How Dataclay CEO Arie Stavchansky grew Dataclay to $1.4M revenue and 200 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is Aria stefchansky he's the founder of data clay a company developing software that automates the production of data-driven creative content at scale his academic and Industry experience inform his entrepreneurial Endeavor is leading a talented team that Sports Enterprise licenses such as Netflix Amazon Apple NBC Universal the NFL and others are you ready to take us to the top yeah why not let's do it all right man so just be clear the logos I just reeled off here your team gave me that when they gave me your bio those are all paying customers of data clay yes that is correct yes that's amazing yeah yeah it's a very powerful tool we've made here let's do NFL let's just do them how do they use you sure so with the NFL um they wanted to separate their marketing department from their video production department to get more content out to their social channels and so our software acts as kind of like a data merge software for video so we built them a slack chat bot where marketing folks could go in and chat with the bot and then content would be made on the other side right on a server that somebody at the NFL would QA and then it would go to their social channel so it's basically helping them create content for their social and then also we have another group in the NFL that's doing stuff like you know just um player stats and just pre-renders for stuff that you see on broadcast so a lot of the work that that gets done in post-production and that kind of you know world where they're creating uh Graphics um our software sits uh atop of their workflow to handle all the data that's incoming from the games and from the players to get that data to display in the way that they want it to display in their uh in their content so all right just be clear look I'm a big Washington commanders fan it's obviously a bad time for us right now but we just put Aaron Rodgers and Green Bay Packers the past weekend and it's always remarkable to me when some play happens right I'm gonna make this up Aaron Rodgers gets sacked and right away Troy acne the broadcast Booth there'll be a graphic that pops up that says this is the first time in nine million years that a quarterback older than 38 with five gray hairs who runs slower than 10 miles per hour got sacked in the third quarter with two minutes left and it's like they they feel like I feel like they can pull a stat for anything and I always wonder how the hell do they do that is this on the back end is this what you're powering someone's basically a marketing person putting that in and then it's going live on broadcast yeah so on the broadcast side um they a lot of those systems are like real-time systems our software kind of plays to that market where they're experts but they're using the Adobe ecosystem the Adobe Creative Cloud ecosystem and so what you're seeing when they do it like in real time virtually real time is um is more of a broadcast based real-time graphic system our system is more of an automator and it allows users to create a lot of different unique content before it gets broadcast or before it gets to a play out so you know it depends on how fast they want to get that content out there but when you're seeing live but you're the not real you're not real time no yeah we are we we're called just in time so it's it's it takes time to render but a lot of the content that gets rendered out eventually ends up in some kind of play out you know some some kind of control panel that gets played out oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built the into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out I'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your final path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different valuation private Equity Firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when I hover over here here right so the teal is what a VC would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on YouTube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of SAS valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform I hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview well what about what about okay so you're not able to feed data directly to a live broadcast on NBC when I'm watching commanders or screen Bay Packers but what about right wing Terry McClure and a receiver makes a 40-yard catch and it goes up on Twitter from like six different accounts and that becomes a viral tweet for that game that's that's almost real time but not 100 real time is that you that's exactly yes it's that that is the use case for our software yes it's not people at the NFL or even an NFL team it's like people that run their own NFL related podcasts or the NFL content they are able to get these clips you're the one powering that yeah on their servers so our software is running we don't have access to their data and that's one of the reasons why I think our customers really like our software is that the data is actually very precious it's very it's their Crown Jewel for the customer so they don't want some you know video production company having access to that data our software allows our users to install it on their own environment within their own environment so they have complete control whereas data clay has no conception of what data is flowing in and out of its software which is it's sort of on-prem in that regard that's exactly right so how do you generate recurring Revenue so you can have predictability and you know build a team and build companies like an SLA agreement or a licensing agreement how do you structure that yeah so um we it's basically a term-based license um you get a license key that activates the license on the machine it's a recurring uh payment that must be made for that license to continue to operate on the user's machine um and as far as like the larger Enterprises yes we will engage with them on a more SLA level we have you know a master Professional Services agreement for you know Mission critical projects that they might be doing so yeah it's I mean it's in one aspect we have our website where people go and they download a license key they pay us they download a license key and then it's a recurring Revenue stream we also have an exclusive reseller that has more uh uh that we've partnered with that has a lot of inroads to a lot of different studios around the world um so it's a it's a mixed approach as far as as far as that so so help me understand what your price again does it number of Clips generated num amount of data processed per weekend number of seats how does the NFL not the NFL but just we're using NFL how would they pay you yeah so uh we basically license on a per machine basis so it does depend on how much volume they are rendering but um it we don't track per video and I think it's interesting that's that's another reason why I think that our customers enjoy our software is that we're not interested in being so restrictive about oh it's going to cost you x amount of you know dollars per video that gets rendered how many machines though does the NFL have or ambc Universal or apple I mean are we like I just have no concept of this is it 10 or 10 million no it's not 10 million certainly not I mean we're talking about a software that is extending Adobe software which is very much human driven like Adobe requires humans to be in front of their their software so it's it's a desktop...