How Automatedinsights CEO Marc Ziontz grew Automatedinsights to $7.2M revenue and 300 customers in 2018.

hello everyone my guest today is Mark Zion T's had a successful career leading company since 1987 and is currently the CEO of automated insights a vista effort a partner's own company his independent board director for pivot 3 and many other companies on with friends of the earth decide to join time with family he is an avid outdoorsman an accomplished bicycle racer mark are you ready to take it to the top I am alright so for having me you bet give us the story here so let's start from the beginning and go from there what does automated insights do and what's your revenue model I do make money yes so automated insights is a leader in natural language generation or nlg and essentially what nlg is is that we take structured data as an input and we can create from that data a story or a narrative or a report that sounds like it was written by a person that we do that through software the business model for this is is it is a subscription service so today Enterprise SAS software subscription in which our users with a basic subscription can create an unlimited number of use cases have an unlimited number of users and then they're picking how much production they want per month basically how many outputs if you want 500 stories 5,000 we have customers that do over 20 million a month is it based on your ease or or the word count per story not word count it's based actually on it technically on an API hit which equates to each output but we really don't care that outputs a sentence a paragraph or three pages what determines the weather oh it's all the same in terms of cost structure and output yeah it's just a matter of how many outputs you create but the length of the output doesn't matter okay so paragraph is gonna be one API call and so is a single word that's correct okay so someone writes a bit you know you know I mean it's a 10 paragraph long piece of piece of work via your tool they're gonna pay the same as someone that types one or you generates one word yeah yeah nobody's gonna generate one word but that's the point a sentence is the same as 10 pages for most people the kind of output that we create is anywhere from a couple sentences to a paragraph and at the most typically it's going to be a couple pages that because that might be some sort of a report I see okay and um will you see if you use the word enterprise so let me give me a general sense here our people are paying what 10 grand about the hunter grand a month or are you higher than that even know a basic subscription so we have an annual you know minimum of an annual contract so our most basic subscriptions about $24,000 at a year so usually there's a very powerful return on investment here because if you compare it to the hours of a full-time equivalent this is gonna save money and it's gonna allow people to work on more valuable things yeah and would you say that 24 grand is also I know that's your minimum but is it also fair average or no no the average is actually you know higher I've just based on the blend of customers and then we have a slightly different business model when we're because when we work with business intelligence our product also integrates with leading bi solutions like tableau click MicroStrategy TIBCO Spotfire power be God and there we we basically look like a Purdue or kind of model that matches the subscription that they charge for their services yep or most of the folks that you're working with are they actually you know do your traditional media companies or no that's a small portion it's very visible however so the work that we do with you know people like The Associated Press is very visible or the cool stuff that we do in the game Call of Duty or that we do at Yahoo NFL that's very outward facing so people see that but the vast majority of our customers are business-to-business where we're inside dashboards we're working in e-commerce we're doing reporting for businesses mark give me the the unsexiest use case of automated insights well I mean if you just think about I mean you know for all of it it's you know it all relates to the same thing and that's our vision statement and that is to make the world's data understandable so our general belief is that we live in a world where our problem isn't that we don't have enough data our problem is the exact opposite we have too much data and we're just trying to make sense of it and we just want to be able to get to what does it mean to me and how do I make it so tell me a real customer though like II like who many people will define as a very unsexy space but where you provide a lot of value Oh weekly sales reports so we have a large insurance company they have about 15,000 people between their direct and independent agents and once a week they want them to get a report based on their role whether you're an agent an agency or in the sales management of the company they want a weekly report that says how they're doing how they're trending and giving them some advice weekly on how they can improve their performance so that's 15,000 reports a week times 52 weeks a year and you know that's certainly not as fun as fantasy football but it also is really great for helping them run their business in a more efficient manner when did you launch this company this company started just about 10 years ago I am NOT the founder just to be clear I I am I took over from the founder just over a year ago our founder is our chip is our executive chairman and he's a technical founder so I came in through the private equity owner to scale up the business and continue to grow it to the next level so when I think it was Vista Equity right when did that deal happen that happened just over two years ago that they acquired the company so we were backed by venture investors originally how much was in the company pre pre the deal oh I actually don't have these doubts on that but you know under the pre the pre deal but we were purchased died in just over two years ago by Vista I came in through the Vista side of things to run automated insights I've been running company since 1987 so and a hundred percent of what I've done my whole life is technology and just I'm doing that and I just love the technology that we have great team great set of customers so it's a it's a very exciting time for our company how did that work I mean did you most private equity firms or people in-house always looking for deals and sometimes when that person kind of leaves the deal internally they end up actually running the company post deal was that the case with you add Vista or know like how did how did best to say oh we got to get mark on this company yeah so I knew a number of the vista CEOs in vista people so you're right that sometimes that happens where an operating partner looks at the deal and they take over in this case I was a known entity to Vista and I was I was very very interested in working with Vista because they're quite unique and that uniqueness is is that they exclusively invest in enterprise SAS companies so when you think of private equity there's some niche firms that are very vertically focused but they tend to be smaller vistas very large but vertically focused on software businesses you see other you know companies in their size they may invest all over the place they don't necessarily have an expertise in the industry so I think the Vista model is quite unique I think it brings a lot of advantage to our customers I also think it's very attractive for our team because it provides him with a tremendous amount of development and how to operate a business with best practices okay so 2008 was founded you joined about a year Vista bottom called in 2016 you joined in 2017 obviously the Avista the founder original founders so I think you said Chairman's was still involved to some degree I think we understand the products nicely what have you guys scale to in terms of total customers I don't have a total customer count but it is several hundred customers that are that are active and what's really interesting is that our sales team is in the US and we're based in Durham North Carolina we now have people on the East Coast on the West Coast we're expanding the team outside we don't have anybody outside the US but we actually have customers now in 40 countries that are creating their use cases in over 25 languages so that's something else you can create this this output in English or Mandarin or French whatever you want so our reach is quite large for the size and what's also really interesting is that we have fortune 100 customers and we have customers that have 10 people that are just growing their entire business using technology and leveraging technology so that they can punch way above their weight yeah so it's really fascinating to work with that range of customer sense well yeah it's certainly not out of $24,000 man on a CV on year one I mean obviously it's not an SMB play but yeah you feel still be stay pretty scrappy with that budget and really save a lot of times you know you think about it I see usually when running that sales report on a small team every week if they can automate that saves a lot of time right and we're not unlike some of our customers in that you know one of our core beliefs is automate everything so we'll you know anything that can be automated should be automated so your people are doing the most valuable things they can be doing what is your team size today so we're sixty five people today when...