Truebill

Yaya Muktarzada had worked as VP of Business Development at a company called Nanagon's before recognizing a fundamental shift in consumer spending habits. As more services—from Netflix and Hulu to subscription razors—moved to recurring payment models, he realized people had no easy way to track and manage all these subscriptions centrally. The insight was simple but powerful: consumers were losing money and forgetting about active subscriptions they no longer wanted.

Yaya started working on Truebill in September 2015 and launched in January 2016. The core product was straightforward: users connect their bank account or credit card, and Truebill's algorithm scans all transactions to identify subscriptions automatically. This approach required users to hand over sensitive financial data, but the value proposition—central visibility and easy cancellation—was compelling enough to drive adoption.

Growth came quickly through organic adoption. Within months of launch, Truebill had signed up 50,000 users, with 10-15,000 new users joining each month. The company's activation metric was simple: users had to connect their bank account or credit card. Once they did, Truebill measured success through email open rates, email engagement, and offer engagement. The freemium model—providing the core service for free—was crucial to achieving this user growth velocity.

Truebill's monetization strategy evolved quickly. Initially, the team signed up for Commission Junction and similar affiliate networks to test partnerships. However, this low-touch approach didn't generate meaningful revenue. So they flipped the strategy: instead of scraping existing affiliate deals, they built a list of companies they thought would resonate with users (Netflix subscribers getting Spotify offers, Blue Apron users getting Plated offers) and negotiated individual partnerships one-by-one. These deals varied by partner and vertical—sometimes paying per click, sometimes per lead, sometimes only on actual conversion. The key pitch to partners: "We're small now, but we're going to be big. If you don't have first-mover advantage with us, your competitor will." In the first two months of turning on revenue, Truebill earned $500 in month one and $4,000 in month two—modest but showing healthy growth momentum.

By the time of this interview, Truebill had closed a $1.75M SAFE funding round (with a $10M valuation cap) that would keep "the lights on" during growth phase. Yaya was projecting the company would reach $50,000 per month in revenue within 12 months. Beyond affiliate partnerships, the team was exploring deeper revenue opportunities: extracting processing fees from subscription transactions, facilitating payments directly, or even introducing a SaaS subscription tier (though they weren't pursuing this aggressively yet). The company's strategic position—sitting between consumers and subscription payments—positioned them to explore multiple monetization vectors as their user base scaled.