How Any.do Scaled to Over 100,000 Paying Subscribers and 150% Growth in Six Months (Interview with Founder and CEO Omer Perchik)

Introduction and What Any.do Does

Nathan Latka

00:01Hello everyone. My guest today is Omer Perchik. He is the founder and CEO of a company called Any.do. That's Any. Do. All right, Omer, are ready to take us to the top?

Omer Perchik

00:01Sounds good.

Nathan Latka

00:01All right, tell us about the company. What do you guys do and how do you make money?

Business Model and Paying Subscribers

Omer Perchik

00:14So Any.do is the world's most popular task management app with over 20,000,000 users with a current business model of subscription where people can pay us for features within the product. We have over a 100,000 paying subscribers growing pretty rapidly.

Growth Rate Discussion

Nathan Latka

00:30What's rapid gain? Like are you talking like a 100% year over year growth or?

Omer Perchik

00:34More than that. More than a 100% year over year.

Nathan Latka

00:37Okay. But I mean like wait like 400% or between a 100 and Like

Omer Perchik

00:40we don't like we don't discuss these details, but I can say that it's more

00:43than 100

Nathan Latka

00:43You can't come on the show and

00:47say, We're growing really, really fast. And then when I say, Well, what's the number? And go, I don't know.

Omer Perchik

00:53So I can say that within the last six months, only the last six months we've grown like 150%.

Nathan Latka

01:01Then give us more the backstory. So when did you launch the company?

Omer Perchik

01:04So we launched the company back in 2011, across initially Android, like late of twenty eleven, then Android, then iOS.

01:14And web. We've grown to become the most popular one through the fact that we really focused on design early on, so everybody does well designed product these days, but back in the day when we started, nobody did.

Nathan Latka

01:27I hear child labor in the background.

Omer Perchik

01:29Yeah. So it's in the far distance. I apologize. Like, I closed myself in the room at the end of the house.

Nathan Latka

01:36I'm kidding. How many how many kiddos you have?

Omer Perchik

01:38I I have one kid. Sorry about that.

Nathan Latka

01:40That's very cool. That's great. Okay, good. Twenty eleven productivity tool. Walk me through, if someone listening right now wants to use this, I mean, will they pay you on average per month?

Subscription Pricing and Paid Acquisition

Omer Perchik

01:49So the subscription is like $35 a year. One of the unique things about our product is that it's very similar to the psychology of a gym. So a lot of people are willing to pay upfront for a subscription model because they're kind of like want to show commitment to the type of product that they'll be using. So vast majority of the conversion happens really early on within the product. And more recently, we just started doing paid

02:17acquisition. So until December of last year, we've never done any paid acquisition whatsoever. And in December we started and very, very quickly we got to the point where customer acquisition cost is actually lower than day one ARPU.

Nathan Latka

02:32Meaning just to be clear, they pay $35 for the year up front. You're saying your CAC is below 35. So you get paid back on a cash basis immediately.

Omer Perchik

02:40Yeah. Within one day.

Nathan Latka

02:43Yeah. On a on a on a revenue recognition basis, obviously, it might be many months. That's super healthy. Why did you wait so long to try paid?

The AI Personal Assistant Vision

Omer Perchik

02:52Because the business model that the company aims

02:59to become over time is less premium subscription and more about completion of tasks. So the idea behind the company is not to really build a to do list with subscription. It's to build a to do list that does itself, which requires heavy AI and humans that we've been for many, many years, and we've more recently started launching it for a small segment of users. And that's our future business model. But in order to pay the bills

03:28and in order to grow faster, we had to build, like we had to plug in, you know, a subscription business and that worked very well for us.

Nathan Latka

03:35How do you say it's like task completion is your future business model? I mean, you could argue that you have no control over this. You don't know what task people are gonna put in your system and you don't know when they're gonna complete them.

How the Assistant Works in Practice

Omer Perchik

03:45No, so we basically, we've developed a personal assistant service within our product that basically does your tasks for you. So think about it as kind of like, let's let's just give an example. You write down a task buy flowers for Stacy, our system automatically detects it as something that we can help you with. We put a button next to the task, you tap on the task, it starts a conversational thread between you and an assistant that

04:12asks you for all the relevant questions. How much do you want to spend? When do you want to get it delivered? Where to? And stuff like that. You respond and then within seconds, you'll get a bunch of suggestions of things that perfectly fit to what you're looking for. And we do anything from buying flowers to booking up your next trip, to canceling your Verizon account, to scheduling your appointment with a dentist. We do a very wide

04:37variety of things and you will essentially be paying us essentially per transaction or with a subscription model. It will vary in the future, but that's kind of our long term business model that we're looking for. So it's going to be, in a way, one side of the market will be kind of a marketplace like, like AdWords lead gen type of model, and the other side will be subscription based, which will have additional benefits for the users.

