Data Duopoly Revenue, Valuation & Funding (2023)

hey folks my guest today is tanabe ethanandan she's the co-founder and ceo of data duopoly a chartered accountant from ernst young and a cambridge university graduate economics she takes the lead on the financial and business strategy at the business they are focused on incentivizing visitors to explore tannery you ready to take us to the top yes okay what kind of visitors is this for b2b sas companies to get their visitors or in person places to get visitors who are you focused on we're focusing on any venue worldwide we primarily work with visitor attractions like theme parks museums and venues um so we worked with absolutely fantastic eden project here in the uk which receives over one million visitors for pilot test and we've now recently launched the national trust cornish tin coast partnership which covers three world heritage mining sites which is absolutely fantastic to be involved with such an exciting project and directing visitors to the least busy areas interesting so how did you get this idea were you working at one of these parks or doing financial analysis on one of them or what actually the idea came about because me and my co-founder were so tired of getting stuck in keys everyone's been there they've had an exciting day out they go to the visitor center and see the sign turn left you end up following the same set of people around the whole site when actually there's loads of space around the site but you just didn't know so we thought how could we incorporate digital to make the physical experience so much better interesting and who's paying you is it the amusement park or the historical national monument directly yeah so we charge the venues directly on a sas contract what do they pay on average per month um so really it depends on the size of the venue um so we're looking at around 30 000 pounds or medium-sized venue to even higher depending on the scale and we're also looking to work with university campuses okay when you say 30 000 pounds or about 37 000 usd is that monthly or annually that would be annually annually okay and when you say the size of the campus measured by what acres or people or what really it's a number of visitors so we would normally work with clients that have around more than 250 000 visitors and visiting every year okay interesting when did you write the first line of code for the platform so myself i'm not a technical co-founder so we actually used contractors so it was actually when we did our mvp so that was probably really early on and it was a really ugly manual prototype as many are you test it out you try and get out the kinks and when it's launched to market it looked a lot better when we had our in-house development team when was that though when did you get started on the code back in about sort of early 2019 2019 okay very cool so tell me about your first customer which who was it and how did you land them so really with the national trust tin coast they were first paying client and we actually had conversations with the project manager early on and they were really excited what we do then covert hit and really the whole world and went into lockdown and people couldn't explore at all so the world was in desperate need of a chance to go out and explore but actually understand where the busy areas are and make informed decisions of where to go next say that one more time your first customer was who the national trust cornish tin coast partnership what is that is that a national site yes it's actually a collection of three world heritage mining sites based down in cornwall geva levant and battalic and what it allows people to do is sort of explore the rich heritage of the coastline seeing how the mining took place and we direct them around seeing what the really exciting bits are in the area very interesting because that was your first customer how many customers are you serving now today so at the moment working with them we've got a really strong sales pipeline so we're also working with a local company to develop gamified trails we're also working with university campuses which is really exciting so farm at the university our first little pilot site and we're using our same technology to help students and staff navigate around the campus so i love pilots i understand the need to do that to drive paying customers national trust partnership was your first customer paying how many are paying you though today at the moment those are the only ones and we've to stop two or three so three at the moment okay got it three so this is great so how did you guys survive cobit i mean that's all you have to deal with cutting expenses i mean that's a big deal so we were actually really early on so we only incorporated in october 2019 so we were a team of two myself and my co-founder aaron morris so we kept ourselves really lean we bootstrapped the company we sort of took trains um slept from very dubious airbnbs and we went to trade shows in london the works but really we then managed to secure our first seed round of a quarter of a million pounds and that's when it changed and we did that during covert and the real reason for that was we secured our first paying client during then but actually more importantly there was actually a big need people suddenly realize they need to understand where their visitors are on site knowing that they just sold a million tickets for a day isn't enough they need to know actually where are people on site and that's where we can really help so we managed to get backing from the european space agency for our seed round also another organization in aerospace and some fantastic angel investors and that enabled us to grow our team from two to six and very shortly becoming seven which really has ramped up our sales pipeline and our sort of development capabilities which has been hugely exciting how much equity did you have to sell to raise the 275 000 yeah so for us that we had to give about 10 equity away but i would like to say we came from an incubator beforehand so they had a stake in the business at the very starting point i see so the precede folks took about 10 how much did the incubator take so they took a lot more um it was 24.9 at the beginning okay and who was that incubator so that's actually launch pad and they're based down in cornwall and really they were the people that brought evan and myself together so they took us at individuals with no business idea and they gave us a year and funded us for masters in entrepreneurship and said can you start up a business how much capital they give you if any so they didn't give us capital per se but they gave support and expertise um but really it was down to aaron and myself to do the hard work and that's where we've got to you today so tell me you and aaron own 65 today and the incubator has 25 and the pre-seat is 10. exactly about 66 between evan and myself very cool okay what a great story now you're growing today the team is six people um how are you thinking about burn i mean can you self-fund off customer revenue yet so at the moment for us actually we are using our seed money but for us we're quite lean we don't pay for office space we've sort of adapted to that hybrid working we've got some free office space at the moment in cornwall which is fantastic it means we can meet once a week but actually we work with a developer in the philippines which keeps our cost really low and he's absolutely fantastic an integral part of the team how did you find him amazing and i think covert taught us that we can how did you find how did you find him oh sorry i thought you meant how we find him with how it goes how we found him was we were advertising the role he applied and we went through an interview process where did you advertise though um on linkedin on angel list um the usual sort of hot spots but it actually came through a direct connection very interesting so he's developing can i ask what you pay him per month um yeah you can do um so for us we sort of do us all about um 2 000 pounds a month um but