Richard Moot: Hello and welcome to the Square Developer Podcast. I'm your host, Richard Moot, head of developer relations here at Square, and today I'm joined by Ryan from Payable. Thank you so much for being here. Ryan, could you go ahead and just give us an intro of yourself and tell us a little bit about Payable?Ryan May: Yeah, for sure. Thanks for having us. So Payable Apps has been a Square partner for probably about three or four years now. We got started by making connections with Google applications, so everybody knows Google Forms and Google Sheets and how easy they are to use. And what we did is we made a payment connection for Google Forms and Google Sheets so you could connect them to a payment provider like Square, and then as while you're creating a Google form for somebody to fill out, whether it's a t-shirt signup or a membership or an order form, it can also take payment right inside that Google form for you and keep small businesses organized inside the software.Richard Moot: I've always really loved the idea of what you guys have built because it's taking something that is really simple and ubiquitous with a lot of small businesses and then allowing them to make sales using that make, it's really meeting them where they are and with something that they're familiar with.Ryan May: Yeah, I agree. Micro sellers are huge. There are so many of them out there. Almost everybody has a side hustle or they're doing something to try to turn their passion into a business, and they're all using free tools. They want to use free tools as much as they can. And so our goal was to take some of those free tools like the Google Suite, which has some handicap, some lack of advanced features, and try to just build it out just enough so that it is good enough for somebody who's doing five orders a day, 25 orders a day, until they grow that business into something more serious. It actually is a really good solution for them.Richard Moot: Yeah. So I'm curious, where did the inspiration from this originally come from?Ryan May: Yeah, I mean it as actually my co-founder real world situation, it was during COD, her boss tasked her with this task of saying, Hey, I need you to go around the office and get everybody's t-shirt size for this event, and you have to collect $20 from every one of them for this team outing event. So she was like, okay, well no worries. I'll use a Google form and I'll get your name and whether you're going to attend and if you have any allergies, what your food preference is, and ask for your t-shirt size. And she was like, why can't a Google form also just ask for $20? Because it became a nightmare. She had to get, some people were paying her with e-transfer, some people were bringing cash to her desk. It was all over the place and it was up to her to manage this collection of funds.And she goes to me, my background is in payments. She's like, well, Ryan, why can't we do this? Why can't a Google form also just have a pay with credit card button attached to the end of it? And I was like, there's all these PCI compliance and all these rules and it's not extendable in that way. And I was like, yeah, it's just not possible. But I sat there thinking about it a little bit one night and I was like, you know what? I think I looked at Google's developer docs and how you could extend it. And I thought if you were a little bit creative, you might be able to tack on an extra page and collect payment and do this in line to make it look very native and secure with the payment providers like Square or Stripe or PayPal. So we started with PayPal and we launched it and I said, well, if I'm going to build it for you, I might as well build it for everyone. Why build code once? So if I'm going to build this little solution for you, we might as well build it together.So that was the idea. And yeah, that was our first app called Payable Google Forms. And since then it's been downloaded over, we now have a hundred thousand different active small businesses who use it on a given month, and it's one of the more popular Google form payment and accounting add-ons that exist in the marketplace today, so it really has grown. It hits that one simple problem where people really know how to set up a Google form. Almost everybody has done it, and they just add Payable options inside of it. And it's live and easy for them, especially for things that are one-offs. Like we think about life and there are people who are creating a business and they want to have, I'm opening a t-shirt shop and I'm going to sell t-shirts all day every day. But for people who are tasked with these rare or seasonal or occasional projects, something like a Payable Google form is a really good way to set something up and go live quickly.Richard Moot: Yeah, no, I mean, it makes perfect sense. I mean, there's an interesting kind of parallel between, in that same Micro seller space that we used to see initially with Square was you go to a farmer's ...
