Birdsi Technologies Revenue (2024)

[00:00] Guys, there you have it. He launched his first company, made some money, made 500,000 here, lost $300,000, now built an agency launched five years ago. The agency processed $75,000,000 of ad dollars last year across a 120 clients. He kept on average 7% of that. So call or sorry. Five to 7% of that. So call it, you know, about $5,000,000 of revenue last year, a team of 30 on the agency. And then they said, you know what? Let's [00:20] start building software. They got five full timers building software right now. They've convinced agency customers to already start contractually paying for that. Already It's at about a 1,200,000 run rate. It's called birdsi.io, br birdsi.io. Hey, folks. My guest today is Ramzey Nassar. He is the CEO and founder of birdsi dot I o, spelled b I r d s I dot I o. He's an experienced entrepreneur with deep proficiency and building high caliber teams to scale hyper [00:48] growth digital brands. He's got over a decade of technology technology and digital marketing experience and is an elite Internet entrepreneur and CEO, having enabled his companies and hundreds of businesses owners to surpass 7, 8, and 9 figures in online revenues. Alright. Ramzey, you ready to take us to the top? [01:04] >> Yes, sir. [01:05] Alright. So what does birdsi do? Who are selling to? [01:08] >> So we are a B2B identity resolution platform. We are building a B2B2C identity graph. What that actually means is we've engineered our own pixel and if you run advertising on the internet, you're going to want it. What we do is we de anonymize anonymous web traffic, we turn them into powerful retargeting audiences, and we basically recapture a lot of lost data that we've been trusting, you know, the Facebook pixel, TikTok pixel, Google Tag Manager, etcetera to [01:46] >> pick up. But due to all the data privacy kind of legislation, but also, you know, moving targets as to what's happening in that world. We've decided on top of my advertising agency to build our own kind of proprietary analytics and attribution tool. [02:10] So how does it work? I mean, I've tested a bunch of these tools where it basically says, know, hey, Nathan, we'll give you the email of the person on your site from their IP address. They don't even have to create an account. That way you can email them and get them to like sign up. You know, they're rarely accurate. Right? So what are you doing differently? [02:24] >> So I've been building internet companies for a decade now. I have a couple of exits under my belt and there's always a commonality, right? Big data, if you have data, you are in a better and more advantageous position. So we've been testing this product over the past year and a half. We're still kind of in its early stages. It's not even open to the public. [02:52] >> What we're doing, you know, differently is we're building a fingerprinting technology. So it's a little bit more complex than just an IP address. There are more things that we gather upon the website login or visit. [03:06] Like what? [03:08] >> Mobile ad identifiers, hashed emails, IP address, device information, screen size resolution, audio fingerprint, visual fingerprint. So basically, the browser omits a signal anytime it interacts with [03:28] >> a device and vice versa. And what we've been able to do is have multiple factors in addition to IP address, which can kind of corroborate who that person is. And in the background, we have a lot of these data feeds essentially alongside open web information that exists and we're stitching together who that visitor is. So for the professional side of things, we are sharing, you know, the PII, if you will, the personally identifiable information. [04:03] Oh, 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 2807 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 [04:26] your 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 [04:50] get 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 [05:12] not 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 [05:38] going 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. All right. We're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second. But [06:00] if you 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 [06:26] the interview. [06:28] How do you get that, though? Everyone listening to this right now is thinking GDPR, Europe, lawsuits. They're thinking Google Chrome's not gonna let people just pull PII off the off the screen. I mean, how do you get around all this? [06:38] >> Yeah. So, I mean, it's definitely a moving target since we've started, but we are blessed to have several in house councils on the project. And also, we're doing everything in a very privacy first way. So, there's