How Apideck CEO Gertjan De Wilde grew 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 Boardman and that enables us to monitor those apis for changes and that can also help us with scaling and making sure that 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 1000 to maybe 2 000 different connectors for our customers very cool when did you launch the company what year we launched it in 2018 with our first product and actually launched only our first unified apis uh one and a half year ago so between 2018 and 2021 when you guys it sounds like you were maybe pre-revenue um how are you making money how are you paying your bills 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 uh small Angel tickets and that enabled us to really build the foundation that we 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 and how do you think today about profitability are you guys generating a profit monthly today or are you still burning money each month we're still burning each month but it's uh manageable at this point and we're also looking to like race we see money um in the upcoming year so that's our that are that's our Target at this point to make sure that we can really invest in the right things that we can get why the boss market share because this is really a tough problem for a lot of companies the number of SAS companies is exploding I don't need to tell you uh you're well experienced in 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 So when you say you're still burning today how much are you burning what's net burn per month I would say around 30k at this point does that make you nervous at all no not at all we have a lot of great investors who are looking to to do more so no not at all so you mentioned you're maybe raising here later this year how much are you targeting to raise really depends on the market environment we don't know yet it really depends how what would you value your company at today you know you're doing six hundred thousand dollars a year in ARR growing 100 year over year that's a great question um for me itself I think you're building a deck Accord so that's my target to really put a price on the uh I really don't know at this point all right what's the team side today how many folks whole time we have 10 full-time people on team right now and are how many are engineers I would say 90 if I count my co-founder also as an engineer so most of the people on team are technical they're doing daily customer support which our customers also love uh so we now recently added one commercial uh member to our team and he's now focusing on make sure that we can do also more outbound that really can have like uh yeah the great mix of having that plg motion but also with larger uh Enterprise customers is that what you're betting on I mean how do you double triple the company are you going to rely on an outbound model are you going to grow some other way 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 yeah let's say you're going to this fundraising round and someone offers you five million dollars at a 30 million dollar evaluation let's say you had also someone willing to pay you 30 million all cash up front to acquire the whole company would you sell the company for 30 million all cash he said this very quickly which I love all right very cool let's wrap up here with the famous five TJ number one what's your favorite book my favorite book is actually from the founder or CEO from um snowflake uh against Frank swoop man that's a good one uh what's the name again do you know it um I forget the book's call but his name is Frank slootman and the book is a blue book it's a good book number it says say number two is there a CEO you're following or studying right now um 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 number three what's your favorite online tool for building API deck whoa great question I would say online too can it be open source sure um open API specs so it's more like a concept but that's really what's driving most of our our Automation and making sure that we can build the right stuff number three how many hours of sleep or four how many hours of sleep do you get every night uh that ranges uh would say around five okay and what's the situation GJ married single kids yeah I have a girlfriend but not married yet no kids no kids all right GJ and how old are you I am now 32 32 last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20. and that you need to have patience that you can't like breathe Force any problem that you need to wait for the right right moment for uh for a certain idea or concept to get traction so be patient and then you will get lucky API was launched API deck was launched in 2018 they're doing fifty thousand dollars a month today in Revenue up from 25 000 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 a hundred connectors right now across nine different categories like e-commerce or HR tools or CRM tools they're burning netburn 30 000 per month right now but they have plenty of cash are sitting on a million dollar seed round raised last year or 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 GJ thanks for taking us to the top thank you thanks for the invite definitely love the interview one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm Central it's called Shark Tank for SAS 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 our poo CAC LTV you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every 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