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How Thera is building the Financial Operating System for SMBs
Building Hubspot in a world of Salesforces
Sheldon Bishop
May 22, 2025
What's up! This is Sheldon from The Zero to One - helping you grow your product by breaking down the strategic playbooks, GTM motions, and product approaches behind your favorite early-stage startups and giving you the actionable insights to replicate them. Check out all my previous deep dives here.
This week, I sat down with Akhil Reddy, Founder & CEO of Thera, for a behind-the-scenes look at how they're building an ecosystem of apps to run a modern business. And how they’re doing so by challenging industry norms, focusing on the segment everyone else forgets - SMBs. Proving that deliberately staying focused on this forgotten segment can be both more profitable and defensible when executed with discipline.
This conversation and episode is a deeper look into the debate between integration and segmentation of products, and Akhil gives a unique perspective, that I believe is helping them win.
While most B2B SaaS companies use SMBs as a stepping stone to enterprise, Thera proves that deliberately staying focused on "forgotten" SMBs can be both more profitable and defensible when executed with discipline.
So without further ado, this is the story of how Thera went from Zero to One 🚀.
Thera At a Glance
When Akhil founded Thera, he noticed a pattern: financial operations platforms started serving smaller businesses, but then inevitably moved upstream to chase lucrative enterprise deals. This pattern happens in most B2B categories.
But there’s a fundamental problem with it.
It leaves SMBs with increasingly complex, fragmented, and expensive tools designed for much larger companies.
So Akhil set out to change this by recognizing a broader market opportunity:
“Fintech is entering a bundling era, and there are few, if any, all-in-one platforms like ours. When I was at Amazon, I thought deeply about the reasons for their success. Amazon won due to three main reasons: (i) affordable prices, (ii) selection, and (iii) convenience. We’re bringing this same ethos to Thera.”
This one-platform approach is a key differentiator for SMBs. With legacy providers either too fragmented or too expensive.
“Unlike other global players, we don’t mark up our FX. We take the Costco approach and pass on wholesale rates.”
Thera's Foundation
Thera began with a laser focus on global contractor management – a strategic wedge product that perfectly addressed an emerging market need.
"Many startups now have more contractors than they have full-time employees. Many legacy payrolls have no international capabilities at all."
This juxtapositioned insight revealed an opportunity: growing businesses needed global capabilities that existing solutions simply weren't providing.
So Thera leaned into it.
"It's our most robust product. It's also our most popular," Akhil notes. This targeted approach gave them an entry point that solved a pressing problem while establishing a foundation for their broader vision: an integrated financial operating system for modern SMBs, eliminating the traditional fragmentation of 5+ separate tools for payroll, treasury, spend management, payments, and accounting.
And the early days? They looked like your typical founder hustle story - Akhil describes it as "door to door sales, meaning I met people out in New York City."
The YC network provided a few initial customers with a higher risk tolerance for new software. But the focus was always on delivering excellence.
“For our first set of customers, we focused on delivering a white-glove experience and made sure they were incredibly happy. Once we ironed out our experience, we used our initial set of customers as case studies to attract our next.”
This point on risk tolerance is critical: When you're a startup, you have no market trust. Finding early adopters with higher risk tolerance - typically other startups who understand your position - is essential for gaining initial traction.
Thera then used this initial traction to build a product that delivers a significantly better experience than legacy providers for SMBs, and at more affordable rates - attracting hundreds of customers and reaching well into seven figures of revenue.
Let's break down how they did it.
💬 Winning the Forgotten Middle
Most startups follow a predictable playbook: start serving other startups & SMBs for initial traction, then inevitably chase the bigger checks of mid-market and enterprise. And it makes sense. Bigger customers typically mean more revenue.
But what also happens is that this gravitational pull toward complexity, bloat, and price increases is created.
This is a problem for SMBs.
The solutions they have used for years slowly get more expensive. And the companies providing these solutions point to all the new features included.
But most of those features are not useful to an SMB. They were built for midmarket and enterprise.
So those SMBs either have to suck up the cost of unused features or look for a new solution.
Thera deliberately broke this pattern.
Their core insight: the real opportunity is in NOT going upmarket.
Choosing to be the solution for the segment that everyone else abandons. And not treating them as a stepping stone. But a destination in and of itself.
