An In-Depth Conversation with Founders Kevin and Aria Eghbali on Transforming the Payment Experience
I had the pleasure of interviewing Kevin and Aria Eghbali, the founders of Kade Pay.
Kevin is a 2x founder and a senior software developer with over two decades of experience in the retail industry, primarily working on POS, payment, and staff management solutions. He is an expert in enterprise structures and solutions.
Aria is a student at UPenn studying towards his Bachelor’s and Master’s in Computer Science & Cognitive Science. He has previously worked at Tesla as a Data Science Intern on the Finance Analytics team and is involved with the entrepreneurial community at Penn through VentureLab, the university’s entrepreneurship hub. He has an interest in using technology to streamline business processes.
What motivated you to launch your startup?
We were motivated to launch Kade Pay after watching our favorite local businesses struggle as the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a quickly shifting payment space. I saw firsthand how franchises and larger businesses were expanding their digital footprint with new features on their apps, while smaller mom & pop shops struggled to keep up. We wanted to create a modern payment solution that would address both hygienic concerns and provide an adaptable solution for small businesses to be competitive without the need for high capital investments in their own online platforms.
What is Kade Pay?
Kade Pay is both a mobile and web application that allows small businesses to easily accept digital payments and provides them with many useful features by moving the payment experience to the customers’ mobile devices. The features Kade offers can be simplified to: remote payments, convenient bill splitting, pay at the table solution for restaurants, a real-time promotion platform, the ability to issue and accept digital gift cards, and a customer analytics dashboard for businesses to gain a better understanding of their customer’s behavior.
What is it that excites you about what you’re building?
What excites me about Kade Pay is the potential to help small businesses embrace digital payments and lower their burden of high payment processing fees. Our platform offers innovative features such as remote/mobile payments, easy bill-splitting, and an engagement platform for customer loyalty. I am also excited about our plans for future growth and expansion, including enabling businesses to accept new payment methods such as cryptocurrencies.
What is the process for a business to use Kade Pay?
We do not require businesses to integrate their POS or need any additional services to accept Kade. Businesses can use Kade however they want, whether that is as a complete payment solution or a supplemental solution in which case they can process payments coming through Kade similar to cash in their existing POS system. To make it easier for businesses, we also provide a printer that prints a receipt as a payment confirmation for all payments a business receives through Kade.
What has been your biggest challenge when growing your startup?
As a startup, we face many challenges when it comes to growing our business. One of our biggest challenges has been building awareness and trust in our brand and our product. We are constantly working to improve our marketing efforts and reach out to potential customers to show them the value that Kade Pay can provide. Given that Kade Pay can be used by so many different businesses, one of the challenges we have faced has been finding a market that is easy to penetrate and form our niche to scale rapidly.
What are your future plans for your startup?
Our future plans for Kade Pay include continuing to grow and expand our business by enabling more businesses to embrace digital payments and providing them with a payment solution that is highly adaptable to new payment methods such as cryptocurrencies. We also aim to lower the burden of payment processing fees on businesses and transform the culture of how we pay to be centered around the user’s phone.
If you had to share, “words of wisdom,” with a Founder who’s about to start their own startup, what would they be?
My words of wisdom for a Founder who is about to start their own startup would be to stay focused on your mission and vision, and never give up on your dreams. Starting a business is hard work, but it can also be incredibly rewarding. Surround yourself with a supportive team and don’t be afraid to ask for help when you need it.
How can our readers follow you on social media?
Readers can engage with us on LinkedIn and can find all of our social media linked on our website www.kadepay.com.
This was very insightful. Thank you so much for joining us!
