How Apideck Hit $600K ARR with 100% Year-Over-Year Growth and 75 Customers (Interview with CEO Gertjan De Wilde)

Introduction and Company Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00API 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

00:23on 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

00:45apideck.com. They help developers build integrations faster. GJ, you ready to take us to the top?

GJ De Wilde

00:52>> Yeah. Definitely. Thanks for inviting me.

Nathan Latka

00:54You 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?

How Apideck Differs from Zapier and Competitors

GJ De Wilde

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.

Nathan Latka

01:32So 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?

GJ De Wilde

01:41>> We help your engineers connect to other APIs. That would be the setup.

Nathan Latka

01:45I 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.

GJ De Wilde

01:58>> Exactly. And Codec is one of our competitors.

Nathan Latka

02:01Ah, okay. Are you better than them?

GJ De Wilde

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.

Pricing Model and Average Contract Value

Nathan Latka

02:23And what are customers paying you on average per month?

GJ De Wilde

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.

Nathan Latka

02:37Okay. And what do you upsell against? Is it number of API connections launched, number of API calls per month? How do you price?

GJ De Wilde

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?

Customer Count and Range

GJ De Wilde

03:13>> Currently, we have around 75 paying customers globally, and that ranges from pre revenue companies to public companies even.

Nathan Latka

03:22That's amazing. So can I take 75 customers at $850 a month?

GJ De Wilde

03:26>> You're doing about $6,364,000 dollars a month in revenue?

03:31>> We are getting there. Yeah. When can

03:34you 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.

Nathan Latka

03:42So are you what what's what's MRR today? Like, 50,000?

GJ De Wilde

03:47>> Around 50,000. Then we're going to be at 1,000,000 ARR very soon.

Nathan Latka

03:51That's amazing. Can you hit 1,000,000 ARR this year, you think?

GJ De Wilde

03:56>> Yeah. Definitely. Definitely.

Nathan Latka

03:57And if you're at $50,000 a month today, where are you exactly one year ago?

Funding History and Angel Round

GJ De Wilde

04:03>> We were at one year ago, we were at like 25 k.

Nathan Latka

04:08Wow.

04:09So and have you so you've doubled over the past year. Have you done this bootstrapped or have you raised capital, GJ?

GJ De Wilde

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.

Nathan Latka

04:35How much did you raise from Angels in what year?

GJ De Wilde

04:40>> More than 1,000,000 that I can say of.

Nathan Latka

04:44And you did that last year?

GJ De Wilde

04:47>> Yeah. Most of it we did last year.

Nathan Latka

04:49And was that on a safe and uncapped safe or did it have a cap?

GJ De Wilde

04:55>> It was kept to a certain amount. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

04:58How do you negotiate the cap? 5,000,000, 10,000,000?

GJ De Wilde

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.

Nathan Latka

05:23Oh, 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

05:46your 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

06:10get 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

06:32not 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

06:58going 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

07:20you 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

What Attracted Angel Investors

Nathan Latka

07:46interview. When you say high, you mean something like 15,000,000?

GJ De Wilde

07:52>> It's a little bit between 10 and 15, let us say.

Nathan Latka

07:55That's perfect. How were you able to get that cap considering you were only doing at the time 25,000 a month in revenue?

GJ De Wilde

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.

Nathan Latka

08:22How many?

GJ De Wilde

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.

Nathan Latka

08:37How 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?

GJ De Wilde

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

API Categories and Connector Count

Nathan Latka

08:55just 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?

GJ De Wilde

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.

Nathan Latka

09:25So it's going pretty keep these all

GJ De Wilde

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.

Nathan Latka

09:37How do you keep a 100 of them up to date?

Keeping 100+ Connectors Up to Date with Portman

GJ De Wilde

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.

Nathan Latka

10:20Very cool. When did you launch the company? What year?

GJ De Wilde

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.

Nathan Latka

10:34So 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?

GJ De Wilde

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.

Company Origins: 2018 to Unified API Launch

Nathan Latka

11:10And how do you think today about profitability? Are you guys generating a profit monthly today or are you still burning money each month?

GJ De Wilde

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.

Nathan Latka

12:05So when you say you're still burning, say, how much are you burning? What's net burn per month?

Burn Rate and Path to Profitability

GJ De Wilde

12:11>> I would say around 30 at this point.

Nathan Latka

12:14Does that make you nervous at all?

GJ De Wilde

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.

Nathan Latka

12:23So you mentioned you're maybe raising here later this year. How much are you targeting to raise?

GJ De Wilde

12:29>> Really depends on the market environment. We don't know yet. It really depends.

Nathan Latka

12:34How 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.

GJ De Wilde

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.

Nathan Latka

12:54Alright. What's the team site today? How many folks full time?

GJ De Wilde

12:58>> We have 10 full time people on the team right now.

Nathan Latka

13:02And how many are engineers?

GJ De Wilde

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.

Nathan Latka

13:33Is 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?

Growth Strategy: PLG Plus Outbound

GJ De Wilde

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.

Hypothetical Acquisition Offer

Nathan Latka

13:55Yep. 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?

GJ De Wilde

14:10>> Never. He said that.

Nathan Latka

14:12Said this very quickly,

GJ De Wilde

14:15>> which I love. Alright.

Famous Five: Books, Tools, and Advice

Nathan Latka

14:16Very cool. Let's wrap up here with the famous five, GJ. Number one, what's your favorite book?

GJ De Wilde

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.

Nathan Latka

14:43Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying right now?

GJ De Wilde

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.

Nathan Latka

14:56Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building apideck?

GJ De Wilde

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.

Nathan Latka

15:18Number three, how many hours of sleep or four? How many hours of sleep to get every night?

GJ De Wilde

15:23>> That ranges. I would say around five.

Nathan Latka

15:26Okay. And what's the situation, GJ? Married, single,

GJ De Wilde

15:29>> kids?

15:31>> I have a girlfriend, but not married yet.

Nathan Latka

15:36No kids?

15:37>> No kids.

15:37Alright, GJ. And how old are you?

GJ De Wilde

15:41>> I am now 32.

Nathan Latka

15:4232. Last question. What's something you wish

15:45you knew when you were 20?

GJ De Wilde

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.

Nathan Latka

16:04API 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

16:28on 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.

GJ De Wilde

16:39>> Thank you. Thanks for the invite. Definitely love the interview.

Nathan Latka

16:43One 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. It is fun to watch every Thursday 1PM

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