How MetaChi (meta-chee) CEO DS Benbow grew MetaChi (meta-chee) to $72K revenue and 3 customers in 2021.

hey folks my guest today is diaz ben bowie's building a great tool called medici it's helping folks in the workplace collaboration space you got a team you need insights he's your guy uh he's the founder of the business and started focused uh he started my focus on delivery of delivering a world-class predictive work platform that passively collects and objectively assesses how people and teams work and collaborate before this he works in the capacity of product marketing and strategies a number of enterprise companies startups and agencies including microsoft at t zillow and w p do yes you're ready to take this out let's kick it off all right man so if you want to follow along the website url is m-e-t-a like meta and then chi c-h-i dot com when did you guys launch it's been about five years now um it's slow growing um and then we just started to accelerate recently tell me more about the growth at where did the first customer come from do you remember first customer actually came from family my mom had a consulting company at the time where she traveled a lot and had a number of distributed workforce and this was our first place where we actually implemented the solution the second was a friend of mine was running for mayor of seattle and for his campaign in terms of again a distributed workforce we implemented medici versus um one of the more more known name brand companies at the time so what year was that when did you launch the first products well we've kind of been and i would argue incubation for a while we kind of slow rolled it because we were um bootstrapping um but then you know like five years ago we started to like spend more money add contractors and um then that's when it really started to take off so there's there's like the the start of the idea date and then there's like we're really going to make something happen things well let me ask you this how much how much of your own money or investors did you spend uh or your bootstrap but so your own money did you spend before you had your first dollar revenue how big was the risk um easily over 100k and what costs so much software's supposed to be cheap to get off the ground where was it expensive well there was there's the hosting there's contractors there's the design work and we spent money on a variety of contractors in those spaces and now how many folks are full-time today at the company today we have two two people okay i know where are you as an engineer yeah are you the engineer in business are you the engineer i'm the product guy and my engineer is literally a rocket scientist he went to graduate school and got his master's in aeronautical engineering from the university of mississippi yep that is great okay so tell me what pete why why are people so excited about you what are they what are they buying tell me about the product sure so one of the things that we've experienced in the pandemic especially in 2020 is we have a distributed workforce we can't help that um but how do we continue to maintain some of the operational either rigor or operational ways of doing things that we had when we were in person and when you think about employee satisfaction how would you measure that as with the exception of the kind of employee health report that comes out maybe once or twice a year how do you do it in a way that's more real-time and more objective and this is where medici stepped in we again provide passive collection of data based on how you work we take that information and we turn it into kind of a dashboard of this is these are the types of projects i like these are the types of teams that i like to work on here are the things that i'm successful at um here's kind of my own time delivery and here's my sentiment at the completion of a particular project so you start to build over time a profile of not just an employee but also of teams so that they can then understand where they're doing well where they're not doing well and from a management perspective it also gives you much more of a real time view left to right in your organization in terms of how people are not just performing which is super important in a distributed world but also sentiment so diaz what are people paying you on average per month to use this technology so right now the pilots that we're still running are there's a per seat license and then we have what we call a management dashboard which will give you um a very deep dive view into employee behavior um we use about 18 different attributes um to come up with some objective analytics that predict things like inclusion predict things like um on-time delivery yeah i totally get the product you're in a very hot space that makes total sense to me but i'm curious are we talking like six thousand dollar pilots or sixty thousand dollar pilots what's the average customer paying for a pilot the average pilot is is between five and ten okay one time or is it monthly or occurring like an ac it's monthly recurring it's monthly recurring so 5k a month or 5k for a year 5k for the the time of the product um beta which is typically three months okay so if you think about 2 000 a month if they continue past the pilot yeah based on and that's assuming a certain type of size um and that's typically under 100 um but yeah okay and talk to him about how many pilots are running today today we've got three three pilots okay got it so there's about 15k there and like total pilot revenue right how do you i mean you've been you know since 2016 though right so like people listening to wonder like wait hold on is he doing this full time like how's he paying his bills like why isn't this growing faster why are you still in pilots in months sick or year six that is a great question um two years ago we kind of took a step back and did a redesign and rethunk how we wanted to go to market in terms of um our target audience based on feedback and so that took a lot longer than we thought it would um and yes i'm very cognizant of the fact that you know we're not the typical you know six months and we're out the door and then we've launched and then we've hit the hockey stick um but we're not looking for a hockey stick in every business every business isn't a hockey stick you can build a great lifestyle business but this is like six years and you still don't have 10 paying customers that love your product and you know 10 true fans are you doing this on the side or is this full time like how are you sort of supporting yourself you don't mind me asking sure sure we um i am still working at zillow and running campaign strategy there so that might have something to do with the fact that we're just moving a little bit slower we've also turned down um funding three times um and that's primarily because we just felt like we needed to hit um product marketing fit before we took money um and we didn't want to take money for uh figuring out the business and figuring out where we fit general i think that's totally smart you'd be in a worse position if you took money and then you have to deal with board and slow growth and you know you have to quit zillow but but why not i mean if you believe in this it's been six years why not quit zillow and go all in on this thing um exploring that now as a matter of fact when i get back from vacation um i will be having a conversation with the next ceo of wpp and getting some guidance around how to add the right set of folks um to help push us over over the hump so we're actively in that discussion mode right now okay so so three customers on the pilots which is nice you're learning from those folks there's two of you in the company now did you guys just split equity 50 50 at the start actually we didn't because i started um the company prior to my my co-founder coming on board um so it's not a 50 50 split he was working on something similar with a friend but they could never kind of get it finished and over the hump um and so he ended up coming over to medici so we didn't have a 50-50 split but yeah so diaz how much more do you own 60 70 80 about that about that a-plus fair enough fair enough but but what so you know i understand having a conversation with your advisors at wpp but like ultimately you have to drive the execution here right so where's the growth going to come from where are your next top 10 pilots going to come from you think so what we're thinking right now is white labeling and working with complementary partners and ecosystems that require um a distributed productivity tool um but don't either don't want to spend the time and the resources making it um because that's not their core strength this is something that is going to be a complementary to what they already have and we're also looking at communities like for example say digital nomads for example there's no tool for a digital nomad or community of nomads that could they slack slack for sure but after that they use a variety of tools what if they can all use one tool and what if they could all potentially monetize it so um we're looking at that as well all right diaz on that note let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite book my favorite book blue oceans number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um i would say rich barton um of zillow i would say um bill gates um and perhaps jeff bezos number three diaz what's your favorite online tool for building...