Nathan Latka

05:03Yeah, I mean, gave two examples which make perfect sense with your model, but I mean, people putting their own tasks into your system. I mean, how do you codify that? I mean, there might be spelling errors. It might be something like send employee offer letter to James.

Omer Perchik

05:16Years and years of NLP and

Nathan Latka

05:19give me that example though. My task is get offer letter to James before the end of the day on Friday.

Omer Perchik

05:25Yeah, so in this particular case, so like it's okay, one thing that you're asking, like what you're saying is a task that we won't be able to do. So there is a large portion of tasks that we will never be able to either However, understand or

05:40for years we've developed AI and machine learning to be able to detect tasks that we can do.

Nathan Latka

05:40Got it.

Omer Perchik

05:40And that portion is actually very, very high. So we can't really say the number, but it's a very high number. It's decent tens of percentages

05:56from within our database.

Nathan Latka

05:57Can you say in the millions of tasks you feel like you can replicate? Okay.

Omer Perchik

06:02No, no. So I'm trying to think what's the best number I can give you.

06:11Tens of percents. It's over 20% of the tasks we're getting on a daily basis.

Nathan Latka

06:16Oh, I see.

Omer Perchik

06:17Think we're keep you complete. And every day we're getting over a million tasks coming in every every new day.

Nathan Latka

06:25So there's 200,000 tasks that you think you can use with machine learning and AI solve.

Omer Perchik

06:30At least. Yeah. At least. The 20% is the bare minimum.

Nathan Latka

06:33And you feel like it will be more efficient for me to have a conversation with your bot about where I want to send the flowers, what the handwritten note I'll should hear make. Okay. Me finish my question. Talking to your system versus just doing what I do today, which is I go Google flower delivery in Denver, Colorado, send to my mom's address, here's the handwritten letter. Why would I take the time to talk to your system

06:53more versus just going and executing the task?

Omer Perchik

06:53Would

06:55be far faster, right now.

Nathan Latka

06:56You're sure it'll be faster.

Omer Perchik

06:58Yeah, it's going to be faster, we're going to learn you. Think about every executive that has an assistant that does all these things for them. You basically will spend a lot of time doing the Google research, signing up, checking in, finding the flowers, all of these things. In this case, you're basically offloading a lot of your work to someone else so you can focus on the things that you're best in. So you'll have more time to

07:20do podcasts or whatever it is. So in our case, it's just the ability to offload things that you're not the best at and you don't want to spend time on. Yes, if you want, you can do them by yourself. There's a portion of people that will never want to utilize a personal assistant. But we believe that

Nathan Latka

07:38Yeah, a lot of I'm my question is not a desire thing. It's just a time thing. You're sure that it will be quicker for me to do the task by talking to your human or bot than it would be for me to just execute it myself.

Omer Perchik

07:49Right. So obviously there will be tasks that it won't be cost effective, but there are tasks that it will be cost effective, and those will be the tasks that we focus on. It's not even necessarily a question of time, right? So let me give an example. If you write down a task that you want to cancel a Verizon account or something, or disconnect from Comcast, it involves so much pain for you and so much mental headache

08:12that you would just like, okay, I'll even pay $200 to get it off my plate, and let someone else take care of it for me. There are a lot of things in our daily lives that are just hectic that we do over and over again. We don't enjoy doing, but we need to do. And our claim is, no, you don't have to do that. Someone else can do that on your behalf, and we can actually surface

08:34these type of services for everyday people within a simple app they're only using to manage their everyday life.

Nathan Latka

08:40Yeah. This is like Fiverr started by getting a marketplace of people that could do tasks. You're doing this basically marketplace, but from the other side, you're getting the whole task list and then kind of aggregating and you'll solve it on the back end how to get them done.

Omer Perchik

08:52Right. Right.

Nathan Latka

08:53That's great.

