DeckRobot Revenue & Funding (2024)

hello everyone my guest today is tony urban he's the ceo of dec robot ai for powerpoint presentations a serial entrepreneur and ex mckinsey tony you ready to take us to the top yup i mean anyone like anyone that can take an interview and do it on the beach i mean you're doing something right man i want your life well apparently it's only a few days a year but there you go all right so the so the x mckinsey guy would be the one to create an ai for powerpoint presentations because i'm sure you created your your own fair share so help us understand what the company does and what your revenue model is how do you make money sure that's basically sas business so campaign does pretty much the same that internal designers were doing at mckinsey and many other firms sitting somewhere in india or costa rica or poland they dealing with your design requests and they turn your ugly messy slides into beautiful see already ones and that's what our artificial intelligence engine is doing just instantaneously click one button and you can have the whole deck or one slide or selection of slides ready to show anywhere on the conference with your employees for your clients which is extremely helpful i mean i use for myself when i'm doing sales decks or vc and what is good about that robot that also proposes a lot of different options styling so my intention creating slide mx machine system quite good slides yeah still i don't have so many ideas how to show so so help me understand pricing right on average what our customers paying per month for this yeah so it depends on the size of customers so we work only with enterprise folks so the minimum required amount of users will be around 1 200 users and typical customers for us is at least 5 000 users and the pricing is starting from 75 us dollars per user per month and going down afterwards negotiators and depending on the scale okay i mean if you only work with teams that are larger than five thousand you charge 75 bucks a seat per month i mean you're talking contracts that are 370 grand a month minimum well 5000 will be much cheaper okay like employees okay so i guess i guess on average what's a company paying you all in per month are we talking like a grand a month 10 grand a month 100 grand a month well in our market average is a little bit tricky thing because it's hyper concentrated you have uh six largest companies like big four and accenture or cam to mini who are taking pretty much 1.7 mil 1.6 mil out of two three male consultants worldwide so there is like separate segments for these big folks and there are separate segments for anyone smaller or just like any enterprise who having like you know financially chartbox like thousands of them per company or few thousands using so forks like enterprise the average check per year would be anywhere from 200 to 500k okay and then your smallest users uh the smallest i think so far is 200 employees that's pretty much the smallest and what does that mean in terms of the contract value for the first year uh well after all this counts to seems like 75 okay 75k yeah it depends the climb by climbing because sometimes we're taking small amount initially but there is a promise of rolling out next year yeah yeah okay is it i want to talk more about your back story here but i want to get this right first so it's fair to say that all of your current customers today spend north of 75k per year some as high as 200 000 per year is that accurate um a lot of them spending more but there's just like a few of them okay does it market but all are north of 75 000 bucks a year though yeah of course okay so this is very much an enterprise sales motion it is only enterprise yeah yeah so why on your homepage do you advertise hey build your yc deck here obviously someone applying to yc is not going to be paying you 75 grand to do this it's pretty much was kind of pro bono slash pr sync so we're making campaigns and protocons um pretty successful knowledge yeah we're trying to get some attention which actually worked from you know different way this is and yc dac is something a lot of folks saying so and also it's a good thing to do we just help many startups to craft their decks i know personally a few folks who were sending me their decks to check and i'm like i recognize these slides you guys were using a button yeah with it yeah so of course it's not intense that you create like 100 of your slides with this board but it gives you a good start no that's good all right let's get more of your story here when did you launch the company what year so in 2017 we started commercial sales and before that we were making like ground wars with er research because i left mckinsey in 2016 2017 and spent some time figuring out how to do this properly so when did you write the first line of code it's actually quite distributed because our first co-founder was writing some initial drafts many years ago which we used for this problem of slides you can imagine slides it's not the only two-dimensional thing you can also create websites etc what year tony though was that though when was the first line of code written well it was probably 2012 but really we started full time working product one 2017. it's the reason i ask is i'm curious how much you guys spent right total money to build the mvp before your first dollar of revenue was what well we don't pretty much disclose it but it was stage by stage so the first mvp was real cheap i mean it was founder's time i'm just curious if you there's a there's a balance when people launch a company they either try and sell a total idea that has no existence yet to get cash flow immediately or they spend a million dollars building an mvp and then go try and