How Mindee CEO Jonathan Grandperrin grew Mindee to $3.5M revenue and 70 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is jonathan gran pion he's the co-founder and ceo at mindy an entrepreneur with a keen eye for technology disruption and addressing real world enterprise challenges his executive tech experience on his shoulders having held the cto title for thank you and actor prior to joining mindy jonathan are you ready to get to the top yeah all right so just to be clear you said joining mindy are you a co-founder you came in later co-founder okay and what year was that when did you guys get going sorry when what year was that when did you guys get going oh we started working at 90 like in early in 2018 with uh two of my co-founders and everything really started in 2019 yeah what do you mean by restarted um actually at the beginning for the first year we have been kind of trying to discover how the market works and what were the needs in terms of document processing in companies and when we figured that there was a specific need on this area we started working on the products in 2019. i see okay so tell us yeah tell us what the product does and and who you're selling to who are the customers yeah um so basically we help software companies build document processing automation features in their software so our users are mainly software developers in general and also product people like product managers or cpo vp products and and we give them the technological layers so that they can build very easily document processing features for their users got it and what are they paying on average per month to use your technology uh that's very depending because we have large enterprise as well as very young companies but it's between a few hundred euros to to 10 12 k monthly okay but what that's a huge range what would you say sort of your sweet spot is like 500 bucks a month or more like five thousand a month well between one two three uh i don't have one so the reason i'm asking that now i can be specific if someone's paying you three thousand uh you know us dollars per month what are they getting for that is it based off number of api calls or something else yeah based on the api calls as uh almost all the api companies but uh yeah one page is 10 cents on the first pricing grid and then the more you consume the more you use the api the less the marginal price will get um so what do you mean by one page is 10 cents is that if i upload a document that's 10 pages long and i need that signed yeah one page of a document like if you have a pdf of 10 pages it's going to be 10 pages price so 10 times 10 cents one dollar i see i see but you obviously care more about moving everyone to the api model that probably is more effective yeah but the value the unit of value of our product is the page actually so but it's kind of really related to the number of api calls in the end because on average the document is like one to two pages more maximum so i just think about driving usage it's it's a tricky thing to tie your upsell metric based off the thing you need found like people to do to get value which is the page because for example if docusign charge per page every time i did it i'd feel a little bit negative because i'm going do i really need to spend 10 cents to get this signed right now and slowly i'd look for alternatives and eventually i would probably churn how do you guys balance that uh for now we we are not shown at all so i don't think this is a problem for us today um in general like well what do you mean no turn at all how do you man how do you measure that we have no we have no logo churn and uh very strong negative junction rate so people are more uh using more and more the api over time than uh just dropping because of that i don't think the pricing is uh is a problem for us in the adoption actually uh just because of this digressive pricing grid you know if you uh if you make 10k calls monthly is going to cost you 800 [Music] if you have a volume of 25k it's going to be less than that like six cents per uh document so we want to help our client grow and uh build the best user experience yeah i mean you're talking about you're talking about retention right i mean you have churn and then there's expansion and there's net dollar retention and usually api businesses like this you look at snowflake you look at twilio they said that cengage they have really high net dollar retention of way above 100 where are you guys at uh it's between 200 and 250 percent after one year so it's uh that's great that's uh something very good for our business so yeah so the average a year a year one customer doubles their what they pay you in year two but when you look at it okay but when you look at your full base so you look at the last 12 months across your whole base gross churn plus expansion net dollar retention is what yeah we don't have churn at all in terms of usage so jonathan just be clear when you say you have no the reason i push you on this i find it very unless you only have like one customer but i find it very hard to believe that there are zero customers that use you who last month signed 10 pages and this month no one went down lower than 10 pages in other words your churn will be measured by a little downgrade in usage month to month you're saying no one ever uses less this month than the last month okay it happens of course like during the server for example we have obviously a lower usage but people are hard to say that the the extension is so much higher than the uh the the slow of their usage the contractions and contraction and expansion yeah that's what i'm trying to measure right so contract like you you might have 10 contraction but expansion is so big expansion could be 90 so your net dollar retention is still 180 that's what i'm trying to understand yeah the net retention rate of 250 percent i was talking about is including the contraction also of the usage today maybe yeah because you're giving me that net dollar retention of 250 based off first year contracts which is easy someone could go from a dollar to four dollars and that's 400 percent expansion the better way and how publicly traded companies track net dollar retention is you look at your full base your full installed revenue base a year ago compared to today that's what i'm trying to get to not just your first year customers uh i i think it's the same like we compute our course monthly so quarterly sorry so all the customers we had like one year ago and we signed during the last year quarter yeah it's okay we can skip over it's not important i think you give us a good lesson which is you're pricing off a number of api calls usage is going up some people use it a little less but the expansion is so big it doesn't matter so you have really healthy unit economics that's the keyboard yeah all right let's get let's move on from that let's get more of your backstory here so you guys started writing the code in 2018. um how many co-founders are there uh three co-founders and one late funder three co-founders and one what late co-founder as well like he joined us in uh early in 2019. i see did you guys just split 25 each no how did you have that conversation every founder has to go through that it's a tricky situation it was actually very natural because uh i don't know i don't even remember when we had this uh this conversation it was kind of natural to to make the splits like we came with a plan very easily and there was no discussion at all on this so i'm not going to give you the the figures on how this is distributed in terms of capital between the founders but at the very very beginning we started with mohammed my chief of science and the split was done between the two of us and then olivier joined us the first month and he's the co-founder as well of course and uh yeah everything was supernatural between us but what i'm trying to dig at here is every co-founder team has to have this conversation right so somebody owns more is it because they brought more capital more experience more take me into that conversation a little bit okay uh no i think we just focus on you and muhammad just the two of you thinking differently like it was not my first uh experience as a co-founder of startup so maybe it was important in the discussion at this moment at this point in time and uh just because of the role as well maybe it's important as well like the the ceo owns a bit more than the other co-founders for example i see got it okay so you know maybe a little bit more than everyone else because of these things yeah okay so you guys get going in 2018 tell me about your first customer do you remember who it was and how you found them oh sure uh an hrs company hri sorry uh in france uh one of the leader they have approximately one million users i think or maybe more they're called luca lucca and they add an expense management solution and expense management mobile application and they wanted to to to improve the user experience when passing receipts and we are using a company called abi a buy i don't know the english pronunciation for that uh abdyy and and they were not okay with the performances in terms of response time and accuracy as well so we built our first prototype with this client and the benchmark the solution we were proposing to them against the...