BetterPic Revenue & Funding (2025)

[00:00] Do you want $270,000 a month in revenue as a new founder? Well, you're about to meet Ricardo at BetterPick, a tool that enables you to create headshots and other content just from images of your headshot. He scaled from zero to $3,200,000 totally bootstrapped. He's kept full control. But here's the secret. He did this all using three specific growth channels, SEO, affiliates, and free tools. And I said, Ricardo, I want my audience to learn all of this. [00:30] Tell me how you did it. That's what you're about to learn over the next twenty minutes. Stick around for an Unbear Advantage, and let's find out how Ricardo added so much revenue so quickly. Hey, folks. My guest today is Ricardo from BetterPick. These guys are on to something special. They are building in public at betterpick.io, helping you get the most beautiful headshot you've ever seen. I mean, people see this headshot. They fall in love with you. [00:52] They send you money. They just PayPal you money the second they see your better pick headshot. That's what I hear. 28 mil over to almost 30,000,000 headshots already created. Very cool tool. We're gonna jump into all their growth tactics today. Ricardo, are ready to take us to the top? [01:05] >> Yes, sir. [01:06] Alright. Is everything I said true? These headshots are the best they can find anywhere online. [01:11] >> Oh, that's what we aim for, I would say. But, yes, I would say yes. Oh, look at these beauties. [01:18] Take us through the product. Right? What's the most what's the most popular feature here use case wise? [01:24] >> The use case the biggest use case we've seen is people using them for their CVs. So anything that they're applying for jobs, that would be the biggest use case right now. Second one is social media. So that's where the users are, like, most of us are LinkedIn, anything related to, like, you know, showcasing in public. And third use case is the what we call the about us sections. So if you're building up a new website or [01:47] >> you wanna showcase your face on a website, that would be the third biggest use case. [01:51] Mhmm. Interesting. And you guys are seeing the use cases here on their site. This is their pricing today. Ricardo, let's not bury the lead. What's revenue today? [01:59] >> So this we're about $2.70 in, $2.70 k per month so far in April 2025. [02:08] Okay. And what does that look like in terms of growth rate? So if you're $2.75 k today, where were you, like, a month or a year ago? [02:14] >> So a year ago I can actually quickly pull up the numbers. So a year ago, we would be doing about 3 k per month, somewhere around that. That would be, where we were at, about a year ago in that sense. [02:27] A lot of growth. What is driven let's start from the beginning. Right? So in 2024, around April, you're getting your first $5.10, $20 a month in revenue. Where did that original traffic and customers come from? [02:38] >> Yeah. I think the first original was we were testing a few channels, but, you know, they were too expensive. Google Ads, we've tried, we're through some money. I think from the beginning, we did invest a lot in SEO. So from the get go, so when we started December 2023, we set SEO first because with the average order value that we have, which is about $44, we need to be SEO first because otherwise, we would never get [03:01] >> to profitability. So that's basically where we yes. [03:05] Let's look at that here. So walk we're seeing the metrics from Ahrefs. Right? So basically nothing in 2023. Pretty explosive growth. Domain rating, you know, grew pretty darn quick up to 57. What are you optimizing for right now? Backlinks, domain rating, site traffic, top pages. Where are you focusing? [03:22] >> So I think there's a couple of things. So we're doing a lot of backlinking. We're even buying backlinking. So that one is is one of the strategies. We're doing a lot of PR at the moment as well. That's where we're focusing on in this quarter as well. And before, it was it's still a lot of blogging in that sense. I think we hit, like, five to 10 blogs per week. That's basically what we're pushing out right [03:41] >> now. [03:43] Who are you how are you buying? A lot of people say we've tried to buy backlinks. They're always crappy backlinks. How are you buying backlinks? Did you hire an agency to do it, or are doing it yourself? [03:50] >> Yeah. We got an agent we got a couple of them. So we have an agency that suggested some backlinks. We will say yes or no depending on on our research in that sense. We have, like, three agencies supporting us on that side. It's like a pay as you go model. If we don't pay, you know, they don't get paid, so that helps as well. And then, of course, on the free PR things, that's mostly where we [04:08] >> do more of the stunts where we go on podcasts and stuff like that. [04:12] I love it. Stunts. We'll get into stunts here in a second. Are you comfortable sharing maybe one or two of those agencies that you think give good backlinks? [04:19] >> Yep. But I would need to dig them up, I would say, because that's the SEO manager that is responsible for that. I'm a big believer of outsourcing where I don't have the knowledge, so I just trust the team. But it's that thing. So we're at you know, Better Pick itself is about 13 people, and then the new company, Better Stu, is around four. So in total, 17 