sell it i'm just curious where you fell we're in between sir of course it's pretty much hard to sell only an idea too large in the price especially the conservative forks like we're working with all the companies banks etc so you have to have something you have to show at least a demo so so how much did you put in again before your first dollar of revenue we're talking like 500 grand we don't really disclose it i'm sorry but this of course was less than nil okay uh fair enough okay so launched in the launch your first dollar revenue was 2017 yeah you don't know that you don't you don't sound sure about that is it accurate it was late 2017. so the first contract started like late 2017 and i don't remember that cash flow okay and then walk me through walking through your first 10 customers how did you land them who were you you're targeting just one of my house network well come on tony it doesn't just happen okay you have to be intentional about this kind of thing so tell me tactically actually how you did it you go through your linkedin page you see probably more than a thousand people you somehow know or you know someone who knows them then you drill it down to your potential customers which was who for you what was the title uh initially we were looking for someone like head of design head of sales head of design design design because we were working with consulting companies only which one of the best go to market service i will tell you we see right now but it worked i mean then uh i know quite a lot of folks in consulting so all first let's see 30 leads or completely out of my network okay we just use some very primitive non-sophisticated linkedin just adding people like sales representing people on linkedin saying hey you might be interested yeah at some extent and so let's fast forward to um some other ways now today you're getting customers so uh on product hunt you got 1700 upvotes in february of this year number three product hunt of the week um walk me through what was the strategy behind this um how did you seed the upvotes to make sure that you ranked really high that day so that was pretty much team effort and we made a lot of mistakes i'll tell you i was even making some articles in russian how to not do the same ups with it sort of my language but the initial plan was just to ping all their people we know inside the team so we have at that point we had a team of 15 i think or 20. so everyone was pinging at least 50 friends someone was pinging more made small competitions so like making people aware hey we're launching please check it out and the second thing which i think helped us initially it was not the right stuff to do so we launched on the wrong timing so you have to launch at midnight san francisco time sharp and we screwed it up and launched on london time i think something like that so pretty much missed a lot of the day before it changed the day and then we managed to stop the campaign with protocol they said oh okay we can stop it right now after a few hours but that for a few hours when like 200 of course i think appeared from our friends and then we launched next day with 200 reports ahead and that was helpful to be honest i see okay so where are the uh so let's say your 20 team members each got 20 of their friends so that's 400 up votes there that you still had another 13 from the team it was around 200 okay you hadn't you had another 1500 up votes come in though did you email your list how did you get the rest of the distribution yeah well we mail of course some of our clients how many um not much i think less than hundreds okay so you may have another one male 200 clients and did you make did you ask them tony did you incentivize them to get their teams no we just like said okay hey we launch on the product share your feedback that's it okay if you can so then so then what was the upside for this so we've interviewed probably 300 people that have launched on product hunt and typically when you're the number one spot on a day you'll see anywhere between kind of seven and fifteen thousand website hits from that placement um what upside did you see from that ranking uh we had pretty much a lot of new custom requests how many how many website hits that day uh a range now it's a few thousand for sure less than five no i think it was between five or seven okay there's no more than i can check it was google no that's okay that's okay yeah we really care about number of visitors because these kind of inbound say sales when people just googling for us and then uh ping us to have a contract that's where everything to happen in our segment to be honest or we didn't know well then why'd you post on product time uh brotherhood was once again just to make people aware of us a lot of pc folks started fingers afterwards okay good so there is upside here right so 5000 website hits how many of them actually asked for a customer call or demo or signed up um one can turn to be a real big one so tony my question was of the of the website hits how many of them actually sign up for a trial or ask to call you know get a call with you 500 or more sign up for trial okay most of them were like small startups which is relevant for us and we had to disappoint people saying like we can sell you something but you're not going to buy anything from us yeah because there were two really good forks i'm inclined one really large we hope to convert it soon yeah when you know that you're not doing something completely stupid yeah so 2017 was launched uh you do product hunt you do early outbound linkedin research uh and and pinging and how many customers are you now serving today so right now we have more than 40. uh we don't disclose number of users or revenue four zero or