How Bitskout Reached 6 Enterprise Customers with Zapier-Rivaling AI Automation (Interview with Ilia Zelenkin)

Introduction: Ilia Zelenkin and Bitskout

Nathan Latka

00:00Hey, folks. My guest today is Ilia Zelenkin. He is building something called Bitskout. He calls it Zapier with brains. He was born in Minsk, immigrated to Barcelona, pursuing a career in global multinational. Last seven years, he led the innovations unit and built super successful things, got multiple innovation awards, then finally left to build his own thing, which we love.

00:18>> A month before COVID, this is

00:20when this all happened. He's a husband, the father loves basketball and video games, a fan of Steve Blank, Ben Horowitz, Peter Thiel would work for Elon Musk just for food and the bed. Ilia, you ready to take us to the top?

Ilia Zelenkin

00:32Yes. Thanks a lot, Nathan. Yes. Food I'm

Nathan Latka

00:34food, a bed, and a flamethrower. Right?

Ilia Zelenkin

00:37Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

How Bitskout Competes with Zapier

Nathan Latka

00:38Alright. What is Bitskout? I mean, how can Zapier improve? It's a huge company, 4,000,000,000 valuation. How do you beat them?

Ilia Zelenkin

00:46Well, 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.

Customer Use Cases and AI Capabilities

Nathan Latka

00:55What does that mean? Can you tell me a customer who's using you and how they're using you?

Ilia Zelenkin

00:59Yeah. So simply only humans and 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 or that's a scratch or that's a break. Zapier cannot do that because 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

01:24make better decisions and be more productive.

Pricing Model: Pay Per Use and Monthly Plans

Nathan Latka

01:26I see. Interesting. When do you what are average customers paying you per month to use the platform?

Ilia Zelenkin

01:32So we we have we are pay per use. We have pay per use models, so customers pay for a kind of transaction, but we package this into monthly plans, which is easier to predict what the costs will be. Right now we are approximately at ACV 1,000 per year.

Nathan Latka

01:48Okay, got it. So about $90 per month is the average customer. And what's the utility metric, the usage metric you're pricing against?

Ilia Zelenkin

01:56So we In

01:59general, we are pricing against value. In this case, we are saving time. On average, we save from five minutes to weeks of time because of the automations. And we only price against that metric.

Nathan Latka

02:13But 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 at the number of automations?

02:20Yeah. So it's a it's a tough balance. So what we do is you have monthly plans where a number of executable number of transactions is included, you have number of gigabytes. And what happens is the moment you overuse this capacity, you move forward with just charge extra and let's see.

Workflow Runs and Project Limits Explained

Ilia Zelenkin

02:39Ilia, 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 basically, if you set up a system on Bitskout, 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. 3,000 workflow runs, you're going get advanced again. So you're really pricing against number of

Nathan Latka

03:01workflow runs and number of projects. Correct?

03:04Yes. Yes. Well, number of projects is just a natural 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.

Ilia Zelenkin

03:17I see. And it's now when you say up to 15 scouts, that's 15 seats. Right?

03:22Yes. 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, in project work environment, you can assign awards for people when they do tasks.

Nathan Latka

03:37Oh, very cool. Very cool.

03:39What is called as cloud, you know.

Six Enterprise Customers

Ilia Zelenkin

03:40Ilia, how many customers today?

03:43Right now, we have six enterprise customers.

Nathan Latka

03:46Six customers. So can I take six times $90 a month? You're doing about $450 a month in revenue?

03:52Like that. Yes.

Ilia Zelenkin

03:53Oh, sorry. $540 a month.

03:56Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Launch Timeline and Team Structure

Nathan Latka

03:57Okay. And and so is this fairly new then? Did you just launch?

Ilia Zelenkin

04:01Yes. 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 tool. We are not a separate tool. 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 tool. So there are no such lists exist. So you

Nathan Latka

04:24cannot go to Zen Outreach, for example, and get this list because this is a protected thing. That is the first barrier you need to overcome. But once you overcome this barrier, the users are naturally embedded in system into their projects.

Ilia Zelenkin

04:37Understood. So just to be clear, you launched this year in January. And is it just you or do you have a team?

Nathan Latka

04:45No. There are three of us, but I am the only one full time.

Ilia Zelenkin

04:49Okay. And how much equity do you own? Do you own a 100%?

04:52No. I own 70 something.

Nathan Latka

04:5670 something. And who owns the rest?

04:59It's my CTO and my second CTO.

05:03Two CTO. That's a good that's a good group. Two CTOs.

05:06Yes.

05:08Okay. Cool. Now have you bootstrapped this or not?

