How Krome Image Labs CEO Eduardo Llach grew to $3.1M revenue and 500 customers in 2024.

Chrome image labs.com launched several years ago now doing 200 000 a month in Revenue up from a hundred thousand dollars a month just a year ago they're serving 500 customers they help those customers last last month process over 15 000 images through their system they set up of 200 editors and designers on their back end almost like uber for each image they charge about 25 bucks per image the editor designer makes call at 10 sorry uh five to ten dollars on that so the overall margin of a company called 50 to 60 they've done this in a very Capital efficient way they just now closed their first six hundred thousand dollar round of funding at saw call it somewhere between a 10 and 20 million valuation so very Capital efficient their team size just six people full time hey folks my guest today is Eduardo Jackie helps Amazon Walmart and Sotheby's create images that lift their product sales by using their proprietary data and AI algorithms to determine what image elements are lifting sales they then use generative AI designs and a global team of designers to create listing lifestyle and infographic images at scale affordably and faster than anybody else they do this at Chrome photos.com com that's Chrome with AK at the start Eduardo you ready to take us to the top yes absolutely all right very cool so you've got some Enterprise accounts here that must mean you've been doing this for a bit when did you launch the company we launched a company a few years ago we have done over a million images for over a hundred thousand customers we started creating images for our customers and we moved on to the Enterprise two three years ago um Walmart is using our technology and our images to help their National sellers Amazon we're a top ranked Amazon SPN seller studybee's users are technology in our images for their um Online Auctions uh Sasol hotels at home and a number of others and we're just launching an ability to for people we have launched it and we're actually creating Pilots where they can send us 10 of their products 100 of the products a thousand of the products and to your point we will then use the data um AI generate AI to create images that are guaranteed to lift their sales so Eduardo what are these companies today paying on average per month to use your technology they tend to pay per image anywhere from 25 to 50 or an image okay 25 to 50 per image and so how do you price do you let them just pay as you go or do you do you sort of price in buckets credits of images we do both you can get a subscription and have read it similar to the way that audible Works where you have credits that you can use for anything you can use them for listing Lifestyles infographics photography design sessions bundles you name it but most people are coming in and then using it for the lifestyles and infographics interesting okay so in March the last full month here last month how many images did you process we did about um you do the math here about 15 000. fifteen thousand well across how many paying customers we have uh consumers smbs and Enterprises and I would say that uh that was in the order of you know 500 customers or such some of the customers tend to do a lot more images than others but yes uh 500 customers paid at least a dollar last month something like that oh yeah no much more than a dollar uh but you're not just saying I'm just saying these are your pain these are not free users I'm just saying these are your paid customers last month now can we take 25 per image times fifteen thousand dollar images that would put you at about 375 000 a month in Revenue last month yes it's a little bit less than that because some customers are doing simpler images but yes that will give you a good idea north of 300 000 a month in Revenue it's more north than 200 000. okay okay so you're doing greater than 200 000 a month in revenue and help us understand growth this is a hot space everyone with chat gbt generative AI where were you exactly one year ago do you remember we were about a hundred thousand so oh wow yes have you done this have you driven this growth bootstrapped or you raise money we have done a little bit of racing money uh on the seed side of the equation but it's definitely been a lot of bootstrapping I also have put in my own money into the company but it's definitely been bootstrapped and with some seed uh funding when was the seed round we just finished a safe round that we did with our lead uh investor uh Evolution VC Greg Smith uh and that it was meant to power the the launch that we're doing with Walmart where basically they are taking our technology to highlight which products in their catalog they have 50 million products need to be updated uh we're telling them which Sellers and which products need to be updated highlighting those and then they're telling their sellers that hey these products are below par uh here's what you need to do here's a company that can help you and we expect to get 20 30 percent of those customers to use us and it's a very how much was there before I go deeper into the product though what was the so how much was the race for we raised um six hundred thousand dollars 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 the 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 evaluation 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 founder 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 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 traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent 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 valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna 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 okay six hundred thousand dollars