Support Pay

Sherry Atwood's journey to founding Support Pay began in her own life. A former VP at Symantec and one of the top 40 under 40 executives in Silicon Valley, she had achieved significant professional success. But when she went through her own divorce, she discovered a massive gap in the market: there was no good solution for managing childcare payments and shared parenting expenses. "I was actually doing an expense report when I was working at Symantec and thought wait, when you do an expense report you enter an expense you attach a receipt—why can't we do the same thing for child support?" The insight was elegant and rooted in solving a real problem that impacted millions of parents globally.

In 2011, Sherry made the bold decision to leave her comfortable executive life and bootstrap the company. She had saved multiple houses, cars, boats, and "about two years of salary in the bank" from her Symantec days. With no technical background and no formal computer science degree, she taught herself to code by buying books at Barnes and Noble and learning HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript. "I taught myself how to code, built the first product myself," she recalls. By 2013, she shifted to hiring and began building a team. The core product was deceptively simple: a platform where both parents could track child support payments, attach receipts, and maintain certified court records—eliminating the endless financial arguments and "he said, she said" disputes.

Sherry spent her first year focused purely on growth, talking to over 1,000 parents, family law professionals, judges, and child support services. "Everybody I talked to is saying you know there's nothing out there to support all of these parents and it's something that I desperately needed," she explains. By focusing on getting active, happy users rather than immediate monetization, she accumulated 30,000 free users processing about $3 million a month in child support volume. Customers were compelling: "I get calls from vendors saying either I need this or I wish I had this when I was a kid." In July 2016, she launched paid tiers—$9.99/month (or $120 annual), which provided access to certified court records and long-term payment history.

By May 2017, Support Pay had 43,000 total users with 2,000 paying customers. Revenue had reached approximately $100k monthly—about $20k from pure MRR ($10 bucks per month × 2,000 customers) plus $80k from $120 setup fees. The 12% visitor-to-paid conversion rate and exceptionally low 3% annual churn on active users proved the product was sticky and valuable. However, Sherry initially didn't focus on revenue, which nearly derailed fundraising when venture capital dried up in early 2017. She pivoted quickly: "We had to quickly change our go-to-market strategy as well as our development and really focus on revenue." The move also included relocating from Silicon Valley to Sacramento after raising her first $3M. At $90,000 monthly burn in Silicon Valley, she couldn't compete for engineering talent: "another company down the road would come and offer them more cash."

Support Pay had raised $7.1M as of the interview (May 2017), including a $4M Series A in December 2016 from investors like Salesforce Ventures and Tim Draper. The valuation was based not just on the $240k ARR, but on the massive TAM: 55 million parents in the US with 1.2M new ones annually, and 300M parents globally exchanging over $900B in child support. Salesforce invested partly because Sherry built on their Force.com platform, positioning the company to eventually sell into the government space (which spends $6B annually on aging child support systems). With a 25-person team (14 engineers), 2,000 paying customers, and plans to eventually monetize transaction volume, Support Pay was on track to dominate a market that had been ignored by incumbents.