Challenge

David Paffenholz, cofounder and CEO, and Ishan Gupta, cofounder and CTO, launched Juicebox in 2022 to address a clear gap in recruiting: teams were stitching together fragmented tools, manual sourcing and keyword searches instead of leveraging scalable, intelligent automation. Today, the Juicebox team has grown to more than 50 employees and offers widely adopted products like Network Sourcing and 24/7 sourcing agents. Much of that momentum comes from a company culture centred on speed, efficiency and continuous iteration.

In selecting a payment provider, Paffenholz and Gupta prioritised ease of use for both businesses and internal teams. Businesses needed to be able to pay quickly and easily using their preferred payment methods and, as Juicebox expanded globally, in their local currencies. Because Juicebox operates on a subscription-based business model, it also needed payments infrastructure designed to increase authorisation rates and reduce declines, helping minimise involuntary churn.

All of this needed to be simple to manage and maintain: "We run a lean team and we need infrastructure that just works in the background, so we can focus on our product and our customers," said Eric Lee, head of finance at Juicebox.

Juicebox also wanted a partner that would help it scale and evolve in the years to come while maintaining a lean finance and accounting function. "We wanted a partner we could grow into rather than grow out of," said Lee.

Solution

After considering several payment providers, Juicebox chose Stripe for the breadth of its solutions and its reputation as a trusted, reliable partner.

Based on its global expansion goals, Juicebox implemented Stripe Payments, which supports 195 countries and more than 135 currencies. Through Payments, Juicebox gained access to Stripe's Optimized Checkout Suite. The suite includes embeddable UI elements through Stripe Checkout, a prebuilt payment form optimised for conversion. It also provides local payment methods and Link, a digital wallet built by Stripe that lets customers autofill payment details to pay faster and more easily.

Juicebox initially turned on payment methods that included credit and debit cards, ACH payments, Apple Pay, Google Pay and Cash App Pay. The team also enabled Adaptive Pricing, allowing businesses to pay in their local currencies.

Juicebox also chose Stripe Authorisation Boost, which combines Stripe's AI-powered acceptance optimisations, including Adaptive Acceptance, network tokens and card account updater to minimise declined payments and increase acceptance rates.

To manage billing, Juicebox implemented Stripe Billing, Stripe's platform for managing pricing, reducing churn and growing revenue. The team used Billing to support its two subscription models, giving businesses the option to pay either per seat or per agent. With Billing, Juicebox gained access to Smart Retries, a tool that predicts the optimal time to retry a payment using AI trained on billions of data points across the Stripe network.

For its finance and accounting, Juicebox implemented Stripe Revenue Recognition as a source of truth and subledger for revenue. The team also connected Stripe to Juicebox's ERP and uses Revenue Recognition alongside the ERP to ensure accuracy across accounting calculations.

Results

Juicebox now enables easy payments with a 98% authorisation rate

With Stripe, Juicebox implemented a variety of optimisations that minimise the churn risk common to subscription-based businesses. Using Stripe's churn reduction features, Juicebox has achieved an authorisation rate of over 98%.

Payment volume now grows 20% month over month across a global customer base

Over the last few years, Juicebox has grown payment volume by 20% month over month as its customer base has expanded worldwide. Today, Juicebox serves more than 5,000 businesses, ranging from one-person startups to Fortune 500 companies with thousands of employees. Approximately 24% of its payment volume now comes from outside the United States.

"It only takes one minute for a customer to sign up and start their subscription," said Lee. "It could not be easier."

Businesses on Juicebox are also taking advantage of Link, which speeds up checkout by autofilling details. Since launch, 575 businesses on Juicebox have created Link accounts, and 30% of transactions now use Link.

Finance and accounting operate as a team of one

Though Juicebox has raised $116 million in funding, efficiency remains central to the company's DNA. Unifying payments functionality and data on Stripe has helped the team grow to more than 5,000 businesses on its platform while keeping its operations lean. "Stripe lets our finance and accounting function operate essentially as a team of one by centralising invoicing, payment collection, customer billing changes and reporting in one place," said Lee.

A lean engineering team stays focused on product innovation and customer experience

From the beginning, Stripe met Juicebox's needs for a platform that was easy to implement and manage. "The process of getting Stripe up and running went very smoothly," said Lee.

As Juicebox continues to grow, the company has relied on Stripe to keep its engineers focused on building the product and improving the customer experience. Support team members can easily look up billing histories, answer questions, resolve issues and update payment methods without needing to involve engineering or finance teams.

"For me, Stripe's main benefit is how easy it is to use," said Lee. "I spend minimal time on the platform, which is critical when we're managing this many customers."