and this would be would you call this like a seed round or series a seed round we're focusing on a series a this this year likely in Q3 okay so 600 000 raised on your seed just now and most folks today are selling you know 15 to 20 of our company in their seed round were you sort of in that same range no no it was much less okay I was about to say with your Revenue I'm hoping you were able to preserve your Equity here um when you say much less can we say under 10 percent yes okay so north of a six million post money valuation said again north of a six million dollar post one evaluation then it was it was much much further north than that okay what I mean I found out all the time there's two School thoughts manage your multiple and who cares get the highest you can right very different so like which boat do you fall in we have optimizing for bringing the money when we need it at the best value we can get it at and that has helped I still have a significant portion of the company Greg is our lead investor he also has a significant portion of the company uh and that's the way we want it when we go to the series a then we'll be doing a more traditional 10 million round at 30 40 million dollar valuation and go from there but the good news is that when we do that we already have the technology that works we already have customers to your point and you know we've got it up into the right results so just to be clear then I mean you sort of raised it something like a six to ten X multiple on current Revenue then yes yeah so that would be like something around 24 to 30 million valuation today the last round I'd rather not go into the details but it's more than 10 and less than 25. okay fair enough fair enough so good so you're managing your your multiple which is great you're I guess this begs the question why do around it all I mean this is good Revenue why do you need an extra 600k here why not keep all the equity I I think that's a really good point we this is a massive Market we estimate there's the time of this Market to be North of 60 billion dollars it's a disaggregated industry where you've got you know Fiverr upwork there Sunnah Snapper allow you to send stuff to their Studio or have a photographer come to you but it's really a disaggregated market is think think about taxis before Uber and Lyft and given the size of the market we want to capture it we do need to bring in more data we right now have 8.4 million data points on products uh product images that sell we like to have that to be in the 100 million in data points and we also need to create models right now we're using existing models feeding our own data but eventually we want to have our own models of data what you know that create General images based on the data that we have in what cells and then create the flywheel of feedback and that's a significant ask that yes you could bootstrap it but you you're in the risk that someone else is going to come in that's going to be a significantly better funded and take it over we see ourselves as owning that space how many folks are on your team today full time we are very lean we have six people full time but we do have a very sophisticated gig infrastructure so we have 200 200 sorry 200 editors and designers who are able to create these images that I mentioned how do you do that tell me how that's structured yeah we've built that over a period of time and basically similar to an Uber driver who gets a ride and is told how much uh they're going to make and where they're going to go we say here's an image of a microphone this is what needs to be done these are the inputs you're going to get paid this much they do it we then review that if everything is good then we send it back to the customer and customer goes thumbs up or hey do a minor tweaking goes back to them and fix it and that is a a really sophisticated system using pricing that we know exactly how much money we're making on that image how much money we're paying what is the margin and we're able to then have margins that are 55 to 60 percent interesting so how much of what you do would you say a software versus a really smart organization of humans I would say that everything up to the actual image creation is software all the data of what is going to move the needle for this microphone in front of me uh what are the elements who should be in front of the microphone uh what how the images should be photographed all that stuff is is data and AI machine learning deep learning gen Ai and so on when you finally say go ahead give me that image and here's my product here's my branding here's my logo Etc at that point all of it comes into a an editor or a designer who then assembles the final image we give them a whole bunch of pre-assembled images and ready to go so they do the final Photoshop work and then create the final image what is the average let's say each photo costs on average 25 bucks for you to process of the 25 you charge the customer how much of that goes to one of these editors and designers that you have on staff between five and ten dollars okay interesting so on 200 000 a month in Revenue you've got about 70 80 000 of that paying out these 200 editors and designers yeah as I said our margins are being consistently between 55 and 60 I mean isn't that the big question that's probably what makes it hard for you to get like a SAS multiple right as your margins are lower than SAS then you know they should be around 85 so but but you're doing it the right way the first step is build a human system the second is can you start replacing humans to drive down your economics right or yeah can you do that not yet the Gen AI is not there uh but what is happening is we're automating more and more and more of it right and so by the time the editor comes