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 sell here yeah i think so i mean i think that's pretty standard i've seen all the data but um you know i think i'm more interested in the partner than in the like specific amount within the bounds of kind of what's normal given up um because you know vcs can make great connections especially around hiring and customer base and stuff like that so looking for you know some of the softer skills maybe um as being more important in this next financing yeah the only i mean the only thing that's important in terms of like the check size versus evaluation is dilution effects on yourself right and others right so like i mean it sounds like if you if you're comfortable doing a million dollar round signing 10 and 20 you're comfortable assuming the right strategic but you're comfortable doing like a 45 million dollar post all the way up to obviously an 80 million post would be 10 only 10 dilution is that right that's right yeah yeah interesting interesting very cool okay so scaling nicely um there's eight customers here you already have a playbook because you had a pre-code now what how how many customers you have pre-coded um we had probably about the same so we lost three customers due to bankruptcy unfortunately during the pandemic um but we've actually only had the only churn we've ever had are those three bankruptcies and two companies that got spun off to private equity by their owner so we've never actually had any product related churn which is i think pretty incredible that we kept the customers during the pandemic when everything was falling apart for them so what would like when you got into this race people are gonna ask for a growth rate right so what would you say your growth rate was over the past 12 months yeah so um since the beginning of 2021 i don't actually know it for the past 12 rolling but um since the beginning of 2021 it's 140 and we should end the year at 400 year-over-year got it and if you're around like 100 a month in revenue what you're saying is what you started the year at like 60 grand a month in revenue something like that on a monthly basis i'm not sure but you know okay uh math sounds right from a growth yeah standpoint yeah 60 60 grand a month and and then 40 growth takes you up to like you know 80 90 now and 400 i mean gosh that would be what do you think you can get like to a quarter million a month by the end of the year yeah wow yeah we have been lined up right to that yeah that's great and is it expanding the number like the the wallet share of the current date customers are adding brand new logos all together both okay interesting very cool okay great great great interesting story here and um pre-coded were you at the same revenue level so if you compare 2019 to 21 and would it look flat without the cobin dip yeah if you just looked at those two it would look fine it doesn't tell the whole story for sure but no gosh no definitely not very cool well yeah obviously rooting for you this is great any other thing any other products that you want to chat about that i didn't ask about you think it's really important yeah we have one cool product that's um it's so we do this content creation mostly for the brands owned and operated properties so like their website their um they're sorry their website their social media stuff like that but we have a new offering that we call brand edit syndication that is basically taking that point of view and putting it on the multi-brand retailers site so um that becomes kind of like a flywheel from a growth perspective for us but the benefit for the brand is they get consistency for their sort of storytelling storytelling opportunity on platforms that they don't control without having to do any manual work to keep up that you know asset um and then or create that asset in the first place i should say and then the multibrand retailer can monetize that so you're starting to see a trend in retail where multi-brand retailers you know like walmart has walmart um connect macy's has macy's media network where they're monetizing their websites with traditional advertising so we have a new product offering for that which is going to be huge and then we have some new features and functionality within our existing software to help with some more of the like back office metrics things like inventory sell through rates and gross margin management or optimization um for the merchants so it's not just about the consumer experience anymore both of those new offerings were things that we like hunkered down and did during covid because everything was changing everything had to change and i think our value proposition now to brands and retailers is like 10 times stronger than it was before coveted when it was just you know just getting you more revenue right that's nice and it was working but now we have these additional um levers to pull as well well we hope all those customers get addicted to those new lines and you come on in a year and tell us about the success again but for now michelle let's wrap up with the famous five number one favorite book ooh um quiet it's i think the subtitle is the how to succeed in a world that won't stop talking or the power of introverts in the world that won't stop talking number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um i like my peer group i think that i learned more from them than i learned from you know bezos or some of the big ones that don't feel as relatable anymore so i have a ceo peer group of like seed series a and series b companies that i connect with there's a number of them number three what's your favorite online tool for building find mine oh great question um i'm a big fan of carta they're probably my favorite favorite saves you a lot of time yeah number four how many hours i sleep to get every night nine okay and situation married single kids married with one child he's 18 months oh well congratulations that's so exciting can i ask how old you are i'm 30 i'll be 36 on monday oh happy early birthday that's great thank you take us home here last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. um nobody has it figured out so my guess is as good as theirs guys there you have it find mine.com retail brand launched in 2016 working now with eight brands they do about a hundred thousand dollars a month in revenue that's up significantly about 40 from the beginning of the year as they come out of cobit much stronger they raised seven million dollars today looking at doing a traditional series they now call it you know raising eight million bucks we'll see what happens but again check out findmind.com and check out michelle again predictive intelligence for merchants and markets to automate their catalog michelle thanks for taking us to the top thank you 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 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