How Citia CEO Linda Holliday grew Citia to $1.2M revenue and 12 customers in 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...