How Gravity Sketch CEO Daniela Paredes Fuentes grew to $21.6M revenue and 20 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is daniela puederer is fuentes she's the co-founder and chief executive officer of gravity sketch she's a designer bringing science design and engineering to propose a more natural way to communicate 3d ideas websites gravitysketch.com daniella are you ready to take us to the top i am i am i'm the chief uh chief experience officer but chief experience sorry i may have said that wrong chief experience officer uh now but you're also one of the co-founders correct i am yeah how many co-founders are there we are three three okay now were you guys nice and friendly at the beginning you just split equity evenly at the start or what yeah that's nice yeah that's great how did you guys meet each other and how did you discover this problem so for we met um one of my co-founders and myself studied together so we we went back to academia and started our master's degree and that was actually where gravity sketch was created so we we were the people that were experiencing the pain so we're designers looking to you know bring 3d ideas to life and so we saw that there was a problem that had you have an idea have a three-dimensional idea in your head it's kind of like really really difficult to bring it out to the world to communicate it to others and to visualize it so we thought why not just try to tackle this problem and we decided to create clarity sketch very interesting okay and what year was that when did you launch 2014 really long time ago all right fair enough and and help me understand today so when someone signs up and pays for gravity sketch what do they get is it a is it a browser ui they can do like figma but for 3d um so actually gravity sketch is free for everyone um only like larger customers pay for it for security and so on i mean crowd sketch is secure for everyone but they pay for extra extra security and the services and so yeah i mean it's not it is like figma but in 3d like you got it there like in some way it's for collaboration in 3d the difference is that you need to be wearing a headset in most cases so you download the app on your headset on the app and so there's multiple different uh app stores where you can download the software you're talking a vr a vr headset yeah like the one behind you yeah yeah so i mean there's multiple ones this one is usually the one that most people have the the quest too um and so you go in there there's an app store you download it you make your account and you just jump in and start start sketching in gravity sketch and you can start inviting other people to join the same environment with you so in a way it allows people to be in the same space without necessarily being in the same physical space and how many free users are on the platform today today we have one million and a half uh downloads and we have about a thousand um daily active users at the moment and when you look at the pattern behaviors of those daily active users what makes like what are they doing every day what makes your tool addictive uh yes um that's it that's a very good question because there's multiple things that they're doing there so an addictive is it's a good word because a lot of our users actually use that word um first of all you jump into gravity sketch and you just get into this creative flow because you don't need to be worrying about you know a tool or like functions or perspective drawing or anything you just go in there and start using kind of like the most natural ways of creation so in a way it just allows people to really dive deep into the idea that they have in their head and try to solve it as opposed to trying to figure out how to actually make the thing possible and so that's one thing so they jump in they start kind of like creating geometry that's one of the the use cases actually it is pretty addictive for two reasons because it's awesome to use it and really fun but also since you're immersed you don't really see the light of the day and so people lose the track of time quite often so we actually had to put a clock one of the controllers like inside oh wow so that's amazing oh them it's been like three hours and i'm still here 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 going to get a different valuation a vc is going to pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're going to 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 attraction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 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 founderpath.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 is that what's the key usage metric for you then is it like number of new 3ds like sketches done per day or what's the usage metric the the usage metric that we measure most is exports so for us um exports and we're now starting to measure this one is a bit of a newer newer one but it's collaboration sessions with more than two people in there and so those are kind of like the two things that make people kind of like really go back to gravity sketch one is finding it useful to be able to go into the the platform create something and be able to export it and bring it somewhere else and that's the thing that we value the most because we don't want people to be just creating something that they're not going to be able to use in their entire workflow and so that's the like that's the biggest metric that we mentioned and then the other one is uh yeah number of people having this kind of like collaborative sessions and the duration of those sessions because that's the other really powerful thing about gravity sketch is having a lot of people come in and have design reviews presentations and just give feedback in this kind of virtual space and danielle last month how many total exports were created on the platform right now we are still kind of like in the midst of like tweaking the numbers so yeah can't actually tell you that okay so you're you're still trying to figure out how to measure that yeah i mean we've already put some um some things together but it's still kind of like you know going like early okay fair enough now we've talked about the sort of the freemium tool obviously people switch on and turn to paid when they want extra extra security help me understand what the pricing looks like so what does the average paying company pay you per month to use gravity sketch that really depends on the number of people they're going to be using it and the types of services so it varies a lot and it's kind of like a bit of a yeah a confidential thing per company that we can't actually hold well don't obviously tell me the company name uh i'm just asking for generally speaking are we talking like a thousand bucks a month or like you know 10 000 bucks a month or something different what's what's a range no it's it's uh it's about like that's why i'm like it varies a lot so it's hard to like tell exactly i know i know i varies danielle because you have a ton of different price points but just i'm trying to just get a sense of small medium large can you give me some sort of idea you really just um sell to like large organizations we don't sell to like medium if there's like medium companies that want to be using it they can be using the the yeah sorry jenny the reason i'm asking the question this way because my audience doesn't know what your version of medium is compared to their version of medium right so like are you talking like only you're only looking at a hundred thousand dollar per year plus contracts or are there some people paying you for extra security at a thousand bucks a month no yeah we mostly it's like about yeah fifty thousand uh dollars a year to a hundred dollars in your contract yeah i see okay got it so that's sort of your enterprise motion now have you been selling that a long time or is that a new product we've been selling that for about three years now a bit more oh okay so got it so this is your main go to market strategy now when did you you launched in 2014 when did you get your first paying customer do you remember yes uh 2017 actually it was 2017. so how did you guys pay your bills between 2014 and 2017. that's a good question um yeah it was pretty hard for us at the beginning to pay the bills because you know on one side not a lot of people had vr headsets so we couldn't