Citia Revenue & Funding (2024)

good morning everybody my guest this morning is Linda Holliday she's an entrepreneur who has spent a career at the intersection of media marketing and tech building leading edge strategies technologies and companies that empower the most demanding marketers and publishers to learn teach target cell and story-tell across an ever-expanding array of opportunities and challenges she is the founder and chief executive of Cydia and first and only the first and only third-party system that creates swipeable card based media flows that integrate into the native feeds and flows on mobile media Linda are you ready to take us to the top this is this is like tinder for enterprise content right swipe and you're good that's probably a better way to say it so you you tell me what are you doing with your business model how do you make money so a little bit of a back swing because City is really a thesis-driven business and the thesis is that a few years ago the internet really changed from this transitional internet where we were putting stuff like brochures and ads on the internet and it's become something that's all feeds and flows the best example is music like we used to buy music a CD or a download but now it just streams so all contents going there it's going to stream so every company has to make streaming content if they want to participate in the next Internet and we're the platform that lets big companies do that at scale so they can make something on a platform one time and then use it in infinite reconfigurations across any channel and what's the what's the business models at SAS or performance-based we charge by the month we have enterprise customers so you know we we charge for inventories and they can buy multiple inventories and I want to learn more about kind of how the tech actually works before we do that before I get more of your back story Linda what give us an average size here what's the average enterprise would you say pay in a year so we're depending on the size of the contract 90 to 150,000 a year and what kind of leverage are you using to drive that kind of cost up or down as like as a number of seeds pieces of content whether the numerous so we're trying to price it in a way we don't throttle our own adoption so instead of pricing by the seat to be priced by cards and in the future we may end up going into a storage model as well so we're trying to you know make as much money as we can without you know discouraging that more viral adoption inside companies what is a card my audience won't know what that means a card is like a post or a pin a Pinterest card so when our customers make card based media the format is standardized and that lets us in the background iterate that content across ten different systems so it's optimized in every browser and device combination to be beautiful that's how we get that swiping action we actually we actually access you know the graphic processors etc we do all the email QA and all the social integrations so if you're familiar with unity it's kind of that concept where a customer makes something once and then we handle that permanent kind of iteration across all these platforms it's essentially like you've created the Lincoln Log for kind of web streaming you know streaming 2.0 and you then take that Lincoln Log that chunk of content can build many many different things with it I love that exactly I get 10% I just want to make it relatable for my audience and you know I actually do relate to this because all these interviews I do with CEOs I'm actually now they Auto create cards in my database I'd get Latka calm and what we're doing is it's nowhere near your sophistication that why I need to check you guys out but we take those cards that can be easily embedded in blog posts and other forms of media on mobile and it's working so well thinking in forms of Lincoln Logs versus static content exactly because what's happened is we've kind of gone to a small piece ecology like a lot of what was built in the past was built on almost like a high-rise like you had a giant web site and you had all these special-purpose digital content elements and they're big and they're they're not easy to use if you just think about your chunks of content like you did and wanting to shoot them wherever you want them to go and having uniform metrics that come back to you that's the system that fits the new do you know feed and stream ecology and when you update the core Lincoln log at Auto updates across all the instances right exactly your styling because that's a big selling point for you guys isn't it well it's a big pain point for our customers right all that stuff gets out of sync because you know a lot of this technology has been built for startups it's like hand-to-hand combat and I say there's a big difference between playing pickup ball and running the Lakers you know like the Lakers has a parking concession right it's a complex business with lots of moving parts lawyers regulations global fans etc so managing all of that media across all these regions and channels is not just difficult it's a liability issue yeah that makes good sense now take me back here when did you launch the company and if you decided to bootstrap are you raised capital well we launched in 2012 and we were working mostly with publishers so we did some really cool work with like Kevin Kelly and Snoop Dogg and but we decided that wasn't they weren't really ready for what we were doing in terms of business models and commitments so we decided dog is never ready let me just tell you he's never ready he's more ready than you think he's pretty much learned a lot from those projects that actually allowed us to perfect the software with some really you know imaginative people and use cases so that was really great and it was really hard like if you could make a book like what technology wants into cards that's you know you kind of set the bar out as far as it needs to go anything else that's easier but then we just pivoted to companies who are more kind of serious about really rocking this new era and we look for big companies like GE Comcast MasterCard Viacom company how many do you work with now today how many customers we have twelve enterprise customers got it so this is very much a kind of a low volume high touch high ACV model versus a volume low ARPU model right yep now can I take you mentioned earlier kind of the contract value of around 90 grand