Fig revenue, CEO Brendan Falk, team size, customer count, churn, and more in 2022.

hey folks my guest today is brendan faulk he's the co-founder and ceo of fig he grew up in australia specifically sydney did his heart undergrad at harvard and now lives in san francisco the company has raised 2.2 million from y combinator general katos and executive uh and founders at stripe github heroku he's also one of the fastest growing open source startups in the world last quarter brendan you ready to take us to the top absolutely thanks for joining nathan you know i'm a numbers guy so when i see in a bio fastest growing in the last quarter i'm obviously going to ask you to quantify that measured by what who who's the source what's the ranking so there's a ranking called the ross index they publish the fastest growing open source companies by github stars github forks and a few other metrics you could just google ros index and in q3 last year i think we were number two or number three and then q4 last year we were like in the top 10 i think maybe 10th what's factors going to that is a number of number of developers who contributed at least one line of code to the open source project or like what's the number so github stars is it's sort of like a like on facebook it's a bit of a vanity metric to be honest but then they also look at github forks a github fork for non-technical users listening is i go to a project online that is open source so all the code is available and if i want to contribute to it what i do is i download the code that's called forking i make my changes and then i submit what's called a pull request which says hey i've made some changes can you review them and then we review them and we click merge and suddenly they're available to every user so fascinating a lot of our company is open and that means anyone in the world can contribute and we have been growing so quickly because we've had so many contributors we're at about 150 or more contributors at this point okay that's what i was going to ask you so in q4 150 people downloaded the the i guess the fork to then submit something back to you to appreciate we probably had like hundreds if not thousands of forks meaning they downloaded us and then in terms of contributors we probably had like 30 or 40 contributors just in that quarter but over the course of our company we've had yeah 160 170 contributors you can check out if you go to github.com with fig slash autocomplete you can see all of the the open source success that we've had well yeah you know everyone is looking for the next the next sid right the next get lab right you know i remember having sit on many years ago and i i asked him some tough questions around you know open source folks are generally givers and when there's the big mean business guy that comes in and tries to make money off this it's a hard balancing act so like he obviously figured a way to do it how are you balancing that how do you reward these contributors when it's clear like wait brennan you're making money on this your equity value is going up you just raised 2.2 million where's our money so i think a lot of developer developer tools companies that have done really well have realized that most of their money comes from massive enterprise deals it's not from you know making five dollars here or there from the individual user so our focus is right now let's just make sure individuals love our product and so do you love a product that's paid or do you have a product that's free everyone loves free so we're making it free we're really focused on growth we're all about getting adoption getting people just literally use fig every single day make it just a core part of their daily workflow because we know that like most sas tools we're gonna make all of our money in enterprise so we're not worried about the money for individuals today we can worry about that in the future 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 it 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 in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're gonna get a different valuation a vc is gonna pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're gonna do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when i hover over here right so the teal is what a vc would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on youtube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of sas valuations than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderprath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation 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 so let's say i was one of the 30 or 40 developers that that pulled down the pull request submitted something back thousands of forks in q4 let's say i write some code and then like a year from now you're selling that code to to amazon right on your fig enterprise plan like do i get a kickback of that how do you manage that storyline so we aren't selling that exact code we uh like our model is some of our stuff is open source meaning all of that code is public and anyone can contribute some of our code is closed the stuff that we're going to sell is the closed stuff and so any of the open source contributions we have basically said this is going to be free forever if you are familiar with github github's model is for individuals it's free for open source it's free and then for private stuff for teams it's paid and we're going to follow the exact same model so anyone who contributes we are just totally going to say this is free and open to the world forever we're not going to get rid of this and that's you know we've held that and there's no the way this specific repo works i mean i know it's a short podcast so i won't go in too long but it's you download fig and you use it for your workflows but maybe there's a specific workflow that you do every day that not many other people do and so that's where you go hey you know what i want fig to be better for me so i'm going to contribute the you know the what's called autocomplete spec which is exactly what we're doing we're going to it for me i would contribute it so the rest of the world can also use it that sort of makes sense but it's basically solving your own problem scratching your own itch and then allowing other people to also get access to the solution so you would only experience a quote-unquote community revolt if you took things that you said were going to stay free and then put a paywall up and made them pay that's the only time like that you would not want to do that i hope we never experienced a community revolt that would be terrible but yeah like that's just you know if we say one thing and then two years later do another thing it's people don't trust us we need we like want people to trust us we want them i'm i'm digging here because i think there's a lot to learn about how folks like sid and others there's many others that have leveraged an open source community it's the closest comparable we have to web three where everything's on blockchain right where like you actually vote with the number of tokens you own of the fig product but