Omer Perchik

08:54It's a... In a way. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

08:55Yeah. No. It makes a lot of sense. Okay. So let me just summarize here. Launched in 2011, twelve month payback, just turned on kind of paid acquisition, growing a 150% over the past six months alone. You've passed a 100,000 paying customers, right? That's what you said at the beginning.

Omer Perchik

08:55Right.

Nathan Latka

08:55Okay. I mean, if they're paying $35 a pop, you guys are north of $3,500,000 in ARR. Okay. And, and is that your only revenue model? There's no

09:17marketplace. There's no transaction fee right

Omer Perchik

09:17No,

Nathan Latka

09:17Okay. When does that launch?

Omer Perchik

09:22It's already launched, but we're still in alpha mode. So there's about a thousand users in The US that are currently getting AB tested and we are working on kind of what we define as KPIs that are like the answer for yes, we have product market fit. Right now we don't feel like we have a strong enough product market fit, so we're iterating.

Nathan Latka

09:41Okay, got it. And again, from a growth perspective, 3,500,000 today, which means you're at call it 1.25 or sorry, one point seven five six months ago. And that's accurate, It's 150% growth?

Omer Perchik

09:52Yeah, something like that.

Churn and Retention Metrics

Nathan Latka

09:53Okay. Churn, super tricky in this kind of space, at least other task management tools I've talked to. Tell me about your churn.

Omer Perchik

09:59So churn on what? On paid customers or on users using the app? What type of churn?

Nathan Latka

10:06Well this is more for me about you. What do you care more about?

Omer Perchik

10:11I care about both, but

Nathan Latka

10:13Okay, me both.

Omer Perchik

10:15So churn for paying customers zero per year because it's mostly yearly users, so it's 40%,

10:27which I think is okay, I don't know.

Nathan Latka

10:29So 40% is kind of gross logo churn per year.

Omer Perchik

10:33Yeah.

Nathan Latka

10:34Yeah. So what do you mean? You kind of shut off that and say, I don't know if that's good or bad.

Omer Perchik

10:38I don't have a lot of benchmark on that. I don't know whether it's a good number or a bad number, but

10:46that's the data that we have. On a retention basis and stuff like that, I can share a lot about user retention compared to our actual numbers, but I can say that from benchmark tests that we've had, both from third parties like SimilarWeb or even Google gave us some data, we have about five to 10x the retention of our competitors, like day seven, day 30, day one. Day one, no, but day 30, have about 6x to 7x

11:17more users in terms of retention.

Nathan Latka

11:21Yeah. Well, so how do you measure retention? Someone logged in on day five? You consider them active?

Omer Perchik

11:26Editing a task, completing a task, one of these two things.

Nathan Latka

11:30Okay.

11:31So it's not just a login?

Omer Perchik

11:32No.

Nathan Latka

11:33Got

11:34it. And so if a cohort signs up today, six months from now, how many of them will create at least one task in that month?

Omer Perchik

11:43This is something that we were not sharing.

Nathan Latka

11:45Okay, got it. And is that something you're not sharing because you feel like you're really good at it or you're not sharing because you're embarrassed and you still need to improve it?

Omer Perchik

11:51No, I think in the market that we're in, we are the first.

Nathan Latka

11:57Okay, got it. You feel like you're above average.

Omer Perchik

11:59Again, think about it as a gym, right? A lot of people sign up to a gym, but a lot of them churn because it's hard for them. But if you had the world's best gym where people come all the time and they're very much fit, would you just share your numbers? I'm not sure.

Nathan Latka

12:13Yeah, not necessarily. I mean, look, the churn number is really high. I mean, 40% churn annually for a SaaS company is like super, super high churn in my opinion, but you're also not really selling B2B. It's really B2C SaaS. Right?

Omer Perchik

12:13Yeah.

Nathan Latka

12:13So maybe it's actually, I don't know B2B, B2C a lot. Maybe that's actually better than average for B2C. Don't know. Tell me more about your team. So, so how many of you guys are there and

12:34where are you guys based?

Team Size and Locations

Omer Perchik

12:35We're 20 people. We're split between Tel Aviv and San Francisco. Vast majority of the team is in Tel Aviv. You know, mostly developers like iOS, Android, web, stuff like that.

Nathan Latka

12:47Are you ex Israeli defense?

Omer Perchik

12:49Yeah. Like everybody.

