mogonzal

If this point is not getting across, my apologies for not being clearer: this product is for startups and SMBs that don't have the time or resources to host a fractional CFO or a full-time finance team. If you have the time to manage your own treasury as a founder, that's amazing and we really want to know your secret sauce!

But for the majority of founders who want to spend their time building, the fee isn't for ease of use just as this "nice to have", it's for the outcome that ease of use delivers: no need to hire for treasury operations, no manual reconciliation between accounts, no time spent on stuff that isn't your product.

We really think that in most cases, the tradeoff is worth it. But if it's not for you, we totally respect that too.

Also want to note that most treasury products start their fees at 0.6%, which we agree is quite ridiculous hence why ours is less than half that.

Tons of schlep blindness here for sure. That's the only plausible explanation for why existing treasury products have made it this far

I'd say your long-term bets are earning interest... it's just going to the house and not to you

No haha they are not exempt. But neither are money market funds, which are currently the most popular choice for startups and SMBs

The reason for the current framing is that pretty much every founder we have spoken to hears "high yield" and then instantly asks about safety. But like you said, at this spread it isn't risky

But yeah, any time you put those two words together it inspires skepticism, which is totally understandable. I think this comes down to a lack of education, most people think the only two dimensions in this space are yield vs risk when in reality there is a third one (liquidity) that is balancing out the spread

Super open to suggestions for alternate framing. Maybe something like "optimizing" yields?

Haha just wait until we add a chatbot in the corner of your window that's constantly pinging you to deposit more money

Name suggestions are appreciated

Lucky for both of us, the value prop isn't just "we are offering better interest rates on the same instruments because we gave up our cut"

It's actually "we found a way better set of instruments for long-term cash that allow us to offer better interest rates without giving up the cut altogether"

That being said, we do think the current treasury products can be a little predatory with their rates. For example, Rho charges a variable rate that peaks at 0.6% for any deposit of $2M or less. We think that's crazy so our margin is a flat 0.25%, no asterisks or fine print.

Hey Andrew thanks for the feedback

We know that the main barrier to switching is just time and ease of use, so we deliberately built this to have the same operational burden as using your current treasury product

Palus links straight to your bank account just like Mercury, and we'll also allow you to set up rules for moving money around!

That said, if there's any other features that really keep people tied to their current products we want to know about it. Our goal here is to build something that actually cares about the fact that you're a startup with limited time to care about yields, and not just throw your money in a generic fund and forget you exist

Super fair question haha. I'm gonna flip this question first because I think it perfectly frames the current landscape of startup/SMB treasury products

Say you (like many startups) use Mercury Treasury, Rho Treasury, Brex Treasury, etc. Most of these list somewhere exactly what funds they buy into. Why not just open a fidelity account and by them yourself?

The answer is pretty clearly ease of use. Easy to move money from your bank account (likely also with them) to their treasury, easy to set up rules like ("if my bank balance falls below $X then transfer $Y from treasury"), stuff like that

We provide all of these features too! We are not at all asking people to bank with us or spend the time/friction of actively managing their deposits

So if the ease-of-use is the same and the yields are roughly 40% more than the generic money market wrappers out there, we think it's a no-brainer

(EDIT: adding mention that I am OP's co-founder)