Sheri Atwood is the Founder and CEO of child support payment platform SupportPay, and a former Silicon Valley executive. Atwood is a child of a bitter divorce who also went through her own divorce and created SupportPay when her search for a better way to exchange and communicate about child support payments with her ex-husband proved fruitless.
SupportPay is the first-ever automated child support payment platform, poised to transform the complex, time-consuming and stressful process that impacts nearly 300 million parents exchanging more than $900 billion in child support and child expenses worldwide. With SupportPay, today’s modern families can spend less time managing and arguing about child support, and more time focused on raising happy, healthy children.
What is SupportPay all about?
SupportPay is the first-ever automated child support and alimony payment platform that enables parents to manage child support, alimony, and shared expenses directly with each other. The platform helps children to get the financial support they deserve, from both of their parents, while enabling parents to focus on what matters most: raising happy, healthy children. I built SupportPay from scratch when I was going through this process myself with my ex and needed a solution to help me track and manage child support along with my daughter’s expenses.
The overall process of this is complex, time-consuming, and stressful. The SupportPay app aims to remove the complexities, allowing users to manage support, share expenses, and make payments, all with a certified record automatically created for each one. Everything is stored in one place via the web platform or mobile app so parents can easily access payments, upload receipts, and make payments – parents have a complete history of all child support payments made or received, and because SupportPay does all of the notifications and reminders, parents can worry less about uncomfortable financial conversations.
Tell us a little bit about your background and how you started your company?
Prior to SupportPay, I was a successful Silicon Valley executive including being the youngest Vice President at Symantec. I was a divorced, single mom who was juggling a busy career and raising a daughter while navigating child support and shared expenses with my ex. Amidst arguments and miscommunications, I ultimately realized that you get a bill for everything in life, except for child support. I assumed there had to be a solution to help but was surprised to find nothing. During this time I was also forced to take a hard look at how I was spending my time when my daughter had to have emergency brain surgery. It was at that point that I realized I wanted to work on something that would have a true impact on the world if I was going to be spending so much time away from my daughter. And so SupportPay was born. I quit my job and started my company to give parents who live apart a solution to manage their child support, alimony, and other shared expenses.
What was the biggest problem you encountered with your business and how did you overcome it?
My initial challenge was a lack of capital to help get SupportPay off the ground – and to this day, females still receive less than 3% of venture capital. I worked really hard from the beginning to overcome this and over the course of five years was able to raise over $7M in funding. Another hurdle I had to overcome was the lack of awareness that a solution to this problem exists. Many parents don’t realize there is a solution to the problem and so they don’t think to look for one. We’ve overcome this by continuously seeking to educate parents and family law professionals about SupportPay.
What were the top mistakes you made starting your business and what did you learn from it?
One thing I’ve learned throughout my entrepreneurial journey is to choose investors wisely. It’s critical to have investors that share the same morals and vision as you. It can be tempting to let this slide when you’re in dire need of funding but these people can make or break your company so it’s imperative to choose wisely. It’s important to remember that you choosing investors for your company is just as important as investors choosing you.
In a similar vein, I also learned to focus on revenue to allow yourself to be financially independent. Once you become financially dependent on your investors, you’re there because you have to be, not because you want to be. Revenue gives you independence and choice as a business owner and ultimately gives you the luxury of accepting money if and when you want to, not because you have to.
What is one thing that you do daily to grow as an entrepreneur?
I try to learn something new every day. I’m constantly reading different newsletters, articles, tips, and tricks, etc to ensure I’m always growing as an entrepreneur.
What are three books or courses you recommend for new entrepreneurs?
Three books I always recommend for new entrepreneurs are The Myth of Multitasking: How “Doing It All” Gets Nothing Done, Blue Ocean Strategy, and The Lean Startup. I’ve found that “Multitasking is a Myth” is especially interesting and more relevant than ever because it focuses on how modern technology and our various communication platforms are making us less productive, not more productive.
What is the one thing you wish you knew before starting your business?
I wish I knew that starting your own business puts an unexpected amount of pressure on any CEO. In Corporate America, you only have the pressure of financially supporting your family, but as a CEO, you now have the pressure to financially support your family as well as the families of all your employees. As a solo founder, it can feel like all the burden is on you to meet revenue goals without someone else to share the burden with.
What has been your most effective marketing strategy to grow your business?
What’s been really effective for us in terms of growing our business through marketing is search engine optimization. We focused on identifying a key phrase that very few people owned – “child support” – and are continuously building unique and engaging content to maximize traffic based on that keyword.
If you only had $1000 dollars to start a new startup, knowing everything you know now, how would you spend it?
Knowing what I know now, I would take the $1,000 and put up a webpage around the idea, then market and advertise it to see how many people are actually interested in paying for the product I was selling. I would also build a very quick prototype to demonstrate what the product could do if it was fully built. I would start here because ultimately, nothing is worth building if someone isn’t willing to pay for it.
What’s your best piece of advice for aspiring and new entrepreneurs?
My biggest piece of advice for new entrepreneurs is to be prepared for a long, hard ride. Building a business yourself is a big undertaking and there will be unforeseen obstacles along the way but if you have the perseverance and grit to push through, it will be a very rewarding journey. It may seem obvious, but I’d also advise entrepreneurs to continue to focus on demonstrating and delivering results. No one can argue with results, so delivering them will make you successful.
What is your favorite quote?
My favorite quote and overall motto is
“don’t talk about it, be about it”.
Three tools that have been really helpful for my company are RecurPost, Active Campaign, and WordPress. RecurPost has been useful in scheduling and automating recurring social media posts to provide a steady stream of content on our channels. Active Campaign has helped automated email journeys for prospects and customers so that we can simply set and forget. Lastly, WordPress has been critical in keeping our website up and running and enabling us to continue to add relevant content
Aside from the tools we’re using to help grow the business, we also rely on a few great productivity tools. We use ASAP Utilities for Excel which has been a huge timesaver as it automates all the things you wish Excel did on its own. Another great one is Sandbox, which automatically segments and sorts email to ensure you see the most relevant emails in your inbox and can allow you to ignore or wait on the other emails. Lastly, to help keep our team on the same page we utilize Microsoft Teams and SharePoint for communication and document/data storing so employees can find everything they need on their own.
How is running a tech company different than what you thought it would be?
Early on I thought that a person could run a tech or software company without knowing how to code. However, after a lot of wasted money, I quickly realized that without the knowledge of how to code and read code, I had no way to assess whether what I was getting was actually good and would be scalable. Without this knowledge, there are a lot of people who will take advantage of entrepreneurs. It’s akin to someone speaking a foreign language and you not knowing if what they are saying is actually correct.
In addition, if you don’t have the money to continue to pay developers, that will likely lead to the demise of one’s business. Throughout my journey of running my own business, I ran into both of these issues when times were tough. After not being able to pay developers and not knowing how to code, I learned everything there was to know about coding and was able to fix the product and any bugs myself.
How can readers get in touch with you?
Readers can get in touch with me and follow along with me on social media. I’m on Twitter at @SheriAtwood and @SupportPayApp, along with LinkedIn. You can also check out our Facebook page.
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