How Img CEO Eray Basar grew Img to $5M revenue and 400 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is daniel houston he is building a company called imagely uh which is where he strives to build platforms to make design more accessible for everyone after graduating with a phd in electrical engineering in 2015 he had a few interim cto positions in the local startup community in 2017 he co-founded immediately with his partner his case his co-founder all right daniel ready to take us to the top sorry are you ready to take us to the top i'm ready are you having me you bet so tell us about the company this is specifically for designers is it a b2b sas tool all right specifically for non-designers actually it's our sdk so it's more like it's us yes it's um software development kit so it's targeted for developers actually um so basically customers which build photo editing or even like things where you need photo editing editing like for example you're building photo books or something or you have a social media network where you want image upload crop it filter it that's where we come in as a plug-in solution which you just take take into your product and everything works okay and what's the model is it one time is it monthly annually how do you price here it's uh subscription based so we have both options with monthly or annually here okay and what's it cost per month it totally depends we're it's pretty modular it totally depends how many features you take etc because you can imagine you can just take something like crop or filter but it can be more advanced like overlays especially which can create graphics automatically etc it starts like a really low with let's say 29 or euros depends per month but can go up to to way higher if you take the full suit and integrate it in your product what's the what's the customer who's paying you the most what are they paying you per month so you can approximately say it depends a bit about the support et cetera they get but it can be around 20-25k yes per month per no no uh per year then per year okay guys so two thousand dollars per month and if you and if you look at what the average does a non-designer is paying you per month or per year what would you say the average is yeah the problem is that the average is not the real average because because sure it's not that there's a customer which has the medium plan let's say this way so the average i guess it's it's totally depends it could be like 500 okay in average but you cannot just calculate the average but it's hard to say i mean you can calculate the average what you're saying is it's not representative of the business right the average is just total revenue divided by customers so that's your average but what you're saying is very different yeah you have very you have very different profiles of people um okay so so again tell us more of the back story here so you launched the you actually had your first paying customer in 2017 or you started writing the code all right somewhere around 2016 we had started writing the code um basically and we actually wrote it not for sale in the beginning actually we were part of our biggest software agency digital agency and we were having different let's say customers which we figured out needed something like photo editing in their applications but to be honest they were not willing to pay the end of amount of money it would take to build it really right and so and we started building it ourselves more like a site project and then said okay you can just have it in your pro in your product but it was not that let's say the sum you would pay if you develop it one time so this is how we really started and then we really put it on github back then um seeing if somebody might might use it and eventually we thought maybe it's just an open source tool and people will be happy about it but then things changed quickly but what changed or changed or one of so for sure somebody called us and said okay it's a really nice tool but how about a commercial license so how about support etc and that was the first where we where we realized okay somebody likes it very much and really wants to pay for it and needs the support for it and so we started um yeah we started really licensing this sdk for in the beginning it was like really one time payment yeah say so it was like our first first or start with it and this is what changed in the beginning yes okay so you put it up on github did you was the agency your agency or were you an employee at the agency i myself was an employee but my co-founder was also founder of the agency so um this is how it started yes how did you guys spin the technology the code out of the agency well this was far later to be honest um like two years ago at first we left it inside the agency and kind of split the pot and said okay this is this is this theme and this is this team and later we are just like you normally do you found a new company and you have to pay some taxes et cetera and then uh you have that one okay but you and the agency co-founder split equity and immediately yeah i see and how many total people are on the team today oh today we are 30 people 30 people okay wow so you've grown to 30 people have you bootstrapped or did you raise we didn't raise at all the only money we took was let's say the initial investment of the agency which meant like at the very very beginning for sure one employee was like building it on the site let's say on let's say 10 hours per week etc but even after that we uh just took the money we got from new licenses and hired new people and invested it over the years inside into the product and that's where we are today so how much money would you say the agency put in initially ma'am so it's really a rough number no because hard hard to differentiate but maybe a hundred thousand it could be hundred times because it's like i said it's hard to tell because the people were not working full time in the beginning et cetera yeah and how many customers do you have using the technology today today around 400 worldwide okay 400 worldwide that's great and obviously churn is critical with any sort of sdk or sas company but what's your turn today yeah we are pretty lucky i guess we have an average we just looked it up it was like 102 this year over the year average wow why is it i mean that is extremely low why is it so low that's for the whole year not monthly that's two percent perfectly yeah the average over the year yes yeah so okay you can say it's also per month then but still um well no hold on is it two percent per month or is it two percent for the whole year it's an average two percent so it's per month one okay got it so 20 so 24 churn annually okay then i okay then i made a mistake no then two percent per year because it's really it's really not not even one person per month sometimes so just to be clear yeah so let me just make sure we're doing this right okay so if a year ago you were doing a hundred thousand dollars a month in revenue right and and you have two percent annual churn that means today you're doing 98 thousand dollars a month in revenue from that same customer base ignoring new customers exactly so but not each customer has the same amount of what they paid but of course yeah well you're right uh and now we are forgetting the new customers right um yes but turn based you're right that's great okay so two percent uh churn and then break down the team a bit for me there's 30 folks total how many are engineers the half of it i would say half of it and or four or five of it of designers and then it goes to our marketing sales our product people yeah we have actually everything in our company so we don't outsource anything well basically the whole food setup that you need for companies you rest daniel is a price point high enough where you can have sales people with quota selling it all right actually good question we don't have quota currently it's not our concept um but we i think we could um but it's not how people work in our company these days so it might happen in the future um yeah now 400 customers at that 500 a month sort of average that would put you guys at what around 200 000 a month right now in revenue yeah a bit less but yes you can say so yeah okay and where were you about 12 months ago just so we can understand growth so i think 12 months ago we were like 125 something like that and i can tell you that we in average it's like two to three percent currently that we are steadily growing uh per month over the last year where's the growth coming i mean this is a great story right you've bootstrapped your way up to about a two million dollar runway company you know we know how you got your first customer it was the github sdk how did you eat your first hundred customers yeah actually in the beginning was really finding us on github for some reason and but then we quickly switched to our let's say we created a landing page then all the seo game for sure so we are present there and you can find us if you search anything about photo editing and sdk or something like that uh and later for also paid search page things etc and blog posts if you write in the technical realm et cetera there but i think most of it comes from typical sale sao seo how much do...