Secret Life Podcast Ep. 97 Carmen Johanson and Kimberley Baldwin

Barb 0:01Today’s guests are solving a $121 million problem, a problem we all have and contribute to. Each year in Canada, paper receipts are used to equal 130,000 trees 130,000. That’s huge. To put that in other terms, you could wrap around the Earth 100 times, just with the amount of paper receipts that are used in Canada in a single year.
Barb 0:36We all do it. We collect receipts when we go to the dollar store. When we go to Walmart, when we show up at a local retailer, there are over 15 point 1 billion receipts issued every year in Canada.
Barb 0:52So our guests today are going to take us down the path for how we can stop spending that $121 million. How we can stop slaughtering, killing those 130,000 trees, how we can start to solve this problem.
Barb 1:08Environmental Engineers by training Kim Baldwin and Carmen Johansen saw a huge problem with the receipt waste, the cost involved and customer tracking. How many times have you had to take something back and you’re scrounging to find that receipt, they have the solution.
Barb 1:26Their company PayTrail is an electronic receipt tracking tool for customers to get the receipt jail for free, pass go on all scraps of paper that are laying around and put the power back into the customers hands for how they want to track the retail purchases. So I’ve done enough talking, I’m gonna ask Carmen to go ahead and introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about the company.
Carmen 1:55Hi, Barb, thank you for having me.
Barb 1:57It’s a pleasure to have you here.
Carmen 1:59Yeah, my name is Carmen Johansen. A little bit about myself is I’m originally from Stockholm, Saskatchewan. I went to the University of Saskatchewan. And that’s where I obtained my environmental engineering degree. Following that, I started working and soon realized that there’s a bigger problem here that I want to focus on. And that was receipt paper. Every time I would go to a till I would say oh, no, I don’t need my receipt, thinking that it just wouldn’t be printed. But that’s simply not the case, which I realized quite quickly.
Barb 2:35And then mentioned, does a retailer still print it and save it for their record? Yeah, for
Carmen 2:40sure. So retailers print receipts for their own records as well as they put one for you. And when they print one for you, regardless if you want it or not. It’s still printed. Can they just crumple it up and throw it in the garbage?
Barb 2:52Oh, wow. Okay, I didn’t realize that. Okay.
Carmen 2:55Yeah. Yeah. And I just got tired of seeing that. And I thought this is a pattern that shouldn’t exist anymore in this day and age. So I wanted to do something about it. And that’s when we started PayTrail. And I became a co-founder with my partner, Kim.
Barb 3:08Excellent. Well, Kim, on that note, let’s have you introduce yourself.
Kim 3:12Yeah. Thanks so much for having us, Barb. My name is Kim Baldwin, I like Carmen, a small town in Saskatchewan. I was born in Davidson, Saskatchewan. So a little more central than Carmen was down south. I also went to the University of Saskatchewan, which is where Carmen and I first met. And then I started working. And Carmen mentioned this receipt problem that she saw a couple years ago. And she just was like, this is crazy, how don’t we have a better solution?
Kim 3:47And I feel like I really resonated with that. And as soon as she mentions it, like lots of the people we talk to about this problem, as soon as you say it out loud, you start to see it all the time. And so that’s what happened to me. And that’s where we created PayTrail.
Kim 4:03So paytrail is, like you said, a platform committed to eliminating receipt paper waste. We partner with stores to allow their customers to directly transfer and track their receipts from the tills to a user account that is in the version of an app on your phone.
Barb 4:23So take me back to some of those early conversations that you guys had. We all tend to talk about the things that bug us. But not everyone takes the step and says okay, I’m going to start to solve this problem. So how did you guys actually sort of make that leap? Find yourself knee deep in entrepreneurship? Take me back to some of those conversations. What did that look like?
Carmen 4:49For sure? This is actually I love I wish this was a meet cute, but really, it’s our idea starting cute. So, um, it’s a really funny story. Actually. I knew Kim when I had previous conversations about this issue, you know, we would talk about this issue.
Carmen 5:06And I feel like every once in a while you’re surrounded by a group of friends. And you have those who have a million dollar idea who have a million dollar idea that can, you know, pay for us all to keep living and none of us, none of none of us have to work. And I always would always say, Oh, I have an idea, I have an idea. And I would always talk about this receipt one.
