How Bitskout CEO Ilia Zelenkin grew Bitskout to $17.4K revenue and 6 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is ilya zalenkin he is building something called bit scout he calls it zapier with brains he was born in minsk immigrated to barcelona pursuing a career in global a multinational last seven years he led the innovations unit and built super successful things and got multiple innovation awards and then finally left to build his own thing which we love a month before cobit this is when this all happens he's a husband the father loves basketball and video games a fan of steve blank ben horowitz and peter thiel would work for elon musk just for food and the bed elia are you ready to take it to the top yes thanks a lot nathan yes food food a bed and a flame thrower right yeah yeah yeah all right what is bit scout i mean how can zapier get improved it's a huge company 4 billion valuation how do you beat them well that's very simple we beat them with intelligence zapier only moves stuff around but we can understand what is inside and make a better decision what does that mean can you tell me a customer who's using you and how they're using you yeah so simply only humans and the artificial intelligence can understand what's in the content so they can look at the picture and see like that's five chairs or three cars so that's a scratch or that's a break zapper cannot do that because it just understands that this is a picture and what we do is we allow our users to integrate ready-made intelligence into their projects where they need a little bit more understanding of what's going on to make better decisions and be more productive i see interesting when do what are average customers paying you per month to use the platform so we we have we are pay-per-use we have pay-per-use model so customers pay for a kind of transaction but we package this into monthly plans so it's easier to predict what your costs will be right now we are approximately at acv 1000 per year okay got it so about 90 per month is the average customer and what's the utility metric the usage metric you're pricing against uh so we so the in general we are pressing against value in this case we are saving time we can on average we say from five minutes to weeks of time because of the automations and we only price against that metric but you can't price against time saved because you don't know how much time you're going to save them so you're pricing the number of automations yeah so it's uh it's a tough balance so what we do is uh you have monthly plans where a number of executive number of transactions is included like you have a number of gigabytes and uh what happens is uh the the moment you overuse this capacity you move forward with uh we just charge extra and that's it elia let me take a shot at pitching this to my audience because i think you have a smart pricing plan but i still think they understand it right so you basically if you set up if you set up a system on bitscott you know send my lead from hubspot to a google sheet that's one workflow run if you get 500 workflow runs you're going to get advanced 3000 workflow runs you're going to get advanced again so you're really pricing against number of workflow runs and number of projects correct yes yes well number of projects is just uh naturals limit it's not physical it's not a technical limit in the system we want if you have more than five projects like it's better to talk with us maybe we can structure it better i see a scout when you say up to 15 scouts that's 15 seats right yes but in in because there is a additional feature included in our platform that we are still developing which is called rewards and because our platform is used in work environment and project work environment you can assign awards for people when they do tasks oh very cool what is called a scout you know elliot how many customers today right now we have six enterprise customers six customers so uh can i take six times ninety bucks a month you're doing about 450 bucks a month in revenue something like that yes sorry 540 540 a month yeah yeah yeah okay and so is this fairly new then did you just launch yes well we actually launched in january but it took some time to take it forward because the challenge that we have is we are on top of some two so we are not a separate tool we are on top of monday and asana so when you do customer discovery you need to make sure the first condition is met the customer uses monday or asana or some other project management too so there are no such lists exist so you cannot go to an outreach for example and get this list because this is a protected thing so that is the first barrier you need to overcome but once you overcome this barrier the users and actually embed our system into their projects understood so just to be clear you launched this year in january and is it just you or do you have a team uh no there are three of us but i am the only one full time okay and how much equity do you own do you want 100 no i own 70 70 something 70 something and who owns the rest uh it's my cto and my second city 2c2 that's a good that's a good group two ctos yes um okay cool now have you bootstrapped this or not yes we totally bootstrapped we love that we love that so what's the plan how do you go from six customers to 600 well um that that is what we're doing right now right now our thinking is that we closed half we closed three customers ourselves and then well i closed them and then three customers came as an inbound leads so we understood with using acv of between 500 to 2000 k we need inbound customers that's the outbound not going to work and we are building our strategy and our site and features of the product so we we we on board more from inbound from our website and we are actually replicating the peer strategy by creating lots of landing pages like for instance if you wanna compare two documents between each other click on that button the ai model is in your account if you wanna for example create make a summary of a meeting click on that button the model comes to your account so that's what the pr did which is actually very clever so you cut through all the you know marketing you just say that if that's what you want let's click a button so yeah obviously 500 a month for you personally and your co-founders is not enough to support yourself so how are you guys like paying like personal expenses while you grow your startup so first of all we have uh personal savings because when i exited my uh this large multinational so i took uh compensation due to the fact that i had [Music] there was a plan tied to solutions i've built and uh so we're using our own money but we're looking forward to fundraise in nearest time uh maybe a seat or present round because we understand how the sales work we have a strategy how to make it work really fast and this is where i think when the external capital how much do you want to raise we're thinking between 200 to 500k why is that well i'm really cautious in spending really fast because it's a very it's a product that involves ai so you need to be very clear in your value proposition for instance for us it took uh three to five minutes to explain what it is ai and etc so i don't want to raise a lot of money i hire lots of sales people before i really understand how this thing works and the the most important thing on my on my table right now is uh ceo strategies and inbound strategy and that doesn't require lots of capital at the beginning how much personal like your personal life runway do you have in other words how long do you have to build this startup where you can survive on your savings for a while i think i have six months left and how do you think about that i don't know i wake up and at night and cry you know no i mean how how low have you where are you based right now i am in barcelona how low have you been able to drive your personal expenses so you can extend your runway and focus on the startup i don't think that um well i can we can extend easily for a couple of more months by just moving to a different city in spain and all smaller city but i don't think that that's a very good strategy because this is like a limit that i have and everything every plan that i have is built from that limit so this there is a date and that's that that's the deadline second of the second of february and what goal do you want to hit by the second of february uh we either have to raise a seed round of approximately 200 to 500 or we need to reach at least 5 000 ml and what if you don't do irons you quit i think i will hibernate so i will regroup myself go take consultancy job because i have lots of experience in telco and telecommunications and there are lots of consultancy projects regroup myself for a couple of months and then come back to that billy i think it's great that you know that date with very clear metrics of what you want by that date you know it's very easy to start something what no one ever talks about is how to stop something so you get a lot of very smart people stuck inside projects that are never going to be bigger than 10 grand a month when they could be spending that time going after a much bigger challenge so i'm eager to see what you do between now and february yeah i mean all right...