How DeckRobot CEO Tony Urban grew DeckRobot to $4.2M revenue and 15 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is tony urban he's running a company called deck robot which makes slide decks with one click he's an ex mckenzie folk who turned into a serial entrepreneur tony you ready to take us to the top sure thing all right slide decks are obviously a hot space everyone's pitching everyone wants capital how many decks did you produce in the past 12 months would you say myself i probably produced like 20. no i mean all your users using your technology oh all your users like thousands and thousands thousands i let me know yeah it's like many thousands many thousands of users like one user producing seven thousand flights a month wow and is that who are these power users are they are they agencies typically there are internal agencies like designers working for big professional services firms like big4 big street yeah so they're just slide machines now when you they're slide machines that's what you were at mckinsey right so you jumped into this in 2017 um you came on back in 2019 and talked about your growth you passed i think about 10 customers at that point how many customers are you serving now today yeah so right now it's more but not that more it's less than 20. the secret is easy which is growing inside existing accounts so we normally start with like small pilots and that's small-scale projects and then just get more and more so our largest customers having like 200 250 000 powerpoint users so we might have ended up having five customers will be more than enough to become unicorn so you have between sort of 10 and 20 total customers right now yeah help help me understand a little bit around what they pay per month on average that really differs that's why we don't publish our pricing on the website i would only say that it's like more than 10 times they pay for microsoft office itself and the reason is very simple the productivity gain is such that they have at least 200 percent roi but it really differs um you know an auditor would spend different time in powerpoint than a designer than a real estate agent or metals factory producer yeah let me ask the question a bit differently don't name the customer but the customer that pays you the most per month what do they pay per month yeah so would it be 197 a thousand dollars per month no no 197 per user per month okay got it and how many users how many users do they have for the largest one for your largest customer yeah yeah it will be another one if you take the largest numbers of revenue overall but the biggest accounts were right now having 15 000 employees but they have different price tags got what i'm trying to get to is this what's the one company you work with that pays you the most and what do they pay you all in like if you try if you're trying to set the largest contract we have i wouldn't disclose it uh tony i'm not asking for your name the largest customer i'm trying to ask you how large your swap is between your lowest price customers and your most expensive ones i'm just asking you all in the customer that pays you the most okay okay okay yeah so we have three pairs of customers the smallest contracts are anywhere from 100k to 300k the average is 300 to 700k and the biggest of the multi-million engagements okay got it let's hope someone so someone listening right now michael wait a second somebody's making slide decks and paying tony 300 or 700 000 per year to make slide decks i don't understand help them understand yeah that's very easy so if you count uh the amount of time you spend on powerpoints and multiply by your salary only you'll already be surprised so most of our customers uh making surprises like two hours a day five hours a day earning 100 115 k per year after fancy mbas and that does not include the office costs etc and this is just a one small reason of having jack robert actually the bigger reason is to win the proposals you have a bigger win rate between your business and that's where a lot of decks are used and uh one more reason large corporations want their documents to be on brand to be consistent and that's what we do and tony last time you came on you said you'd raise about 200 000 have you stayed bootstrapped since then or did you raise more capital no raise a bit more so we announced the overall 2.5 mill okay so you raised another 2.3 million then yeah why did you why did you need to raise more capital well i asked myself the same question every time we erased do we really need this so quick answer the enterprise cycle is quite long so we can afford growing sustainably and the slow pace based on the cash we have from the business but that's going to be slow so if you look at our competitors like sync cell it took them 10 years more than 10 years to be substantial in the size venture capital is basically a short living drug which gets you high in terms of your growth so it just helps you to have more people everywhere in the product development in the sales so that's why we decided to do this so last time the team so you raised additional capital i think you did a what was it a 7 000 convertible note in 2018 and then a 1.5 million dollar price seed round in 2020 right yep and and walking through the team today last time you came on youtube about 20 people how many folks today pretty much think okay but there is yeah right now there is 18. but what we do we consistently improve the crate of our employees so whether we fire those who do not perform as we want or we just grow existing employees so from the time we spoke with you last i think we have five straight with us and they've really progressed nice so if you look on our team uh two years ago it was much more junior a lot of support roles right now all the sports is outsourced and the folks in the team are very senior so that's it and we want to stay i want to stay small in terms of head count right i understand how many of the 20 are engineers so we're now in yours a half so 10 of them are engineers yeah i think they carry a quota the other 10 are they sales reps and if so how many carry sales sales plus operations so you have also talents you have ops you have finance so yeah so tony the question was of the ones that are in sales how many of them are carrying quota three with quarters but but we have just been said we have a splitted sales process so we have pre-sale which has no quarters we have post sale which also has no quarters because unlike other starters which try to have this one-man show where one sales person is covering everything from the lead generation to account success we decided earlier on to split it this makes no sense so if there's no quota pre-sale there's no quota post sale who's carrying a quarter yeah only hunters the three people who are hunters they have quarters they have to close the deal no for the hunters the cash quarter the sales quarter yeah of course what is that what is that annual passport is it like a million bucks something like that a bit over there okay and if they hit their quota can they make about one-fifth of the port of target so call like 200 grandish something like that yeah so basically it's a percentage so a bonus per race on what they exceed of the quarter we have quite generous uh bonus structure because we want to grow yeah no that's obviously important scaling those sales teams so so wherever you use the additional capital you raised if your team size is still basically the same as it was two years ago yeah so first of all it is not the same as it was a year ago when the code hit when code started we downsized the team and left only the most senior fox then we basically replaced junior folks by senior fox when raised capital so in terms of head count we try to stay pretty much the same in terms of the team cost it actually changed a lot and that's why how we want to do it so we want to have a small team like our biggest competitor making hundreds millions of revenue they have like 50 folks in the whole team including secretaries so that's pretty much the target state and they understand that um a senior machine learning engineer can make the same as 10 junior folks yeah and and what is your what is your goal for this year what revenue run rate do you think you can pass this year that we do not disclose but uh the gross rate we plan is over 15 x so we have to grow what do you mean by that i mean on every dollar we made january this year we'll try to have 15 dollars by december so growing one five 15 times are you on are you on track to grow so far so far but we'll see the q4 is the most important for enterprise sales so that's basically the crucial quarter when you can say hey we made it or we actually yeah target now earlier you said you had 50 between 10 and 20 customers and the average ac is between 300 and 700 thousand dollars so we just take a middle 500 000 average ac times 15 customers that would pretty at about a 7.5 million run rate today is it accurate no it's not accurate because um you did not encounter the fact that some of the customers already made the first initial stages when they have a pilot then they have a small contract which is 100k to 300k and then scaled up so different customers have a different life cycle so if you do the math you did the way you will overestimate germany here but as i mentioned before we do...