one four four zero four zero okay well i mean you said earlier that every customer pays more than seventy five thousand 000 per year so that would mean you're doing north of 250 000 a month right now in revenue is it accurate i have to check because not all of them fully on board right now okay yeah so i'm asking just customers that are actually paying you have to differentiate the run rate and what they're starting from many of them starting from pilots the pilot is like 10 20k exercise it's not much so you have to start with the pilot most cases then you convert to the real contract and real countries many times they have uh stages when they start like for instance some big term like big consulting firm they're starting from one region from one office and then they roll it out to region then to larger region and that's how it works okay so your minimum is not 75k like you said earlier it's actually ten thousand dollars it's run rates minimum yeah so if you're talking about annual contract of course that would be minimum but before the annual conference there's a lot of pre-sale when you do pilots we don't do free pilots we have only commercial pilots but you do the pilots you roll it out uh the results are kind of sales cycle thing you can lead the pilot everything is successful people want you moving on already count on the customer but another contractual thing well tony but what i was asking is how many ignore your pilots i don't count pilots as customers how many actual customers you have actively using the tool and paying for it so right now we have more than 10 actually using okay got it that's what that's way more helpful so 10 and then it sounds give about 30 that are piloting okay got it so i can take 10 times pilot is already in converting to the full-scale contracts just taking time yeah that's a really large thing here yeah that makes sense so 10 customers at the run rate you want minimum 75k per year you're doing north of call at 60 grand a month right now on revenue that's more accurate and where were you about a year ago do you remember uh that was much less like were you doubling i would say 10 in total most of them were pilots i think there was three so it was three no so like in terms of revenue you're doing like 10 grand a month a year ago something like that we don't disclose it but you can't figure it out you're pretty good in this well no i'm trying to understand your growth rate you're doing 60 north of 60 grand a month today i'm trying to understand if you doubled or tripled or quadrupled year over year so a year ago today what were you doing we're growing from zero pretty much so we can double and triple but still it's been i mean what we're doing right did you have any monthly revenue a year ago yes we have okay that's what i'm trying to get at right so so it sounds like it was three clients on pilots around a thousand bucks you said a pilot earlier was 10 grand a year so that would be like 3 000 bucks a month basically uh it was different it was 10 customers in total okay so 10 so 10 grand was pilots three of them were paying so okay so you're you're you're somewhere around then doubling year over year going from 30k a month a year go to 60 grand a month today once again what we have these early years it's not like real gross curve because we're just exploring the market many of the customers we started talk with two years ago are only converging right now so you have to tony this is like you're saying things this is true in any startup i don't understand why growth rates are growth rates and yes everyone has pilots everyone has onboarding everyone pivots all i'm asking it's probably different huh if you talk with btc it's probably different i don't think your b2c if you're selling to thousand person consulting companies that's b2b yes yes so why are you bringing up b to c because there are different segments there are enterprise smb if you talk about smb you have to start your gross quick quick yeah tony i get that i've interviewed almost three thousand b2b ceos they all have cohorts that are smb mid-market and enterprise so i get the patterns regardless you have revenue growth rates that's all i'm asking so let's move on past that have you decided to bootstrap this yourself or did you guys decide to take dilution and raise capital so initially we would strap when we saw just like a small idea you know just to have one or two customers in a lifestyle company and then when we started we realized that we have like small capital needs really small and we started to fundraise from france basically and figure out quickly that there is much more demand from both investors and while we were fundraising we were growing our pipeline realizes there's much demand from clients and then we'll fundraise like normal angel seed round okay so about how much in the company right now so again how much have you raised to date how we do this closet we lose is around 20 of capital what do you mean 20 percent of capital huh what do you mean 20 percent of capital so that's what will be converted when we have equity right now okay you know the valuations of early stage companies well i know but tony i the whole purpose of this is i'm trying to get your story right so i'm trying to understand how much you decided to raise early on not what a standard industry benchmark is otherwise i wouldn't have you on the podcast i'd go look up standard industry benchmarks so for are you talking like 100 you're talking like 100 or 200 grand something in that range so i won't i will not comment this i'm sorry tony why are you being cagey about this can't i just go to the sec filings and look up how much you raised uh you can probably so save me the time okay i'll give you the reason