people. [04:41] What's the hold on. I didn't know about the new company. What's the URL? [04:44] >> Betterstudio.io. [04:48] Okay. Tell me about this. This is your second this is officially your second product? [04:51] >> That's the second product, basically, that we're launching. We you're using the same technology we know at Better Pick. We're applying that to the fashion market, which is, you know, more recurring and a much larger market in that sense. [05:02] How much so forgive forgive the sort of direct question here, but a lot of times, like, I'm not a technologist. So I when someone tells me we're using fancy technology to do this stuff, I can't tell if they're really deep technologists and there really is a moat there or if it's like a fancy wrapper on an LM or something else. What are you? Are you a fancy wrapper, or is there, like, deep proprietary tech? [05:19] >> There is deep proprietary tech in that sense, and we don't rely on any wrapper. Our base model is still flux. It's about 30% of our core model in that sense, but the rest is the is the model that we've created in that sense. [05:31] Okay. So you've built your own is it like a Rag database with a Frontier model in front of it or a chat interface in front of it? What's what's the actual tech stack look like there, the proprietary dataset? [05:40] >> Yeah. There's a lot about processing data, so how we how we get pictures in, how we transform them, how we put them onto models. Like, there's different datasets of I would say from BetterPick. In BetterPick, it's mostly about how we rank pictures, how we upload pictures, how we guide you through that. Then it's how we, you know, label them, how we rank them, how we, you know, use data of people that like pictures and dislike pictures [06:02] >> in order to generate new batches. So I think that's more of the wrapper, I would say, that you put on top, but I think that's a good picture as well. So oh, that's actually a growth. Yes. [06:13] Yeah. This is this is the money slide here. Okay. So, again, you're telling us about what you did about a year ago to drive growth. These early months, it looks like it was heavy SEO focused. What else were you doing in the early days growth wise? [06:24] >> Yeah. Growth wise, we were doing a lot of affiliate marketing that is also where I think this last month, we did about 77 k through affiliate marketing, a 100 k projected this month. So we're doing a lot of affiliate marketing. The reason why is because most affiliate managers, are used to, like, you know, conversion rates of 0.5 to 1%. Our program actually allows you to go from nine to 12%. Their best performer is about 12%, but [06:47] >> we take an average of nine. [06:49] So just to be clear, when you say in April, quote, we're gonna do $77,000 of affiliate marketing, that's the new MRR or the new ARR? Like, new annual contract. Like, just the [06:57] >> dollar value that affiliates That's in months, basically. So they the affiliates drove 77 k of our revenue in total in that month. [07:05] Wow. Okay. So of the $275,000 you did in MRR last month, April 2025, 77,000 of that or almost 30% was affiliates? [07:13] >> Yes. [07:14] Wow. Okay. That's pretty impressive. How many affiliates drove that 77 k? [07:20] >> I can quickly pull that up, but that would be I think in in affiliate marketing, you mostly have, like at anything, you have, like, the top 10%, and then you have the 90%. So I would say 10% is actually driven by the you know, a 100% like, 90% of the revenue is driven by 10% of the performers, basically. [07:38] Which how many is that on a on a just a number for you? What is 10% of your affiliates? Is that five affiliates, 30 affiliates, 39 affiliates? [07:45] >> I think the top 10, I would say, yes. I would say even seven in that sense. Seven seven of them drove all that revenue. [07:53] Wow. So let me ask you a question. I would obviously ask you to share your I mean, are you open to sharing your screen and showing me your affiliate back end of coaches there, or is that, like, something you you don't wanna share? [08:02] >> No. We we're we're quite comfortable with sharing pretty much everything, so I can quickly share if you want. [08:07] People struggle this, Ricardo. So, like, as you guys are listening to this, a lot of you guys, when you try to launch your affiliate program, you'll ask me questions like, well, Nathan, what commission structure do we set? How do we go recruit affiliates? Where do we get them from? So, Ricardo, you're doing it. You're doing it. I mean, it's working. Teach us. [08:21] >> Yeah. So we got a dashboard here. This is just for this month so far, so give you an idea, but that's basically how we track. We kinda see what the revenue is coming in, what the average order value is, what the purchase is, what the weekly sales are. So that's basically what we're tracking, and that's why I say, like, we keep track of, like, the top 10 percents because those are mostly what drive up all the [08:39] >> all the revenue, basically. [08:41] And and so what can we can we dive into the red one here, Ananangsha Almenian? Who like, who is that? Are they a YouTube influencer? Are they have a big email list? Are they a podcaster? What is that? [08:51] >> So this is actually funny enough, so she's she's a big YouTuber in that sense, but she also has a big Medium following. So when she posts something on Medium, it