a lot of like B2B companies out there that exist that you can buy their data or license their data, right? Rocketreach, Seamless dot ai, Clearbit, there's several of them that exist out there. And a lot of them use the same [07:12] >> kind of waterfall of vendors that exists. But what they're not doing is they're not tying the professional profile with the consumer profile. That's what we're doing. And what we're doing to stay privacy compliant [07:25] I don't know what that means. I don't what that means. Let's say [email protected] visits a website. You're basically saying give a way to tie Nathan at Founderpath dot com to [email protected]? [07:34] >> Correct. [07:36] How? [07:38] >> Through a lot of data science and big data. [07:41] Interesting. What what's the metric you track to track, like, you know, basically accuracy on that? What's your hit rate? [07:48] >> Right now, we're averaging at around 50 [07:52] Okay. [07:54] >> To the take of deanonymized traffic. But for the consumers, we are not giving you their email addresses. What we're doing is we're encrypting it and we're allowing you to upload those back into the ad networks to have more powerful targetable audiences. [08:10] More effective lookalike audiences, which should drop your cost per click increase conversions, etcetera. [08:15] >> Right. So custom audiences, which then you build lookalikes off of. And the cool thing is is we're also tying analytics and attribution behind that. So it's kind of the perfect marriage of who's on the website and then their click journey as they enter the website, leave the website, come back a month later, and, you know, ultimately tracking what got them to convert. [08:38] Yep. Yep. Very interesting. I think what's interesting about this story is more about how you're approaching this versus what it actually is today. So you have successful exits. We'll dive into those in a seconds. But it sounds like you really are building this out of your agency. Talk to me about the agency. When did it when did it launch? [08:53] >> Yeah. We started the agency about five years ago. It's called Doe Media. [08:58] D o u g h? [08:59] >> D o e. So it stands for Data Over Ego. [09:04] Nice. [09:06] >> And we're really just a world class full funnel direct response advertising agency. We've [09:14] >> spent well over a $150,000,000. [09:18] That's all time managed through the platform? [09:20] >> Yeah. Yeah. And in 2020, I guess, 2022 or 2023, we surpassed just, you know, over $75,000,000 just in that year. So that statistic isn't even updated. [09:34] So last year, you did $75,000,000 in ad spend management through the platform? [09:39] >> Right. And we generated around 600,000,000, excluding our newest and largest client, Alibaba. [09:45] And you we take do you how do you price your fee? Is it based a percent up to 75,000,000? [09:50] >> Exactly. We just take a percent or a fixed retainer, whichever is greater, essentially. [09:55] Interesting. So what did that percentage generally average out to on the 75,000,000? 4%? [10:02] >> On average, it's, like, seven to 8%. [10:06] Okay. So so what is that? You guys did about $5.5, $6 million in revenue last year? [10:10] >> Give or take. Yeah. [10:11] Yeah. That's pretty good. Okay. And how many folks were on the team? [10:15] >> Right now, we're at about 30 people in The States. [10:20] Is that good agency revenue per employee? I just don't know. [10:24] >> From what we've seen and what we've mapped that exists out there, yeah, we're operating at about a 50 to 55% margin. [10:33] What is that though? 5,000,000 divided by 30 employees. It's like a what is it? A $166,000 in revenue per employee for an agency? It feels pretty healthy. [10:39] >> Give or take. Yeah. [10:41] Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. So so you launched the agency, you said five years ago, I'm guessing 2018? [10:47] >> Yep, right around then. And now we're over 120 partners worldwide. We work [10:53] What does that mean? [10:55] Oh, customers? [10:56] >> Clients, yeah. [10:57] Yeah. [10:57] >> We like to call them partners because they truly are. We have little engagement commitments, we have ninety day engagements, then it's month to month. So we're boasting about an 85% retention rate since So our we really do a lot of quality work and that's because I started this from a necessity perspective as an entrepreneur, building technology and direct to consumer businesses. Like I was the actual one that was looking at the EBITDA, looking at the P [11:29] >> and L every day, in the warehouse with the teams. And I feel like there's a lot of agencies out there that don't have that hands on experience [11:40] >> and are more just like media buyers. So we like to take kind of