that is for specifics project costs i see interesting okay so six people now today um what do the six people do so we have a variety so myself i take some of the business and financial side of things my co-founder is an award-winning film director so she actually takes the lead on the product design and the ui and ux we have a sort of lead developer based in the philippines which is fantastic a full stack developer we also have two underground developers at the moment um here in cornwall one sort of a mid-level developer sort of taking charge on the back end side of things and then we also have more on the app side front end development a junior developer and we have a sales and marketing lead and the new team member hopefully joining us later this month is the junior marketing assistant willing to ramp up that sales cycle so so how much are you guys burning per month right now so at the moment it's not too bad we sort of have about one way in the bank account probably for around another eight to nine months actually okay okay that's pretty good so what's the plan then do you think of enough customers be profitable are you gonna go raise again so i think profitable with startups that's not the aim the aim is to get that customer base and get that recurring revenue up so for us at the moment it's really pushing on that sale so we're going to as many trade shows as possible so we went to the visitor attractions conference down in london we're going to the family attractions expo in birmingham we're actually going to leisure up in france as well a key retail and leisure industry trade show really to get our name out there now that covert you know is allowing travel restrictions to slightly be lifted that's really important for us to get our name out there um but for us really we were going to be looking to do an avocado round um that's sort of eis funded here in the uk um which means sort of the enterprise enterprise relief fund um which is sort of quite beneficial to invest in startups and and what's revenue today so revenue today is ongoing so for us our focus is actually driving more sales in our pipeline i would say i'm gonna be slightly cautious about saying the revenue to date but i'm certainly happy to have a conversation with anyone who might be interested further you mentioned three thousand dollar average per month right okay and you said you have three paying customers today can we multiply those together you're doing about nine ten thousand dollars a month in revenue potentially but really for us it's you know actually driving that future sales pipeline and actually obtaining the data because i think the data insights are really powerful for us well yeah i mean every startup wants to get more sales so the statement i'm trying to get a sense of how you've how you've executed so far so i mean are all three of those customers actually paying customers or some of them still on a pilot so they're all paying customers which they are okay that's great well congratulations that's a big step to go from nothing to three paying especially in your space during cobit so nice work there that's fantastic thank you how do you get your next 100 customers is it going to trade shows is it ads something else yes and i think that's a challenge for everyone but for us we are actually talking to as many people as possible and using our existing clients as case studies and i think that's really powerful to see the value we can give to them so actually showcasing that we can understand visitors dwell time and actually say did you know that if you know that the visitor is spending more time here they can actually increase the concession we spend on site that's really powerful and using incentives to drive them away from the busy areas so what's quite unique it's very easy to sort of say okay great there's a big crowd congregating in this area but what can i do about it if we can say we can connect to a few visitors and say do you want to get a half-price coffee at the quiet cafe over there or equally if you were to see that the penguin talk at 3 p.m is really busy but 5 p.m is looking quite quiet so why don't you get a half price ice cream right now that's really powerful and can drive an increase in sales so i think that's really where one of our usps are what's the average visitor to the national trust partnership mining site spend per day or per visit on concessions um so for at the moment it's been quite a quiet time um because now it's winter and as you can imagine it's quite rainy and windy so we don't actually know how much necessary they spend but we can definitely see how much football we're changing does that mean that they churn during slow times when they're closed so could you repeat the question does that mean they cancel they stop paying you during slow times when they're closed no we charge on a 12 month base contract so it means it doesn't matter how many visitors are using it we want to encourage as many people as possible to keep using the platform yeah but if someone's paying you for 250 000 visits a year but covet or rain or storms or hurricanes or snow whatever only means they're have five thousand years a year they're gonna feel like they're paying you for something they're not getting so how do you manage churn um oh no so we really sort of operate and saying actually this is your upfront sort of your 12-month licensee contract based on your expected number of visitors so really what we can give is your data insights into the visitors that are coming we purposely didn't want to say we're going to charge you per visitor because there's an incentive for the venue to say actually we don't want everyone to download the app so there's not going to be that sort of self-promotion to get the most out of the data obtained that makes total sense uh this makes i'm excited to see what you guys do for the next year in the meantime though let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book my favorite business book oh my gosh this is quite a hard one there's just so many wouldn't say it's an orthodox one but nudge by thal and sunstein is one of my core principles because it's all about behavioral science and that's what i love number two is there is founder you're following or studying yes i think nick nelson is amazing design my night i think it's such an amazing story and i think for us you know just learning more about that has been great number three what's your favorite online tool for building data duopoly favorite online tool by far i've really found that two things marvel as non-technical co-founders prototyping has been so useful and trello i mean everyone uses it just to help organizing the team tanami what's your situation how many hours you sleep to get every night not too many but i love what i do and i couldn't i wouldn't be doing what i do unless i love it what do you average though how many i was asleep probably pretty good definitely eight to nine eight to nine okay and what's your situation married single kids i'm a single um graduate and doing loving my business okay not not married no kiddos do you mind me asking how old you are yeah i'm 27 years old last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20 to have the confidence just do it do it and don't necessarily go for a graduate role guys she joined an accelerator back in 2019 who helped her found her co-founder aaron they owned 65 percent today and the incubator owns 25 and they raised a seat around selling 10 to the business as they scale data duopoly a easy way for historical sites or physical attractions like amusement parks to understand where visitors are spending time how to increase concession venue and how to drive foot traffic to less popular but very valuable areas they have three paying customers today looking to scale with their team of six over the next 12 months tanabe thank you for taking us to the top thank you very much one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fund raise a big sale a big profitability statement or 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