How Doxci CEO Austin Ambrozi grew to $1.2M revenue and 8 customers in 2024.

guys doxy.ai launched back in 2021 won the Nashville startup competition called 120 000 bucks there we're doing about five thousand dollars a month a year ago now doing 50. that's five zero thousand dollars per month across eight customers they help you automate anything that relates to paper right so they they say it as sort of like the GPT automated AI bot that takes care of all of your paperwork right now focused on sounds like insurance industry where there's a lot of paperwork that historically hasn't been able to be automated we'll see where it goes from there they're charging fifteen thousand hundred thousand dollar sign up fees 75 000 pre-seed round raised back in 2022 out of 10 million uh cap hey folks my guest today is Austin ambrosy he's building an AI powered paperwork employee at d-o-x-c-i dot AI That's doxy dot AI Austin you ready to take us to the top yes sir all right what is that what's a paperwork employee um so the official the official term used in the industry is intelligent document processor IDP and effectively the mission of the companies put paperwork on autopilot so that um that could take the form of variety of um ways it depends it depends on the nature of the paperwork um and the uh workflow that it's associated with and so give me an example of a customer that uses you today and what paper workflow they've automated so one of our clients is an insurance company uh they get all of their applications for coverage to a designated email inbox typically whenever someone applies for insurance they send in some supplementary documents you know a proof of address driver's license couple things like that so doxy will monitor the email inbox it will read uh whenever an email comes in for applying for coverage it'll read that email it'll read each of the corresponding documents it'll then calculate a rate that can be offered to the prospect based on the information provided and then since people are you know human and forget to submit things it'll automatically draft an email back to them saying hey you know this is the rate that we can offer you if you submit X Y and Z pieces of additional information we might be able to offer you a better rate it sends the email and that whole process is now automated and doesn't require human involvement at all wow how do you price what's the average customer pay per month or per year um so the price the way we have our pricing set up is we have one Implement upfront implementation fee which varies from anywhere from fifteen to a hundred thousand dollars depending on the nature of the architecture that we're integrating with if it's a newer system and it's just a few API calls and it's on the cheaper end of things and if it's some you know older Legacy systems um then it's on the pricier end of things that's for the implementation fee and then after that there's no licensing fees it doesn't matter how many people use the system some we charge based on throughput so cost per page model and we're in the process of converting to set tiers so it'd be sort of like buying minutes for uh uh for a cell phone plan and give me a general sense of what someone processing I don't know a thousand uh pages per month might pay um 250 bucks okay interesting what is your average customer pay today uh honestly that's uh that's uh that's tricky because we have a we have we have some clients that are you know only paying three thousand a month and we have other clients that that's kind of our our floor I would say is around the the 10 to 12 000 pages of the month is kind of the smallest client that we've seen so far and then we've also got uh we've got another client that's um paying close to or well they just signed but they'll be paying close to a hundred thousand dollars a month per um yeah once they reach full maturity okay what would they start out at though they're gonna start out at 12 500 a month interesting and did you just are those the two customers you have today or do you have more customers uh we have more customers as far as the total number I should probably know that off top of my head what's a range uh um less than 10. okay so you just when did you guys launch uh we launched uh technically 18 months ago but we have been um refining the product like mad uh and we actually we started off uh as known as slipbot um and we recently rebranded so when we started we were limited to one document type in one industry and that was the reinsurance slip in the reinsurance industry um and we we were making strides with that we won startup showdown in Nashville we beat there were 300 companies that entered we came in first place 120 000 uh from panoramic Adventures um but we we still were only limited to the reinsurance industry at that time and you know it was a great Niche but uh there was not uh we were not picking up steam like we are now we uh started working with um a management consultancy firm that has been largely involved in software purchasing decisions of several of the top 10 or top five reinsurance companies in the world and so they brought us some of their you know toughest documents that people have been unable to crack throughout the years and by the time that we refined the product to the point that it was able to handle those documents we realized that we could take on any document in any industry and so three months ago we rebranded to doxy and uh now we are now we're definitely picking up steam but the company back when you filed with Delaware or wherever when was that 2021 that was uh yeah that was uh yes uh 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 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founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your evaluation 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 you fund yourself early with 120k from the national startup competition that was also in 2021. uh that was uh in 2022 that was actually this past September okay and have you have you boots drop since then or have you raised any Equity we raised 75 grand from an angel investor um that was I believe July 2022 or June okay how do you you know how do you determine the you know the cap on that or the paper that they sit on uh it's on a were you the tool the vehicle we're using is a safe uh with a 10 million post money evaluation and uh 10 million cap 20 discount no no I would say I was gonna say 24 month conversion date oh interesting is there a discount there or no discount um I do I noticed him no that's that's great Okay cool so you get the you get that in and it was a strategic value there like why you obviously want to keep as much Equity as possible why even let an angel in um we we knew that we had uh we knew that we had a ways to go with a product