How MetaChi Was Building a Workforce Collaboration Platform With 3 Active Pilots (Interview with CEO DS Benbow)

Introduction to DS Benbow and MetaChi

Nathan Latka

00:00Hey folks, my guest today is DS Benbow. He's building a great tool called MetaChi. It's helping folks in the workplace collaboration space. He got a team, need insights, he's your guy. He's a founder of the business and started focused, He started by focusing on delivering a world class predictive work platform that passively collects and objectively assesses how people and teams work and collaborate. For this, he worked in the capacity of product marketing and strategy at a

00:24number of enterprise companies, startups and agencies, including Microsoft, AT and T, Zillow and WPP. DS, you ready to take this off?

DS Benbow

00:31>> Let's kick it off.

Company Launch and Early History

Nathan Latka

00:33Alright, man. So if you wanna follow along, the website URL is metachi.com. When did you guys launch?

DS Benbow

00:42>> It's been about five years now. It's slow growing and then we just started to accelerate recently.

First Customers and Early Traction

Nathan Latka

00:49Tell me more about the growth. Where did the first customer come from? Do you remember?

DS Benbow

00:54>> 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 MetaChi versus one of the more known name brand companies at the time.

Nathan Latka

01:32So what year was that? When do you launch the first products?

DS Benbow

01:36>> Well, we've kind of been in, I would argue

01:41>> incubation for a while, we kind of slow rolled it because we were bootstrapping. But then, you know, like five years ago, we started to like spend more money at contractors. And 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 date.

Bootstrapping and Pre-Revenue Investment

Nathan Latka

02:06Well, let me ask you this. How much of your own money or investment did you spend or your bootstrap, let's say your own money, you spend before you had your first dollar revenue? How big was the risk?

DS Benbow

02:17>> Easily over a 100 k.

Nathan Latka

02:19And what cost so much? Software's supposed to be cheap to get off the ground. Where where was it expensive?

DS Benbow

02:23>> Well, it was there's the hosting, there's contractors, there's the design work,

02:31>> and we spent money on a variety of contractors in those spaces.

Team Size and Engineering Background

Nathan Latka

02:38Mhmm. And now how many folks are full time today at the company?

DS Benbow

02:42>> Today, we have two.

Nathan Latka

02:43Two people. Okay. I know one of you is an engineer?

DS Benbow

02:46>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

02:47You the engineer Are the you the engineer of the business?

DS Benbow

02:51>> 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. Yeah.

Product Overview: Workforce Collaboration and Insights

Nathan Latka

03:02That is great. Okay. So tell me what why why are people so excited about you? What are they what are they buying? Tell me about the product.

DS Benbow

03:07>> 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. 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

03:43>> or twice a year? How do you do it in a way that's more real time and more objective? And this is where MetaChi 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

04:07>> successful at. 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

04:37>> are not just performing, is super important in a distributed world, but also sentiment.

Pilot Pricing and Monthly Recurring Model

Nathan Latka

04:44So DS, what are people paying you on average per month to use this technology?

DS Benbow

04:49>> 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 a very deep dive view into employee behavior. We use about 18 different attributes to come up with some objective analytics that predict things like inclusion, predict things like on time delivery.

Nathan Latka

05:17Yeah, DS, you're I totally get the 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 $6,000 pilots or $60,000 pilots? What's the average customer paying for a pilot?

DS Benbow

05:28>> The average pilot is is between five and 10 k.

Nathan Latka

05:30Okay. Are they

05:31paying one time or is it monthly recurring, like an ACV?

DS Benbow

05:34>> It's monthly recurring. It's monthly recurring.

Nathan Latka

05:36So 5 k a month or 5 k for a year?

DS Benbow

05:39>> 5 k for the the time of the prod product beta, which is typically three months.

Nathan Latka

05:46Okay. So they're paying about $2,000 a month if they keep continue past the pilot?

DS Benbow

05:51>> Yeah. Based on and that's assuming a certain type of size, and that's typically under a 100. But yeah.

Why Growth Has Been Slow: Redesign and Full-Time Job

Nathan Latka

06:01Okay. And talk to me about how many pilots are running today.

DS Benbow

06:04>> Today, we've got three.

Nathan Latka

06:05Three pilots. Okay. Got it. So there's about 15 k there and like total pilot revenue. Right? How do you I mean, you've been you've this since 2016 though. Right? So like people listening are gonna wonder, like, wait. Hold on. Is he doing this full time? Like, how is he paying his bills? Like, why isn't this growing faster? Why are you still in pilots month six or year six?

DS Benbow

06:23>> That is a great question.

06:26>> 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 our target audience based on feedback. And so that took a lot longer than we thought it would.

06:42>> 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. But we're

Nathan Latka

06:53We're not looking for a hockey stick in every business. Every business isn't gonna 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, if you don't mind me asking?