Carmen 5:26And Kim really believed in it. And it was just these funny situations where we talk about it every once in a while. And then after, again, this problem kept becoming so regular in my life in such a constant that I could see it all the time. I started really thinking a lot more about it.
Carmen 5:43And then one day, Kim and I, because we do spend a lot of time together. We were at a gin distillery, just having a drink. And we were just kind of talking about it a little bit more. And I think I asked her right then and there. I was like, Do you want to pursue this with me? Yeah, I was. I was honestly just a shot in the dark. I was like, if any of my friends are gonna be able to do this with me, it’s gonna be you. So do you just want to try it? I don’t know if it was the gin talking. Here we are now.
Kim 6:15Little did we know. A little did we know it was our first team brainstorming session at a gin distillery. Exactly. Yeah, the rest. The next day Carmen followed up and was like, Were you serious about that? And I was like, Yeah, I think we should do it. And then we started googling. Yes,
Barb 6:35Exactly. Because then the googling starts and the brainstorming and the, you know, the notes on the napkins or any little piece of paper that you can find because your brain just starts to turn, doesn’t it? Are all these ideas percolating? K. So from that time from that, that, you know, conversation, the gin distillery to when it started to actualize what was the time period? Was it pretty quick? Or was it fair?
Carmen 7:00It was pretty quick, I would say it was over the course of like a couple months or maybe a month actually not even that long. As soon as we had those conversations, we knew that we needed to talk to somebody in the space because we didn’t know anybody in the startup space.
Carmen 7:12So we wanted to reach out to a couple of the incubators here in Saskatchewan, to kind of see from their perspective. And again, we just utilize any link to anybody we ever know. So Kim asked her dad, who knew another startup person’s father, K, and somehow we got a connection to a startup in Regina that we just requested. Like we have a meeting with you just to kind of ask about things like, what life is like and how it works and what we should do and who we should talk to.
Carmen 7:44And again, just taking those leaps of reaching out to anybody to learn. And from there we Yeah, had a meeting with Hannah from a cultivator in Regina. And yeah, that probably was over the course of a couple of weeks. And then oh, wow, following. Yeah, I was really quick. And then following that Kim and I had our first full day session of just kind of mind mapping this all out.
Carmen 8:07We sat at my kitchen table for probably seven hours just on our computers trying to, you know, Google, what is a startup? What do you need to become a startup? What is the pitch deck? Like we knew nothing, and we just took it all by storm. It was really an exhausting first day, but we knew we were in the right place.
Barb 8:26Good. No, that’s super exciting. So that was Hannah from the Connexus. Cultivator. Right. Yes, yeah. And so are you a part of that cultivator? Are you a part of any of the cultivators at this point, or because you’re both still full time gainfully employed as well? So you’re trying to do both. So how do you balance that time then?
Kim 8:43Yeah, so we participated in the cultivator Start Program, which was incredible. Like I think Carmen and I both agree, it really set us in the direction that we are still going. It taught us how to reach out to people, make connections and do customer discovery. It honestly just gave us so many tools.
Kim 9:05And then we are not currently officially a part of any of the other cultivator programs. But we still are on the cultivator slack. We probably talked to Hannah from the cultivator every single day. And so yeah, we’re still very much involved in that community. It really becomes one of the greatest things about the Saskatchewan startup community is it becomes just like such a tight knit connection. And as soon as you’re in it, it’s like everyone’s there to help. Everyone’s working together. Like we’re all on the same team. And so we’re very, very much involved with cultivators. We love the crew over there.
Barb 9:47Yeah, those connections that you create that network. I would guess that it’s invaluable because there’s almost always someone who has faced a similar challenge who can help you through any of your current challenges. Right.
Kim 10:00Yeah, yeah, the amount of times that on the cultivator Slack channel, someone will just post in the general group and be like, This is what I’m looking for. I’m looking to solve this problem or I’m looking for a connection, who knows something about this topic, and it’s just a thread of responses like, hey, I can reach out to this connection, I can maybe help you. It’s incredible. They’ve really fostered a great community there.
Barb 10:26And so are all the cultivators working together? Is that just the Connexus cultivator?
Kim 10:32Just connect this cultivator there so there’s another incubator in Saskatchewan based in Saskatoon called CoLabs. Right? And they’re pretty connected to us, we have some connections. So seven shifts in Saskatoon. We have some amazing mentors who work there. And they’re very involved in CO labs. And because Saskatchewan is so small, it’s pretty, it’s pretty interconnected. Whether you’re a part of the CoLabs community or the cultivator community.