development and um it was just it made it made the most sense you know raise money when you need it um when you don't use it who's we you keep saying wait how many co-founders uh there's two two co-founders um Isaac Hicks and myself um and then total total employee count now I believe that we're at 11 full-time and we've got an additional four or five um part-time contractors on sales side Isaac and when you were negotiating with him the hardest part about co-founding is negotiating Equity at the start did you guys just split 50 50. uh no Isaac has uh Isaac has more than I do because he's the he's the real he's the technical one between the two of us and he's the the real wizard with like 60 40 kind of split yeah okay very cool that fell for it felt fair to you at the start yeah very cool all right moving forward uh again you've got 11 folks now you've got eight customers um how many how this would be interesting across your current paid customers how many pages are you processing monthly um total monthly I believe that is somewhere is that let's see here I should not answer that as well um I honestly don't know the answer to that um is in the millions or hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands it's in the hundreds of thousands okay hundreds of thousands hundreds of thousands per month okay and so what does that mean in terms of Translating that to revenue I mean if I take eight customers you know paying whoa you know somewhere between three kids what about 50 we're at about 50k mrr um right now um with the client that we just signed on whenever they reach full maturity that number will be at about uh 150. and if you're at 50k of mrr today where were you exactly a year ago do you remember uh exactly a year ago um let's see here it's let's exactly a year ago I think we were only at like uh like four four or five thousand or more yeah well that's good growth it sounds like the Rebrand is working nicely which is great talk to me about the setup fee though this feels to me like that would make it really hard for anyone to try you and sign up they have to spend fifteen thousand to a hundred thousand just to get set up yeah so um it's the you know it's actually a lot cheaper than what our competitors are charging uh one of our competitors is um well I'm not gonna name dark competitors but one of our competitors is charging like 200 to 300 000 for implementation uh another one of our competitors probably the market leader they have like a million dollar minimum um so they are the market leader um I mean I guess stuff for debate but there's you know you have instabase Indigo data um those are those are probably the two biggest okay so they both you're just comping based on what they do one's 250 000 set up one's a million minimum well I haven't been comparing in terms of you know the you know expensive is relative right so like you know uh they're they're definitely trying to gear towards Enterprises where though we plan to serve some Enterprises we're taking a slightly different approach because one we want to go after a lot more mid-market opportunities especially as you know the the public awareness around AI uh continues to grow um so we're definitely trying to Target mid Market more and then also just with the the sheer the multiples that we're seeing in this industry the multiples are so high that we would rather we would rather try to reduce The Upfront costs as much as we can um just to you know and get grow our mrr now that makes good sense okay so fifty thousand dollars per month we'll see what happens what do you think you'll finish this year at uh honestly I have no idea we have we have we have a couple seven figure uh deals in the pipeline right now so I mean there's those are those are with Enterprises um you know there's a million ways that those could could fall through so I don't know I try not to think about that so how are you managing burn today um by just living very lean Lean Startup for life you know so you're not you're not paying yourself I I took my first paycheck um I think it was less than a month ago it was it was a couple like two three weeks ago I took my first paycheck out of the 18 months so we've watched uh so are you guys burning money today are you profitable um with this new client that we just signed we will be profitable uh here in like I think should be about a month okay sorry how do you think about that you know balancing profitability versus growth um I I try to keep a very tight gauge on team morale um and so you know there I don't think that we need I I'm much more I'm much more concerned with making sure that that people are happy with their their salaries and the people are feeling good about that their their upward trajectory with with what we're doing here than I am about you know paying for big PR releases or paying for you know the flashiest you know software packages and things like that obviously there's a bit of a balancing act there because you know you give your team better tools they're going to be um you know they're going to be feeling happier uh with with work obviously but that I try to I it's it's definitely about the people yep all right very good let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite book uh favorite book um I'm gonna say the monk who sold his Ferrari yep number two is there a CEO you're following or studying CEO that I'm following or studying uh a lot I can't boil that down to one number three what's your favorite online tool for building Doxie um um I wish I had a less cliche answer but slack number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night that varies we'll we'll call it we'll call it seven all right fair enough in situation married single kids uh single so yeah gosh I can't and how old are you I'm 27. all right Austin last question something you wish you knew seven years ago when you were 20. the AI was going to revolutionize everything guys doxy.ai launched back in 2021 won the Nashville startup competition called 120 000 bucks there we're doing about five thousand dollars a month a year ago now doing 50. that's five zero thousand dollars per month across eight customers they help you automate anything that relates to paper right so they they say it as sort of like the GPT automated AI bot that takes care of all of your paperwork right now focused on sounds like insurance industry where there's a lot of paperwork that historically hasn't been able to be automated we'll see where it goes from there they're charging fifteen thousand hundred thousand dollar sign up fees 75 000 pre-seed round raised back in 2022 out of 10 million uh cap um we will see where they go from here Austin thanks for taking us to the top thanks sir one more thing before you go we 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