Apideck Revenue, Valuation & Funding (2024)

[00:00] API was launched apideck was launched in 2018. They're doing $50,000 a month today in revenue, up from 25,000 a month just a year ago. So a 100% year over year growth serving 75 customers, helping them to connect to APIs fast. They service over a 100 connectors right now across nine different categories like e commerce or HR tools or CRM tools. They're burning net burn 30,000 per month right now, but they have plenty of cash. They're sitting [00:23] on a million dollar seed round raised last year with a cap between 10 and 15,000,000 and looking at raising more later this year as he goes and aims to build a deck of corn. Hey folks, my guest today is GJ De Wilde. He's a builder of directories, a second time founder and today co founder and CEO of apideck. He's interested in APIs, PLG Network Effects, open source, and the developer experience. Again, you can follow along at [00:45] apideck.com. They help developers build integrations faster. GJ, you ready to take us to the top? [00:52] >> Yeah. Definitely. Thanks for inviting me. [00:54] You bet. So when you say help developers build engine build integrations faster, it sounds sort of like it sounds like Zapier a bit. Is that the right thing way to think about you? [01:04] >> Yeah. That's what many companies think where we go actually one layer beneath that to really deliver the APIs per metal, where you're able to tap into multiple API categories, where we actually take that standardization for us and where we try to build a developer experience similar like you used to from Stripe, Twilio, and other API first companies and try to bring that to every SaaS API integration you're building. [01:32] So are you helping, like, Founderpath wants to launch our own API, you'd help us launch that or you'd help my engineers work with other APIs? [01:41] >> We help your engineers connect to other APIs. That would be the setup. [01:45] I see. So, like, Kodat, for example, does this in the fintech space or or Plaid and Teller do this for financial data transactions. This is what you're doing, but to connect to any SaaS platform. [01:58] >> Exactly. And Codec is one of our competitors. [02:01] Ah, okay. Are you better than them? [02:04] >> Definitely. We have another approach. We are trying to target the different segments. We are working really towards SaaS companies to handle different integration needs, not only to commerce data and accounting data, we go beyond that. So we try to be the holistic provider to solve your integration needs with one unified API player. [02:23] And what are customers paying you on average per month? [02:28] >> It's around 10 k. Per month? Per month. No. Sorry. That's per year. So it would be around $809,100 in MRR. [02:37] Okay. And what do you upsell against? Is it number of API connections launched, number of API calls per month? How do you price? [02:45] >> Number of API calls is an important lever for us, but also the amount of unified APIs customers are using is an important one. And also why customers love us is the fact that we don't try to cap it based on the amount of customers that they are linking to integrations. So they're able to use our building blocks to build any integration workflow, and that really helps them solve a lot of different use cases. And how many [03:10] >> customers do you have today? [03:13] >> Currently, we have around 75 paying customers globally, and that ranges from pre revenue companies to public companies even. [03:22] That's amazing. So can I take 75 customers at $850 a month? [03:26] >> You're doing about $6,364,000 dollars a month in revenue? [03:31] >> We are getting there. Yeah. When can [03:34] you hit [03:34] >> initially start [03:37] >> with another product, which is lower in ACV size. So it's a bit of a blend of the two. [03:42] So are you what what's what's MRR today? Like, 50,000? [03:47] >> Around 50,000. Then we're going to be at 1,000,000 ARR very soon. [03:51] That's amazing. Can you hit 1,000,000 ARR this year, you think? [03:56] >> Yeah. Definitely. Definitely. [03:57] And if you're at $50,000 a month today, where are you exactly one year ago? [04:03] >> We were at one year ago, we were at like 25 k. [04:08] Wow. [04:09] So and have you so you've doubled over the past year. Have you done this bootstrapped or have you raised capital, GJ? [04:16] >> We actually raised some funding from angels. We have a lot of VC interest, but we're actually trying to hit the right metrics first before actually putting the pedal to the metal and really putting rocket fuel and to to get like the the most market share. So at this point, we didn't raise PC money yet. [04:35] How much did you raise from Angels in what year? [04:40] >> More than 1,000,000 that I can say of. [04:44] And you did that last year? [04:47] >> Yeah. Most of it we did last year. [04:49] And was that on a safe and uncapped safe or did it have a cap? [04:55] >> It was kept to a certain amount. Yeah. [04:58] How do you negotiate the cap? 5,000,000, 10,000,000? [05:04] >> It's actually larger than that. So we're really trying to build a high growth company. So we put it high enough to also make it work for the rest of the team and make sure that we can hit the right metrics and also can convert it at, yeah, an advantage for us as the team. [05:23] Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this, you love watching these interviews with SaaS founders, but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 interviews I've done manually. Saves you a lot of