How Feedsauce CEO Omar Choudhry grew Feedsauce to $236.8K revenue and 50 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is omar chaudhry he founded feed sauce in 2018 after running an agency to 600 000 bucks in annual revenue with nine people and then noticing that all their customers were always interested in content more than anything they accidentally had built a speedy system for creating product photos in their agency and used this model to pivot to feed sauce and provide custom product photos for brands in 72 hours now they're building a marketplace to open the platform to all creators around the world omar you're ready to take us to the top yeah of course all right so what did you be here thanks for having me what did you very few people have the courage to shut down an agency doing six hundred thousand dollars a year to go all in on a marketplace sas product is the agency still running today no it's not we we ran it uh for about another six months before i realized that it's too difficult to try and focus on two different things that just went all in on food source uh around around 2019 early 2019. okay so all in on feed source so what i mean did you literally just shut the agency down just told all your customers sorry we're shutting down yeah um it was a bit of both to be honest um we had some accounts i would do for renewal and we thought you know what it's not worth us kind of renewing those contracts and secondly we started to gain a bit of momentum with what we were doing with feed source so it made it a bit easier for us to kind of make the shift as well and a bit um because that we still created content in the agency um it facilitates facilitated us a bit better in terms of our team as well so 2019 is when you got this thing going and how many people are on the team today uh there are about five of us five and how many engineers yeah uh two two and any quarter carrying sales reps or no uh so we have a sales and support person who works remotely for us um still in the uk as well but she works full-time for us remotely quota or no quota are they on a quota do they have a sales target oh i got you okay uh no so she works she has an employee but then she works on a commission structure as well so we incentivize her on kind of sales she manages to close too i see okay let's dive into the product because first off a website is gorgeous your product shot one million ways so is this really a metadata play you're creating the image and then and then sticking it on these metadata feeds so it shows up good on amazon on shopify and wherever else they publish uh well every photo is actually handmade so that's one of the kind of the key anchors of this is literally created by photographers wow um yeah so we we kind of when we say speedy system um if you think of it like mcdonald's like a drive-through you go through window one you say hey this is my product this is the type of photos i want this is the style i like which we call recipes and you go to window two you drop off your product and window three you collect your photos so it's that kind of kind of concept but in a digital format okay well so explain this to me right because you you've sort of you've done this in a very unique way to make this thing modular it has to be very visual and you've sort of said hey does your product shop want to look like an influencers bedroom doesn't want to look like our block concept where it's like triple layer could be different colors you've got some sort of other concepts as well walk through sort of how this works right so um effectively there is it's very simple what we've done is we've created these pre-made recipe styles because what we learned very early on is that brands themselves don't know what they want and especially our target consumer is your smb so it's people that you know standard consumer good products by people that might be drop shipping or you know your average shopify seller that started a product and wants to launch it um and a lot of times these people first of all creating a product is new for them but on top of that it's very unlikely that they'll have many creative talents and be able to actually create the content that competes with your l'oreal and yours of the world and we have that background so you'd come on you'd find a recipe you like it you tell us how many photos you want you send it and then from there you can select the sizes you want and then one thing that's really worked well for us is we actually pick up your product the next day so we're offering that in the uk right now but we'll be expanding it globally now too where we come and collect your product it comes to our studio and you have your photos within 48 to 72 hours after that so what i see right now i'm looking at you with the feed sauce logo and your thing you guys have a studio there in that office somewhere and you actually have to get all these products if someone pays you they have to get the product to you somehow physically that's correct so right now we've had the entire infrastructure built here um but this we really wanted to make more of a concept for us to test the model because as you know when you're starting something out and especially pivoting you know everything's high risk so we wanted to make sure we can control as much of the the input and output as possible but now that we've got our model completely refined we're now scaling this out into a marketplace where creators from all around the world will be able to sign up and use the platform a bit like you know being a host on airbnb for example and then brands from around the world will be able to tap in and get their content done too got it so you know the the way i would argue that this is currently done is a brand like glossier might find a bunch of influencers on instagram who already take great images and just send them free product and then have the rights to use that content ugc themselves your model is hey gloss here listen just ship us your product we'll take these professional shots and you can use them on billboards or your own marketing any way you want but you're paying us a fixed price per image is that accurate that's correct and that's so interesting you mentioned that right now as well because one of our advisors runs one that runs one of the most successful influencer agencies here in the uk and what we learned from them is that 30 of the influencer content transactions that are happening now are actually just for your standard kind of pack shots or or flatly type shots like that influencer bedroom yeah because brands don't know where to go and they're paying on average fourteen hundred dollars per shot to an influencer not for any exposure these are people with less than 2 000 followers or people that could just create good content um and we're really you know a huge fraction of that price you know so um that's why it's becoming a lot more attractive to them bring those brands into our ecosystem instead of having to go to influencers so okay couple questions your pricing page is very simple almost too simple simple like simple scary so let me just ask a couple questions can a brand pay you just to do one image can they pay you just 30 30 euros for one image um so we have a minimum of three photos that you can order uh however we are just launching tomorrow the ability for brands to get a sample one sample photo for free so if you want you send your product in and we just create this shop for you and if you like it you can order more if you don't there's no cost to you okay so um i guess let me ask you on average how many images are you creating per customer that signs up so on average brands will order anywhere between nine to fifteen photos our kind of average order value is somewhere around 400 pounds okay and do they do that consistently like is this a sas play can you rely on them paying you 400 bucks or 400 pounds every month so we actually started off as a subscription model uh so very early on we did that and we noticed this kind of concept called ad fatigue or content fatigue what happens is brands tend to over purchase so what happens is you say hey i need 30 photos because i'm going to put one a day on instagram that's their method of thinking and what they realize is they can't actually do that they then have too much content sitting there and now we look like the bad guy yeah like we've almost taken too much money from them but when we switch the model into a pay-as-you-go model we had huge retention so we saw that anywhere between 40 to 60 of our customers were coming back and they're coming back because they're now ordering at their leisure and they are then ordering photos based on their business needs and now we've made our experience a lot more of an intuitive experience for them hence the platform where they can kind of plug in and buy as they need and the photos just appear on their dashboard so omar in july let's take full month of july how many unique brands paid you at least a dollar oh wow ah july uh i'd say around 50. okay around 50. got it and and so they are paying on average you said for like 9 to 15 photos so what does that translate like last month total top line revenue was about what so total top line revenue last month was probably around six thousand okay six thousand so yeah got it...