How Findo CEO Gary Fowler grew Findo to $83.9K revenue and 700 customers in 2017.

this is the top where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of Revenue or customer base you'll learn how much revenue they're making what their marketing funnel looks like and how many customers they have I'm now at $20,000 per top 5 and6 million he is held bent on global domination we just broke our 100,000 unit sold Mark and I'm your host Nathan lka okay top tribe this week's winner is is Charlie dags okay he was a middle manager at a Manufacturing Company he wants to break free and he won the $100 I give out every Monday for your chance to win simply subscribe to the podcast on iTunes right now and then text the word Nathan to 33444 to prove that you did it top tribe you know I don't have a lot of time to waste that's why I use fresh books to send out invoices and make sure I'm collecting my money to get your free month go to Nathan lad. slf freshbooks and enter the top in the how did You Hear About Us section Nathan L here this is episode 602 and coming up tomorrow morning we hear from the CEO of Alaska who's 29 years old with one kid his name is enrio casadi they've sold 20,000 Italian shoes to over 15,000 men and they're growing so fast they did 1.6 million in 2016 revenue and they've raised over $750,000 uh to to date good morning everybody Nathan laa here our guest this morning is Gary Fowler he's the co-founder and CEO of findo findo is a smart search across multiple platforms for email files and folders Gary has over 23 years of a startup experience he's an award-winning CEO a senior executive and speaker with over seven technology startups and a successful IPO with the company cks W Gary is known as the goto startup CEO that gets stuff done Gary you ready to take us to the top I'm ready good okay thanks for joining us so tell us what findo does and what's your Revenue model how do you generate uh money so findo the the challenge that we all have today is that we have a tremendous amount of information that's within our own own personal cloud Nathan and that that amount of information if you look at the average person has about 300,000 items well the internet the number web sites in 1996 was only 257,000 and that number's doubling every year so think about all the all the email addresses and all the information your email addresses your Dropbox your box your Google Drive your one drive your drive on your um laptop all this information in these desparate places what we allow it to do is to be able to search from one place using natural language we're an AI tool so in it's learning all the time so those hundreds of hundreds of emails that you get every day to be able to search through them and prod provide insights so M Mike and then real quick before I ask this question how do you generate Revenue so we we have a subscription model so um the subscription model is a monthly basis we've got an advanced at uh $4.99 per month and we've got the ultimate at $9.99 per month so what that means is that you can search as far back with as many accounts that you want with the ultimate and the advanced is a uh six months worth of History okay so this is a s SAS platform yes okay and so we don't have to get into every specific plan just give me an average what's the average customer paying you per month the average customer pays us per month is uh $9.99 most of them are going for the advanced model okay got it okay great and then let's go back here and get some history uh when did you launch the business so the business was spun out of my part my partner is one of the top AI seral entrepreneurs Who David Yang okay and uh he's done nine startups he uh we spun out of a his company uh Abby and um created a US Corporation I became the co-founder and CEO of uh the US Co Corporation with him and I've known him for four years we're friends and and how did that spin out happen like had the had the parent company like raed Capital did it need board approval why did you make the decision to spin it out well we spun it out because the U Ab Core businesses working primarily with uh scanner manufacturers and this we understood that this is way be Way Beyond that because it's such a pain point that each one of us has you know we know the file exists but we can't find it why we don't know where it's located or we've forgotten to keyw and so it's really not uh it wasn't aby's Core Business so we spun it out we bought the IP and and now it's ours what you bought the IP from Abby yes you and your your uh your co-founder who's also the CEO of Abby my co-founder is the founder of Abby the founder how did you manage conflict of interest there like how did you come up with the right price to buy the IP when he was also the CEO of Abby how did we come up with the right price because we had it uh independently evaluated oh got it okay so and for people listening right now that are thinking about spending out their own company and they want to figure out how to do this independent evaluation how do you go find someone to do that what's the search term what's it called so what's uh going out to find in independent evaluators what's it called yeah like how' you find the person to do that so you look at people that can actually go out and evaluate companies so there there are companies out there that allow you to uh do that and and that's their uh job their job is to be able to look at a company and figure out you know what what is the value of that and how much it's worth and what did you so what did you end up buying this kind of out of the main company for was it you know millions of dollars or hundreds of thousands or less it um it um was hundreds of uh thousands of dollars and folks would wonder when they hear that well where did Gary and his partner where did you guys get this Capital was it just your own personal savings or what no so we had had a um we had a investment by the a parent company and um so we took as some of the proceeds of that we used that as a as some of the that was one of part of our u a seed one round oh I see okay and how much total Capital have you raised to date $7 million okay got it that's helpful and so they LED your seed round so I guess what I assume you're up to series a well right now we're we're series C2 we had two rounds our our C2 round uh was with a a group called Flint capital and we also uh as part of our C2 we had um the uh uh competitor of adobe Fox that actually was one of the major contributors to the uh part of our seed to so um every uh PDF reader that foxit which is the um competitor of adobe has will be including a findo within it so that be up to six and a half million a month and Gary what is sorry six and a half million a month of what million copies of their PDF reader oh I see you said your seed 2 why why do people say seed seed one seed 2 instead of just going and saying this is series a series B series C uh because we you know from our standpoint we really looked at it as a as a seed round so yeah but me understand what that means so someone listening right now they're going hey should I raise a seed a seed B seed C or should I go raise a series a how did you like tell me why you said it's a a seed two because we just we broke it up into increments and we didn't need you know for this round we weren't looking at 10 to 20 Mill ion dollar what we were doing is we were looking for um an investment and the first part of it the first part of the investment the first $3 million we understood that that was uh you know looked more like a seed round and the second part of it we we just didn't want that much money so we were CAU we were you know between a series a and between a c so we decided to uh call it the seed round which from my standpoint was the the best thing for us to do so are these all are these all all debt rounds convertible safes kisses Etc or have you had an equity priced round we've had the equity price D okay was that the 4 million after the three was the 4 million price is that how it worked yes okay got it okay great let's okay let's go back here and and capture more of the story because you've had some you've had a lot of success even before findo what was the year that you officially spun out and launched launch the company uh last year okay so or like early 2016 uh April okay okay April 2016 and what were you doing before that so what was I doing I started the most successful accelerator in uh in Russia and we had done over 185 companies over three year period of time which accelerator was that GBA launch gurus GBA what launch gurus gurus and how do you you say most successful in Europe quantify that for me how do you measure that well so so we had over uh 60% of our companies had raised money which is really unheard of you know one out of uh one out of uh uh 10 are generally uh successful and have raised some money and we we counted success as being able to uh they were...