that full approach to working with brands. And I would say the majority of our portfolio is direct to consumer. So we work with a lot of Shopify stores, BigCommerce, Magento, etcetera. But [12:00] Well, that all that all makes sense. Walk me through I wanna understand, though, when was the moment for you where you said it's worth investing soft resources to start building birdsi? And how did you do that? Did you hire full time engineers just better, or did you pull people out of the agency? [12:13] >> Two years ago. About two years ago, like today, pretty much this week, [12:20] >> we had heard that, you know, iOS 14 was coming out. There was like, you know, murmurs going on at Meta. As a Meta preferred business partner, we work pretty hands on with them. And we knew that the efficacy of campaigns was going to drop, not just for us, right? Everyone. It was going to get harder. [12:42] Then do you do? Do you hire engineers, though, external, or you move them over from the agency? [12:46] >> So we don't have engineers at the agency, like, hardcore engineers. So my background's in technology. I built another company called swagify.com. It's a 120,000 square foot facility in Houston, Texas. It's a print on demand platform. We do that that one does about $25,000,000 a year. [13:06] When did you launch that one? Which year? [13:09] >> Swagify was launched just under two years ago. [13:14] Alright. So 2019, something like that, 2020? [13:16] >> Yep. Yep. And I'm basically just the CMO of it now. Our agency runs it, you know, the a the marketing side of it, and I sit on the board there. [13:25] Who who owns the other 80% of that business? [13:27] >> A friend of mine named Akhil. [13:30] Akhil owns 80%. Okay. Interesting. [13:34] Well, I guess, okay. So did you pull any news off of Swagify? [13:37] >> Yes. So no. So I had [13:42] >> met my old CTO in college when I was like 19, 20 years old. And we were building websites in the past and tried our hand at a couple different tech companies. Some of them worked out, some of them didn't. [13:58] Prolific, ThreadUp, I mean, give us the quick rundown, what worked in? [14:01] >> ThreadMeUp, ThreadMeUp took it to, like, $17,500,000 in about little under three years. That was my first real, like, go at it. Again, go at building, like, a technology platform. But 22 years old, having that much growth and not much experience, that actually imploded at the end of the day. [14:25] So you made no money off that one. [14:27] >> I made no money off of it. In fact, I actually went bankrupt, and I don't think people talk enough about their failures. So [14:34] Well, why? I mean, you led with, hey. It hit 17,500,000 in revenue. People are gonna be thinking, well, what do you mean it went bankrupt? You had 17.5. So was it not real revenue or what? [14:41] >> It was real revenue, but, you know, we had a lot of we had physical goods that we were delivering behind it. We had [14:49] So really shitty margins. [14:51] >> Yeah. Bad margins. It started to getting cannibalized by, you know, vertical manufacturers, and we just didn't, you know, adapt fast enough to [15:01] And then Prolific happened after ThreadMeUp? [15:04] >> Yep. And then Prolific, which is now Doe Media, happened after ThreadMeUp. [15:08] Oh, Prolific. Okay. Got it. Prolific was basically v one of of of Doe Media. [15:13] >> Right. Exactly. [15:14] Oh, I see. Okay. Okay. Interesting. So, I mean, have you I mean, you have a lot of experience sort of starting companies. Have you had what you would consider sort of a successful exit where you made money off it, or you just know what not to do because you've made a bunch of mistakes? [15:27] >> Yeah. So, I mean, Swagify was built from that idea of ThreadmeUp, but it wasn't like the same model. So my CTO and I just built that after, you know, ThreadmeUp died essentially. And we ended up selling it to this company in Texas, which which is now Swagify. [15:49] Oh, you sold it to Swagify? [15:52] >> Yeah. Not ThreadmeUp, a different app that we had built. [15:56] Oh, what was that app called? [15:58] >> That was called Fulfill. [16:00] Ful f u l, Fulfill, like it sounds like. [16:03] >> Yep. Exactly. [16:04] Interesting. And you bootstrapped Fulfill or you raised money for it? [16:07] >> We bootstrapped it. It was just me and my CTO at the time. [16:10] And what did you sell it for to ThreadmeUp for? [16:14] >> To to Swagify. [16:15] Sorry. Yeah. [16:17] >> He doesn't want us to disclose that information, but it was north of 7 figures. [16:22] When what year did you sell it? [16:24] >> In around 2000 right right before 2019. 