How Fabl CEO Taj Forer grew Fabl to $3M revenue and 50 customers in 2018.

hello everyone my guest today is Taj for he's an experienced publisher digital media executive entrepreneur and artist he currently serves as CEO of Fable the cloud-based publishing platform for content marketing serving a global client base including CBS Connie Nash GE ducati among others he's a co-founder of daylight the celebrated international publisher of art books and is the author of two books of his own quickly acclaimed art photography Taj are you ready to take it to the top ready oh you're pretty you're pretty creative dude huh well found yeah come out of the creative industry for sure I've studied art in undergrad and in graduate school so that's been my background that's good so tell us more about the company what what do you do when how stable to make money yeah so we are a cloud publishing company for rich media branded content servicing branded storytelling brand newsrooms native advertising you know Brandon and sponsored content that sort of simplifies multiple facets of the process for building deploying and then analyzing engagement with associated content so we operate with a SAS model we sell I'm anali and eyes license to operations and media companies and intosh is just it's a pure place a small or their professional services set up these things like that on top so it's it's a hybrid I mean we we talk about fables core product offer and of course being the technology platform which is monetized solely through the SAS subscriptions on top of that we have a technology enabled services group a stable content group which does facilitate content strategy content development creative services and associated executions inside client accounts or alongside the client depending on you know the the need and the sophistication of the in-house teams and then we have a targeting and distribution offering as well which is an add-on service for native distribution content discovery social distribution and then and then for our b2b clients we provide qualified lead generation against the content that they're building and deploying with our platform also to add on service so core technology being the platform itself SAS and then add-on services sort of enabled by the technology well when you're talking enterprise accounts I mean we name some some of them in the introduction we're talking like ten grand a month on average 100 grand a million good here's a general range of ACD yeah so I mean it really depends on the enterprise of course I mean when we sell into a really large brand portfolio you know we're talking about you know multiple brands operating on the account to give you some framework we typically charge a 60 K annual SAS fee per group using the platform okay Josh let's move that's helpful understand how the enterprise size kind of what you're dealing with in terms of groups and when you say groups just to be clear that's like if you sign up ducati right and they have multiple locations across the world each one of those patients is a different group that's exactly right and we also differentiate between like brand brand marketing and product marketing groups right so you know it may be that the platform is leveraged as an end-to-end solution supporting marketing organizations inside the enterprise building all of the branded micro sites and associated marketing deliverables landing pages to drive registrations or leads against and then use the platform for the creation of you know responsive cloud-based deliverables for sales enablement and training materials all the way through you sort of post campaign reporting so the platform is really robust it is a like full soup-to-nuts offering that can be used for you know either a branded lifestyle storytelling content section of the dot-com or an antenna you know entire enterprises you know web-based content creation needs and then charge let's get more the back story here I mean it sounds like you have your two of your own books you've got your own agency on the side when did you launch this company and kind of why get into the tech side of things yeah absolutely I mean I've I've been in on my whole life I mean I came I sort of you know started several small businesses when I was a kid I went to school knowing that I wasn't just going to take a nine-to-five job I was fortunate to meet a dear friend of mine and my collaborator now for 15 years in business Michael it cough we founded our publishing company right out of college literally like a classic startup story out of the dorm room it was a print media company playing in the luxury market we scaled that brand from a print magazine into a full-blown our book publishing company globally distributed celebrated in the Art and Design and sort of Kotor market and then inevitably we began exploring you know incrementally exploring revenue opportunities in digital as a publisher that had access to really high value content and pretty significant audiences and we through that process saw how broken the digital tools were for the creation and distribution yes I do I'm sorry what year so myself yeah I graduated college in three that's when we started our previous company and then it was about four or five years ago that we began recognizing the lack of tools for rich media design focused publishing and we began building in-house technology inside publishing company to solve those internal problems that we and our customers were facing and and then a couple of years ago we recognized just how significant the opportunity was to you know build a platform out for third party use and and effectively you know solve these these issues that we were very very successful in solving internally for enterprise clients and so at that point in time we we began building the technology as the third party cloud platform that it is today and the uptake has just been exponential so what was what is uptake been you launched in 2013 what he had to say in terms of total customers well I'll tell you this we've got over a hundred accounts on the platform what's an account like is that a logo or org or a group of a logo or no that would be an individual group using the the platform itself so we've got over a hundred counts on the platform you know some of them are inside a single customer some of them are independent customers they're all right there none of those are freezers yeah I mean we we are we are a for-profit business yeah well no some some of the people say yeah we have you know 10,000 customers and I go so they're all paying and they go oh no - no only 100 are paying right so so just be clear you have a hundred groups that are actively using and paying for the profit product it's a mix I mean we've got we've got a hundred accounts on the platform we have a very healthy customer base that is rapidly growing and a series of those accounts are in some kind of a pilot you know like paradigm right now in the process of either deploying initial campaign some paid on a pilot basis not having converted to a full-blown enterprise account you know first hits for free and then our self is goods you're gonna start paying for it they're at they're after but but yeah we've got a really healthy dedicated customer base our product is very sticky and we are we're growing aggressively okay just to be clear though if we ignore all the current pilot program is you're running I mean is it fair to say you're north of 80 like active paying customers I would say that were were north of we're north of 50 active accounts on the platform I you know I could certainly get back to you with with but the detail that's okay I just wanted minimum so just to be clear you got about 50 they're active they're paying they loved you for a while you've got another 50 that are piloting right now some are free pilots some are paid pilots and that's we get the hundred number from you know you mentioned sticky you said very sticky can you quantify that for me which turn look like we're really successful in converting pilot accounts to paid accounts and we have seen our first batch of enterprise renewals as well we've seen substantial expansion from our customers where we might get in through one brand group and then the product you know performs so well for them that that we we pretty quickly expand into other areas of the organization does that look like I mean are we talking like 120 percent year over year or 200 percent year expansion look like I mean we're growing at over 200 percent a year right now just in terms of birth rate and we you know we painstakingly built this platform to consolidate the multiple disconnected you know tools and and workflow processes for modern digital marketers into an interface that was built for marketers so we are very you know sort of data-driven in our product development we do tremendous listening to our customers and we iterate the product based on the needs of the end-user so it's a very complex technology stack within a vert lease imple pretty sexy design focused interface that begets you so marketers begin touching the tool and they fall in love instantly because it just does everything that they're responsible for doing better more efficiently and it's an enjoyable environment to work in so ties weekend I mean I appreciate all that but we can actually measure that stuff right so you said your first batch of renewals came through was it a 90 % renewal a lot of percent renew anew I mean how sticky was it oh we saw a one hundred percent renewal from all of our initial contracts okay that's great okay so I wasn't renewal and then have you bootstrapped the company have you raised we bootstrapped for a while and then we raised a small round to build out the enterprise version of the platform once we had taken the beta to market and salt was working ok so total raised is what how much we've raised only about a million bucks of external capital okay got it got a guy you couldn't resist the urge you couldn't just stay bootstrap huh yeah I hear ya I hear you know it sounds like you're doing well right...