DS Benbow

07:08>> Sure, sure, sure. I

07:12>> 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 funding three times and that's primarily because we just felt like we needed to hit product marketing fit before we took money and we didn't want to take money for figuring out the business and figuring out where we fit.

Nathan Latka

07:39In general, I think that's totally smart. You'd be in a worse position if you took money, then you have to deal with bored and slow growth, you know, you'd have But to quit but why not? I mean, you believe in this, it's been six years. Why not quit Zillow and go all in on this thing?

DS Benbow

07:52>> Exploring that now. As a matter of fact, when I get back from vacation, I will be having a conversation with the next COO of WPP and getting some guidance around how to add the right set of folks to help push us over the hump. So we're actively in that discussion mode right now.

Equity Split and Founder Ownership

Nathan Latka

08:12Okay. So three customers on the pilots, which is nice. You're learning from those folks. There's two of you in the company. Did you guys just split equity fifty fifty at the start?

DS Benbow

08:21>> Actually, we didn't because I started

08:26>> the company prior to my my co founder coming on board. So it's not a fifty fifty split. He was working on something similar with a friend, but they could never kinda get it finished and over the hump. And so he ended up coming over to MetaChi, so we didn't have a fifty fifty split.

Nathan Latka

08:48DS, how much more do you own? Sixty, seventy, 80%?

DS Benbow

08:52>> About that. It's about that.

Growth Strategy: White-Label and Community Distribution

Nathan Latka

08:5580 plus. 80 plus. Plus. Fair enough. Fair enough. Fair enough. But but what so, you know, I understand you have a conversation with your advisors at WPP, but like ultimately you have to drive the execution here. Right? So where's the growth gonna come from? Where are your next top 10 pilots gonna come from you think?

DS Benbow

09:10>> So what we're thinking right now is white labeling and working with complementary partners and ecosystems that require a distributed productivity tool, but either don't want to spend the time and the resources making it because that's not their core strength. This is something that is going to be a complimentary to what they already have. And we're also looking at

09:43>> communities, like for example, say digital nomads for example. There's no tool for a digital nomad or community of nomads that could Slack for sure. But after that, they use a variety of tools. What if they can all use one tool and what if they can all potentially monetize it? So we're looking at that as well.

Famous Five: Books, CEOs, and Tools

Nathan Latka

10:08Alright, DS, on that note, let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite book?

DS Benbow

10:13>> My favorite book, Blue Oceans.

Nathan Latka

10:16Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

DS Benbow

10:22>> I would say Rich Barton of Zillow. I would say

10:28>> Bill Gates and perhaps Jeff Bezos.

Nathan Latka

10:32Number three, DS, what's your favorite online tool for building the company besides your own?

DS Benbow

10:37>> Let's see. My number one choice would be MetaChi. My number two choice would be MetaChi. My third choice would be Slack, if only because it's ubiquitous and everyone uses it.

Nathan Latka

10:49Number four.

DS Benbow

10:49>> And so it's a lot easier to communicate, yeah.

Personal Background and Closing Thoughts

Nathan Latka

10:52How many hours of sleep do get every night?

DS Benbow

10:54>> Not enough, but I'm learning that I can get all the sleep I need when I die.

Nathan Latka

11:02So how much sleep are you getting right now?

DS Benbow

11:04>> Literally. I'm trying to get six hours.

Nathan Latka

11:08Okay, great. And what's your situation? Married, single, kiddos?

DS Benbow

11:12>> Single.

Nathan Latka

11:13Okay. No kids running around?

DS Benbow

11:15>> One daughter.

Nathan Latka

11:16Okay, one daughter.

DS Benbow

11:17>> One Very

11:18>> daughter and she's in New York. She's an adult now.

Nathan Latka

11:21Very cool. How old are you, DS?

DS Benbow

11:24>> Me? I am 40.

11:26>> 40.

Nathan Latka

11:27Last question. What's something you wish you knew when you were 20?

DS Benbow

11:34>> Where to invest in tech?

Nathan Latka

11:37Guys, there you have it. MetaChi playing in a very exciting space, collaborative work platform that enables you to make better decisions about your team, about your people. Launched sort of soft launch in 2016. He still got a full time job though here six years later. The founder owns over 80% of the business, but they do have three pilots, call it $15,000 in revenue, looking to scale here. They spent about a $100k to get the

11:56MVP off the ground. Again, hoping these pilots turn out nice and they can convert it into monthly recurring revenue. DS, we are rooting for you, my man. Thanks for taking us to the top.

DS Benbow

12:04>> Thank you. I appreciate your time.

Nathan Latka

12:08One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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, ARPU CAC, LTV, you name it, they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live. It is fun to watch every Thursday 1PM

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13:43See you.