How Birdsi Technologies CEO Ramzey Nassar grew Birdsi Technologies to $1.5M revenue and 80 customers in 2024.

guys Jerry have any launches first company made some money made half a million here lost 300 Grand now built an agency launched five years ago the agency processed 75 million bucks of AD dollars last year across 120 clients he kept on average seven percent of that so call or sorry five to seven percent of that so caught you know about five million bucks of Revenue last year team of 30 on the agency and then they said you know what let's 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 1.2 million run right it's called bird's eye dot IO BR b-i-r-d-s-i dot i o hey folks my guest today is Ramsey nasar he is the CEO and founder of Birdseye dot IO spelled b-i-r-d-s-i dot IO he's an experiencer entrepreneur with deep Proficiency in building High Caliber teams to scale uh hyper growth digital brands did 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 seven eight and nine figures in online revenues all right Ramsay you ready to take us to the top yes sir all right so what does bird's eye do who are you selling to so we are a b2p identity resolution platform um we are building a uh B to B to C identity graph what that actually means is we've engineered our own pixel uh and if you run advertising on the internet you're going to want it um 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 uh pixel Tick Tock pixel Google tag manager Etc to pick up but due to all the data privacy kind of um legislation but also you know moving targets as to what's happening in that World um we've decided uh on top of my advertising agency to build our own kind of proprietary uh analytics um and attribution tool um so how does it work I mean I've tested a bunch of these tools where it basically says you know hey Nathan we'll give you the email 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 so I've been uh building internet companies for a decade now uh I have a couple of exits under my belt and there's always a commonality right um 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 um 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 um like what um 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 um uh uh you know 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 um 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 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 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evaluations 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 all right let's jump back into the interview how do you get that though everyone listening to this right now I was thinking gdpr Europe lawsuits they're thinking Google Chrome's not going to let people just pull PPI off off the screen I mean how do you get around all this yeah so I mean it's definitely a moving uh Target since we've started um 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 you know there's a lot of like B2B companies out there that exist that you can buy their data or license their data right you know rocket reach seamless.ai clearbit there's several of them that exist out there and a lot of them use the same 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 I don't know what that means I don't know what that means let's say Nathan at founderpath.com visits a website you're basically saying you have a way to tie Nathan at founderwap.com to nathanlock gmail.com correct how through a lot of data science and Big Data interesting what what's the metric you track to track like you know basically accuracy on that what's your hit rate um right now we're averaging at around 50 percent uh to the sake of de-anonymized 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 a more effective look-alike audiences which should drop your cost per click increase conversions Etc right so custom audiences which then you build lookalikes off of the cool things 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 um and you know ultimately tracking what got them to convert yeah yeah very interesting I think what's interesting about the story is more about how you're approaching this versus what it actually is today so you have successful exits uh we'll dive into those in a second but it sounds like you really are building this out of your agency talking about the agency when did it when did it launch yeah we started the agency about five years ago it's called doe media um d-o-u-g-h-d-o-e so it stands for data over ego oh nice and uh we're really just a world-class full funnel uh direct response advertising agency we've uh you know spent well over 150 million dollars um that's all time managed through the platform yeah yeah and um in 2020 uh I guess 2022 or 2023 uh we surpassed just you know over 75 million dollars just in that year so that statistic isn't even updated so last year you did 75 million bucks in ad spend management through the platform right and we generated around 600 million excluding our newest and largest client Alibaba and do you take do you how do you price your fee is it pays to percent up to 75 million exactly we just take a percent or a fixed retainer whichever is greater essentially interesting so what did that percentage generally average out to on the 75 million three four percent um on average it's like seven to eight percent okay so what is that you guys did about five and a half six million in Revenue last year labor take yeah yeah that's pretty good okay and how many folks were on the team uh right now we're at about 30 people in the states is that good agency Revenue per employee I just don't know uh from what we've seen and what we've mapped uh that exists out there yeah we're operating about a 50 55 margin what is that though 5 million divided by 30 employees it's like what is it 166 000 bucks in Revenue per employee for an agency it feels pretty healthy give or take yeah yeah yeah interesting okay so so you launched the agency you said five years ago I'm guessing 2018. yep right around then and now we're over 120 uh Partners