Barb 11:03Got it. Okay, that makes great sense. So, where are you at right now? If I go on Playstore? Can I download it?
Carmen 11:13Um, yeah, so right now, we actually are like, at this very moment, releasing our app to the Google Play Store. Hey, um, so that’s really exciting. That’s, uh, last night, we just had like an hour and a half long meeting with our developer, just, you know, finishing out some final bugs and discussing some, like, absolute last minute things.
Carmen 11:31But yeah, we’re in the process of pushing that out. So that’s really exciting. And it’s a huge milestone for us. We have yet to be released at the Apple Store, that’s just kind of strictly because Apple is really well known for taking a very long time to go through that process.
Carmen 11:47So we have a couple of weeks, or a couple weeks behind on the Apple app store front, but we are really excited. And yeah, we’re almost there. So it’s really exciting. And we’re really pumped up to really set it to everybody, which we will be kind of posting on our social media when that all starts, so.
Barb 12:03Okay, and that was gonna be my next question. So when will you make the big announcement that it’s available for download? As soon as it’s sort of in both stores? And I’ll say beta tested? Or is that what this first phase is? Is it? Is it a beta test?
Carmen 12:18For sure. So we have been lucky enough to beta test already in, I believe it was in October, November, we pushed it up to a few people, I think it was maybe a group of 20 individuals to utilize the app and kind of go through what bugs were major, what additional features were were people wanting and kind of narrow down and create sort of narrowed down what we’re looking for this app to be as well as you know, expand in the areas that it needs.
Carmen 12:44So we were able to do that and have interviews with all of our beta users. And that’s where, and from there we created what we have today. I think we will probably like to wait, maybe one or two weeks after the apple release, just to make sure there’s no insane bugs or something wild. I don’t know, lights, your phone on fire? Who knows? We’ll just make sure nothing crazy happens. And then of course, we’ll do a major announcement probably, you know, realistically, one week or two weeks after it actually was in the store.
Barb 13:10Awesome. So like a ballpark a month from now. It should be publicly available to everyone and your mom, your dad, your brother, your sister, your cousin your aunt’s your uncle’s like they will be downloading to get it out there. Exactly. Yeah. So that’s the consumer side of it. How do you get retailers? Well, okay, let me rephrase that question. Are you hoping that consumers push retailers or retailers push Consumers
Carmen 13:37I’ll start this Kim, if you want to add later, I, our plan here is for our user base to push retailers. So that’s why we’re really seeing this user app first, just to sort of get it out there to get traction to see a bunch of downloads happen. And then we can take that to our retailers and say, Hey, like we have this, you have this problem. And we have this solution. And we also have a community and we can bring that community to your store. And we can benefit you in multiple ways and you know, create that relationship. So that’s kind of what our plan of attack was when starting with this user app first.
Barb 14:13Okay. And so let me just put on my retailer hat, which I am not, but if I’m a retailer, right now, I’m spending the money to get my til tape anyway. And so I presume that there’s a cost to be in the app, which, in theory, if I didn’t have to buy the tail tape, or even if I only had to buy half of it, I’m going to save money, I’m going to pay my fee. So do they pay like per transaction? Do they pay a percentage of a transaction? What does that look like? Because I presume there’s no consumer cost.
Kim 14:46Yeah, yeah. So our revenue model model is a volume based subscription fee. So as a retailer, you sign up and you pay a fee kind of per month to be direct. We integrated with the platform. With that you’re right. So there’s a really tangible cost. In terms of just receipt paper, we based our initial pricing on approximately 25% of the receipt paper that the average retailer like small, medium, and large retailer are bending on receipt paper a month, it’s about 25% of that cost.
Kim 15:25So with that is kind of you know, you, you want to have as many people using the paytrail option as possible, because every time you get a paytrail receipts, that’s one less piece of paper that you are both printing, which suck for the environment, but also you’re spending money on which sucks for you at all, on top of that some of the things that you can do through the app, when you’re partnered with us is you can push personalized ads through the app.
Kim 15:55So we have a specific deals page, that right now is just kind of email marketing from retailers. But if you’re directly partnered with us, then we can kind of build feature ads and deals and discounts for you and kind of push those specifically for your store. And one of the things is because if people are using it every day, because most of the time, people get at least one receipt a day, they’re kind of opening up that app almost every day, and then they kind of see those deals and see your advertisements that you’re wanting to push.