this is a different structure but it's it's like the closest bridge if you know what i mean yeah yeah there are a lot of different styles of open source so there is what sid is doing at gitlab where it is sort of it's company-led anyone can contribute but at the end of the day the company sort of has the call let's do what's the direction we're going and that uh it's sort of known as the benevolent dictator for life if you've ever heard of that term so big open source projects specifically languages like python have a benevolent benevolent dictator for life uh whereas a lot of other open source projects similar to web3 they have some sort of set of rules which says okay with the community has to vote and then based on the community votes something is going to happen or something is not going to happen there are lots of different methodologies i think the most important thing is for you to say up front here is you know who makes the final decision at the end of the day here are the rules because we don't say that it just turns into chaos so how many folks today are full time at fig we're still small we have a smaller powerhouse team so we just hit seven and hopefully we'll be eight fairly soon but how many engineers we're all engineers we're a developer tool so we have to be coding every day and i think it will be like that for a while and pre-revenue are you charging already for some parts of the tool as i said most of our revenue is going to come from enterprise stuff we know that and luckily we have so much good user adoption that vcs are willing to like vcs look at companies like github and gitlab and go you know what these companies weren't making a ton of money in the early days but their users just loved them because they were solving a massive problem so like vcs know that this sort of bottoms up growth is a like a very saleable product in the future and they're willing to sort of subsidize it in the future so yeah pre-revenue but we have tens of thousands of users you can see on our open source attraction as well like people are really engaged in the product in a way that like i've built products before i had never seen so how like where can someone go to understand what you mean when you say tens of thousands of users they're different than contributors to the open source code yeah so we have like two sides here there's actually building the product though those are where the contributors come in and then there are the people who use the product and that's like that's what i'm talking about with users so git lab is the example they all of their code is open anyone can contribute and make the code better but it doesn't mean you actually use it every day there's usually a high correlation between users and contributors but not everyone who uses fig has to contribute if that makes sense you can go to fig you can go to fig.io download fig and get it done like taking full advantage of what we do we make the terminal easier to use the terminal is a place that developers use all day every day for like diversion control of code like i won't go into a ton of depth because i don't want to go too technical but we make developers lives in the terminal much easier so how many used it in january in january the yeah god it's always already february people i mean we're not saying the exact numbers but we're in the tens of thousands like our monthly active users are in the tens of thousands at this point but it's growing super quickly like this time last year we're almost at nothing and now we're like these are daily users as well as opposed to just monthlies um help me understand the growth in mau over the past 60 days so if you're in tens of thousands in january what was it in december uh again not publishing exact numbers but i can say last month we're up 50 percent or something like that so uh yeah we you know we launched on product hunt we had the second product of the month second top product of the whole month number one of the day another one of the week so it's just people love what we're doing to the point that they're sharing with their friends and we're just compounding the number of users by yeah 40 to 50 percent each month uh you got about 375 upvotes um on that product on listing how did that 375 i think you're looking at uh 20 oh hold on hold on hold on that's different yeah we got a thousand like 1300 that's a different that's a different you gotta you wait that's the exact same name july 7th 2020 fig visual apps and shortcuts for your terminal what was that that was really early on in fig's history we were still pivoting around so coming saying a step back what is fig as i said we make the terminal easier the terminal is really hard there are a ton of different workflows that people do in the terminal every day people also call the terminal the command line the command prompt the shell i'm just going to use the terminal because that's what we tend to stand i tend to stick to but uh we launched this like really a bare-bones version of fig just to see if like this was a big pain point just to test the borders and we got a lot of traction on that product and launched and then since then we focused in on one specific product which was auto completed the terminal and that's what we launched when did you write the first line of code for the for the business what year it was april 2020. okay 2020. so yeah that first product on launch of 375 uploads was in 2020 the more recent one it was 1300 uploads number two product of the month uh in january this is the last month actually um how many users did you get like when you look at your website traffic from products on how much did you get from that launch yeah we got several thousand it wasn't yeah it was several thousand again we're not saying the exact numbers but it's not like what we know is product times is one place where people like technical people hang out there's also hacker news there's also twitter there's also the workplace there's also side hobby projects there's also open there are also open source projects there are a ton of different places and so we the product town is just one of many avenues did uh what drove you more traffic um you know you posted i believe fig on hacker news back in what was it eight months ago or so almost 600 maybe i'm like yeah yeah did that traffic was actually yeah news that's because i think i would say two reasons one hacking uses a more technical audience and two there are a lot more alert this sounds weird but lurkers on hacker news those are people who don't comment they don't really upvote but they read it every day and fig was at the top of hack news basically all day like it was a really long day for my co-founder of me but that got us i would say double if not triple the number of users from from hack and use as opposed to product time yup yup interesting okay um talk to me a little bit more about how you funded the business you're pretty revenue you've got to pay seven employees somehow so you raised some capital when was the first round yep we got into yc we raised that money in april like last year is one of the first hit up banks so