How Indico CEO Slater Victoroff grew Indico to $6.7M revenue and 20 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is slater victroff he's the founder and cto of indigo data solutions an enterprise ai solution for unstructured content with an emphasis on text in nlp he's been building machine learning solutions for startups governments and fortune 100 companies for the past five years and as a frequent speaker at ai conferences slate are you ready to take to the top i'm absolutely ready for it nathan all right so just be clear is indico a sas player it's an agency model you're doing consulting work no no uh so we're we're managed service right so it's a product company uh but not uh hosted as a sas company i see what you're saying so are there sort of folks that use you over and over every month or is that they come in one time you help them and then they leave so uh they buy a product that allows them to drive their own automation right so it's all you know it's 100 error you know they're buying a product right uh you know will usually help get them trained on the product uh but from that point forward right they're basically automating new processes uh and they're kind of getting more and more value out of the product as time goes on but then you know also uh generally upselling and buying new modules and things like that yep that makes a lot of sense so there's a there's a recurring component then you're upselling modules as needed but there's a long-term relationship there yeah yeah exactly okay so tell us what it does tell us absolutely is there a customer is there a customer story you can share and actually use their name or no 100 yes there is uh so we've got one one customer that is a huge of ours uh metlife um and they they did a case study publicly with us pretty recently um and they actually managed to use indico to save over 11 000 hours of effort in uh you know end to end it was about four weeks of time uh a couple of folks to save 11 000 hours and you know at the very highest levels what indico does is we work on document-based automation solutions right so if you've got a document-based process of your enterprise and you need to scale it that's where you plug into code the way our model is very very different than a lot of folks kind of like you said a lot of people in our space they do have this sort of agency model which is you know you want to process invoices pay us a you know 10 million dollars we'll build an invoice box we'll give you the voice box uh we work really really differently we give you a platform that lets your subject matter experts build the invoice box themselves in two weeks right but then the real power of that is instead of just stopping in invoices because organizations you know you don't have one unstructured use case you know you've got hundreds of different kinds of documents you know loan applications right all throughout your business um so it's a really really scalable model that fundamentally empowers for these non-technical subject matter experts to use this very you know kind of complex ai technology uh to productively make make their lives better uh at the end of the day and is that the primary use case or like fintech companies doing loans at scale or documents flowing through docusign you can manage and organize yeah you know it's you know it's uh i'll say it's less than content management right so less on the docusign more you know what are the 200 data points we need to pull out of this loan application for our process right uh yeah you know bfsi is a huge huge focus of ours so you know i mentioned uh metlife but also putnam uh they're they're another customer of ours that's that's boston local um but but it is also broad you know you think any company of sufficient scale they start to have these bfsi use cases internally so cushman wakefield they're another really big uh customer of ours right on the property side um and we actually have another customer that we are processing over 50 million mortgage titles indeed documents for all 3 000 counties across the united states is that your critical usage metric number of documents processed per month that's a really really key one you know there is a trade-off in volume and complexity so you know higher complexity documents you know the numbers don't have to be as high we really focus on time on task time saved right that that's really kind of the roi yeah what is i mean do you have the number for the total number of documents processed for under code last month uh so because we're not sas uh i can't report on all of our customers in aggregate what i will say is our largest customer in terms of raw uh uh volume right is processing a billion items a year with us um item is a contract uh it's not a contract in this case but you know it's a document okay interesting super interesting okay this is great now i think people folks understand sort of where you're playing the space you're in help us understand sort of smb mid-market enterprise what's the average customer paying you like i don't know per month per year totally so we're very enterprise focused right so you know stepping for the the product is you know on the lower six-figure range right annual contract um you know there are there are some some steps there as well we have some spread amongst our customers so i would say it really starts about there and then you know our very kind of highest customers right get into seven figure contract you know three to five year kind of structures yeah yeah no that that that's obviously sort of a healthy spread you sort of see power laws in your revenue because of that when you are sending a multi-year deal do you give up your ability to drive expansion revenue if they fall more in them with the product or are there natural accelerators in your two year three year four yeah so we we've got natural accelerators we tend to do it in a really usage based way so everything for us right now is based around c so the idea is the more you use indico um you know the more the more people are going to be using the product the more procedure you're automating right the more value you're getting and then you will you will kind of uh you know increase more so the main leverage for us really are are the volume of documents processing right obviously that's important that's really tight to compute right the number of people you've got plugged into the process right you also imagine you know these are happening in a kind of complex enterprise so we also have a really big developer focus as you kind of plug these into your other processes give me now that we get the product and sort of the customers uh help me understand like day one when did you guys launch total i mean i i so this is um this is actually the second time i've been on this podcast um so we did the first what i'll call indico v1 was back in 2014. um and actually you know if folks go back and and look at the level you said you said 20 you said 2014 2014. yep why do i have 20 i thought last time came on which by the way was back in 2017. so that was almost 2100 episodes ago in terms of what we were recording i love that i thought you said 2011 but i could have been wrong no so that's when i got into the space personally right but indico was founded in in 2014. i see yeah okay so indica was founded in 2014 and i'd call that indico v1 which was that developer focus piece you know uh as in in that kind of because you know we were really trying to get to a million revenue right we couldn't quite do it the developer focus go to market was not working out for us that gave birth to indico v2 which sort of came about very very soon after after conversation so we brought in tom wilde as a ceo right i shifted over to the cto role and that really was the start of our enterprise market right so really really shifting saying instead of being the api really going to make this product that is accessible to the user right um and so that that kind of initially launched we got a gartner cool vendor in 2019 right and you know we've had a really really nice success i would say 2020 really was uh the year that let us know we were on a rocket ship which i think last time making on the show in 2017 you were flirting with this 50 grand a month in revenue did you break a million in arrow the year after that in 27 2018 uh so no we did not that year right so actually it stayed about flat at that level right so and that was a lot of the reason that we had to do the shift right is that you know we had we had some customers that really really loved us but it was just not a big enough market so we were you know pretty much flat you know some wins some misses some ups and downs right pretty much flat um until we got this next product out right and then and that's why i really say you know you know we certainly had progress through 2019 you know as we're doing the product launch that's really why i say 2020 was the year that like redefined our business got it so that's when you broke that million dollar threshold yeah exactly and you know like a lot of really really awesome metrics you know we grew bookings by 10x you know we quadrupled our arr right you know just really really nice uh improvements across the board that's great so so and you had 20 customers back in 2017 how many customers are you serving now today so it's a very different um mix of customers yeah right so...