Nathan Latka

12:50Oh, you really are. I was joking.

Omer Perchik

12:52Actually are. You have to serve the army. So everybody's Israeli defense.

Funding and Profitability

Nathan Latka

12:56That's funny. Okay. Good. And then talk to me about funding. You bootstrapped or raised capital?

Omer Perchik

13:00No. We raised capital. Our biggest investor is 8VC. If you know, Joe Lonsdale.

Nathan Latka

13:05Yeah. Much total have you raised?

Omer Perchik

13:08So publicly, it's 6.5, but it's actually more than that. But we haven't shared the data yet.

Nathan Latka

13:14Is that because you just raised or you raised in the past or

Omer Perchik

13:16you No, don't wanna share because it doesn't matter.

Nathan Latka

13:16Why doesn't it matter?

Omer Perchik

13:16Because why would it matter?

Nathan Latka

13:22Well, just trying to figure out you've already shared 6.5. Why would you not share full? Either you share none of it or you share all of it. I'm curious why you wouldn't share some of it.

Omer Perchik

13:30No, because the 6.5 is already public, and then we kind of made the decision that it's no longer important, and we're just not sharing from that point forward.

Nathan Latka

13:37Well, many people wouldn't share a bridge round if they had to do it because it's bad signal for the company. Did you guys do a bridge round?

Omer Perchik

13:41We're profitable, so it's not about bridge rounds.

Nathan Latka

13:45Oh, you guys are profitable at this point?

Omer Perchik

13:45Yeah.

Nathan Latka

13:45Great. The last round that you did that was public was in what month?

Omer Perchik

13:53The last one, I don't know. Don't I even remember. What is the last thing that is public? We're just not talking about funding. It doesn't matter that much. We're profitable, we're going quickly, we are focused on what we're going after, which is the assistant model. We got to CAC to be lower than day one ARPU. That's the state of the business. The rest is gravy.

Nathan Latka

14:17Yeah. Well, mean, just to be clear though, depending on cash you're working with, could choose to be more aggressive with acquisition or less aggressive. And there's all kinds of... You could choose to go buy up into a roll up strategy if you have a lot of cash on the balance sheet. I I want to try to understand your strategy, right?

Capital Allocation and Growth Strategy

Omer Perchik

14:31My strategy is to really focus on getting to product market fit with the assistant and then not spending money that they don't need to spend because that's the 1000x multiplier on where I'm at. So I can hire a bunch more engineers and I can spend far more money on paid acquisition, but I want to focus it on something that we see a huge upside in, which is the assistant model. And so until we prove that, there

14:56is no point in just wasting investors' money for something that might not work.

Nathan Latka

15:01Okay. You keep contradicting yourself though. So you are spending money on CAC though, but you just said you don't care

Omer Perchik

15:07You about use CAC in a way that I'm profitable within a day. So if I spend $100 today, I make $120 tomorrow, as an example, I'm profitable in doing that. If I'll end up spending, let's say 10x that, I might not get like 10x point two a day later.

Nathan Latka

15:22That's why I'm asking. So you feel

Omer Perchik

15:24like I'm you that balance based on the business decisions that we have, which is we prefer not to spend far more money so we can actually focus on the assistant model.

Nathan Latka

15:36Yeah, but Omer, is that a preference or is that because you can't spend more money at

Omer Perchik

15:36Let's

Nathan Latka

15:36that efficiency

Omer Perchik

15:41put it. As I said, we're profitable. So if we're profitable and we're in this case, it means that we made the decision. We can spend more money. Every profitable company can spend more money. Right? That's kind of like by definition.

Nathan Latka

15:55Yeah. Omer, my question is really simple. I'm asking if you feel like you can hold that cap and that payback at that level, why would you not spend a billion dollars in that channel? That's the question.

Omer Perchik

16:06Because no billion dollars could be spent in a way that is still the higher the spend you have, the lower the ROI becomes, because you're ending up spending to less and less relevant audiences. That's how the market works.

Nathan Latka

16:19That's exactly my question.

Omer Perchik

16:20Theoretical question that doesn't have connection to the real world. That's what I'm saying.