it's not last year april 2020 then we raised our seed straight afterwards which was september 2020. we are a really efficient business like not only are we software well sorry how much brandon so how much is it sorry yeah we raised we raised 2.2 million we raised from general catalyst was our lead but then a bunch of really cool executives that was all in 2020 that was all in 2020 yeah okay so we're really capital we raised from general catalyst we have sv angel a bunch of partners from really cool companies like the cpo of stripe will gabriel we have the founder of segments calvin we have the brendan what's go what's going on right when i see a company come out of yc and they do around instantly you've already given up seven percent for whatever it is 150 grand so dilution's a real thing here um i mean you should be raising every 12 to 15 months otherwise something's wrong why haven't you raised in over 24 months we have so much money like we have bailed we have still have 25 we still have more than 60 percent or 70 of our money in the bank like we want to grow but i also don't want to grow too quickly i trust yc's advice they say the worst way to kill the best way to kill your company is to just raise a bunch of money hire a bunch of people when you don't have product market fit we raised i don't think we had product market fit straight after raising now we're getting like really good growth and really good traction i think we will raise in the next like three or four months i want us to grow our team before we raise so i'm like we're starting to hire aggressive we were four engineers in december we're seven now so in a month we've almost doubled the team so we're like really going on this like quick growth structure trajectory right now i agree but i also don't buy into the metrics of like you have to the best companies raised in one and a half years or whatever like well it's not the best it's not the best you just do pattern recognition it's usually negative it's usually a negative signal in the market if more than 24 months go by and you're coming out of yc with 2.2 million raised back in 2020 but i think your answer is also very valid you know like we have so much money in the bank this is what i'm saying is sure engineers are expensive but we weren't paying engineers for a long time it was really just by co-founder of me you also look at stripe and a bun like for sell some of these other really big developer tools companies straight after yc they raised the c round but then it took them a long time to raise their series a raising going from series a to series b that was really quick for these companies but they took two to two and a half years at least to go from c to series a i'm not too fussed about that i want the engine to be going i want us to be like really confident that hey like when we raise this series a we are blasting off i think we're getting pretty close so i imagine and most and most in their seat just to understand how you're managing evolution most in their seat are still in between 10 and 20 percent were you sort of right in that same average yeah we were around like 10 to 15 percent okay so on the better under that so 10 to 15 in that seed that's not including the seven percent from yc i assume not including less yeah so you have like 20 equity or so owned by investors right now the rest the team the east up pool all that jazz yes exactly and if you do raise the next couple months how much would you target it depends who we raise from if we go with a big vc like a sequoia and andreessen i say go as if we're fortunate enough to go with one of them they they're they're always taking 20 like that's the way they work so they'll increase the valuation but they will no matter what take 20 percent versus if you go with like just non-traditional capital they'll take between 10 and 15 and like sometimes you can go with a real an angel like you know a sam oldman for instance who i think is sort of diagnosing to this they don't have fixed capital constraints they just want to invest and be part of the journey so i think it really depends at the end of the day who the partner we go with is uh partner is most important to me very cool all right well it'll be fun to see what happens um and and when you know when it's the right time about the pay wall to get to put up the paywall as i said yeah when's your first dollar revenue we will start charging teams and we're launching a new product next month it makes it easier to manage your dot files for technical listeners dot files are like you develop non-technical listeners sorry dot files like your developer environment we for individuals fig's always going to be free for teams after like 10 plus people we're going to start charging and i think we'll get our first paint users in the next couple of months with this new team's product we're watching all right brandon sounds good in the meantime let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite book 1984 by george orwell number two is there a ceo you're following or studying i'm a big fan of guiamo adversary number three what's your favorite online tool for building fig other than fig because we use it to build it every day i would say this is more of a personal thing but superhuman i think building figures a company you need to be really quick and responsive to people and superhuman enables me to like 10x the output i can do per day number four how many hours of sleep are you getting every night i'm big on sleep so eight hours that's great situation married single kids no not married i'm single no kids dm me don't worry all right brian last question what's something you wish you knew four years ago when you were 20 about building companies is focus on problems as opposed to solutions what does that mean when i was growing up i used to build apps and i used to think oh this is a cool idea like everyone's gonna love it but it would they just be ideas i wish i knew to focus explicitly on like what yc calls a hair on fire problem a really really painful thing that's where the best startup ideas come from that's where the idea for fig came from is the terminal if you speak to any user who uses the terminal it is really really hard and fig comes in and just makes that easier the sale is so easy so uh focus on problems not solutions guys brennan faulk fig.io first line of code written in 2020 came out of yc raised 2.2 million sold about 10 to fifteen percent of the business uh obviously yc took seven percent as well they're growing though nicely tens of thousands of monthly active users growing fifty percent their mau uh month over month so again nice growth there they're going to use that growth to celebrate sort of the market hopefully raise some capital here again in the next two to three months team of seven right now as they continue scaling up their engineering team again building a tool that makes it easier for developers to get more out of their terminal brendan thanks for taking us to the top thank you nathan one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get 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