How Keatext CEO Narjes Boufaden grew Keatext to $996K revenue and 30 customers in 2019.

hello everyone my guest today is narjes buffaden she is a pioneer and thought leader in the natural language processing field who's transitioned from the academic world to run her company she founded key text in 2010 for professional services in ai then pivoted into a product company in 2015. nardraz is also a contributor at forbes and a dedicated member a mentor at techstar a i nerd are you ready to take us to the top yes absolutely all right tell us about key tech so when did you launch the company and today how are you making money what's the revenue model yeah so basically we are helping businesses with a product that makes them aware of disengaged customers and employees and that is based on what they are sharing in their text feedback so basically we actually have that product it's a license and then people can well cx managers for instance can upload data uh feedback from their customers and then get a sense of uh what is happening what are the reasons of disengagement and then they can actually start thinking about solutions on how to solve that disengagement and how to reverse that situation with actionable insights okay which are the reasons why what data source so you're you know people are uploading tons of unstructured kind of customer feedback data to your platform you're helping them make sense of it what kind of data sources are they uploading into your platform though just like intercom data or zendesk data or what actually it could be whatever type of data it could be zendesk it could be intercom it could be surveys it could be live chat for instance or text coming from chat box chat bots so it's really whatever text interaction that is provided by a customer okay interesting and then what do people you mentioned this was professional services for the first four or five years and then you just transitioned to product in 2015. um why did you make that transition well for the folks who have done services they can understand that you know you can't necessarily scale and grow very quickly when you're doing professional services basically you are using people you know their knowledge to sell something to sell a service and unless you start to stack people you know one the other then you can necessarily grow very fast and having that product that actually would do part of what people used to do using ai was a very interesting way for me to scale and to grow the business solving practically the same problem but using technology and today as people pay you what do they give me a sense what are they paying on average per month for this yeah so it's it starts always it's around twenty five hundred dollars per month okay and then it depends really based on the volume of transactions the number of feedback the system is analyzing the number of users and the languages that uh in which those text feedback comes okay and when you measure kind of usage uh or like is it api calls what's the actual metric you're measuring there yeah it's it's basically so think of it as a as an excel sheet then you have lines right a lot of columns and and rows it's the number of rows i see okay so number of rows and the number of users at the company direction yeah yeah so number of data rows and then obviously number of number of users at the company that need access to your tool uh what was the other pricing axes languages so sometimes like you we deal with a couple of languages so depending on the languages that we need to to enable that's great and then 2010 2010 was launch date you pivoted in 2015. now 2018 obviously is where we're at today or 2019 how many customers have you scaled to yeah so now we are around 30 customers uh some of them well most of them are big businesses we've done a lot of work with uh with partners basically survey platforms and now we are going back you know to direct sales talking directly to brands and big businesses so can i take 2500 bucks a month times 30 you're doing about 75 grand a month right now do the math okay well it depends when it comes from partners it's a bit it's a bit different because it's uh it's a shared revenue so this is not exactly the same thing but when it comes to direct sales then yes you can do the math right that way so what are you at today in terms of monthly revenue a range is fine uh we are really not far away from 100k okay oh very good uh that's great so so north of a million run rate at this point hopefully very soon okay well 83 grand a month is a million dollar run rate and 100 grand a month is is 1.2 so those are very different so are you north of 83 at this point or no yeah we are almost there but still i mean this is pretty much sensitive data so typically i i don't give a an exact number but we are not far away okay okay from a million dollars in terms of run rate million dollars i see well very well that you have to come back on the show once you hit that that's a big milestone uh how are you driving the growth so the first 30 customers you've landed where are you getting them from uh so as i said part of them are really coming from uh partners and the others really through you know different marketing campaigns like where seo like traditional marketing strategies so yeah again the traditional is boring for my audience it offers them no value in terms of education so be specific here what kinds of partnerships are you launching that are working well oh so as i explained a bit earlier it's really about uh survey platform providers so we integrate our product in their platform name one oh we do have eye perception for example is one of our customers we do have a couple of them of others in the canada and canada and the us okay are we terminally like surveymonkey no we don't necessarily work with big brands typically they will mostly be having their own development in terms of text analytics so they they tend to have their own in-house you know technology okay and then when you say partnerships with these survey providers is one way and then you also have partnerships where people will as i guess self sell your product through them who are the some of these partners so another example of partners we do have lg2 which is a marketing agency so they have a lot of big businesses and they use our platform to you know increase the number of services and then build i would say other services on top of what the platform can provide and can you help me understand the kind of growth rate how effective these channels have been for you so if you're flirting with a million bucks in terms of run rate today where were you exactly a year ago oh you you mentioned in terms of growth well i can't i can't necessarily focus a lot on terms of revenues as i said this is information that we don't necessarily share publicly okay sorry you've already shared it right so you are like that sunk cost to this point help me understand what growth is look like over the past 12 months yeah so we've been really around 20 month over month growth so far this couple of months last couple of months okay again so when you when if we do it on an annual basis right so today is a snapshot on time like go back a year how much have you gone over the past 12 months would you say uh so we've might have multiplied by a factor of five x i would say derivative that's great okay well again if you're flirting with kind of 80 grand a month today and you 5x2 over a year i mean that's means you're doing about 16 000 a month about a year ago yeah and most that again is just coming from these partnerships with the survey providers and lg to selling through your product that's great what's your team size look like today around 20 people 20 people great and what's the breakdown how many engineers versus kind of marketing people sales people most of them are engineers a part of them are marketing and sales but mostly engineers like how many of the 20 uh probably around 14 in terms of of engineers and researchers that's great and where where's everyone based montreal are you two yeah that's great something's in the water in montreal i'm meeting with a lot of entrepreneurs and they're building amazing things in the city well you've heard a lot about ai in montreal and this is exactly like i'm doing ai so ai in montreal is definitely something that you will hear a lot why is it though why is that concentration exist i mean i know you came from academia is there is there an academic institution there that's really promoting ai yeah so you like university of montreal is definitely one of the very important institution institutions that helped a lot with you know growing that community of ai experts and and even entrepreneurs i would say coming from that community okay and and walk me through more about maybe funding situation in montreal have you bootstrapped the company have you raised i know it's bootstrapped and raised like as i said i was doing services so part of the development was you know um bootstrapped with the the income from the services and then we've hit you know um the road with some investors to help grow in the company start developing the product like helping the development and then with the sales and marketing okay so have you raised outside capital from investors or no yes yes of course okay and how much to date so so far we've raised uh around a bit more than four my film four million dollars canadian dollars okay and this is all equity i know sometimes the government will give out grants that is not dilutive or not dilutive uh most well no mostly dilutive uh i didn't count the grant within that...