How Ethn CEO Nate Bolt grew Ethn to $5M revenue and 150 customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is nate bolt he's the founder of ethno a five-person SAS company he's four he's the for research manager at Facebook and Instagram and as a CEO of bolt and Peter's and faculty at the SVA I XD program we'll jump we're not in a second he's also a co-author of remote research and once drone the NYPL based in LA at with his wife son and two dogs Nate are you ready to take us to the top yeah all right break down those big acronyms for us what does faculty at the SVA ixd program mean oh yeah it's a design graduate degree at School of Visual Arts in New York so they do a lot of research as part of their you know kind of degree and and they bring in different industry researchers to help teach some of their graduate courses there's been years since I did that but it's a cool program very cool and then just peel back the onion a little bit give us a glimpse into what you're doing as research manager at Facebook and Instagram yeah that was that was helping to manage you know these smaller teams of experienced researchers or design researchers they're there on the product teams along with designers researchers data scientists engineers and their job is to put a little bit of a human face bring some empathy into that product design process where you have mountains of data you've got metrics galore but sometimes you know you need to travel to a different culture different country or at least do remote research to get a face a human face on these interactions you know put some why behind these what trends that you see in the data yeah yeah this sounds burnt you know we just have the the CEO of user testing on the show and oh yeah Sarah yeah Darrell yeah yeah he was great and you know he came on and shared you know shared numbers you know they're hoping for 40 percent year-over-year growth this year and you know that I mean you know they're numbers they're clear crank in it he also said human human human and my answer my question to him was like you've got full story taking off you got like Hajj are taking off kind of data oriented how are you differentiating from those kind of platforms it's such a good question and you know the field of human-computer interaction HCI that sort of comes from cognitive science the basic concept is that forever as long as there's been an interface there's been people that have trying to automate the process of understanding how it's used you know back to the even the military and the 70s developing you know pilot interfaces an airplane the idea is like men can't we just use computers to generate patterns and trends and data on how the actual humans are using these computers and if you're talking about computers watching people use computers there's a problem there you know and a lot of these tools like hot chair and and even user testing to a certain can extend although they're very human focused they're automating that feedback loop and you need to have humans watching humans use computers to really complete the design process most you know product designer these days there's been it's a funny pendulum swing year-to-year but a lot of product designers now get that that qualitative insight is a key part of the product development lifecycle it's just too easy to say like I just farming out we got analytics you know what do we need humans for it's not like we're actually building for them yeah well so what we through how you're actually solving this right so how's the product work yeah I mean in FDA's case we're very niche you know we're targeting professional UX researchers teams of like two or more that's at me oh it's the logistics that come into play at scale you know if you and I just need to watch somebody use our kind of early stage tasks it's pretty easy to do that you know we can grab somebody to coffee shop we can even get family there's not really logistical challenge around small-scale one-on-one human observation but when you're talking about 50 researchers 75 countries 30 studies you know 22 product teams all of a sudden the challenges in finding the right participants scheduling them paying them tracking them storing them they magnify you know and you're talking about the age-old SAS competitor of spreadsheets yes spreadsheets on spreadsheets on spreadsheets so that's really our thing so I have my own product I'm working at Intuit I were launching a new app I want to target based off like device browser location operating system something like that maybe purchase history yeah I launched a survey inside of into it so that I know that I'm getting my users who already know Intuit to take this kind of user testing what do you so you get their contact information I'm into an employee what do i do do I set up a Skype call and a screen share and I watch them use the app like how is it actually done yeah that's that's exactly right but there's a key point there that's a little bit different and that's for a company like Intuit who's had over the years like 40 five different you know f neo integrations they pass the variables to an ethnos screener screeners just are like word for survey it's the same thing but functionally instead of it being about aggregate data they can pass all those things that you just said to our intercept but the thing is when you're internally using a survey tool like let's just say Qualtrics or 4c or these tools that are designed for aggregate data there's all these little things that don't work the same way when you're talking about getting a real human for one-on-one research so they implement F you know JavaScript or like iOS or Android whatever they're passing all that stuff straight to me�� because their researchers can go in and modify that stuff dynamically like on the fly you know you get to people using QuickBooks and you're like ah we should have asked about their you know XYZ criteria that we forgot so they can dynamically modify the screen or modify the targeting and then their next participant let's assume it's a remote session and zoom or Skype or you know all those tools it's up to each research team for the testing but they can modify the criterion if you know really quickly that's kind of our game that I see I see okay talk to y'all pricing so I'm sure you have a bunch of cohorts but I don't go to on every kind of use case story well what's the average customer pay you per month would you say you know most of our customers at this pune enterprise so our our license you know they they range from you know on the enterprise side well let's start with self-service you see it it's on the pricing page it's like you can do a self-service for like 80 79 80 bucks a month yeah the enterprise stuff you know you know this game it's like all over the map to be minimum typically yeah minimum is like I don't know eight or 10k year cool and then on up from there depending on the size of the team yep 10k might just be like the minimum features a very very small team jump in try it out yeah and and just to be clear that's more reflective your average than an $80 a month price point yeah it is because I think the value proposition for SEO is more centered on larger teams at this point it's evolved over the years yeah put all this on a timeline for me when you launch so side project starting in 2006 we had a research agency and this was like haters what's that this is what both Peters yeah right that's right yeah so in SF doing the kind of consulting thing we realized there was a need just for us that that kind of thing so side project from 2006 to 14 and then it was really you know when I left Facebook in 2014 it was like to work on em you know full-time so it's been you know three or four years of like full-time focus and now we're you know five or six people and bootstrapped continuing to grow that way that's great you so you've decided to kind of stay blue struct which I love what have you scaled to in terms of total customers without raising capital yeah so we're like you know 150 paying customers a month but some of those have 80 or a hundred accounts you know seats so there can be pretty large teams yeah and then something like 2,000 accounts and across the freemium pret spectrum yep yep no that's great if I jut mean so can I kind of back into this right if you've got a hundred and fifty kind of in your enterprise cohort at ten grand a year you know that means you're doing what just in that segment in north of 125 grand a month something like that so that's exactly right cool cool and that'd just be clear that doesn't count yourself you have more revenue than that could sell there's some self-serve stuff that's right that's right but that's a pretty small percentage and shrinking of our total revenue yeah okay good so you're definitely moving more towards again higher touch Enterprise five person team yeah that's right give me some of the growth so where were your figure out hundred to about 30 months say roughly thirty percent year-over-year one of the things that we're seeing the biggest growth in is paying research participants internationally okay that's a weird sort of thing that we've offered for years and it's just been exploding recently because if you have somebody in Brazil or China actually paying them in a way that's decent is terribly hard there's no like Brazil it's like boletos or like totally you know even shy know like there's China Amazon but there's some other stuff and like it's hard to get those accounts let's say if you're in the u.s. you have to have a Chinese credit card to get a Chinese Amazon account and so then to issue a Chinese Amazon gift card you have to go through like these third-party...