time. Well, we've done this. We've built it into the beautiful interface inside of Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you connect [05:46] your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time. You can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna [06:10] get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation. Private equity firm is different. If you're gonna do a minority sale, that's different. And if you sell the whole business, that's a different valuation. You can see all those when I hover over here, Right? So the teal is what a VC would pay. Yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright. Now what's cool about this is this is [06:32] not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder share with us on the show. So traction, 1,200,000 seed round, 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna see companies that have sold the whole business. Well, here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple. Maybe you're [06:58] going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down, what they raised, what valuation they raised at, and what percent that they sold. There's never been a larger dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. Alright. We're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second, but if [07:20] you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link. This link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. Or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products, click on get your valuation here, and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl. Again, all that valuation data live right inside the platform. I hope to see you there. Alright. Let's jump back into the [07:46] interview. When you say high, you mean something like 15,000,000? [07:52] >> It's a little bit between 10 and 15, let us say. [07:55] That's perfect. How were you able to get that cap considering you were only doing at the time 25,000 a month in revenue? [08:03] >> Good question. I think what charmed our angels was mostly the amount of customers that are coming in bound discovering apideck as a platform. Also the amount of connectors and APIs we already shipped with a very small team. [08:22] How many? [08:23] >> And also the TAM. [08:25] >> How many APIs have you shipped? [08:29] >> Now around nine. Nine. We just shipped an e commerce API and issue tracking API last month. So it's going fast. [08:37] How many so like when you say a you know, API shipped, do mean like the HubSpot API you now connect with? The sales, like what do you mean by that? [08:46] >> APIs are really the unified APIs that we have. Like accounting data is one of those, e commerce data, CRM data, Got it. HRs [08:55] just to be clear, you have CRM API, then you list Zoho, Salesforce, Pipedrive, and then you have HRIS API, file storage API. So when you say nine APIs, that's you have nine categories of APIs launched, like CRM, file storage accounting. But under each of those, there's a bunch more integrations. How many do you have under each of those altogether? [09:16] >> Now, little bit more than 100 recently. So we're shipping a lot of new connectors. I think we had like 15 in the last four weeks. [09:25] So it's going pretty keep these all [09:28] >> up to date? I mean, we we integrated Founderpath maybe like six or seven APIs, and they're always changing. I mean, it takes two full time engineers just to keep them up to date every week. [09:37] How do you keep a 100 of them up to date? [09:40] >> Good question. We initially invest a lot of resource in trying to automate as much as we can of the magic internally by looking at how others APIs behave, creating specs around those APIs to have a real contract, how they should behave. And then we built our own API monitoring solution, which is open source called Portman. And that enables us to monitor those APIs for changes. And that can also help us with scaling and making sure that [10:07] >> the integrations that our customers are relying on, that they don't break and that we can also easily scale now from the 100 connectors in the coming years to 1,000 or maybe 2,000 different connectors for our customers. [10:20] Very cool. When did you launch the company? What year? [10:24] >> We launched it in 2018 with our first product and actually launched only our first unified APIs one and a half year ago. [10:34] So between 2018 and 2021, when you guys, it sounds like you were maybe pre revenue, how are you making money? How are you paying your bills? [10:43] >> Yeah, at that time it was mostly my brother and me at that time, and we were already closing some customers. We had a few small angel tickets, and that enabled us to really build the foundation that we are able to use today to really scale out the platform, map difficult APIs to our platform, I really were able to focus on quality and that enabled us to accelerate now in the past two years as well. [11:10] And how do you think today about profitability? Are you guys generating a profit monthly today or are you still burning money each month? [11:17] >> We're still burning each month, but it's manageable at this point. And we're also looking to like raise VC money in the upcoming year. So that's our target at this point to make sure that we can really invest in the right things that we can get like the most market share because this is really a tough problem for a lot of The number of SaaS companies is exploding. I don't need to tell you, you're well experienced in [11:45] >> the area, but that's also a large