How Birdzi CEO Shekar Raman grew Birdzi to $10M revenue and 10 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is sheika rahmani he's a ceo and founder of bird z a b2b sas company an industry pioneering customer intelligence platform that helps supermarket retail deliver a true supermarkets retail so i deliver a true 101 automated marketing and personalization platform at scale using machine learning and other data driven technologies shaker you're ready to take us to the top yes i am nathan good to be back on yeah i know it was 2019 last time you're on so this is great but just to be clear for those that are just learning about birdseed are you only selling to grocery stores currently yes we have been asked by a number of other retailers where platform will work for them but uh maybe towards the beginning of next year is when we'll try to transition into maybe c stores okay so i go into a grocery store if they're using birds are they going to get my phone number or email or how do they get that is that the check out when the people go hey do you want to give me your email address to get updated offers and stuff no typically we work with retailers that already have loyalty programs so they already have loyalty programs implemented and our platform kind of goes on top of that so we take first party uh customer identified data where you put in your loyalty number or phone number so we know exactly what you bought in transaction and we use that data to then track customer behavior trends and then figure out what offers to send you i see okay and what what might one of those offers sound like you know 10 off toothpaste if i come back before wednesday yeah so the unique thing with the bird's eye platform is typically the way the promotion industry works is it's cpg driven so the brands will say hey here's what i want to put out coupons on or here's what i want to get deals on and then the retailers essentially will try to identify the audience that works best for that those offers uh what we did is we flipped the equation we said let's start with the chapter let's look at nathan let's look at his purchasing behavior and what will get him back into the store forget about what's on sale let's see what will get him back in the store is it ten percent of sushi ten percent off pizza whatever it is let's create a promotion tailored around his personal experience and interest and then figure out how to get that funded down the road very interesting okay so what are grocery stores paying you on average per month to use this platform well it depends on the number of campaigns that run but it can run anywhere from 40 to 60 000 a month okay what they typically pass so all of your customers are paying more than forty thousand dollars a month some paying much more yeah i'd say the averages aren't 40. average is 40. okay fair enough that you know this is a very much than an enterprise motion right 500 000 acvs do you have a big sales team no not right now it's just a couple of people because you know the industry while it's big from an addressable perspective and the grocery industry is about 750 billion dollars but there's only a couple of 100 supermarket chains that are really in our target market right and so they represent about 400 billion dollars in sales in total and what we're really going after is one percent of that is our truly addressable market four billion dollar market um so we're going after a four billion dollar tab which is really where the promotions industry is right where coupons and sale and your weekly ad items that's about the money money that's spent on that part of the business and that's where we're going after so how many folks are on the team today full-time about 28 and how many of those are sales folks with a quota two two wow okay so so how many deals do you expect one sales rep to close in in a quarter or a half year yeah so we right now we're looking at a velocity around two to three a year that's a long sale they must be very patient right it is yeah it is you know grocery industry is a tough business so what we have been very successful at doing however is expanding revenue and existing customers constantly with innovation right so we've had a fantastic track record of going into the retailer at maybe 10 20 000 a month and expanding that out to 50 60 000 a month in a couple years 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 it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're going to get a different valuation a vc is going to pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're going to 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 not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on youtube all these datas are built from real time valuation data points founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 to their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to 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 going out right now and you're raising your seed round well 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 data set of sas valuations than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash 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 i was gonna say how many customers are you working with today about 10. okay about 10 yeah i mean i can vouch for this by the way when you came on in 2019 you said the average acv was about 300k now it's 500k so you've definitely expanded there and is that because you're upselling new products or seats or what correct well you know a lot of our roadmap is informed by our customers so we see their pain points and they come back to us and say can you solve this can you solve that and we wind up then building a platform based of it so 50 is coming from pure internal innovation and r d and 50 is informed by the customer i see and can we take 10 customers times that 40 000 rpoo you guys are doing about 400 000 a month in revenue yeah that's about that that would be about right that's great look considering the space you're in right and that pre-code but you were doing about a three million run rate the fact that you sort of grew in your space right almost added almost two million dollars of ar in the past 24 months is pretty darn impressive yeah well you know entrepreneurs are never satisfied everybody wants to be 10x in two years that's right that's right now have you do you have to pursue growth at all costs have you raised a bunch of capital uh not really not since the pandemic we had some just some internal uh note rounds but that's about it for today of course we're cash flow positive so not really looking to raise money until maybe the end of the year we have so that's a big deal too because when you last came on 2019 you told me you were burning 150 000 a month correct correct so right now we are cash flow positive and uh i guess it's a good position to be in but we see a lot of new opportunities come into the market which we think we'll go out and raise some growth capital for so and just be clear including the convertible notes how much have you raised total to date 9.4 million oh well that's a lot wait so these were big convertible notes because when you came on last time you had only raised a million dollar seed round in 2014 right correct and then 2018 we did about three and a half oh and yeah and then in 2020 we we converted some notes and uh did another 1.2 okay okay got it that was in sorry 20 20. 2021 is when we close those notes yeah okay right okay got it so three point so pre-seat of a million seat of 3.5 million 2018 1.2 million notes over the past 24 months correct i...