actually ranks up. Because Medium has a big authority, basically, if you type in, like, past AI hatchel generators, in most countries, you will find her blog. She's the one backlinking to us. [09:11] Interesting. Interesting. Now what did you build your affiliate program on top of? You used Rewardful? [09:16] >> Yes. [09:18] And so why aren't you screen sharing your Rewardful dashboard right now? Why do you feel like you have to go customize it in Databox? [09:24] >> Because we're basically have all our data in there. So we were quite you know, we have all our data coming in. So affiliate performance revenue split per source. So we kinda, like, centralize everything there. I don't like to go back and forth into, like, different tools in that sense. So we kinda, [09:39] I see. [09:40] >> Have everything in in DataVox. [09:42] I see. Really interesting. What is global revenue split in that chart? Is that an important chart that you look at every day, the first one? [09:48] >> This one? Not really. I think more we have, like, the source. So we kinda see, like, where is the money coming from, where is, like, the attribution coming from. So that's mostly what it is. Mostly, my marketing manager actually looks at this. I kinda look at it from a global perspective. So we kinda have our financial models. I kinda more look at it from a from a general perspective where I think this is basically for reporting. [10:10] >> So we kinda see, like, what's the user growth, what's the gross revenue, net revenue, average customer spent. From a product perspective, I look at the refund rates, process to download rate. For us, it's important because you there's a moment you process the images, and then you actually download them, which is the moment, which is you drive value from the product. [10:27] Wait, Ricardo. You have to dive deeper on that. [10:29] >> Say Yes. [10:29] You have [10:30] to say that one more time because there's a lot of founders, again, that that we work with where they don't understand why churn's bad or they don't understand how to price on their pricing page on what utilization metric. And it's always about finding the moment. What is the dopamine hit? You just, like, said that. So go deeper on that. How did you define the moment and point to the chart here? Which which of these squares measures [10:48] that moment? [10:49] >> Yeah. That is for us. This one, basically. So we look at the process to download rate on a monthly basis, meaning the download or the process is like you're processing your AI headshots. That's like you press the button. It's like, I wanna do this, and then the download is like, I've actually driven value from the downloads. It has two flip sides. One is because once you download something, it means you're satisfied most of the time. Second [11:11] >> thing is also we have a policy in place that once you download them, we only refund you 10% of it. Otherwise, it's 90%. So that is also something we play around with, and it's important for us because we know how higher the metric is. Well, the last refunds are gonna take place. [11:26] Wild. Let's talk about you. You know, we've talked a little bit about growth. We've talked about the technology a bit. But what about you as a Warren Buffett, as a capital allocator? When you have 50,000 a month in profits, you have to start deciding, where do we reinvest this money? How do you think about that? [11:39] >> Yeah. I think there's two things, basically. So we're moving into a space for now. We're having a deal with Amazon, and we're also reducing our cost of goods. You can see it. It's, like, 82% right now. We're moving that to 97% in the coming weeks, basically. So we're gonna have huge amount of cash that is coming free in order to generate. So that is one thing. So on on the marketing side, I push them to say, [11:59] >> spend more. I want you to spend a lot more and make strategic investments. That is more like a long term game. Like, I want you to start buying up blogs. I want you to start, you know, doing these crazy things that we have the cash for right now. So that's, like, one part. Second thing is now we're launching Beta Studio. You know, we don't even have revenue yet, but we have, you know, already a team of [12:19] >> four to five people that are walking in building this next big thing. So I look at it from what's the next big thing that I have to use this cash for. [12:27] Interesting. But Better Pick and Better Studio both feed up to the same parent company. [12:31] >> Exactly. That's actually what we're raising capital for right now. So we're bootstrapped until now, but we're raising capital probably in the coming four weeks. [12:39] How much are you looking to raise? [12:41] >> So we're doing our first 500 k angel investment tickets. Very small. We already have a commitment of 310 k, and then the rest is gonna be 2,000,000 in September and then another 10,000,000 the year after. We're gonna, you know, structure it in a nice way in that sense. [12:55] Interesting. So a question for you. Why you have enough revenue where oh, I guess, what's the dilution you think you're gonna take on the 500 k you're raising? [13:04] >> That's gonna be about 5%. We're doing a PRE SAFE 9.5 mil, so that's gonna be about 5%. [13:10] Okay. 5%, 9 mil cap. If if if there was a way to get the 500 k without having to give up 5%, would you like, is that something you'd