in the image may be you know 60 done 70 done and eventually be 80 and 90 done and then that will again bring the uh the the margin per unit cost per unit cost down margins up so you're trying to replace those folks but there's also big companies trying to replace you completely how do you make sure you don't get completely replaced where Amazon or a Walmart seller can just go to chat EBT put in an ugly image and boom it spits out a beautiful one yeah today that is not working um in it chapter doesn't give you perfect text if you've used it you've realized you have to go and edit it right and but the beauty the the reason why Chaturbate is so successful we all know how to write a text right you can take the chat to be detached tweak it send it to grammarly make sure everything is right and then publish it and you can do that anybody can do that right but you can't edit an image majority of people can edit an image and furthermore you don't necessarily know what it is that's going to move the needle for that microphone that you have in front of you or the bicycle behind me um that is very important and so we have that data of what's going to move the needle and then we then can take the general images and make them perfect and that's what people are loving about what we're providing to them because we're making generative AI images work for them whereas generative ad techs anybody can edit but General images don't and further more generative images are not very good now they're going to get better don't get me wrong but they're not very good right now there's a lot of issues with eyes and fingers and that kind of stuff and so typically what we'll do is we'll use a general image as a template and then recreate it with models and and settings and so on so so you have a perfect image that you have the rights for as well what do you think you'll grow a monthly requiring Revenue due by December this year as we expect it to be two to three x what we are new now so 400 to 600 000 a month in December Revenue this year yes based on the work that we're doing with Walmart and and some of the other um companies that we're rolling out if someone came to you and offered uh 10 million all cash up front to buy the whole company would you sell yeah that was quick no not at all no this is a massive opportunity we're talking you know exits of 100 plus million in terms of results just because of the fact of the opportunity that exists I'm telling you what a big opportunity attracts a lot of competition right there's more people you have to beat it's really interesting we've been doing this for a number of years and no one is doing this kind of stuff it's tough people don't like to deal with people but we've automated the heck out of it we're really successful at hiring them we have an automated process for training them and so on and we could deploy them in different areas what we do for Sasol is very different than what we do for sotheby Sotheby's has an automatic you know pre-done assembly line custom assembly line Samsung has an automated pre-done custom assembly and it took us a week or two to create them we have a really sophisticated system that other people are like uh that's a lot of work very cool we're rooting for you we're out of time for today though let's wrap up here at water with the famous five number one favorite book well uh that's a that's a good question I just read critical mass and I really enjoyed it it's a Sci-Fi harp sci-fi I also apologize I should say the project a Hail Mary by Adam Weir is phenomenal number two is there a CEO you're following or studying foreign which are very contrasting and Tim Cook and the Elon Musk yep number three what's your favorite online tool for building Chrome at this point I actually pretty good question we use XD excellent uh XD is uh uh Adobe product it allows just to create mock-ups and then flowing and so on and then they go right into the editing team but that's what I that's what we do number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night I read the book uh stay sharp by Gupta and he said you need to get sleep if you want to be productive and also uh healthy so I tend to get seven plus hours of sleep and what's your situation Eduardo marry singled kids I am married with kids how many kiddos five wow okay how old are you say it again how old are you I am 64. 64. last question something you wish you knew when you were 20 years old to go for it you said you're 64 years old yes wow you look great for 64. that's incredible thank you all right go for it hard that's great guys there we have it Chrome image labs.com launched several years ago now doing 200 000 a month in Revenue up from a hundred thousand dollars a month just a year ago they're serving 500 customers they help those customers last last month process over 15 000 images through their system they set up of 200 editors and designers on their back end almost like uber for each image they charge about 25 bucks per image the editor designer makes call at 10 sorry uh five to ten dollars on that so the overall margin of the company caught 50 to 60 they've done this in a very Capital efficient way they just now closed their first 600 000 round of funding at saw call it somewhere between a 10 and 20 million valuation so very Capital efficient their team size just six people full time which is great Eduardo thanks for taking us to the top thank you Nathan one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm 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 our poo CAC LTV you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every Thursday 1 p.m 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 their 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 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