uh worldwide what does that mean oh customers clients yeah yeah we like to call them partners because they truly are we have uh you know little uh engagement commitments we have 90-day engagements and then it's months to month so uh we're boasting about an 85 retention rate since our inspection so we really do a lot of quality work and that's because I started this from a necessity perspective as an entrepreneur you know building uh technology and direct to Consumer businesses like I was the actual one that was you know looking at the ebitda looking at the p l every day you know in the warehouse with the teams um and I feel like there's a lot of you know agencies out there that don't have that hands-on experience um and are more just like media buyers uh so we like to take kind of that full approach um to working with Brands and I would say the majority of our portfolio is direct to Consumer um so we work with a lot of you know Shopify stores big Commerce Magento Etc um but that all makes sense walk me through I want to understand though when was the moment for you where you said it's worth investing soft resources to start building bird's eye and how did you do that did you hire full-time Engineers just fat or did you pull people out of the agency two years ago about two years ago like today pretty much this week um we had heard that you know iOS 14 was coming out um there was like you know murmurs going on at meta um 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 um it was going to get harder and so what do you do do you hire Engineers though external or you move them over from the agency so we don't have engineers at the agency like cardboard here so my backgrounds in technology I built another company called swagify.com um it's a 120 000 square foot facility in Houston Texas it's a print-on-demand platform um we do that that one does about 25 million dollars a year when did you launch that one which year uh swaggify was launched uh just under two years ago all right so 2019 something like that 2020 yep yep and I'm basically just the CMO of it now our agency runs it you know the the marketing side of it and I sit on the board there who owns the other eighty percent of that business uh a friend of mine named uh Akil Akil owns 80 okay interesting um go well I guess okay so so did you pull Engineers off of swaggify yes so no so I had um met my old CTO in college when I was like 19 20 years old uh and we were building websites in the past and took you know tried our hand at a couple different tech companies you know some of them worked out some of them didn't prolific thread up I mean give us the quick rundown what worked Within Me Up thread me up took it to like 17 and a half million dollars in about a little under three years that was my first real like go at it uh you know go at building like a technology platform um but you know at a at 22 years old having that much growth and not much experience that actually imploded uh at the end of the day um so you made no money off that one no money off of it in fact I actually went bankrupt and I don't think people talk enough about their failures so well why I mean you led with hey it hit 17.5 million bucks 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 it was real Revenue but um you know we had a lot of uh we had physical Goods that we were delivering behind it we had some really shitty margins yeah bad margins it started to getting cannibalized by you know vertical manufacturers um and we just didn't you know adapt fast enough to and then prolific happened after thread me up yep and then prolific which is now doe media happened after thread me up oh okay got it prolific was a basically V1 of of doe media right exactly oh I see okay okay interesting so I mean have you how 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 yes I mean swagify was built from that idea of thread me up but it wasn't like um the same model so my CTO and I just built that um after you know threatened me up died essentially and we ended up selling it to this company in Texas um which which is now swaggerify um oh you sold it to Swagger pie yeah not thread me up a different app that we had built uh what was that app called that was called fulfill well fql fulfill like it sounds like yep exactly interesting and you bootstrap fulfill or you raise money for it you bootstrapped it was just me and my CTO at the time uh and what did you sell it for it to throw me up for uh to to swagify sorry yeah um he doesn't want us to disclose that information but it was north of seven figures uh when what year did you sell it uh in around um 2000 right right before 2019 2018 2019 somewhere in between them which is well owned 50 of the app uh now I own 20 of it you know well fulfilled up before you sold it how much did you own you had 50. yep okay got it so if you sold it for call more than a million bucks it's fair to say you walked away with something like 500 Grand something like that yep and then you pour that into thread me up prolific Etc thread me up is gone at this point yeah I know but if you lose half a million bucks how much did you lose personally on thread me up uh uh yeah on thread me up I lost personally like over 350 000 no thanks for sharing that that sucks but you know it's part of the journey hey man every everyone wants to talk about the the successes and and not the failures but you know you learn a lot through your your losses 100 100 all right so you get going in real quick uh two years ago during covet we also launched a venture fund out of the agency um and we had incubated a company called soil and clay.com um 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 how much did you um was that 100 owned by the by the agency yeah the the agency like and and my partners at the agency so yeah and that was soil and clay.com yep it's now called yarden.com um yeah it was basically a direct to Consumer Greenhouse during the height of the pandemic well that's uh that's very good timing yeah that was D that was a the company