why i'm edgy about this because we're having the price points and they guys have different calories because you have new price points no because we have enterprise clients and i don't want to discuss with my clients how much they raised why it's not like whatever meals or 20 meals or 200 meals whatever so we're competing with pretty much big folks in our market who so there is no reason of uh disclosing this information honestly who who are you competing with well you can't figure out the market there are beautiful ai there are crazy there's a bunch of people in this market in the way we're competing with microsoft itself so well you're a microsoft startup there you're inside of microsoft owns you basically right now so how can you say you're competing with microsoft organization there are different teams microsoft startups is run more by people from azure departments what's your team what's your point we're running out of time here we're running out of time tony so i'm gonna wrap up here quickly what's your team size today how many folks right now we have 20. and then are people sticking when they start i mean when you look at churn how do you measure it uh we measure by contracts so that's we measure inside the contract whether the user is adjourning or not many times it's just like people don't use it because they don't know and we measure the contract turn so far we had zero contract turn so no one was starting the contract having the contract say like ah i don't like it i would not continue has anyone downgraded though there are people that can still they can downgrade and not cancel and that's still churn so again if you look at your revenue churn over the past 12 months so people can still churn and not actually cancel completely they can downgrade and stuff like that no it never happened yet so you've had no customers from a year ago that have either downgraded by even a dollar or churned completely they've all increased their accounts or stayed flat okay do you have so your net revenue retention is north of 100 then yep okay are you driving meaningful expansion revenue on the accounts or they basically flat year every year uh depends on the count we is consulting folks with driving expansion just low yeah all right very good um last question here before we wrap up how aggressive being to get new customers so to get a new call at 70 000 your customer will you spend the full 70 grand to get them uh also case the case uh small customers to spend less because you know there is no upside potential it will be flat yeah tony this is like that's like that's obvious you're going to spend less for smaller customers and more for bigger customers i'm asking for deeper insights here right so you as a ceo how aggressive are you being with cac are you happy with the 12-month payback period or six-month payback period or more or less we have less than six months okay are you generally being more aggressive though like over the next 12 months will you increase that or decrease that you think i think we're going to increase so the biggest chunk of cost for this contract acquisition is sales people right now we have really small sales for us how many have we played right now we have only three of us on salesforce that includes me and uh the reason is simple you have to build predictable sales engine which i think we're pretty much successful right now on and we're gonna hire people this fall or next spring mainly in new york and london we had the terms before to start our sales force in london it wasn't quite successful because there was you know water mouse thing selling through your network not predictable generation of leads right now we're generating like at least 20 liters a week but it started recently yep yep all right very good let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book um i think the one i'm reading right now is very good is uh by ben horowitz uh hard things about heartsync number two is there a ceo you're following or studying it's hard to say i think a bunch of my friends just like pick one tony okay um i think that will be uh [Music] nikita mikaedo from panda dock yeah pretty cool surprising yep yep he's come on the show three times you guys want to hear them you can go back and listen on episode 1037 to hear makita come on number three uh tony what's your favorite online tool for building your company i think favorite online tool the first one was wix.com because they can really book bootstrap great standardized things number four how many hours of sleep to get every night i'm trying to sleep at least six hours and uh how old are you second how old are you i'm 28 28 and situation married single kids married not kids no kiddos all right and uh last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew when i was 20 years old something you knew uh i would probably start earlier having my own business be more decisive guys deck robot ai for powerpoint creation serving 10 full unloaded customers today paying on average 75 000 per year so call they're doing 60 uh grand a month right now or north of that and revenue up from call at 10 or 20 grand about a year ago so nice growth rate there they built their mvp for less than a million dollars uh had a successful product hunt launch which drove five thousand website hits 500 signups and some qualified leads in there they race caught a couple hundred thousand from friends and family they haven't disclosed exactly how much on a convertible note team size of 20 today uh no churn in terms of gross revenue turn annually they do have net revenue retention north of 100 with a six-month payback period on uh on their cac going after these 75 000 per year customers tony thank you for taking us to the top thank you