that fast pace. I enjoy the cost of pivoting. You know, I'm necessarily enjoy, you know, things coming down to the next 90 minutes.

And I try to avoid that as much as possible and try to build systems and processes to prevent it from happening. But at some point, you know, you achieve a homeostasis. Like what I found over my career is, you know, there's been like, you know, three or four times where I've gotten to a period of like, things are calm,

it's peace. There's homeostasis. And what do I do? I start a new business and I just do it all over again. That's why I think, you know, there's always this thing like, are you born in an entrepreneur? or not can anyone do it i think anyone can do it but i think this the character traits that you

just mentioned are the ones that some people are inherently born with and they had that's that's my opinion um but tom this has been great man i learned a lot i i love the stories you got to have you back on i want to hear some more stories about what's happening um but if you wouldn't get in touch with you how can they do so yeah um you know look websites billergeny dot com so you know anytime uh We're here. My personal email is T.eronica at Billergeny.com. Feel free to reach out. Love to connect with anybody. You know, we're here. We've got some cool stuff coming down the pipe. So, you know, maybe next time that we're together, you know, there'll be some more cool news to share. Awesome. Thanks, Tom. Thanks for your time today. Appreciate it, Ed.