Barb 16:28Yeah. So how does the receipt get to my account? Do I have to give the retailer my email address? Or is there a QR code or a barcode that they scan and it then is connected to my account?
Kim 16:38Yeah, so there’s a couple different ways Carmen and I’s goal through paytrail is really universality. We want it to be a tool that shoppers can have all of their receipts. And our vision for the future is that every single receipt is just directly transferred.
Kim 16:57But we know that takes some time. And there’s some building blocks there. And so right now through the app, you can scan, you can manually enter a receipt, and then you can transfer it directly from the till using your PayTrail email. So when you sign up for a Patreon account, you just sign up with your phone number, and then your PayTrail email becomes your phone number out of PayTrail. com.
Kim 17:20You can also change that and add an alias or nickname. So mine is Kim@mypaytrail.com.
Kim 17:28And then at any retailer that uses that email option at their till, you can use that PayTrail email, and instead of it going to your inbox and getting lost and cluttered. And then having a bunch of marketing emails come through, it goes through the receipt directly to your receipt library.
Kim 17:46And any marketing emails that get sent to that goes to your deals page. And then there, if you want to look at them, that’s great. You can look at them. And if not, then they’re just automatically deleted after a couple of weeks. And it really keeps everything kind of clean, keeps events. Yep.
Kim 18:02Eventually when we partner with those retailers, which is what we’re looking at as our next step, we will be building out direct integrations to point of sale systems, which is that direct transfer.
Kim 18:16So you think it might look a little bit different depending on the point of sale. But you think of you know, having an apple wallet card and scanning a QR code from that card, and then the til kind of knows this is the direction this is where I need to send this receipt based on the kind of the information that is being communicated in that QR.
Barb 18:40Okay, um, no, I kind of lost my train of thought there. Because I realized, I also have one other thing that we have to talk about today. Um, but so when I look at the app, the Oh, look at my kids, my kids are teenagers, they never check email. So if these receipts were coming to their email, and would be a waste of time, I love that the phone number or an alias is going to sort of keep all of my information together.
Barb 19:04And whether it’s my you know, power bill and my energy bill, or it’s the purchase of back to school supplies, the thought that it’s all in one place. For me, even as a parent, it’s like, Oh, my God, like so much easier. Is there also the ability and maybe this is a future thought to have that family account where you know, my husband’s phone and mine and the kids like everybody starts to tie together. So there’s one family account, everything’s together and it doesn’t matter if I’m taking my son’s shoes back or if he’s doing it on his own, that kind of thing.
Carmen 19:39Absolutely. That’s a really exciting idea. I think that kind of plays into a thought that Kim and I have discussed which is you know, maybe having like group work accounts where where you’re, you’re with your team, you share receipts in case you know your project manager, whoever may be needs to approve them, you know, being able to see them into you know what, for anybody’s in that group is a really good idea.
Carmen 20:03And that can absolutely be applied to families, which is a great idea. Creating those groups within the app is definitely something Kim and I want to do in the future.
Carmen 20:13Right now, we’re just hoping it doesn’t, you know, crash and burn on the App Store. So you guys. It’s gonna be so great. It’s just, you know, one of those things that we’re definitely looking forward to doing in the future.
Carmen 20:26Right now we’re kind of focused on single buying, being able to categorize what you buy, marking your purchases of warranty and putting in warranty dates, you know, putting notes or comments on things that you purchase, you know, maybe you said, Oh, I bought this for Kim for her birthday, in case you in case she ever asks, you know, oh, I need to return that, you know, being able to make those notes and comments. We’re kind of focusing on that right now. But definitely, definitely in the future. That’s a great idea. Okay,
Kim 20:53We’ll see as well. Right now, you can export receipts, and then you can, like, email them to someone else, or text them or things like that, for Carmen’s example of buying something for someone’s birthday or something like that. It’s really easy to transfer them over.
Kim 21:10But we do see eventually speaking to that, more like sharing within the app so you know, sending it to Carmen paytrail account instead of texting it to her if I have to send her seat. So yeah, if there’s, there’s a ton of very exciting, sometimes we have to narrow ourselves back in, because we just start talking about all of the things that we could add and all the features. And our developer has to be like, Whoa,
Barb 21:38Exactly. And that’s like any entrepreneurial business, you have to prioritize. I know every once in a while I start thinking, hey, we could do this, we could do that. And my folks sort of bring me back in and it’s like Barb, you’re already complaining about, you know, how many hours and stuff you’re already working? If you start doing something else, it’s not good. So, yeah, prioritization, it’s a skill I never learned well.