Nathan Latka

16:24No, Omer, it has a very real connection to the real world because there's diminishing returns in any channel. What I'm trying to understand is if you feel like you've actually already maxed out the channel

Omer Perchik

16:24Well, at that far from

Nathan Latka

16:24Okay,

Omer Perchik

16:24maxing

Nathan Latka

16:24and if you feel like you haven't maxed out the channel, you'd spend more in it. So I'm trying to figure out why-

Omer Perchik

16:24It's

16:43a question of what do we think is the most important piece of the business. I can grow faster, but growing faster is not my biggest objective. My biggest objective and where I want to focus vast majority of my resources is to focus on getting the product market fit for the assistant. Everything else is not as interesting. So I do spend some resources on that, but not the vast majority of resources because that's just not as interesting.

Why the Assistant Is the Bigger Opportunity

Omer Perchik

17:09Because that model, over time, subscription based model for a to do list, is a relatively capped market. It's not going to be a multi billion dollar market. Assistant has the potential of being that. And so that's where I'm spending vast majority of my money.

Nathan Latka

17:23You just said you don't care about growing fast, right? But you just articulate...

Omer Perchik

17:27Don't want to grow something that is not interesting enough.

Nathan Latka

17:32Yeah. Yeah. I get it. So the smart system stuff you think is a much larger market. You're okay, a little bit slower growth while you focus on what you think is a much larger opportunity.

Omer Perchik

17:40Correct.

Famous Five: Books, CEOs, and Tools

Nathan Latka

17:41Perfect sense. Alright. Great. Let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite business book?

Omer Perchik

17:46My favorite business? Probably Principles by Ray Dalio.

Nathan Latka

17:49Yeah, that just came out. Did you finish reading it or you're still reading it?

Omer Perchik

17:53Finished reading

Nathan Latka

17:53Amazing.

17:54Good. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying right now?

Omer Perchik

17:58I don't know, like Bezos, I guess.

Nathan Latka

18:01Don't make it up if you're not

18:02actually-

Omer Perchik

18:02Yeah,

18:05Bezos is pretty amazing at this point. Obviously, I am very fortunate to work with Joe Lonsdale, who's a phenomenal Founder and CEO. He's done a lot of things. I'm very privileged to the fact that I can actually get to learn from him. And I am also very fortunate to have worked with some other amazing people

18:25doing Any. So I follow what they say as well. I follow more ill kind of scenario.

Nathan Latka

18:31Number three, besides your own, what's your favorite online tool for growing a business?

Omer Perchik

18:35That's a great question. Probably Intercom recently became a very favorable tool.

Nathan Latka

18:41Got it. Number... And by the way, do they have a product that allows you to kinda leverage their their chat features inside of your mobile apps?

Omer Perchik

18:47Yes.

Nathan Latka

18:48Oh, great. Okay.

18:49Good.

Omer Perchik

18:49Number one using it, but yes.

Nathan Latka

18:50Yeah. Okay. Number four, how many hours of sleep do get every night?

Omer Perchik

18:53Seven.

Nathan Latka

18:53That's pretty good. Because you got a you got a little one. So so married, one kiddo. And how old are you?

Omer Perchik

18:59I'm 33.

Nathan Latka

19:0033.

19:01Last question, what do you wish your 20 year old self knew?

Omer Perchik

19:06What would I say?

Closing Advice on Hiring

Omer Perchik

19:11Most probably I'd say that like in a hiring perspective, when you're building a team that n plus one has to be equal or larger than n.

Nathan Latka

19:23Say that in

Omer Perchik

19:23Yeah,

19:25so n means that every new person that you bring in needs to be better, equal or better than anyone else on the team.

Nathan Latka

19:33Guys, there you have from Omer. Make sure you're hiring someone equal or better than everyone else on the team. That's how you get smarter, better and create a higher density of sharp people. Launched company Any.do in 2011. Now has a 100,000 customers paying $35 per year. So $3,500,000 in AR. That's up a 150% over the last six months alone. They raised 6,000,000, more than $6,000,000, but 6,000,000 publicly. They've raised churn is about 40% gross logo churn

19:56annually, a $35 CAC, so less than a twelve month payback period. But really he's focused on getting into a new space, which is getting the smart assistant working effectively where they can essentially auto complete tasks for you based off volumes they're seeing and trends they're seeing. And the more than a million tasks that go through their system every single day. They're building this with a team of 20 people between Tel Aviv and San Francisco. Omer, thank

20:17you for taking us to the top.

Omer Perchik

20:18Thank you so much.