How Picbackman CEO Vaibhav Domkundwar grew Picbackman to $144K revenue and 1.7K customers in 2019.

hello everybody my guest today is he is an entrepreneur and seed investor with dual basis in silicon valley and india he runs better which is the parent company of pick back man which is a micro venture firm that builds and invests in category defining businesses at the seed stage before better he co-founded mobile roaming platform leader rome ware which is acquired by audux he is a graduate of the university of california berkeley and runs marathons to put health and fitness as high up as his work and family life in terms of priorities five are you ready to take it to the top yep absolutely all right so let's talk pick back man today what's the company do and how do you make money you know big batman actually helps you keep your memory safe and like pretty described it it said you know it helps you get rid of that photo backup anxiety if you know what i mean and what's your revenue model how to make money um so you know big batman is an application people use to upload their photos and their videos to their online accounts um so let's say when you're when you go for a trip and you have let's say a few hundred to a thousand photos uploading them to a google or smart mug or flickr account is really really time consuming and that's where big batman comes in it's just a one click two click and third and you're done it does that job automatically for thousands of photos and um we have a freemium version so people download the version and use it for free for some time and upgrade uh we charge them a monthly 695 or annual uh 69 or we have a lifetime plan that we're going for a little bit right now for one time um so it's a subscription business um we actually focused a lot on the product first and i started monetizing very recently so just to be clear the the price point on the sas model where it's not freedom is about seven dollars a month that's right okay and put this on a timeline for us when did you launch the company what year um so we've been working on the product for about two and a half years okay so 2016 would have been go time yeah that's right okay and your model is unique you know there's a lot of companies now where they're led by someone who's experienced and has a lot of wisdom like yourself you've seen a lot where you're actually sometimes buying you know little side projects with a lot of traction but no revenue and then kind of investing and growing and turning on revenue i mean is this kind of how your incubator or better labs is working um not really so better is really two parts one is better labs where we essentially build products from scratch or sell so we have a 60 people team so big batman is an example of a product company that is built within better labs and then we've got better capital which is an early stage investor so we do seed precede and pre-series a rounds and structured as a angel syndicate in india and the us and uh last year in 2018 we were the number one angeles india syndicate and how much did you deploy in that year um so you know i can give you the exact numbers but we did 16 deals and um we were somewhere in the um let's say about 2 million to 3 million dollars um largely in indian companies so it's a significant amount have you bought any companies that you were previously an investor in uh no i don't i don't think we're investing in companies that we would buy um i think we're investing in companies that are really kind of going after very large markets yeah so what i'm trying to do is delineate here so just to be clear these are two very different things one is an angel is a syndicate to support kind of the indian kind of startup ecosystem the other is 60 people building your own products in-house from scratch get it i see that's right okay um how do you how do you so let's let's say i was an entrepreneur launching my own company and and and i got a thing on angelus that you wanted to invest but i knew that if you invested you'd have information in the company i would help businesses you're building on the other side of kind of your you know your internal team how do you keep those pieces of information separate um i think there's uh honestly we've never had this problem because what we are building internally at labs is a very very specific we're not building multiple ideas at a time we actually have about four product companies that we are going deep in um whereas everything that we are investing in is of course segments we've done uh crypto uh we've done um agritech we've done sas we've done companies focused on the indian domestic market that have done a very good in terms of growth and scale so they're very very different i think better labs is essentially an outcome of my entrepreneurial career in terms of you know knowing how to start from an idea to get to scale and revenue and profits and better capital is essentially saying that you know we i just don't believe we can do it do it again and again for tens of ideas so capital is essentially to bring all that um experience to early stage founders where you know if you look at the 16 deals we did last year i was very instrumental in essentially building rounds from scratch for some of these companies right so i think um labs and capital are actually very very um um kind of empowering each other more than anything else got it what have you scared let's go back to pick back man now how many customers have to scale to today um so we have about 50 000 plus users in 130 countries and we have paid users that are a fraction of that we hit about um twelve thousand dollars in revenue last month twelve thousand one uh twenty twelve thousand dollars mri and uh will we expect to kind of really scale that this year we just started monetizing and optimizing uh towards the later part of last year okay so you turned not you had 50 000 freezers you turned on the seven dollar paywall late 2018 and now you've got about twelve thousand dollars in revenue coming in per month and at a seven dollar price point that would mean you've converted about what is that seventeen hundred of the fifty thousand into free and paid um yeah i think i don't know the exact numbers from uh from that percentage perspective um but essentially over the last three months we've gone from uh you know multiplying our revenue per day we really track on a daily basis as well um so that that's been a good trend over the last 90 days and i think there's a lot of optimization and just to clarify i think we had had kind of a um price plan for a longer time just started to optimize and really kind of push our customers to the paid service uh with with our launch uh of our latest version in uh middle of last year and so how do you go i mean at this price point you have to sign up such a high number of customers to build a meaningful business right i mean you either have to you know stay low price point and go for a million customers or as you know flip the script and go the complete opposite way um how do you go from you know fifty thousand free users and two thousand paid to you know five million free and two million paid that's right so i think you know uh we're solving a problem that is very universal so for example if you look at what just happened in terms of uh smugmar blind flicker and saying we're turning away the free plan and you had 50 million plus users who now suddenly had to find a new place there and a good majority of them are going to google photos right and we are probably the one google photos migrated today that you can actually use to move thousands and thousands of photos in a very efficient manner right so what we are really looking at is there are um you know hundreds of millions of people who actually need to keep their memories safe and you know first it was flickr then it was smug mark today it's just google photos tomorrow it might be something else but big batman is here to actually help you uh keep it safe uploaded and move from one service to another depending on what you're doing right so i think it's going to be a necessary utility and that's where i think we think there is a there's a lot of upside in terms of um growth uh everything that we've done so far is zero marketing spends how are they how are they finding you i get the whole word of mouth thing but i mean they have to find you somehow how are people finding you i think majority of them are finding us through google right what search term what do they go on google and search um use you search for flickr uploader you search for google photos uploader you search for a smug mug uploader and a variety of keywords we've got a very long tail set of keywords as well we're answering questions about people um who are you know asking how do i manage my iphoto library after you know apple discontinued it how do i take it out and move it to google photos or something like that right so we've got a lot of that as well that that's kind of working to help people find us and and is this i mean is this you have a team that is solely focused on seo and long tail or have you built kind of a machine that identifies these keywords and auto launches landing pages for them uh no we are actually doing a very curated effort because i think uh i'm personally of the opinion that um you know from a uh it's...