How Pixlee CEO Kyle Wong grew Pixlee to $18M revenue and 500 customers in 2019.

hello everyone my guest today is kyle wong he's the ceo and co-founder of pixley a visual marketing platform that helps brands to market and sell using real customer photos and videos all right kyle you're ready to take us to the top let's do it nin okay so first off is this a pure play sas company uh it's a peer play sas company with some data network effects um our business model is sas but you know like many other sas companies in this space we're based off usage versus seats okay so you don't have any upsell revenue based off number of seats it's only based off usage correct and so the upside revenue comes from that and not to kind of go so deep right now in the first 10 seconds but yes we're a sas based company and that scales with volume and usage of photo served okay so yeah give us an example of how maybe kempton use you how do these folks use you on a daily basis yeah so um so we're a sas platform that basically helps brands harness the value of their customer stories so our core belief is that your customers are some of your best marketers and that we built software to make that more scalable so a lot of the brands today um already have consumers that are posting about their brand um on a day-to-day basis talking about their experiences at kempton hotels or airbnb or the product they bought et cetera and what our technology does is we provide that infrastructure to use that content at scale everything from the collection of the content the permission rights of the content the tagging labeling of the content and then the infrastructure to put the place put the content in the right place you can almost think of it like an api for content but that content being customer stories otherwise known as your most valuable marketing asset and what are people paying i mean give me a general range here i'm sure you have a lot of different cohorts but on average what's a brand going to pay per year per month to use the tech yeah we have a ton of cohorts um so we have a free tour um so anyone who's listening and wants to just do it right away we have a free tier uh we have kind of a commercial mid-market tier that encourages anything between a thousand couple thousand bucks a month and then we definitely have an enterprise tier that's more in the tens of thousands a month and that's for brands who are doing this at a global scale so in other words if you just want to use this on a small part of your website that's one thing but a lot of our top customers today are using us at a global scale across their e-commerce email in their ads you know in their stores they're using it anywhere you see a photo so like a lot of api contents uh platforms it's kind of like a uh scale it scales with usage so kyle just a simple fight because then i want to get more of your background story here i mean are you you know let's just talk about your paid folks not free it's great you have a free plan but on the paid plans it sounds like people are paying you know your sweet spot might be like you know a couple grand per year or something like that um per month per okay per month okay good so you're very much an enterprise sales motion um yeah we've definitely moved more in that model um i think historically we were not not that because i think the market wasn't ready for it but over the past uh 18 months or so we've definitely seen a lot of growth in the enterprise segment which is definitely more than six figures a year yeah all right good and then put this on a timeline for me when you launch uh originally we launched the first version of our product in 2014 um so um when we first started the company um instagram just came out of android app and uh when we uh started the company like a lot of other silicon valley stories it was right on the out of the stanford dorm room so um it took some time for the market to really catch up to what we had what we did what we did because at the time the photo quality really wasn't good enough um you probably if you're active on social media you probably have plenty of photos on your instagram with really ugly black borders and very blurry picks um so as that content got exponentially better um so did the asset that we're dealing with and ultimately became a lot more usable for brands so i mean i guess one of the questions i'd like to ask is between first line of code and first dollar revenue how much money you sink into building the platform uh that's a good question i feel like there's a lot more sweat equity than anything else and part of that is because we started the company with four technical co-founders uh didn't really pay ourselves that much money um in the beginning just quantify what you did pay yourself um just to get the product built mvp honestly i think it was like a like like a little stipend like a couple thousand dollar stipend for a couple months um but you know we actually got um paying users pretty quickly in our platform um you know what was the distance between again first line of code and first paying customer how many months probably like five to six months or so okay so so what you know when you add up all the stipends across five developers you're talking like maybe 40 50 grand to get the mvp up something like that something like that yeah and did you bootstrap from the beginning or have you always kind of raised capital um we kind of it was a little bit of half half depending on when you consider uh the bootstrap but obviously like you know when we first wrote the first line of codes we didn't um we didn't uh raise capital how much total in the company today uh we raised an eight did low eight digits uh okay so crunch base says 5.5 million is that accurate uh it's not completely accurate okay why is it no why is it not accurate do you use debt uh no uh well that was equity um i i mean we just haven't uh got around to updating it um it's not something that our our customers really actively look at um and it's something that we're uh just not really uh using to actively promote the company anyway i'm surprised your customers don't look at that if these are enterprise deals a lot of times they see funding as more security means they can invest more in you because you're going to be around longer and part of that has to do with who you sell to in an organization we sell to a lot of vp of marketing vp of digitals vp of e-commerce and just candidly a lot of them really don't care as much they care a lot more about the other brands that you're working with right um and that that you can deal with enterprise scale of of their platform so okay we can be a lot more with the different brands that we work with in the case studies over the funding and i think that's actually more aligned with um our customer value anyway okay so we'll call it eight figures we'll call it somewhere around ten million dollars raised to date um and where why have you had to raise the capital i mean this doesn't seem like it's that capital intensive why do you have to take the dilution yeah well part of it is just the r d that we put into it right um so there's a lot of different areas of r d that we spent a lot of a lot of time on um first is just anything with enterprise functionality you know with all with hundreds of people that are in any system there's a lot of enterprise functionality that you need second is when it comes to things that are facing the customer there's a lot of customization so the same way that some of the customer facing applications allow you to customize everything uh we we allow you to do the same thing with no dev resources uh in the last is all your speakers all your revenue sas or do you actually have professional service and customization upsells um like 99 percent of our service revenue is sas so uh but so that's one of those things where this is something that one in every four americans like sees right and it's right on the front and center for a lot of the world's leading brands it needs to look and feel how they want it and we as a sas company don't really want to be doing all of that right and for us we spend a lot of time developing all that r d to make sure it looks and feels the way it wants and then last but not least over the last 18 months we spent a lot of time on some of the deep learning improvements in our software because when you think about customer stories and this content it's not just a quantity problem anymore it's really a quality data and infrastructure problem around how do you tag and label the content more effectively so that you know what photos or what products are in them so for example when you go to pages i mean google image api and these kinds of things these sdks have gotten pretty sophisticated did you build a lot from scratch no no there's no reason to build all that from scratch you want specific products that are in the photos right there's vertical specific applications of this technology that's super important so the same way that you go to pinterest right and you see the actual products that are in the photos we have we do we enable brands to do that but for their own platforms and so kyle what's the team look like today how many folks um what about 50 people and what portion are engineers or something else um it's about half...