look at? [13:20] >> Definitely open. I think there's two ways, though, of doing it. One is the the small rounds we're doing is more for strategic investors, angel tickets that we appreciate, so that's one part. The rest is definitely open for negotiation. [13:32] Interesting. Look. I'm obviously operating out of our fund. It's a $200,000,000 fund, but it's all debt. Right? So because you're already doing $270,000 a month, we could do an extra 200 k there really easily and let you pay it back over three years. We we would take no equity. But let me I have to prove myself too first. You have to believe you have to believe you have to believe that I can become one of your [13:51] largest affiliates, I think, before you give me a spot in your round. But I'm loving I mean, the focus on metrics, the bootstrapping, 13 people with $2.75 a month. [14:00] >> What is that? So 3,000,000 divided by 13. [14:03] What is that? 230,000 revenue per employee. You're hiring a little ahead of growth, though. Right? [14:09] >> Yeah. Exactly. I mean, you also think about it from a perspective that we have for on customer success depending on how you, you know, put that into perspective, but, like, the core team is about eight to nine in that sense. [14:21] Eight to nine. Yeah. I know. It's it makes a ton of sense. Okay. Got it. So bootstrapped to this point. You've basically gone from 0 to 3,000,000 of revenue over the past twelve months. You're 13 people. We talked about backlinks. We talked about affiliates. We talked about what you measure and what you care about. Let's go back to that revenue graph, if you don't mind, the EBITDA one. [14:37] >> Yeah. Sure. This one. Right? [14:39] Yeah. Exactly. Yep. So okay. So $2.55. Got I mean, what what January to February was pretty flat, and then February to March really spiked. Why is that? [14:50] >> I think there's two parts. There's a few couple of parts to that. One is that February actually has more days. So it has actually February has less days. So those three days actually make a big difference for us in that sense even though the salaries remain the same. So these three days actually does count. Second is we had a huge affiliate boost coming in, so our affiliate marketing is, like, kicking in. SEO also grew a big [15:12] >> thing. So I think the funny thing is that we don't have, like, one channel that is forming better in that sense. It's just, like, all of them are, like, coming together in that sense. I think we have, like, seven channels right now, and they're all compounding against each other. [15:24] Mhmm. No. That makes a ton of sense. I'm gonna I'm gonna steal the screen back here really quick. Yep. Share screen. If we look at if we look at your data here because you mentioned SEO drives a lot of traffic. I see you guys have used free tools, and that generates about 8,000 clicks per month to your website. Which is your most successful free tool, and was that an intentional strategy? Do you go look up the [15:49] term and then go build the free tool, or was this all by accident? [15:52] >> No. We built we looked at the term, and we reverse engineered where we where we're supposed to go, basically. So profile picture editor is just an SEO play. That is basically something we build overnight. Actually, it works pretty nicely as well, but it gives, like, you know, a way a tool to help you, actually. So that was more of an SEO play. The the real play was like the free AI Hedgehog generator. You won't find it [16:14] >> actually on the website. Website. You actually have to really find it through SEO. We don't even link to it to the website, and that's basically our way to capture data. We have about four to 500 people doing this. Yes. We we have about four to 500 people doing this every single day, basically. So that's the crazy part. And so this also allows us to upsell for some people because if you get there, there's gonna be a [16:37] >> waiting list of about I think it's three months right now. If you want it faster, you we can do it, like, at a discounted price. [16:44] Oh, I see. So you do it. You give them the result and say, hey. There's a delay if you wanted to immediately pay. What's the conversion rate free to paid on that? [16:52] >> I looked at it two days ago. It was not super high, but we did make, I think, last month about seven extra k because of that. [17:01] That's awesome. And how much walk me through the SEO strategy on this page. The h one title is obviously important, but is this like an FAQ schema? Do you think this plays well with the LLMs? And take us through that strategy. [17:11] >> Exactly. So we are ranking really high when it comes free AI Hetzel generator, which is also the case. The goal is really for us to be seen for Google and the LMs Ask AI Hetzel generator. That is basically the the main term that is that we're going for. [17:25] Oh, interesting. I haven't actually seen it on Claude. [17:29] Yeah. I I always like doing this. I just I just have a, say, browser with all of them open just to see what happens. But you've optimized for this is what you're saying? [17:39] >> Yes. Not for this specific keyword in the LLMs, but for the for SEO, yes, we've optimized a lot. Canvas both basically going to always be the first, which I think is great because oh, there we go. So there that that's number five. That's so that's pretty cool. That's awesome. Number one, and I