Ever participate in after-school programs as a kid? Whether it was physical, creative, or intellectual in nature, you’d get to spend a few hours every day building key skills in many developmental areas — or maybe you were just partaking in tomfoolery with friends. Nevertheless, after-school programs have been invaluable to so many, including Sean McGrath, who’s able to contribute to the programs he loved growing up as the current CTO and co-founder of LaunchPad.
LaunchPad, a youth-activity management platform, provides business owners and after-school educators with modern scheduling, sales, communication tools and other purpose-built features to streamline their program operations. While the software stands perfectly tall on its own, Sean saw the value that adding payments could bring to LaunchPad’s portfolio (and their bottom line).
LaunchPad Vetted A Few Payment Solutions Before Finding the Right Fit
Sean reached out to Stripe first, assuming it would be the best option for LaunchPad. However, after seeing what Stripe could offer in terms of a revenue share, Sean moved on to other market players including Payrix, Finix, and Tilled. The latter stood out to Sean, as Tilled’s solution could allow LaunchPad to offer a modern payment experience to end-users while earning substantial commissions from payments with Tilled’s revenue shares.
First Impressions of PayFac-as-a-Service: Clean APIs and A+ Customer Support
When introduced to Tilled’s PayFac-as-a-Service, Sean noted he appreciated that it was newer technology, and that the APIs felt fresh compared to some of the others he’d seen served up in the market. Beyond the modern APIs, though, Sean was won over by the attentiveness that a smaller company like Tilled was able to offer partners.
Once they committed to Tilled, LaunchPad didn’t waste any time getting up and running with payments, thanks to Tilled’s easy-to-understand API docs and sandbox access. By leveraging these two resources, the LaunchPad team quickly gained a clear picture of how the integration worked and boom, they were off to the races from there.
Once implementation was officially underway, it took less than four days for LaunchPad to start processing payments; having kicked things off on a Wednesday and moving money by Friday.
“There were very few surprises [throughout implementation], which I wanted. I wanted it to be intuitive, guessable — all the good things you want in a software — and it was.”
Gaining a Competitive Edge With Tilled
With Tilled’s support, LaunchPad was also able to configure their integration to better accommodate their unique business flow.
Now, LaunchPad can share securely stored payment information between merchants, allowing their end-users to add card information once and use that for any future purchases with businesses who leverage LaunchPad’s platform.
Ultimately, this ‘one-time’ payment experience has given LaunchPad a leg up on other competitors in the space — something Sean says they have Tilled to thank for.
How Things Are Going Now
Since wrapping implementation a few months ago, LaunchPad is exploring all that PayFac-as-a-Service can offer; with Sean noting that there hasn’t been anything that they’ve wanted to do with the product that Tilled hasn’t let them do. They’ve had no issues with the merchant onboarding process either; applications continue to move through the funnel without a hitch. When they do encounter hiccups, they can easily communicate with Tilled and rely on Tilled’s team to prioritize any problems and resolve them effectively.
Get Started With PayFac-as-a-Service Today
LaunchPad is using Tilled to add value to their core product and their bottom line. Want to be more like LaunchPad? Get started below.
