How Getdata CEO Gary Teh grew Getdata to $10.8K revenue and 30 customers in 2019.

hello everyone my guest today is gary tay he's backpacked across five continents landed in jail two times he got deported one time while at it he's played on the national team in singapore and came in second runner in mr singapore he's based in san francisco bay area right now building out a company called get data dot io gary you ready to take us to the top all right yeah which countries did you go to jail in uh china and azerbaijan and why did china arrest you i was like at the border area of china and there was like the tibetan unrest during that time so they're afraid that we gesta and would like uh break out into riots which he actually did once across over kazakhstan okay and why did you run from mr singapore uh my friend just kind of like dragged me into the whole thing even was like i'll get another friend's pageant and why do you i mean is this like a is this like are you a cute person or like how do you win mr singapore i don't know just by being there i guess well what is it based off what's the judging criteria uh the way you dress the way you present yourself the way you [Music] talk so what are you are you like a model or something when you're not building software yeah for real yeah i was you have a six-pack not now man i had like too much beer america became to me all right get data what's the company doing how do you guys make money so get data helps users gather data in a simple and affordable manner so the way we make money is by charging a subscription there are three tiers of subscription here one is if you just want to gather data once tier two is if you want to schedule your data repeatedly for gathering let's say every 15 minutes every hour every day and so on and so forth tier three is if you need to gather more data through time okay interesting so if you just look at kind of your the people that are paying you on a recurring basis every month on average what are they paying you per month to use your technology um well it ranges right i know what's an average average around 30 plus us dollars per month 30. okay and quantify what they get for that is it a number of records per month or what is it yeah how many records for the low side you have say um half a million records per month on the high side you have like close to 20 million records a month okay so for 30 bucks a month i'll get about 500 000 records yeah okay and what name some of your customers like are these marketing tech companies doing outbound marketing or who's using you uh actually they are artificial and um intelligence and machine learning companies they're trying to pull data from the web to train your models okay this is like metadata from amazon listings or shopify yeah like somewhere in that direction like i have so far around three universities like using like that data right now unam down based in mexico mit which is using us and then like uh the university of ireland is coming on board how many total folks are using you total like non-paying users there's around like 4 000 plus they're growing at around 40 percent every quarter okay and how many of the 4 000 are actually paying around 30 okay so 30 are paying so 30 paying 30 a month that puts you at like a thousand dollars a month in revenue is that right yeah and where were you a year ago were you pre-revenue uh a year ago like this time i was making like 28 a month 28 yeah okay so how are you surviving in san francisco you have no money oh you know here's the funny thing right uh all the data needed to be pulled from the web right uh you could actually use them to generate trading signals as well i've been using that for trading so it's been working quite well for me it's like past two years my portfolio has been up 35 on the average 35 yeah and where did you get initial money to invest i saved okay so did you i mean did you have an early exit in something or no you just worked at a big company and you just spent less than you made and you saved up a nest egg and now you invest it yeah which company and moto say it again at yeah what do they do they are the world's largest social network for education interesting and when did you leave that company and start get data uh well i left last year during halloween why they scare you no pun intended no i figured i was there for five years already and then i really needed to spend some time off to cover that one final continent which is africa that i haven't been to before like i started getting busy okay so you want to travel the world now it takes guts to obviously quit a company most people like to build up six or 12 months of kind of monthly expenses right before they actually quit what was your ratio how much did you want to save up before you quit i've been my regular like savings ratio was around 80 okay and you were living in san francisco at the time i'm living in san mateo okay that's still expensive how did you save eighty percent of your total wages in such an expensive part of the world uh i guess i got lucky my rent was pretty cheap it's like oh it's only 750 bucks a month and everything's included like utilities internet garbage right now where you're living you're paying 750 bucks a month yeah okay that doesn't that is not in line with average prices in your area why hasn't the why isn't the person trying to increase rent on you it's nice and i think she finds me nice you are gary you are an interesting guy um i will give you that um okay so you are making most of your money right now by actually using your technology to trade and your portfolio is performing at 35 on average over the past 12 24 months yeah that's irr uh no actually yeah 35 ir yeah so why mess around with this 30 a month plan serving 30 customers basically doing like nothing in terms of revenue why not just keep trading uh well i actually really wanted to do that right that's why i wanted to build this out this trading thing was just by product like really fascinated with turning the whole web into a giant graph database right which it actually is it's just that the sql layer is missing so i was like all right let me put that down right that's the hypothesis that would be about me were you a developer at app um at your bus company or did you teach yourself how to code i was there for five years i was hating an engineering team and then like for the past final year i was on the product management side hitting growth and have you bootstrapped the company today to raise capital this one uh bootstrap man okay so any any team members or just you uh apparently i have like a bunch of friends they're like working on like some pretty close like well scope like projects just mainly working on it for fun just like any full-time employees on getdata.io nope okay just you yeah okay um when did you i mean what are your growth channels how did you get the first 30 customers oh uh seo man it's like the whole way this thing is built it's like a ugc like compounding model okay what search terms do you rank really well for that other people don't rank for uh predictions yeah predictions like box okay if i type predictions into google uh you don't come up anywhere near the first the first page yeah it's like uh some obscure search term i think well you mean you optimized it what give me an example of a real search term i i didn't optimize it the users optimized it themselves so when they come in and create the data source right those guys that did not pay for it their data sources are created publicly which means they are seo and so every like new data source pulls in more people yeah i get that though can you i mean can you give me an example of one of those landing pages you're automatically launching from your user data that then ranks really well for seo uh when draw win try searching for that term say it again win draw win it's like uh the sports batting w-i-n-space drawer d-r-a-w-e-r e-r-a-w d-r-a-w oh win draw like draw with a pencil and then win w-i-n yeah yeah okay that is the free football betting and soccer tips site it should be like rank like seven to eight last time i checked got it okay so you rank for this term because your users are using your tool to pull some sort of data set from it yeah okay yeah i'm on page two going to page three now i oh there you go your top of page three tonight get today's and tonight's free football predictions and tips yeah okay so it's just kind of like very emerging organic like uh ugc that's like pulling other users in but sometimes they hit jackpot and then you start like seeing a whole bunch of people coming in from like some random keywords yeah it's not a ton of traffic i mean your alexa rank is 547 000 so i mean you have some traffic but by no means you know you know millions of people hitting it um what's the what's the process to converting people from a visitor to actually paying you 30 bucks a month so they'll come they use a few times they kind of like like it and then like sometimes they may be like reach out and if not they just like uh once they cross the 500 record threshold for the month right if they really see any value they just like click and upgrade yeah very cool let's wrap up with...