think it's great because they're actually driving us the most b two b revenue is coming from Canva. They Uh-huh. People use it. They hate [18:06] >> it, and then they come to us. [18:07] Interesting. Interesting. Argon, magic, canva. Better oh, you're here to better pick. They say you don't have a free version. Interesting. [18:17] >> Well, we don't if you look at it from that perspective, but yes. [18:22] Yeah. Yeah. No. It's just fun. Like, look. No one really has the answer yet to, like, how to show up in these LM results. People will say, well, it's all about, like, keyword clustering and semantic search and blah blah blah. No one really knows. But it's cool to see I mean, look. The numbers don't lie. Right? You're getting 20 I mean, you're getting a lot thousands of clicks per month into your free tools. Is there anything [18:41] else we missed before I let you go? We I mean, we talked a lot about different things of growth. Anything I should be asking you about that I just completely missed? [18:48] >> I would say I'm just looking at the metrics in that sense. [18:54] >> No. I think I think that's think that's most of the metric. I have, like, a lot of metric. I think what helps with sharing metrics is that, one, you you draw a lot of attention, but also, like, our team also has a very deep insight into what's happening, how much revenue we're making, where is it spending, and allows them to operate at scale without me being there. And I think that's what people misunderstand when, like, you're [19:13] >> sharing in the open. It's not just open towards the, you know, the world, but it's also to your team, which allows them to operate at scale. I think that's the beauty of Mhmm. Like, building in the open, I would say. [19:24] Yep. Yep. No. I I agree. I mean, you guys and, obviously, it's a good content marketing strategy for you guys as well. All your stuff gets tons of engagement. So this is great. And I I didn't ask. 275,000 a month in revenue, how many total customers is that? [19:36] >> That's about five 6,000, I would say. That would be it. So let me pull that exact number up for right now. We got 5,974. [19:49] Okay. Do you guys have I mean, what's the monthly logo churn look like? [19:53] >> The monthly what? [19:55] Logo churn. [19:57] >> Oh, we don't have churn because it's a one time purchase, basically. So that's [20:01] Oh. Oh, interesting. Oh gosh. I I didn't even realize that. [20:06] >> No worries. Because you kinda just need a hedge one time. We don't like, if you wanna add some fluffy things, yes, can probably do that recurring, but for the hedgehog, you mostly just need it once. So we bank a lot on that. [20:20] I see. Oh, yeah. Of course. It's right here on your pricing page. Now that being said, you can use the same technology, and you start selling it to, like, businesses. Right? So these are a once per person, but Better Studio, I bet you you have recurring pricing here. Yeah. There we go. Got it. So this is the SaaS play. [20:38] >> That's the SaaS play. So we're using that cash on the Bootstrap business, which is actually quite nice to generate cash. It allows us to build the recurring business. Got a lot more coming up for this one. We are building a Chrome extension for consumers as well to go shopping, to kinda, like, just upload an image of themselves, click on a picture that they wanna kinda see on them, and allows them to try before they buy, basically. [20:58] >> So that's also the b two c playbook we're playing for these guys. [21:01] It's wild, Ricardo, to see just the the blending of b two c and b two b. I mean, your technologies basically can be used on both, and sort of this idea of, okay, it starts off as b two c, then maybe morphs into b two b, but then goes back to b two c with a Chrome extension. It's sort of interesting. [21:14] >> Yes. It's I mean, the technology is there. Right? The underlying technology is there. We have a competitive advantage towards I mean, we have a whole slide deck on us comparing to OpenAI, the biggest competitors on how we're better. Like, we have that. Like, it's crazy to see. And now that we have the technology, we're like, we can just build crazy things with it. And why just limit ourselves to one thing? [21:34] Yeah. No. It makes a ton of sense. Well, look. This is awesome. I appreciate you coming on being so transparent. If people wanna learn more about your try the tool out, where can they find you online? [21:41] >> Yeah. Betterpick.io, I would say. My LinkedIn is where I post most of the things. I have a personal website, but I haven't looked at it for a while. So I think LinkedIn is, like, the best case, I would say. [21:53] Guys, there you have it. Betterpick.io launched, called in 2024. They had about, like, no revenue exactly twelve months ago. Now they're at $275,000 a month in April 2025. Over 5,900 customers paid their 13 people full time with four new folks working on their new sort of SaaS product. What's crazy about their growth, they started off with a lot of SEO. $77,000 of their revenue last month came from affiliates. Specifically, seven of their top 10 affiliates drove [22:16] that revenue. They're bootstrapped so far, now fundraising, targeting $500,000, 9,000,000 cap, giving up about 5% of the business. We'll see what happens next. But, Ricardo, thanks for taking us to the top. [22:26] >> No worries. Thanks a lot. Thanks for having me.