An Exclusive Interview with The Co-Founders of Rimuut
An Interview with Esen Bulut & Mert Safak Bulut, Co-Founders of Rimuut
Bestinvoicingsoftware.com sat down with co-founders Esen Bulut and Mert Safek Bulut of highly regarded payment solutions site Rimuut and we discussed a number of interesting matters and they laid out their thoughts on the industry as well as their missions and goals for 2021 and beyond
1. Tell us how your journey in the industry started?
Our journey has begun based on personal and painful experience. One of the two founders, Mert, managed outsourced mobile projects abroad and faced constant invoicing and payment issues as he was unincorporated. Being an innate entrepreneur himself, Mert knew that freelancers worldwide needed a solution for their financial problems, which caused huge barriers. By joining forces with Esen, with a finance background, we came up with the idea of transforming freelancers into virtual companies to be equipped to function as companies without carrying the burden of starting of actually running a company.
When we extensively researched the freelance economy, we saw many problems dealing with billing, settlement, and freelancers’ payment procedures, especially when working with local and global businesses. We focused on solving these problems.
Right now, Rimuut transforms freelancers into virtual companies by equipping them with commercial and managerial tools to handle billing, settlement, and payment. We enable freelancers to easily invoice their corporate clients, get paid, and protect their work by contracts without the financial and mental burden of starting and running their own companies.
Rimuut embarked on its journey in January 2017 by getting admitted into ITU Cekirdek Incubation Center (2nd best in Europe and the 3rd best in the world by the international UBI Global index) was selected among the top 8 startups at Startup Turkey in the EMEA region.
2. What are your Rimuut core values, and how does it reflect in your daily work?
Our primary value is putting the needs of freelancers and the businesses hiring freelancers at the core of our service. Rimuut’s user-focused business strategy is enabling the people who are using Rimuut to empower their businesses. From invoicing to customer support, we focus on the excellence of the user journey and experience.
3. How are you coping as an organization in these times of uncertainty with covid-19 impacting the global financial growth?
Nothing has changed for us. As we believe that remote work is the future of employment, we teamed up with great independent professionals. From day one, we have been working remotely. After the COVID-19 lockdowns, we saw a significant shift to the freelance economy due to rising unemployment rates if we are talking on a business level. This created rapid growth on our side. We won't cheer about it, but COVID-19 has created growth opportunities for us. We are now focused on scaling up our projects to provide more benefits to freelancers around the world.
4. Other than covid-19, what are the biggest challenges the industry and your company are facing?
One of the biggest challenges for us is the perception of freelance jobs or gig jobs. Companies are still trying to adjust their work models to remote working, but we still see prejudice on the companies' side about remote working productivity. The other challenge for us is the excessive and inadequate regulations we see most of the time.
5. Fast forward ten years, how do you see the industry?
Without a doubt, the freelancing industry will grow exponentially, mainly due to automation and rising unemployment rates worldwide. Rimuut's target segment is remote workers, independent professionals, digital nomads, light entrepreneurs and adhoc agencies. As these will grow, the industries will grow with them.
We expect high competition, followed by the monopolization process as every rising star industry has experienced so far. In ten years there will be probably a few players providing services for millions of people. We offer more flexibility, applicability, and broader coverage compared to our competitors. We believe we have the upper hand in the competition.
6. What would you say are your two top three best practices for leading strategy?
The top three best practices we experienced in the last years are, first of all, supporting autonomy to get rid of unnecessary bureaucracy. Secondly, transparency to communicate honestly and directly, and the last one is being agile and disruptive. These are all the practices that shaped us our business dynamics and made us the field's pioneer.
7. What Motivates Your People to Do Their Best?
We believe that independence is the greatest motivation for especially creative people in our field. In our team, we give everyone a space to make sure they can contribute as much as they like. We don’t believe in an old hierarchical workplace environment. Our work scheme is pretty flat. We realized that giving people their freedom in our professional relationship based on mutual trust and respect works better.
8. From your experience, what is the most important thing to consider when using invoicing software?
They should know if the invoicing software is enabling them to work globally when they're doing business beyond borders or if the product is providing flexibility.
9. What would you advise anyone considering taking an invoicing software?
We would advise them to learn more about the services’ flexibility and applicability. For instance, umbrella companies in the UK offer their services to UK freelancers, and Scandinavian competitors mostly provide their services to local customers. Businesses and freelancers can use Rimuut all around the globe. Also, since the services Rimuut offer does not depend on human-dependent transactions, unlike competitors offering tax consultancy and operations, the product is more fundamental/essential. Thus, our model is more scalable.
10. Would you like to share a few words with our audience?
We see freelancers as a part of our exponentially growing community, and we would like to invite them to join us and grow together.