called Dila acquired acquired yarn right um no a company called intrio Brands acquired so okay interesting okay very cool uh did you make up I mean you get rich off that or no sort of a whatever an aqua hire uh I made money but it helped me further ideas so you pour more of that back serving in the agency and bird's eye I guess walk fast forward out today how many folks are working full-time on bird's eye uh we have a team of five right now Engineers mainly yes okay interesting and and what's the plan I mean how do you how do you get it out I mean when do when do you open this to the public if at all so we've been incubating it from within the agency meaning we're kind of testing it on on our agency Brands uh to make sure before we open it up that we're comfortable with it essentially so you know if you if you do the math you know our average ticket um is anywhere from 500 to a thousand dollars a month we have over a hundred clients at the agency so the mrr is kind of there already to build the platform um yeah I mean they're not paying for the saw 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 percent and make more money yeah it's it is it is a separate entity and I and basically our trajectory there uh is three three million after it's fully built which is in about four to six months um in in that first year after it's built eight million year two and then 20 ish million year three and what does that mean three million in year one how many agency customers does that mean you have buying bird's eye that would be beyond the agency but that would be uh pretty much um what we have is about 80 agency clients ready to to use it we have it installed on about 18. it's a very high sell through rate I mean you're effectively saying you think 80 out of 120 customers are gonna you're able to cross-sell and from your agency into the SAS product yeah they they've already committed to it we're just you know signed contracts they've paid yep they've prepaid the software fion bird's eye not prepaid the agency dollars correct okay so what are you charging for prepayments on bird's eye 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 so how much money and don't don't like really tell me actually close like sign deals for just the technology not agency Revenue just bird's eye what is the Run rate today around 1.2 million okay interesting across how many folks have signed uh let me open it up probably what 15 20 30 something like that it's I'm I'm looking at the spreadsheet right now I'm opening it I don't want to say anything false no I mean I like I want other people to learn the strategy who are running an agency I mean so what do you tell these people you say it's not live yet it's going to be live in a couple months we want you to prepay 30 grand right now and they they wire the money and sign the contract we're not doing it in annuals we're doing it monthly so you know it's they can delete you know they can de-install it essentially and leave if they want but what it's helping us do is lower their customer acquisition costs and get more data from their already existing advertising spend so how many are signed up um there is 80 right now 80. so there's 80 there's 80 agency customers that are already paying monthly fees for bird's eye yep 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 yeah I mean we okay we've launched it in a closed environment I should say yeah I mean 80 customers depending on average 1 250 per month gets you to that 1.2 million run rate yep and some of them are smaller at like 500 some of them are bigger we have some clients that have you know 5 million UVS a month on their website so they pay a lot more than that um but we're really obviously still ironing out like the the cost model to service that and and how what's the what's the cap table at bird's eye look like does the agency own like 80 of it and then like you own the other 20 or how do you structure it um we have uh 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 and they put in dollar Capital they invested uh we are contemplating raising money right now yeah um so the federal agency partners really own 85 90 and then there's some other points scattered around PE firms and elsewhere and Technology what do you mean technology uh a fractional CTO and then I see uh that's of the six full-time full-timers right now five full-timers right now very cool Ramsay well I love this story here let's wrap up with the famous five number one favorite book Tipping Point number two is there a CEO you're following or studying Saleem basool number three what's your favorite online tool for building uh bird's eye hmm GitHub number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night that's a moving Target uh man I don't know five to seven that's not terrible what's your situation married single kids single no kids how old are you no kids 32. last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. you don't need to have all the answers losing is not losing it's Lessons Learned build on top of it and adapt guys there you have any launches first company made some money made half a million here lost 300 Grand now built an agency launched five years ago the agency processed 75 million bucks of AD dollars last year across 120 clients he kept on average seven percent of that so call or sorry five to seven percent of that so caught you know about five million bucks of Revenue last year team of 30 on the agency and then they said you know what let's 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 1.2 million Runway it's called bird's eye dot iobrdsi dot i o check it out Ramsey thanks for taking us to the top thanks appreciate it man 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 Thursday 1 p.m Central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on YouTube every day at 2 p.m 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 SAS World whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else I don't want you to miss it 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