Building Acodei and Kasera

Today, I want to write a personal post about Acodei and how I am starting a second company, called Kasera.

I started Acodei in 2020. The origin of Acodei is kind of random because my journey is pretty random, too, but here it goes. I taught elementary school from 2009-2015. In 2016, I started a company called Coder Kids, serving the Houston area. Coder Kids was a difficult business to run, because I felt like there was never enough time to manage school partners and sales, parents and customer support, student learning and curriculum, instructors and training, and everything else on the business side. So from the start, I was trying to systematize things.

In the very early days, I was trying to figure out registration flows. This was pre-AI, obviously, and everything had to be hand-coded. Hard to even remember those days now. My brother Matt and my friend Brent helped me to build a basic registration flow with Stripe accepting payments.

Eventually, once I got enough people signing up and taking classes, I hired an overseas developer based out of Indonesia, named Ronald, who also goes by David. David helped me build all these systems, and he worked incredibly efficiently. I felt like I'd go to bed at night and wake up and the work was done. This allowed us to scale and grow to a large extent, peaking in 2018.

Along the way, one frustration was trying to do any accounting out of Stripe data. I would try to get my books figured out and it was a nightmare. I remember in like 2018 and 2019 in particular, just being up all night trying to figure out my accounting. Around tax time, it probably took me 40 hours to resolve the big mess from Stripe. This was probably before they had clean report downloads too. And even though I had an MBA, I had very little knowledge of how to handle small business accounting.

I looked around on the market and the only option out there was really Synder. And I had nothing against Synder, they were just too expensive for what I wanted to spend. To be fair to me and them, I was so broke, and paying that much for a SaaS was out of the question. A more savvy businessperson would probably not invest all their time on "systems" that are actually time and money sucks, but I did. What could have cost me $60 a month in a Synder subscription probably cost me $1000 to develop an initial integration. And I'd have to maintain it. But that was my mindset at the time.

So we built the integration. We would make sure that every transaction had fees properly documented so we could see gross revenue, a bank deposit, and some basic product mapping, essentially breaking down if it was a summer, fall, or spring class. The integration into QuickBooks was a little janky, but it was good enough for my purposes. In 2020 when tax time came around, my taxes were not perfect but much smoother. Thus began my Stripe-to-QuickBooks journey.

In 2020, when Covid hit, I was skeptical at first that it was going to be a big deal. It turned out to be a huge deal, not only for the world, but also for Coder Kids. On March 13, amidst a lot of uncertainty and class cancellations, I told David that we had to try to pivot to build a Stripe to QuickBooks integration. Immediately he shifted his focus from building systems for Coder Kids to building this QBO integration. We launched v1 for Acodei in July.

Coder Kids actually survived decently through Covid. James was already working for me at the time and had taken on most of the responsibilities of running the business. We offered online classes and a few small group classes. It actually wasn't a total disaster. James bought Coder Kids from me fully in 2022 and I stepped away.

In July and August 2020, we got a few users for Acodei. And things have just kind of grown organically since then for Acodei. What started as a venture where I was hoping I could cover David's salary turned into the best Stripe to QuickBooks integration on the market. I like that we've stayed focused and that we have gone deep with our integration. We have thousands of users now, and even though I took a full-time job as a product manager from 2021-2024, Acodei continued to grow organically and eventually I was able to pay myself just through the integration.

Last summer, I went to visit Indonesia for the first time. What stands out in Indonesia is that the people are extremely welcoming and hospitality is in their blood. I didn't see a lot of angry or discontent people. I even commented at one point to David that I was so hot in a train station, and no one around me, not even a single person, was complaining. Americans are complainers but I'm especially a complainer. This leads to some interesting observations about societal optimizations, especially in the emerging markets.

One interesting aspect about Jakarta that I never knew is that there is a lot of money in Jakarta. Banking and industry are well established. Indonesia is the fourth-largest country in the world, and you see it when you arrive. I thought I'd be arriving in a scary place where everything is dangerous and foreign, but truthfully, Indonesia does not feel far removed culturally from other places in Asia.

On the other hand, coming from the United States, you notice things that seem behind. QRIS (their primary payment system, effectively like Venmo) is universal, but the ability to pay by card is behind. Point of sale is not fully integrated into payments, so you go to the grocery store, and the system that scans your groceries and the card payment is not seamless. There is no "Square". Bank transfers are still one primary way to pay for services, even in small amounts, which can be risky and cumbersome. It's also difficult to get a credit card in general.

Walking away from my trip with these observations, I thought a long time about this idea of there not being a simple, straightforward "Square" card reader. While the regulatory environment is not super ready for a full-on Square system entering the market, I believe Indonesia, with broad smartphone adoption and a growing middle class, is primed for more financial innovation. If you think about it, Stripe and Square, two of the largest financial institutions in the US, have not entered Indonesia. Indonesia is flying under the radar to a large extent. I see this as a huge opportunity.

With this in mind, David and I eventually landed on the idea of launching Kasera, which is a booking, shop management, and payments software for the beauty industry in Indonesia. Our hope is to eventually expand to other verticals, eventually trying to offer services like Square throughout southeast Asia. But we have to start from the beginning and work toward that goal.

Running two companies might not be as straightforward as I hope. Acodei is growing at a solid clip, and I don't want to let off the gas. There are so many great things happening in the company right now. But I think Kasera holds a lot of potential. This is the most I've ever invested in a new idea. I am super pumped for the potential and the future!