"The SMB market has been largely overlooked with the current solutions and many of them are moving upstream towards mid-market & enterprise."
Thera identified a massive opportunity in being the company that stays true to SMBs' unique needs rather than following the typical trajectory of moving upmarket.
So while competitors sacrifice SMB experience for enterprise revenue, Thera doubled down on creating the definitive solution for them. Creating a moat that's difficult for enterprise-focused competitors to replicate without completely rebuilding their products and teams.
“Often times with SMBs, you’re selling to the founders. Our value prop of consolidating their finance stack and saving them thousands of dollars a year hits home.”
Why this worked:
Practical insights from the tactic.
1. Building "Hubspot in a world of Salesforces"
This pattern was prevalent in the financial & HR operations market. You have legacy players and startups all focused on enterprise clients.
Leaving SMBs with increasingly ill-fitting solutions - and at higher prices.
"Everyone is building Salesforce, but no one's building Hubspot." Akhil explains.
This analogy perfectly captures their strategic positioning.
While competitors chase larger enterprise deals with bloated software, Thera created an integrated platform specifically designed for how SMBs actually operate.
"Enterprise software isn't going to be particularly well suited for SMBs. There's a lot of bloat in the software - we see that complaint from companies coming from Rippling (or similar solutions) all the time,"
A powerful positioning insight that creates a compelling narrative.
Deliberately targeting what Akhil calls the "Unspoken heroes. They're not necessarily venture-backed, they're typically bootstrapped but they're still making millions of dollars in revenue a year."
This focus wasn't immediate - it evolved through experience and testing.
"We started from early-stage startups when we just got going, but now we understand that we match better with later-stage SMBs,"
By recognizing patterns in customer success and churn, they identified their sweet spot: companies with enough revenue to need sophisticated financial operations, but not so large that they require enterprise-grade complexity.
Enterprise software is built for scaling complexity, managing bureaucracy, and higher budgets.
SMBs need tools that stay out of their way while enabling growth.
By focusing exclusively on this segment, Thera can make opinionated product and marketing decisions that would be impossible with a broader market approach.
2. Strategic feature discipline to maintain product integrity
Arguably more important than knowing what features to build, is knowing what features not to build.
With every feature you add, you are signalling to the market the type of customer you want using your product.
You have to be very thoughtful.
And often this means ignoring or saying ‘no’ to customer feature requests.
Your users are not always right. They do not know what is best.
They know what is best for them.
But what is best for them, sure makes their lives better, but might cause bloat for all of your other customers.
You need to balance customer feedback with both product taste and direction.
Because not only does every product decision take resources away from other areas. It also has the potential to signal the wrong type of customer.
This is something to avoid like the plague. Having the wrong set of users for your product can kill your business.
If you do attract the wrong users (like 1-person consultancies, when you're built for larger SMBs), you can end up with a customer base that's too fragile to sustain your product.
Thera needed to make sure they were sending the right signals.
Akhil explains their framework:
"If it's as simple as, 'Hey, I want this note added on all our invoices.' Yeah, we'll do that for you. But if it's like, 'Hey, I want this workflow where I'm billing clients the exact amount that I billed this contractor,' then it’s like, 'Well, that feature is probably not very useful for companies outside your segment. So we'll tell them that we can't build that for them."
This discipline is what prevents the bloat that kills SMB-focused tools.
Every feature request is evaluated through the lens of: "Does this serve our broader SMB customer base, or is this just enterprise complexity creeping in for the benefit of a few, or a single user?"
This approach requires confidence in your positioning.
And the ability to say no to potentially more money in the short term.
But it's a level of strategic discipline that separates successful, focused companies from those that lose their way chasing every opportunity.
3. Modular by default
SMBs hate being forced into all-or-nothing solutions. It’s the root cause for solutions that are both too expensive and bloated.
It’s why one of Thera's defining principles is being default modular. Unlike traditional "all-in-one" solutions that force customers into a rigid bundle, Thera is built as an open ecosystem of apps that can operate independently or integrate seamlessly.
Each app in the Thera suite, from Payroll to Spend to Docs, is siloed by default.
Need just contractor management? Great, start there. Ready to add payroll later? It integrates perfectly - but it's not required.
This isn't just a feature decision - it's a fundamental philosophy that respects how real SMBs adopt technology: gradually, based on burning needs, and not all at once.