actually sell the software and not a lot of people wanted to invest in vr companies um so for a really long time we survived out of uh grants and awards and also part-time jobs i see okay so when did you guys all officially join full time full-time was 2016. and that was when we launched the the app for actually people to be using it um like the vr app before we launched an ipad app and then in 2016 we launched the vr app um and started come like receiving a few like donations and like that and with our savings we were just kind of like keeping afloat until we were able to raise investment and close our first deals okay so you decide to raise instead of bootstrap uh when did you raise the first round of capital and about how much was that for 2 000 it was 2018 and that was for 1.7 million and where did you guys want to invest that money we just people we started like growing the team yeah and have you raised more since then yeah so after that we did a c plus round which was 3.2 million um and then end of last year we were able to close a round of 33 million okay so that seed plus round was that also in 2018 that was 20 20 beginning of the pandemic 2020 20 20 20 interesting okay so and sorry the one that you raised last year you said was for 22 million for 33 million oh 33 i might always one of my digits off okay interesting so talk about the most recent raise where do you plan to invest this capital to drive some growth we plan to invest it quite heavily on the go-to-market strategy so really putting a lot of resources in making sure that gravity sketch is known um and you know like it's its values it's known um in the industry on top of that making sure that our current customers are having everything that they need to be able to grow and use gravity sketch and see value so that's kind of like our most like important focus at the moment um along with with marketing uh marketing up until now we have been doing it in a very organic way we don't really have a marketing team so far how many people are on the team right now full time right now out full time in a whole gravity sketch whole team yeah two people six zero six zero yeah how many how many of those are engineers um it keeps changing but i think on the last count it was 18 people 18. okay and you guys probably do you build your own i mean do you have a lot of animators and designers on the team or no we have quite a few designers animators we don't um probably in the future we will we have quite a few designers um they have different roles though so like we have some designers that are actually working on the product and we have four designers working on the product but then we also have footwear designers and automotive designers um that were actually gravity sketch users before joining us and now yeah it's pretty cool and now they're part of the team and they're helping our customers get the most value out of the tool so it's kind of interesting yeah hire your customers that's always a great strategy uh okay very cool now is the is the you know a lot of these sort of sas companies that go from free to paid it's bottoms up right an employee starts off on free then six other employees join them before you know the enterprise is moving to like a paid plan or do you guys see that same pattern happening or are your enterprise users coming on and directly paying from day one with for 100 seats with extra security no no that pattern is happening all the time actually all of the accounts that we have have come up from like bottom up oh i see interesting so you are your sdr aes team they're basically looking at your most active free users going are there more people from that same company using gravity sketch should we talk to their cio and give them more security features that's how they prospect yeah exactly very interesting interest have you learned anything from that process that surprised you well i mean the the the interesting here the part here is that they there's like normally designers that fall in love with gravity sketch bring it to their workplace and then it becomes kind of like a crazy like you know navigating the the corporate waters to like figure out how to bring that tool into the ecosystem which tends to be really hard so that's the part that we are like looking to crack right now it's like how do you equip these people that normally don't like their their job is not to really go and look for software right and so how do we help them navigate those waters in the easiest way so that you know you can eventually get like this software serving the majority of the people in that organization yeah that makes a ton of sense all right before we wrap up here you said you mentioned you got you guys went full time 2016 got your first customer in 2017 which is a great moment how many customers are you serving now today today enterprise customers we have 20 enterprise customers that's nice so it's a small group you can really focus on them and just focus on selling them a lot of product yeah exactly all right fair enough and you mentioned earlier obviously that you have those those high acvs usually about 50 000 so we can take 20 times 50 000. you guys are doing at least a million in revenue at this point correct 1.2 uh last year yeah oh wow congratulations and what were you doing the year before that do you remember way less we were at 300 300 000 yeah the pandemic actually helped a lot because yeah people needed to figure out how to bring people together in the same space without that's remarkable and and what do you guys think you'll close this year at uh we're looking to close at probably six million and so yeah that's incredible so you guys i mean listen uh don't think this is a bad thing i think it's a great thing you're clearly really good storytellers about vision where you're headed because you raise 33 million with about 1.6 million or 2 million run rate when you sign the initial term sheet if i'm getting my timing right so that's like a that's a huge valuation multiplier what did you put in your deck that made excel go oh my gosh we'll give these guys 30 million bucks today they're worth it we just put them in front of our users and they were able to just like sell the dream better than us that's amazing so it was a 1.5 million install based and a thousand daus yeah yeah very interesting okay danielle anything i missed before we wrap up no no i don't think so yeah you bet all right let's wrap up here with the famous five first one favorite book wow um uh brand um telling a brand story number two is there a ceo you're following or studying not really okay number three besides steve jobs steve jobs okay number three what's your favorite online tool for building gravity sketch unity uh well online tool sigma actually sigma okay number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night eight eight that's good and what's your situation married single kids married with one kid one and a half year old oh wow that's exciting all right and do you mind me asking how old you are yeah 36 36 last question take us back 16 years what's something you wish you knew when you were 20. wow uh really good question i wish i knew that i didn't have to worry so much that i just needed to kind of like keep going following my dreams and working hard and things would happen guys one of the first stories of someone that's launched sort of a b2b application specifically for vr where you have to have a headset that's actually gaining traction gravity sketch now has over 1.5 million downloads they've got over a thousand daily active users danielle is measuring activation by how many exports are happening per day that usage and those usage metrics have enabled them to go out and raise a competitive around 33 million dollars just raising their series a as they look to scale past six million bucks in revenue this year with a team of caught 60 people 18 engineers to date we're rooting for them daniella 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 1pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2pm 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 notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathan lacka dot com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive i am on these shows but i do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that i appreciate your guys's support all right i'll be in the comments see ya