minimum can I take that times 12 and assume you guys are doing about 90 grand a month is that fair around there I mean the problem with these big customers and we have like Fortune 100's maybe fortune or whatever but they're pretty slow to pay so the lag time between yes and maybe even being in market and getting the revenue is is the thing that no long what's the sales cycle the sales cycle is short the pay cycles long so I mean we usually get a yes in the first meeting but we are kind of cherry picking who we call on and then it takes how Linda how are you doing that so we look for tells like poker tell like when companies are actually talking about innovation in a way that is fearless and not romantic now the problem with publishers is they're very romantic about what they make GE just wants to survive or win so when we hear those signals from a big company that because it's painful to change from the way they used to change to the way they need to be and so and we hear that that serious that's when we go in what are you spending well actually before I ask you what your CAC is I mean have you bootstrap this or have you raised we raised an angel around a couple years ago and we've been bootstrapping and running off our revenues so how much total has been invested in the company we're not really talking about that now to help help me understand that but strategically helped me understand why um well you know the positioning to potential raises and whatnot is pretty delicate craft and we want to make sure we do that really well got into all the metrics right yeah I mean my research team they do a great job at getting data that what they brought back to me was you guys have raised about 2.8 million it was pretty public and a press release is that accurate um at one point it was accurate okay how does that number change you pay some of it back or more of my money and we've been you know making money so yeah there's more invest in the business than that at this point I got it and now how did you give me more of your backstory so people are going wait where did Linda get money from how she must've had it something big successful after this how'd you do it why did you launch the company and where were you at a mental state when he did that well I had a significant exit a few years ago sold a company to publicist and decided to do what everybody does became an angel investor and I was very excited about this new technology it was Christmas in 2007 you know last iPhone html5 I couldn't wait to just like sit around and tell people what I thought they should do but what was the company Linda that you sold the publicist or publicist it was called NBC and then it was Digitas house and now it's I think bootless this house okay and when you say significant like if that's a very relative term is there any way you can quantify that I never had to work again okay good that's good so but you didn't go buy a hundred million dollar jet but it was enough read enough to work again right no I was it was enough to actually fund some you know project big special projects to which is I haven't already been running but that was my fourth exit so I had already kind of been living the life I had in mind so I didn't really have a pent up need to get off ramen or anything and I'm more interested in making media and what's coming I'm I'm very excited and I got disappointed with what I saw which was a lot of iterative thinking you know page turning stuff it wasn't very imaginative and we really got all the technology we needed to make anything we can think of literally anything you can think of you can make at this point and so I just had to get off the sidelines and get back on the field because I really didn't see people approaching media with that kind of imagination in my backgrounds design and systems sciences I'm looking at this what I can't read it so don't worry but I'm looking at this whiteboard behind you with he's very organized post-it notes going she must be like a systems thinker what do you have today in terms of team size we're 13 okay all based it are you in New York we're all in New York New York City so it launched in 2012-13 folks full-time New York up to kind of 12 enterprise customers what are you finding you're having to spend to land these guys like fully weighted would you say well our paybacks well under a year we don't really spend a lot on media we do a little bit of promoting post it's it's pretty organic and the bizdev Department of which I am one you know there's one and a half of us I'm half you know we do all this pretty much we're we're definitely looking up our platform is pretty DIY now so we're looking at opening up the soft-serve version of that and and looking at the pipeline and seeing seeing how that fills our funnel out this year maybe decree you like maybe moving kind of price point down but doing no touch sale self-serve kind of model possibly that's the part we're trying to figure out right now you know we obviously can do that but there's a lot of demand in the product we do have so we're more interested at the moment in lead gen how do you how do you introduce that kind of no touch product without eroding your enterprise revenue by not pricing it less okay got it so you would make it DIY but keep it the same price yeah and there's so many features in these platforms if it came down to crippling some you know metrics or a number of cards available there are there's a lot we could do to kind of you know encourage customers to move up into more fully featured versions it does kind of happen organically though one of the weird and wonderful things about the platform is when people buy it for one purpose they start using it for a lot of other purposes so customers are using it for training for employee communications for publicity for product information all kinds of things so their their usage actually grows and then hopefully our price points that will grow you know elegantly with them with these 12 enterprise customers you have been considering your background you've had many many exits you've been in this space for a while how many of these customers have been your customers across many different companies one oh really I was expecting that you just take this chunk of ten core customers and launch them in it whatever new products you come up with oh no actually only one okay all right one doesn't customers all have the same problems right so it's a little bit indistinguishable