2018, 2019, somewhere in between them, [16:32] which is when own 50% of the app? [16:35] >> Now I own 20% of it. [16:38] No. No. Well, Fulfill, though, before you sold it, how much did you own? You had 50? [16:42] >> Yep. [16:43] Okay. Got it. So if you sold it for, call it, more than a million bucks, it's fair to say you walked away with something like $500,000, something like that. [16:50] >> Yep. [16:52] And then you pour that into ThreadmeUp, Prolific, etcetera. [16:54] >> ThreadmeUp's gone at this point. [16:56] Yeah. Know. But did you lose $500,000? How much did you lose personally on ThreadmeUp? [17:01] >> Yeah. On ThreadmeUp, I lost personally, like, over $350,000. [17:06] No. Thanks for sharing that. That sucks, but, you know, it's part of the journey. [17:09] >> Hey, man. Every everyone wants to talk about the the successes and and not the failures, but, you learn a lot through your losses. [17:20] 100%, 100%. All right, you keep going in. [17:24] >> Quick, two years ago during COVID, we also launched a venture fund out of the agency. And we had incubated a company called soilandclay.com, and that was just exited in February. I can't disclose. They don't allow me to disclose how much that was, but it was a healthy exit. [17:44] Mhmm. How much did you was that a 100% owned by the by the agency? [17:49] >> Yeah. The the the agency, like and and my partners at the agency. So yeah. [17:54] And that was soilandclay.com? [17:56] >> Yep. It's now called yarden.com. [17:59] Oh, yarden. Okay. [18:01] >> Yeah. It it was basically a direct to consumer greenhouse during the height of the pandemic. [18:05] Well, that's that's very good timing. [18:09] >> Yeah. So I [18:10] That was that was the company called De La acquired acquired Yarden. Right? [18:16] >> No. A company called Indrio Brands acquired. So [18:18] Okay. Interesting. [18:20] >> Florida. [18:22] Okay. Very cool. Did you make up mean, you get rich off that or no? Sort of a whatever, an acquihire? [18:27] >> I made money. I wouldn't say I got rich, but but it helped me fuel further ideas. [18:33] So you pour more of that back sort of in the agency and birdsi. I guess, walk fast forward now today. How many folks are working full time on birdsi? [18:41] >> We have a team of five right now. [18:44] Engineers mainly? [18:46] >> Yes. [18:47] Okay. Interesting. And and what's the plan? I mean, how do you how do you get it out? I mean, when do you when do you open this to the public, if at all? [18:54] >> So we've been incubating it from within the agency, meaning we're kind of testing it on our agency brands to make sure before we open it up that we're comfortable with it essentially. So, you know, if you do the math, you know, our average ticket is anywhere from 500 to $1,000 a month. We have over a 100 clients at the agency. So the MRR is kind of there already to build the platform. [19:23] Yeah. I mean, I'm not playing for this. I mean, you're basically saying right now our agency margins are 50%. Adding in this new layer of technology, maybe we can juice those to 60 or 70% and make more money. [19:35] >> Yeah. It a separate entity and basically our trajectory there is 3,000,000 after it's fully built, which is in about four to six months. [19:49] >> In in that first year after it's built, 8,000,000 year two, and then 20 year three and and beyond. [19:56] Mean? 3,000,000 in year one. How many agency customers does that mean you have buying birdsi? [20:01] >> That would be beyond the agency, but that would be pretty much what we have is about 80 agency clients ready to use it. We have it installed on about 18. [20:11] That's a very high sell through rate. I mean, you're effectively saying you think 80 out of a 120 customers are gonna you're gonna be to cross sell in from your agency into the SaaS product. [20:19] >> Yeah. They they've all already committed to it. We're just, you know [20:22] Signed contracts. They've paid. [20:24] >> Yep. [20:25] They've prepaid the software fee on birdsi, not prepaid the agency dollars. [20:29] >> Correct. [20:31] Okay. So what are you charging for prepayments on birdsi? [20:34] >> So it it depends on how many how how much web traffic you get. Yep. So it's it's it's like a dynamic pricing model. The average ticket right now is $500 a month. [20:46] So how much money and don't don't, like, really tell me actually close, like, deals for just the technology, not agency revenue, just birdsi. What is the run rate today? [20:55] >> Around 1,200,000. [20:57] Okay. Interesting. Across how many folks have signed? [21:00] >> Let me open it up. [21:02] It's probably what? Fifteen, twenty, 30, something like that? It's [21:14] >> I'm I'm looking at the spreadsheet right now. I'm opening it. I don't wanna say anything false. [21:20] No. I mean, I like I want other people to learn the strategy who are running an agency. Mean, so what do you tell