Barb 22:03Okay, so how in the heck are you guys balancing it all, because your developers are doing a ton of the code writing, I presume? You guys are the brains behind the operation. But you both shared with me that you’ve got some pretty exciting hobbies, and you love to get outside and do some nature. And, you know, I presume that you actually have family and friends, you need to see how the heck are you balancing it all?
Carmen 22:23I think the key is this is a secret. This is a startup secret. The key to balancing it all is never sleeping. You just stay up all the time. And you never sleep. And you try to work off. Yeah.
Carmen 22:38No, but in all honesty, I would say that is our biggest secret. There are two of us. Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t know how solo founders do it on their own. They’re, they’re superheroes if they can do it on their own. I think Kim and I are able to balance that workload and kind of, you know, be able to split it up as to, you know, what we do best?
Carmen 23:01You know, I focus on this, Kim focuses on that it’s been very, very manageable. I mean, don’t get me wrong, we do. We do stay up late, we do work hard. And we do have to sometimes prioritize, you know, PayTrail, what we’re doing our passion over, you know, those nights to go for drinks with friends. But I think we’re just very lucky that there’s two of us to push through this. And you know, two of us, we have somebody to lean on through it all. And I think that’s just a really good way to go about it. i Yeah, I’m not sure if there’s anything else to add, Kim.
Kim 23:33I think one of the things like when we first started it, I think both of us had a lot of troubles, giving ourselves a break or realizing when we needed a break. And I think breaks and startup world is like an evening. It’s not like, Oh, I’m taking a week off. It’s like, I’m going to spend four hours just trying not to think about this thing. I think you realize that you found something that you love, and you’re passionate about when you cannot stop thinking about it.
Kim 24:02But it’s important to kind of realize when you need to just allow your brain to have a break and put your phone down and take your Apple Watch off. Because if your phone is down, your Apple Watch is going off.
Kim 24:17And so that’s one of the things I think as we’ve kind of gotten further and further into it, we probably both are better at communicating. You know, Carmen said to me a couple of weeks ago, I’m going to watch a movie tonight. And it’s just like, Okay, perfect.
Kim 24:33Like I know that Carmen is just going to take a couple hours tonight and turn her brain off and just enjoy the downtime and I’m not going to bug her with things unless it’s like you know, I really need this kind of thing right away. And so, when it comes to balance, it isn’t always something that you can have 100% of the time but making sure you get it sometimes is something that’s important. That’s something we’re working on. But we haven’t necessarily completely achieved that. Yeah,
Barb 25:04Exactly. No, I totally get that. Ladies, believe it or not, we’re basically out of time. And so can I get you to share? Like how to folks learn more? How do they find your social channels? And I guess, you know, mark your calendar, because you guys should be in the app store, buy about, the 23rd of March, or both app stores by boat the 23rd of March, give or take. And so yeah, give us the details so that everybody can find you.
Carmen 25:34For sure, absolutely. So you can find it at www.my paytrail.com as well as on all social medias. We’re on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, of course, at my Paytrail. I yeah, I would say mark your calendars for the end of the month here because we have some exciting things coming down the pipe.
Kim 25:55You can reach out to us like on Instagram, send us a message or LinkedIn send us a message. We are pretty quiet on social media as we kind of make our way through and make kind of quiet progress. And it’s really just working our way up to a big release. But you can still even though we’re quiet, you can still reach us on the platform.
Barb 26:17And that’s it for today. Thank you to Kim and Carmen for sharing their exciting updates with PayTrail.
Barb 28:21If you are interested in being part of their retailer program, or their consumer program, please watch for updates and releases on their Facebook and Instagram accounts. Retailers in particular if you’d like to be a part of their pilot program, just reach out to Kim or Carmen directly and they can give you more information.
Barb 28:43Thank you for joining us today for the Secret Life.
Barb 28:46If you’d like to be a guest you can email me at Barb@ZebethMedia.live or reach out on Facebook and Instagram at ZebethMedia.ca just a reminder, you can submit questions in advance of the show on our Facebook page.
Barb 29:02I’m your host Barb McGrath, local business owner and Google girl. Remember, you worked hard for your success. Don’t keep it a secret. Bye for now.