How FindMine CEO Michelle Bacharach grew FindMine to $3.2M revenue and 8 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is michelle bakarak she's a ceo and co-founder of find mind an award-winning content engine that uses machine learning to scale content curation for the world's top retailers michelle you're ready to take to the top yeah thanks for having me all right content creation is a tough space walk me through this how did you get into the industry is it is it fashion and and content for retailers exclusively yeah retailers and brands currently across fashion beauty and home those are our first three categories and i started the company because i felt like there was a big friction point for the consumer where you know consumers aren't experts in the product categories we're buying um whereas the companies we're buying from our experts and so there's a gap between how much of that expertise is actually reaching the consumer and i found that that gap was really happening because merchants and marketers within these brands are you know they're trying to communicate their expertise but they're stuck with kind of manual um means of doing that so making an email campaign or a instagram post or um you know curating a landing page on the website so what our approach is is to use machine learning to kind of predict what that person is going to do within the organization rather than predict what a customer is likely to do because if we're predicting what the customer's likely to do they're going to stay at that same level of expertise they've always had whereas if we predict what the brand expert is going to suggest we're going to get that aspirational kind of brand imbued expertise um what are these what are these brands paying you for this technology on average per month so our average contract size is about 160 000 um per year yeah and it's driven by volume so the more places they use our engine to put content in front of customers so let's say like location like physical locations or web properties properties so channels like email or social media ecommerce the more you know eyeballs basically that we have on our content the more um the more they pay but there's also you know a unit economic benefits there's economies of scale built into that pricing model yep yep and what's the cheapest plan people can get started with it's about 20 000 a year and how and how many unique hits is a website getting if they pay you 20 grand a year it depends so it depends a little bit on how many products they have um depends on like what their average order value is and how much revenue we think we can increase for them um but you know it would range from like a few million to maybe 20 or so million okay interesting views across properties okay so you're upside down it's multiple churches and then don't obviously name the company but what's your largest customer paying you per year um our largest contract is probably about three quarters of a million okay god it's a pretty large what's the back story here when did you guys launch yeah it's a great question so i've been trying to kind of solve the consumer side of this problem since 2010. um and it was always kind of on my list of you know i i hadn't started a company i was getting my mba it was working full-time and other um and other things but you know i had this list of 50 startup ideas on my phone and this kind of friction for the consumer i kept coming back to and i was trying to solve it from like a consumer standpoint since like 2010 you know officially like incorporated a holding company to workshop um startup ideas of what of which this was won in 2014 kind of hit on like the b2b angle in 2016. we launched with our first b2b customer in 2016. um and then you know since the pandemic obviously retail has changed dramatically and so our business and the product offerings and the way we do it really changed in 2020 um but i would use 2016 if you have to kind of pick one start date and what was your revenue in the first year it's always a fun question i think our first year revenue was like three thousand dollars for the year how did it make you feel in december that year do you remember i mean it was great i think our customer got like a 3000 x roi and we were like okay we need to change our pricing a little bit um but we were thrilled that was huge yep and then it was covered did co generally increase your revenue or decrease your revenue i mean kobe decreased the revenue but now has increased it so i think it was like it um it was a curse and then a blessing i like to say yeah no that's good now how many customers are we working with today um we're working with about eight different payers um and some of our customers have portfolios of different brands so you know we work with adidas and they own reebok and we work with perry ellis and they own cubavera and callaway and original penguin so there's you know some portfolios that we that we uh that we work with so there's definitely more brands and then we also work with multi-brand retailers who sell hundreds of different brands so we have probably about 500 brands on our platform well michelle if i'm doing my math correctly you just passed an important milestone can i take eight customers times the twelve thousand dollar rpoo that's 96 grand a year you're north of a month you're north of a million dollar run right at this point sorry yeah you can you can do that math was it accurate did you guys pass that earlier this year we have passed that yeah that's exciting congratulations now did you do a boost or did you raise we've raised financing yeah we raised about 7 million lifetime to date okay what was that broken down and like how many how much juries in 2016 if any um in 2016 what do we do i think it was like an angel round of a hundred thousand dollars plus the mid accelerator money so we we did an accelerator called xrc labs and we got 50k from them you recommend them have been helpful yeah so we were actually part of their first class ever and they've like completely they were startup themselves they've completely grown but they're retail focused specifically and if uh if a company was trying to sell into that space i 100 recommend them wow okay got it and then you raised more sense than what was the other rounds so we did um like seed after that and um yeah so that was the balance of it but um oh so you're just in the sea the seed was a 7 million seed uh yeah oh wow okay when was that pre-pandemic or post yeah wow okay so what what's sort of the next plan i mean once you serve on the vc flywheel you have to sort of be raising every 18 months otherwise it looks bad in the markets are you raising now yeah we're actually uh you know 2020 was not a good time to go out to the market especially within retail but now it's a great time to go out to the market because retail has more than rebounded i would say the whole industry has been pulled forward like 10 to 15 years um and we're just seeing like tons we're getting tons of inbound from vcs who are like we're really into e-commerce enablement or we really want to focus on retail tech never happened before yeah i mean that never happened before people were sort of like retail tech like that's not that sexy of a market and now all of a sudden people are really excited about it so so what's the right amount for you to raise do you think so we're looking to do like an 8 million dollar series a um you know kind of right down the middle we don't want to raise too much we've seen companies do that and not have great consequences but we also have really uh like clear unit economics in terms of like pipeline conversion ratios um how many uh account executives we need to achieve quotas and stuff like that so i'm pretty capital efficient you can do a lot with a little mm-hmm how many accounting executives are there today um you're looking at her it's just you yeah yeah so how do you model your first sales hire that's not you obviously they're not going to perform as good as you you're the founder so we we actually already went through that pre-covered um and then because of covid we we don't have a sales marketing team since then that's part of the way we you know cut burn and stuff um to keep the lights on during the really challenging time of 2020 but what's really good about that is like we know all we have been through the wall on the first sales higher which is a big challenge um and learned a lot and so we have kind of our unit economics and like the ramp and the training assets and all that stuff kind of lined up so i know exactly what that looks like and i know how many months to ramp how many months to ramp is in the plan for a new sales rep four four okay and when they are ramped what do you expect them to hit quota wise million a year oh yeah and do you have like traditional full on target earnings 200 grand underground base under crank commission yeah it's it's 50 base 50 commission but commissions are uncapped um yeah so we you know they could be like 25 75 or whatever you know guys the limit there and how many total people on the team today there's 12 full-time team members today um about 20 something if you include you know part-time and consultant what about full-time engineers full-time engineers four four okay interesting nice mix here so so looking raising now obviously most folks uh well not obviously but most series a folks are selling 10 to 20 percent of business these days do you think that's probably what you're gonna have to...