How Merge CEO Gil Feig grew Merge to $20.8M revenue and 160 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is gil feike he's the co-founder of merge now previously he was the head of engineering at canvas he's led progress of projects at wellfront and linkedin and he's going to graduate a graduate of the cumberland university he now lives and works in san francisco bill you ready to take us to the top yeah let's do it all right real quick so talk to me a little bit first uh when you leave an engineering role at a company it either means your your equity is you know vested and you're good going on a new thing or you got bored and just wanted to leave which one was it um i think i've always wanted to start a company and the timing was right the problem was there you know canvas was a great place but the timing was ready and i always wanted to do it so i decided to make the lead so talk to me about the current product you're building and ideally tie into the discovery of the problem via your director of engineering role at canvas yeah absolutely so uh what we're building here are unified apis and so you integrate once with us and then you can offer your customers 20 30 40 different integrations in hr applicant tracking accounting and then more categories on the way uh and we we came to this idea me and my co-founder after experiencing this exact problem at both of our past companies so my co-founder shenzi was you know had chief of staff to the ceo at expanse the cyber security company and they had to build out a ton of ticketing integrations she saw it from the business side and then you know as leading an engineering team 15 people i was spending my nights and weekends working on these integrations because it was just so much work there was a lot of support they were constantly breaking and so when we realized that we both had this problem in two very different spaces but a very similar problem we did a lot of research nice weekends and found this spam so many b2b categories and so we decided to launch merge which is a platform for unified apis in the b2b space what year was that so we we started merge last year uh so it's been about about a year and a month since we started the company and have you been able to take down that first paying customer or still pre-revenue no yeah we have several paying customers live in production we're we're powering some pretty uh business critical functions now so it's been it's been really cool to see adoption so so what do you look at in terms of you sign up a new customer you need them to do x y and z in terms of activation metrics to get them addicted is it like number of api calls per day or what's the metric yeah so what we're really looking for is for someone just to embed us within their platform so we kind of provide that you know as you describe that plaid style linking flow at the beginning where the customers go through and they link their account it's really simple it takes 30 minutes for someone to embed that and then they just add our sdk to their backend and they can start exchanging all that data with us so we consider the point of activation to be the point when they've made that first back-end exchange of data and link their first either customer or test account so like if we were going to use you at founder path because we rely on a lot of integrations could i do this knowing nothing about tech or would my cto need to do this with a javascript embed or something similar got it yeah so we are aimed towards developers we're built for developers that's the whole experience is shaped around that we make it really easy to just add those platforms with our sdks but yeah it is always going to be an engineer who abouts us god and and what's your first guess here what pricing is going to work what are these couple of customers paying per month on average yeah so so it really depends um we don't you know we're not we're not it really varies from customer to customer but uh we we offer our pay as you go plan so it's one cent per api request um and then we offer a flat rate plan and that's really focused around the the level of support that enterprises need um or even even mid market you know when you need custom onboarding sometimes these integrations you're going to have situations where someone has a really custom instance set up and we're there to support along the way and that's when we we do a fixed rate plan and what would that look like if i didn't want mobs my cto to do this and i would just pay you guys to get the setup done what would i pay you what's maybe a range got it yeah so so we don't uh we don't actually build it out for you that's just a flat rate plan that doesn't vary based on usage um and again it really it it varies a lot based on what your predicted usage is for the year but that's how we kind of get you that flat rate um and our goal always is to be significantly cheaper than the cost of an engineer um and you know that that will save a lot of time as well give me a guild though give me sort of a range i know you're experimenting i mean are we talking like a hundred bucks a month here these customers are doing like 100 grand a month i mean what's sort of the range of where your pricing comes in at yeah yeah it'd be closer to the former so it's you know again it really varies but it's on the order of a couple grand a month for our enterprise plan um or it's not quite enterprise it's more of like a plan where you require support and customer onboarding so really if you're you know a b2b company starting to onboard really legitimate customers that's when you might consider moving to something like that and have you successfully upgraded any of these initial customers to that thousand dollar a month price point or no that's sort of the next oh yeah many oh great okay take me back to customer one this is always tough for founders who are they how'd you find them yeah so it was it was kind of i would say our first five to six customers onboarded at all around the same time um and it really was word of mouth at the beginning ultimately we started using a lot of marketing we go for virality with a lot of things like that we're really big on social and all of our you know if we if we build a new integration it auto-generates all of our marketing content and posts it across social um so so we're really going that way and that's resulted in a lot of our later customers coming in uh but yeah early ones were some friends then that spread through word of mouth to non you know non-friends now i would say we're quite close with all of our customers we're all especially our early ones um and then we we really we did kind of view them as design partners but we also know that integrations are business critical so there wasn't a lot of room to really make mistakes so it was sort of like uh you know they give us feedback but we made sure that things were perfect before ever launching things yeah now this is always an interesting question too i mean did you do some early consulting before you fully developed the actual productized version of this last year or no you went straight for this ask revenue oh yeah no we we went straight for the stats revenue uh we were fortunate enough to fundraise early and we spent six months just building up the platform um we didn't have a single integration and then in january alone we added 20 integrations because all of what we built is around being able to really quickly add integrations but also keep them up to date make sure that nothing breaks um we did have an api break on on a sunday at 3 a.m because they had you know a breaking change that they released automatically and it broke hundreds of companies integrations with them unfortunately our on-call got paged and our postmortem says it was fixed by 306 a.m so we're pretty proud that we can we can react really quickly as well and not expose any downtime or issues to our customers how many total integrations do you have today i believe currently we have around 45 to 50. we add like i would say probably about two to three a week and we're going to continue increasing the rate that we're adding them and is that just a function of you hiring more engineers to build this out yeah so fortunately engineers we engineers and non-engineers are able to build integrations here because of a lot of the tooling we've built we've made it really easy again for us to move quite quickly when we add new integrations but yeah that with the toilet that we built is internal um and that's what what you know we could again we can hire a team like in miami to go out and build out those integrations um or anywhere so couple couple customers early customers last year how many customers right now serving today yeah so so we're not we're not publicly sharing all those numbers just yet um but we will be coming out more we do currently have 280 customers on the platform um and that's been going up quite rapidly so it's been customers or users so we have we have 280 uh organizations that have signed up for the platform um and then order of i have to i don't have the latest number on me but 40 to 50 fully embedded and more and more adding yep and when they're fully embedded that means they're paying or no you still have to convert them from fully embedded to actually paying you yeah so that means they're that means they're paying some are...