these people? You say it's not live yet. It's gonna be live in a couple months. We want you to prepay $30 right now, and they they wire the money and sign the contract? [21:32] >> We're not doing it in annuals. We're doing it in monthly. So, you know, it's they can delete you know, they can deinstall it essentially and leave if they want. But what it's helping us do is lower their customer acquisition cost and get more data from their already existing advertising spend. [21:54] So how many that are signed up? [21:55] >> There's 80 right now. [21:57] 80. So there's 80 there's 80 agency customers that are already paying monthly fees for birdsi. [22:02] >> Yep. [22:03] Okay. So what did you mean earlier when you said you haven't launched it yet? I mean, it sounds like you have real revenue over there. [22:11] >> Yeah. I mean, we okay. We've launched it in a closed environment, I should say. [22:17] Yeah. Mean, 80 customers paying on average 1,250 per month gets you to that 1,200,000 run rate. [22:22] >> Yep. And some of them are smaller at, like, 500. Some of them are bigger. We have some clients that have, you know, 5,000,000 UVs a month on their website, so they pay a lot more than that. But we're really obviously still ironing out, like, the the cost model to service that. [22:40] And and how what's the what's the cap table at birdsi look like? Does the agency own, like, 80% of it and then, like, you own the other 20%, or how do you structure it? [22:49] >> We have myself and my two agency partners are owners in it. We have a private equity fund who we work with in our venture fund that owns a few percent of it. [23:01] Did they put in dollar capital they invested? [23:05] >> We are contemplating raising money right now. [23:09] Yep. [23:11] The three agency partners really own 85, 90, and then there's some other points scattered around PE firms and elsewhere. [23:18] >> And technology. [23:21] What do you mean technology? [23:24] >> A fractional CTO and then a chief data ops. [23:27] I see. [23:28] >> That's of the six full times full timers right now. [23:29] Five full timers right now. [23:31] >> Yep. [23:32] Very cool, Ramzey. Well, I love the story here. Let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, favorite book. [23:39] >> Tipping Point. [23:40] Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? [23:45] >> Selim Bassoul. [23:46] Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building birdsi? [23:55] >> GitHub. [23:56] Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night? [23:59] >> That's a moving target. Man, I don't know. Five to seven. [24:05] That's not terrible. What's your situation? Married, single, kids? [24:08] >> Single. [24:10] >> No kids. [24:10] How old are you? [24:11] >> No kids. [24:12] >> 32. [24:13] Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20. [24:18] >> You don't need to have all the answers. Losing is not losing. It's lessons learned. Build on top of it and adapt. [24:26] Guys, there you have it. He launched his first company, made some money, made 500,000 here, lost $300,000, now built an agency launched five years ago. The agency processed $75,000,000 of ad dollars last year across a 120 clients. He kept on average 7% of that. So call or sorry, five to 7% of that. So call it, you know, about $5,000,000 of revenue last year, a team of 30 on the agency. And then they said, you know what? Let's [24:47] start building software. They got five full timers building software right now. They've convinced agency customers to already start contractually paying for that. It's already at about a 1,200,000 run rate. It's called birdsi.io, br birdsi.io. Check it out, Ramzey. Thanks for taking us to top. [25:03] >> Thanks. Appreciate it, Ben. [25:05] One 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 [25:30] Central. Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM Central. To make sure you don't miss any of that, make sure you click the subscribe button below here on YouTube, the big red button, and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live. I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a big [25:53] fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or something else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if you want to take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS founders. You want to get in there. We've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing. You can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying. Sign [26:14] up for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, but I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people. [26:34] We got to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. Alright, I'll be in the comments. See you.