05:10Yes. We totally bootstrapped. We love that.

Scaling Past Six Customers: The Inbound Shift

Ilia Zelenkin

05:13We love that. So what's the plan? How do you go from six customers to 600?

05:18Well, that 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 2,000 ks, we need inbound customers. That's the outbound not going work. And we are rebuilding our strategy and our site and features of the product, so we onboard more from

05:48inbound from our website. And we are actually replicating Zapier strategy by creating lots of landing pages, like, for instance, if you want to compare two documents between each other, click on that button, the AI model is in your account. If you want to, for example, create make a summary of a meeting, click on that button, the model comes to your account. That's what Zapier did, which is actually very clever. So you cut through all the, you

06:12know, marketing. You just say that if that's what you want, let's click a button.

Nathan Latka

06:16So Ilia, 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?

Personal Savings and the Case for Raising

Ilia Zelenkin

06:26So, first of all, we have personal savings because when I exited my this large multinational, so I took compensation due to the fact that I had there was a client tied to solutions I built. And so we're using our own money. But we're looking forward to fundraise in nearest time, maybe a seed or a seed round, because we understand how the sales work. We have a strategy how to make it work really fast. And this is

06:59where I think we win the external capital.

07:02How much do you want to raise?

07:04We're thinking between 200 to 500 k.

07:08Why is that?

Nathan Latka

07:10Well, 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, took three to five minutes to explain you what is AI and etcetera. So I don't want to raise a lot of money, hire lots of salespeople before I really understand how this thing works. And the most important thing on my table right now is SEO

Ilia Zelenkin

07:39strategies and inbound strategy, and that doesn't require lots of capital at the beginning.

Nathan Latka

07:45How 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?

Six Months of Personal Runway

Ilia Zelenkin

07:53I think I have six months left.

07:58And how do you think about that?

Nathan Latka

08:02I don't know. I wake up at night and cry, you know.

08:07No. I mean, how low have you where are you based right now?

08:11I am in Barcelona.

08:12How low have you been able to drive your personal expenses so you can extend your runway and focus on the startup?

Ilia Zelenkin

08:18I don't think that well, I can we can extend easily for a couple of more months by just moving to a different city in Spain, or 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 date. That's the deadline.

Nathan Latka

08:42>> What's the deadline?

08:44Second of the second of February.

February Deadline and Success Metrics

Nathan Latka

08:48And what goal do you want to hit by the February 2?

Ilia Zelenkin

08:52We either have to raise a seed round of approximately 200 to 500, or we need to reach at least 5,000 MRR.

Nathan Latka

09:02And what if you don't do either of those? You quit?

Ilia Zelenkin

09:05I think I will hide, I believe. So I will regroup myself, go take consultancy job because I have lots of experience in telco, internal communications, and there are lots of consultancy projects. Regroup myself for a couple of months and then come back to that.

Nathan Latka

09:20I 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 are never going to be bigger than $10 a month when they could be spending that time going after a much bigger challenge. So I'm eager to see what

09:38you do between now and February.

Ilia Zelenkin

09:40Yeah, me too. My whole family does.

Famous Five: Books, Tools, and Habits

Nathan Latka

09:45All right, let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite book?

Ilia Zelenkin

09:50My favorite book is business book is Competing Against Luck by Clayton Christensen. Non business book is Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things.

Nathan Latka

10:01Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Ilia Zelenkin

10:05Yes. Ali Ghodsi from Databricks.

Nathan Latka

10:08Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building your business? Notion. And number four, how and Monday. How many hours of sleep do get every night?

10:18I gave I get straight eight hours sleep without question. Nothing can stop that.

Ilia Zelenkin

10:23And what's your situation? Married, single kids?

Nathan Latka

10:26I am married. I have a kid, four years old.

Ilia Zelenkin

10:29Oh, very cool. And Ilia, how old are you?

Nathan Latka

10:31I'm 38.

Ilia Zelenkin

10:3338. Last question. What's something you wish you knew when you were 20?

Nathan Latka

10:41You don't have to rush.

Closing Thoughts and Wrap-Up

Nathan Latka

10:43Guys, Bitskout, it's Zapier on steroids launched this year, already have six enterprise accounts paying on average a $100 per month, call in the SMB mid market, but he's doing about $500 a month in revenue aiming by February to get up to either $5k a month in revenue or go raise a 200,000 to $500,000 seed round. We'll see what happens. He's been scrappy right now. He's got six months of personal life runway left. He's got, you know,

11:05him and two co founders. He owns 70% bootstrapped so far. We will see what happens. Ilia, thanks for taking us to the top.

11:11Thanks, Nathan.

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