How Apideck CEO Gertjan De Wilde grew Apideck to $1.3M revenue and 75 customers in 2024.

API was launched API deck was launched in 2018 they're doing fifty thousand dollars a month today in Revenue up from twenty five thousand a month just a year ago so 100 a year over year growth serving 75 customers helping them to connect to apis faster they service over 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 are sitting on a million dollar seed round raised last year they cap between 10 and 15 million 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 dewild he's the Builder of directories a second time founder and today co-founder and CEO of API deck he's interested in apis plg network effects open source and the developer experience again you can follow along at apidec.com they help developers build Integrations faster GJ you ready to take us to the top yeah definitely thanks for inviting me 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 yeah that's what many companies think but we go actually one layer beneath it to really deliver the apis bare metal where you're able to tap into multiple API categories where we actually data standardization for us 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 SAS API integration you're building so are you helping like a Founder path wants to launch our own API you'd help us launch that or you'd help my Engineers work with other apis we help your engineers connect to other apis I see so like kodat for example does this in the fintech space or or plaid and Teller do this for financial data and Bank transactions this is what you're doing but to connect to any SAS platform exactly and coded as one of our competitors ah okay are you better than them definitely we have another approach I think they're trying to Target the different segments we're working really towards SAS 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 and what are customers paying on average per month it's around 10K per month uh per month no sorry that's per year so it would be around 800 900 in mrr okay and what do you upsell against is a number of API connections launched number of API calls per month how do you price number of API calls is an important level 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 keep it based on the amount of customers that they're linking to integration 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 customers do you have today currently we have around 75 paying customers globally and it ranges from pre-revenue companies to public companies even that's amazing so can I take 75 customers at 850 bucks a month you're doing about 63 64 000 a month in Revenue uh we're getting there yeah can you actually initially start with another product which is lower in ACV size so it's a bit of a blend of the two so are you what's what's mrr today like 50 000 around 50 000 that we're going to be at 1 million error very soon that's amazing can you hit 1 million AR this year you think yeah definitely definitely and if you're at fifty thousand dollars a month today where are you exactly one year ago we were at one year ago we were at like 25k wow so and have you so you've doubled over the past year have you done this bootstrapped or have you raised uh Capital GJ we actually raised some funding from angels we have a lot of VC interests but we actually try to uh hit the right metrics first before actually uh putting the below to the metal and really putting Rocket Fuel and to to get like that the most market share so at this point we didn't raise PC money yet how much did you raise from angels in what year uh uh more than one million that I can save and you do that last year uh yeah most of which we did last year and was that on a safe and uncapped safe or did it have a cap uh it was kept to certain amounts yeah how do you negotiate the cap five million 10 million uh it's actually larger than that so we're really trying to to build the hybrid Road company so we put it high enough to to also make it work for for the rest of the team make sure that we can hit the right metrics and I can also can convert it at uh yeah an advantage for us as the team oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built the into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out I'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your founder path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different valuation private Equity Firm is different if you're going to 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 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 not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on YouTube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to 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 going out right now and you're raising your seed round well 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 data set of SAS valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your evaluation 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 all right let's jump back into the interview when you say hi you mean something like 15 million it's a little bit uh between 10 and 15 let us say 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 good question I think what charms are Angels was mostly the amount of customers that are coming in bounce discovering apiatic as a platform also the amount of connectors and apis we already shipped with a very small team how many also the 10 um how many apis have you shipped now around nine nine we just shipped an e-commerce API and issue tracking API last month so it's going fast how many so like when you say eight you know API shipped do you mean like the HubSpot API you now connect with the sales like like what do you mean by that apis are really the unified apis that we have like accounting data is one of those e-commerce data CRM data contrast data so just to be clear like you have CRM API and any list Zoho Salesforce pipedrive 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 all together now a 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 so it's going how do you keep these all up to date I mean we we integrated founder path 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 how do you keep a hundred of them up to date good question we initially invest a lot of resources 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 like to have a real contract how they should behave and then we built our own API monitoring solution which is a source called...