when you go between like Comcast GE they all have the same scale problems they all have you know the the growth their own kind of internal process is a lot of their challenges are have to do with being big right and so they're very common across the companies what is your turnover attention look like or or it's hard for you to measure that because the cohorts so small it's really you know our business is really chunky with this kind of customer set but I'd say it's it's well under 10% annually yeah that's great in terms of both revenue and logo churn yeah only logo churn revenue is you know not positive growing god you mean like net negative where your expansion is way more than your work yeah yeah by the way I'm Dyslexic I always get that upside down well cuz you have churn and retention and then you have net negative or positive it's like cool okay so you're just to be clear your expansion revenue on your base even always eclipses any lost revenue you've gotten over the past year and things happen like GE divested a unit and so that new company that bought it signed a contract yep alright so that happens for us too we're what team are you typically selling into when we do outbound we're looking for often a marketing person or an innovations person it can be a P&L person though who has a real business agenda that's clear so it's more about the mindset to change that we identify but they tend to be top-line people looking for you know new ways to make markets because that's gotten so tough and are you inventing kind of a new line item in the in the budget of these folks or you replacing something we're mostly replacing internal tack so like internal CMS stuff I'm not CMS so much but custom technology so sometimes we say it's like going from custom kitchens to kind of an IKEA kitchen no they're replacing they're you know single purpose media built on more you know kind of outdated and expensive platforms with expensive partners one of our customers do study where 90% out cost solution and at the same time we have a huge impact on metrics so it's often ten times the metrics they got in the prior strategies and tactics so it's a cost out and an impact up scenario and what they replace our old things that don't work and some expensive partners sometimes agencies a lot of these customers are also trying to do more of this work in-house last question here before we wrap up with the famous five lifetime value this is obviously like a finger in the air right but for you how do you think about lifetime value and how does that help guide your business if it does it all well we the lifetime value is unknown because these inventories have value themselves it's kind of like your shopping list on other platforms you might use so there's a big cost in these customers moving their assets off of our platforms so we think that makes us pretty sticky and as they get more and more comfortable with communicating out of more of an asset or a library framework rather than a campaign framework they'll continue to reuse all these things one of the big you know profound changes of the customer journeys have become nonlinear they used to be a little bit more tightly managed by these companies so they need all these assets constantly to be refreshing all these different customer journeys and you know they live on our system and it's such a you know such a lean approach to what they've been doing I think there's a lot of room for us to stay really vital and well priced for them so do you assume a minimum of at least three years I think permanent myself I mean I can be proved wrong but I think it's just like an Oracle or or AWS that you have a kind of you know your customers know how to use you who they've you know given you their product in input and you've incorporated the meaningful and put into the product and that we can have a long-term healthy relationship with them we're really clear about our business model it's to make our customers successful yeah I asked the LTV question there because like if you assume infinite lifetime value you could get really aggressive on CAC and then that can get you in trouble so I'm just curious in your most conservative world do you have do you do you think about an LTV minimum well I think it's meant many millions of dollars because you know we're at such a you know rounding error to that right now right now our payback is less than a year even at that price so I think the room for us to go is at least you know ten times that it makes good sense Linda I love I love it I love the product I love the space you guys are and it's gonna be fun to watch you let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book team of teams number two is that yeah is there a CEO you're following or studying right now well Jeff Bezos that's like being alive when Henry Ford figured everything out if you're not studying him you're missing something number three is their favorite besides your own is there a favorite online tool you have okay this is silly but Apple notes is amazing because series the best dictation software in the world and it's free and it automatically updates in the cloud on every device you use so that's like my microphone I'm talking to constantly I'm doing I do the same exact thing and it's free which is the best number for how much now I know how many hours of sleep to get every night oh six okay it's pretty good and what's your situation married single you have kids married any kiddos no kids no kids and you mind me asking Linda how old you are oh let's step back what's that wonder take us back take us back to your 20 year old self what he was she knew um okay that's interesting I think maybe I would have I would have cut some losses faster there you guys have it from Linda she would have cut some losses faster she's now building a brand new company in the kind of content management space relative to the new web and sliding and flipping and all this kind of stuff launched it in 2012 they've put over 2.8 million bucks into the company both her own money because she's had successful exits and outside our capital their team of 13 is based in New York they're working with over 12 enterprise level brands paying over 90 grand per year on average again as a scale and grow doing around 70 grand or sorry excuse me doing around 90 grand per month in revenue with super healthy economics Linda thank you so much for taking us to the top it's great to be here thanks for having me