Introducing Accountgram (by the Proxycurl team)

Update / Shutdown Notice

Accountgram is no longer available.

Also, Proxycurl API has been sunset. I am the founder behind Proxycurl, and today my full-time focus is NinjaPear, which is profitable and where all of our energy now goes.

I am preserving this post because the original problem was real, the economics were real, and the lessons still matter.

I'm happy to share that the team behind Proxycurl is launching Accountgram today! Update: Accountgram is no longer available, but I am leaving the original launch post below mostly intact for posterity. The problem it addressed was very real for us when we were running Proxycurl, before Proxycurl itself was sunset and before I moved my focus fully to NinjaPear.

Accountgram is a digital B2B debt collection service with a 32.5% success rate from 64 collections, and an average of 12 days to collection. Accountgram is the key that reduced our customer churn rate from 15% to 3%. We are able to accomplish this feat in Proxycurl by:

1. Employing annual contracts, coupled with PAYG plans for casual or one-time use
2. Enforcing contracts with Accountgram

With dramatically lower churn, growth on Proxycurl compounded exponentially to the tune of 250% per year.

Accountgram enforces B2B collections with teeth in two additional ways beyond dunning, aka nagging:

1. Public debt database, which leads to reputational consequences
2. Data-driven escalation to employees and possible vendors

Here's the thing. As a business owner, we have to deal with bad actors who breach long-term contracts on a whim. There is this decade-old 10M ARR company that sought huge discounts from us, claiming they hire a lot of Ukrainians affected by the war, and that they’re in it for the long term. I relented and gave them big discounts because they are big and surely would respect a contract, right?

Nope. They took our discounts, our data, built a prototype, decided it wasn't going to work, and then proceeded to ghost me. This is just one of many instances we have to deal with.

And it really grinds my gears because, for sums between $1 and $10,000, there just aren't any scalable ways to enforce these breached contracts. And these bad actors know. Our average sum to collect is $539 from customers who sign up for the 12-month plan with a monthly payment of $49, then block the card the next month after milking the discounted credits in the first month.

Small claims filing costs $850 in the Californian courts with the cheapest law firm. And nagging just does not work.

This is why we built Accountgram. There must be teeth in the collection process. We read through the regulatory scriptures of B2B debt collection in the US, and we employed every trick we can legally deploy that is both scalable and ethical.

Today, Accountgram is no longer something you can sign up for, and Proxycurl is no longer the business I run. Proxycurl has been sunset. I am now building NinjaPear, profitably, full-time.

I am keeping this post up because I still believe the underlying lesson is correct: if you sell B2B subscriptions with contract terms, you need an enforcement mechanism that is actually credible. Otherwise, your contract is decorative.

If you were reading this because you wanted to use Accountgram, the honest answer is that you cannot. If you were reading this because you wanted to understand why we built it, the answer is simple: churn math, contract abuse, and the lack of scalable enforcement for small B2B debts.

If you want to see what I am working on now, take a look at NinjaPear. It is profitable, it has my full attention, and unlike Accountgram, it is very much alive.