By Riley Kaminer
You work today, but you may not get paid for weeks later. In a context where some one in five workers run out of money before payday, having money hit your bank account a few extra days early can make a big difference.
The team behind Broward-based startup Clockout knew this first-hand, working jobs where they would rack up hundreds of dollars of tips a day but not get paid for weeks later. That is what inspired them to launch the startup last year, which enables employees to get paid on demand.
“We had 60% month-to-month revenue growth last month,” co-founder and CEO Juan Jurado-Blanco told Refresh Miami. The company is in the process of onboarding 1,400 employees from 20 partner employers with over 60 locations collectively. Already, the company has provided workers with $130,000 in advance funds since launching in January. While most of Clockout’s footprint is in Florida, it has begun to expand to Texas and Minnesota.
Users pay Clockout between $0.99 and $3.99 per transaction, depending on how much they are withdrawing. Clockout leverages its debt facilities to float the employees’ earnings until the employee gets paid. At that point, the employee automatically repays Clockout.
That model is slightly different than it was when we spoke to Clockout a year ago. Then, it was the employers who repaid Clockout. “With that model, we found a lot of friction with larger employers,” Jurado-Blanco explained, since it required a lot of compliance and operations intervention on the employer side – also causing larger sales cycles for Clockout.
“Now we’ve completely lifted all the hassle and technical implementations for employers,” Jurado-Blanco asserted. He believes that this improves Clockout’s value proposition for employers as a free and easy benefit that they can offer to their employees.
Growth is top of mind for the Clockout team, with plans to double their current seven-person headcount within the next few months. They hope to reach profitability by Q4 of next year with 3,200 active users.
Clockout also hopes to forge debt facility partnerships with institutional investors. “We need to have the debt facility sufficient to float our demand,” Jurado-Blanco noted, emphasizing the crucial role these partners will play in Clockout’s future growth.
For now though, the company is focused on improving their core product with new features such as payroll and income analytics. Jurado-Blanco additionally signaled that Clockout is working on developing products for a new segment – although exact details are still under wraps.
Anthony Tardugno, co-founder and COO, underscored just how rewarding it has been for the Clockout team to support workers. “It feels awesome to know that we’re helping people, especially since most of our customers look like us and speak our language.” He said that Clockout even has one customer who uses Clockout every day to pay for transportation to and from work.
“We are fulfilling a big gap,” Jurado-Blanco added. “We were stagnant with our old model, but now everything is different. It’s very fast-paced, and we’re looking forward to achieving our goals.”
Photo at top of post: from left, Clockout co-founders CEO Anthony Tardugno, COO Juan Jurado-Blanco and CTO Jeremy Pagley.
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