This flexibility is fundamentally different from the bundled model, where adopting one feature means inheriting the complexity of the entire platform.
When used together, Thera apps unlock powerful integrated workflows:
Automatically sync payments and payroll with accounting.
Route invoices from Thera Payments to Thera Cash.
Run Payroll from Thera Cash.
But none of it is mandatory. You choose your entry point. You grow on your terms. Dramatically lowering the barrier to adoption while avoiding the bloat that marks competitor products.
This modular design gives Thera a unique advantage:
Lower barrier to adoption: Start with one need, expand as trust builds.
Better customer fit: Avoids bloat and complexity of "one-size-fits-all".
Composable stack: SMBs can build their own finance OS instead of adapting to someone else's.
It's how Thera simultaneously solves the "too simple" and "too complex" problems that plague SMB financial tools while staying nimble, customer-centric, and scalable - all at once.
Turning Service into Market Share
In an industry increasingly dominated by self-service products and automation-first approaches, Thera believes that service quality isn't just a nice-to-have - it's a major competitive advantage.
This wasn't just a philosophical choice but rather a strategic insight born from observing customer behavior and competitor weaknesses.
Most current solutions have terrible customer service.
Legacy players are notorious for slow response times, confusing interfaces, and impersonal interactions.
And the big-name startups prioritized scale and automation over human connection.
Thera saw this as a massive opportunity.
So they built systematic approaches to deliver consistently exceptional experiences that create tangible business value. Balancing high-touch service with scalable systems.
Every aspect of their model is designed to not just satisfy customers but to turn them into vocal advocates who drive word-of-mouth growth.
And they're not just providing a white-glove service; they're building a machine that can deliver white-glove experiences at scale.
Why this worked:
Practical insights from the tactic.
1. Speed as a service
In competitive industries like financial ops, response time isn't just a service metric - it's often the deciding factor in customer acquisition and retention.
Thera recognized that when businesses have financial issues, especially payroll problems, they can't wait days for responses.
"Practically our response times are far, far faster than some of these other solutions,"
But this speed isn't accidental - it's the result of deliberate system design.
They've structured their team and processes around rapid response, treating speed as a core product feature rather than just a service goal.
Creating a powerful acquisition channel: "We actually do see many customers coming because of poor customer service from their previous provider."
When competitors take days to respond to critical issues, Thera's rapid resolution becomes a compelling reason to switch.
Transforming customer service from a cost center into a growth engine.
2. Embracing "unscalable" high-touch service
While a lot of SaaS companies, especially those with no previous founder experience, see human interaction as an inefficiency to minimize, Thera treats it as a competitive weapon.
Every customer gets a dedicated CSM and direct access through Slack Connect channels - an approach that seems unscalable but creates incredible business value.
"We give a dedicated CSM to every customer that onboards, and we give them the ability to interact with us via Slack through Slack Connect. Every single customer gets a Slack Connect channel."
This level of personal attention creates several strategic advantages:
First, it dramatically improves customer retention by building personal relationships.
Second, it provides continuous product feedback from real usage scenarios.
Third, it creates emotional connections that lead to referrals and testimonials. Turning customers into advocates.
And most importantly, this high-touch approach allows them to understand their customers deeply.
When you're connected to your customers daily, you can anticipate their needs, spot issues before they become problems, and build features that truly matter.
Plus, you start to speak their language. Which makes it easier to build rapport in sales calls and with future customers.
Importing Innovation Across Markets
Thera's breakthrough was recognizing a simple parallel:
What Wise did for consumer remittances, someone could do for business payments.
"B2B payments, in many ways, looks like what consumer remittance looked like ten years ago."
And this wasn't just about copy-pasting features; it was about importing an entirely different philosophy about how financial services should work into B2B.
Consumer fintech has proven that customers would choose a better experience and transparent pricing over incumbent relationships.
They'd also shown that technology could dramatically reduce costs while improving service.
And most importantly, they'd demonstrated that users, once they experienced the new way of doing things, wouldn't want to go back to the old way.
And so Thera brought these beliefs into their product.
Why this worked:
Practical insights from the tactic.
1. Exploiting the B2B-consumer innovation lag
Most industries experience innovation in waves.
Consumer applications typically lead the charge. And B2B solutions follow.
This applies to product, marketing, sales, and support. The pattern is consistent.