opportunity because everyone needs integrations. If you don't have integrations, you're dead in the water and you need to integrate with larger platforms like NetSuite, Workday, but also Salesforce. And those companies are never going to integrate with you. And that's where you really can benefit from the power of unified APIs. [12:05] So when you say you're still burning, say, how much are you burning? What's net burn per month? [12:11] >> I would say around 30 at this point. [12:14] Does that make you nervous at all? [12:16] >> No. Not at all. We have a lot of great investors who are looking to to do more, so no. Not at all. [12:23] So you mentioned you're maybe raising here later this year. How much are you targeting to raise? [12:29] >> Really depends on the market environment. We don't know yet. It really depends. [12:34] How what would you value your company at today? You know, you're doing $600,000 a year in ARR growing a 100% year over year. [12:42] >> That's a great question. [12:46] >> For me itself, I think we're building a deck of board. So that's my target to really put a price on that. I I really don't know at this point. [12:54] Alright. What's the team site today? How many folks full time? [12:58] >> We have 10 full time people on the team right now. [13:02] And how many are engineers? [13:05] >> I would say 90%. I count my co founder also as an engineer, so most of the people on the team are technical. They're doing daily customer support, which our customers also love. So we now recently added one commercial member to our team, and he's now focusing on making sure that we can do also more outbound that really can have, yeah, The great mix of having that PLG motion, but also with larger enterprise customers. [13:33] Is that what you're betting on? I mean, do you double triple the company? Are you gonna rely on an outbound model or are you gonna grow some other way? [13:41] >> We we really believe in doubling down our PLG approach. We do know that there's definitely a lot more opportunity outside of our inbounds interest that we can generate. So doing outbound is still the the right thing to do at this point. [13:55] Yep. Let's say you go into this fundraising round and someone offers you $5,000,000 at a $30,000,000 valuation. Let's say you had also someone willing to pay you 30,000,000 all cash upfront to acquire the whole company. Would you sell the company for 30,000,000 all cash? [14:10] >> Never. He said that. [14:12] Said this very quickly, [14:15] >> which I love. Alright. [14:16] Very cool. Let's wrap up here with the famous five, GJ. Number one, what's your favorite book? [14:21] >> My favorite book is actually from the founder or CEO from Snowflake. Can't Frank it's a good one. What's the name again? Do you know? [14:33] >> I forget what the book's called, but his name is Frank Slootman and the book is a blue book. Yeah. It's a good book. Number It's insane. [14:43] Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying right now? [14:48] >> Jason M. Lemkin is not really a CEO anymore, but I love the content that he's putting out daily. So I really love his approach. [14:56] Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building apideck? [15:02] >> Well, great question. I would say online tool, can it be open source? Sure. [15:10] >> Open API specs. So it's more like a concept, but that's really what's driving most of our automation and making sure that we can build [15:17] >> the right stuff. [15:18] Number three, how many hours of sleep or four? How many hours of sleep to get every night? [15:23] >> That ranges. I would say around five. [15:26] Okay. And what's the situation, GJ? Married, single, [15:29] >> kids? [15:31] >> I have a girlfriend, but not married yet. [15:36] No kids? [15:37] >> No kids. [15:37] Alright, GJ. And how old are you? [15:41] >> I am now 32. [15:42] 32. Last question. What's something you wish [15:45] you knew when you were 20? [15:50] >> That you need to have patience, that you can't brute force any problem, that you need to wait for the right moment for a certain idea or concept to get traction. So be patient and then you will get lucky. [16:04] API was launched, apideck was launched in 2018. They're doing $50,000 a month today in revenue, up from 25,000 a month just a year ago. So a 100% year over year growth, serving 75 customers, helping them to connect to APIs faster. They service over a 100 connectors right now across nine different categories like e commerce or HR tools or CRM tools. They're burning net burn 30,000 per month right now, but they have plenty of cash. They're sitting [16:28] on a million dollar seed round raised last year with a cap between 10 and 15,000,000 and looking at raising more later this year as he goes and aims to build a Decacorn. GJ, thanks for taking us to the top. [16:39] >> Thank you. Thanks for the invite. Definitely love the interview. [16:43] One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM Central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. We call it deal or bust. One founder comes on, three hungry buyers, they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards, their expenses, their revenue, ARPU CAC, LTV, you name it, they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live. 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In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, but I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people. We [18:11] got to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. Alright, I'll be in the comments. See you.