Consumer products make humorous social media campaigns. A few years later, so do B2B companies like ClickUp.
And almost always it comes with the same criticism: what works in B2C, doesn’t work in B2B. Except a few years later, everyone is doing it.
Akhil recognized that they were on the edge of this pattern and positioned Thera at the forefront of the B2B wave of it.
"The B2B management space, in many ways, looks like what the consumer remittance space looked like ten years ago. To send money abroad, it was extremely slow, extremely expensive. And then you had Wise come in. And Wise was like, it shouldn't be this expensive, and it shouldn't be this difficult."
Turns out this wasn't just an observation - it was a blueprint.
They could see exactly where they were heading by looking at where consumer payments had been.
And there’s an underlying reason for this consistent pattern: At the end of the day B2B is still somewhat consumer. You are still selling to people, who just happen to be making decisions for a company (there are nuances however).
And these people become accustomed to consumer trends and innovations in their personal lives. And so start to become comfortable with, and even expect them in their professional ones.
This is exactly what is happening with Thera. Consumer financial systems are sophisticated at the smallest level. B2B buyers want to see the same in them.
2. Pricing. Pricing. Pricing.
Thera didn't just look to Wise’s innovations - they took inspiration from their business model too.
Instead of maximizing margins per transaction, they focused on volume through better pricing.
"Largely, we've taken that playbook and adapted it to contractor management. And typically, contractors will see anywhere from 2-3% more if you use our payroll versus a Deel, Rippling, or Gusto,"
This 2-3% difference represents a significant shift in industry economics.
To put this in perspective: for a contractor making $100,000 annually, that's an extra $2,000-$3,000 in their pocket simply by working with companies that use Thera.
But here's the real brilliance in this pricing model: those contractors become one of Thera's most powerful sales channels.
"We actually didn't predict this, but every month we get new clients who just hired a contractor that was previously paid with Thera. They insist that their employer switch to Thera."
Think about it - when contractors move between companies (which happens constantly), they bring Thera with them. They've experienced getting an extra 2-3% in their pocket, and they're not going back to the old way.
This creates a viral growth loop that's nearly impossible to replicate without incumbents sacrificing margins. Contractors literally sell the product for Thera by insisting their new employers switch.
A network effect hiding in plain sight.
3. Dogfooding as a product excellence engine
Perhaps the most powerful application of consumer fintech principles is using your own product obsessively.
Consumer fintechs live by this rule - they use their own apps daily and feel every friction point, every moment of joy, and everything in between.
If you can use your own B2B product - you should. Actually, you must.
It builds an intuitive understanding of your customers that just can’t be learned. It has to be experienced. There are many great examples of this, and we’ve spoken about a few previously, lemlist for example.
And Thera is no exception.
"We use Thera to pay all of our Thera employees. And we're distributed across five different countries," Akhil explains.
They're not just dogfooding - they're stress-testing their platform with their own complex international payroll needs. Multiple team members. Multiple countries.
"We'll have regular bug bashes, where everyone goes through the entire workflow of what it would be like to onboard, to run payroll, and all the other typical workflows that you'd expect from financial ops."
And unlike a lot of B2B startups, Thera don’t need to simulate these sessions, the Thera team experiences them first hand. Creating an experience that can’t be replicated.
Dogfooding like this creates several advantages:
Immediate feedback loop: Problems are discovered by the team before customers even experience them.
Deep product understanding: Team members become expert users of their own product. Meaning better support. Higher sales conversion rates. Better marketing copy.
Authentic motivation: Everyone has a personal stake in product quality. It affects their lives.
Competitive advantage: Edge cases and improvements come from real usage rather than theoretical planning
Thera is quietly building what their competitors overlooked: a cohesive, global, user-centric financial OS for SMBs. By:
Staying focused to SMBs
Building with discipline
Delivering human-level service
Importing consumer innovation
They’re changing SMB expectations. Where in a world of bloated tools and impersonal product building, Thera is proving that better software and better service can coexist, especially for the businesses that need it most.
For The Zero to One, it's been your host, Sheldon.
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In case you missed it ⏮️
Last week I sat down with Alyona, founder of Fuelfinance, and it was the best conversation I’ve had all year - no exaggeration.
She is one of the sharpest and most exciting founders I’ve ever spoken to - and she’s building an awesome business.
Stay awesome and speak soon!
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