How Reely CEO Daniel Evans grew Reely to $8M revenue and 128 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is daniel evans he's a dynamic entrepreneur and senior executive with a passion for emerging tech systems architecture and user experience he's got an extensive background aligning technology advanced with marketplaces opportunities and assembling teams to execute today he's building really.ai automated short form content creation daniel you're ready to take it to the top sure all right so who who's buying this is it the sports team directly or content aggregators or somebody else yeah it's kind of a mixture we a lot of our customers are in the collegiate space uh you know d2 d3 uh some division one uh and then we have some pro teams that that we work with and then we've been recently been moving more into the high school space with name image and likeness kind of hitting the college scene more brands and sponsors are kind of looking at the high school space and so we're we're moving down there a little bit too so like george mason university is a good example of one of your customers help me understand on average what are these companies paying you to use your technology per month uh but it varies it's generally a sas model based on games right so the number of games that they want to run for the season uh and then we we kind of base that around how many hours that that will run through our system so what would you say a sweet spot is for for those uniforms yeah well no like george mason will buy about 300 games right because we'll cover baseball football basketball we cover all the major sports so they'll they'll do that and they'll pay somewhere between you know 40 50 bucks a game okay interesting uh that's that's for the annual contract correct got it you're looking like 12 000 annual contracts is your sweet spot sorta somewhere in there right it depends smaller schools may buy 60 games versus 300 right so just it varies from 300 your highest is that your biggest customer 300 again no we have we have some that'll run uh 2200 games and those are like private websites and uh people that are trying to post up you know more social engagement websites uh whether it's a sports site or if it's a new site that wants sports content and so that 2200 customer that's that's paying for all those games is it still 40 bucks a game about 80 000 bucks a year no it'll it'll come down and scale it just depends on the number of games yeah fair okay take me back here when did you write the first line of code for this so i was not one of the original founders of this i actually came in because a friend of mine uh you know they were kind of struggling a bit after a couple years of development and he asked me to kind of come in and stabilize things and set things up for the future but the original intent was uh the founders were big fantasy players there was three of them and uh one of the founders really wanted to be able to get the alvin kamara touchdown in his in his feed like as soon as he got it so that he could essentially send it out to his friends and rub it in uh and that was kind of how it was born uh they started to kind of cut games themselves manually uh and then said you know this is crazy uh so they went digging into the academic sphere and found somebody that had written a book on using machine vision and machine learning to do this and hired him bought his work and the rest is history what's the hard part there is you know i'm a washington football fan is it you know when i see a touchdown pass i can like i can like find an illegal stream that online and cut it up in imovie myself isn't the hard part actually getting access to the content not cutting the 60 second clip well it's you know you can't scale that right like you can have individuals like that but you know our system will we'll pump it out in about three seconds and then it'll it'll add any branding but how do you get right to the content say again how do you get the rights to the content uh generally that our customers have those rights you got it so you exist people can't use your your real tool unless you are have that person as a customer so like an nfl team like my team if you don't have them i can't get clips of the washington football team correct yeah got it okay interesting who are you competing with because i see the football team put like every nfl team does this when touchdowns happen real time they put them out who do you compete with uh so that's a company called wsc uh it's an israeli company they work at kind of the high end of sports uh they're driven mostly by data feeds and ai right so they're getting the like the sport radar or stats inc uh feeds and then they're they're pairing that up with some ai to cut that stuff do you have any idea on how big you think they are revenues are they public uh they i think they've raised their valuation i think is somewhere in the 200 million dollar range so they're they're fairly sizable i'm not sure what their revenues are yeah interesting okay so what year did you join the company uh i joined in 2019 and took over as ceo in 2020. and when did the you know the co-founders originally launch it uh 2016 2017 yeah 2017. okay give me a little bit of the funding history it sounds like there were investors who are unhappy that's why you came in so what was the funding history before you joined i wouldn't say that i think there was just a little bit of difference in vision but uh we've raised uh 1.8 to date uh and we're in the middle of raising a round right now a little that'll value the company around 12 to 13 million when was the 1.8 raised uh we closed that in 2020 early 2020 2020 okay so so no there was no money raised then before you joined uh a little bit of friends and family okay got it but you would consider the 1.8 that you raised your precede correct i see okay got it so friends and family before that 1.8 precede what valuation did you raise that on uh four million four was that fair at the time you think yeah i think so interesting why is that i mean this isn't a right or wrong answer i'm just curious yeah yeah it's it's solid tech right they spent two years on the tech the ai is pretty robust and being able to do this in real time is is very very difficult because you've got to balance the machine vision machine learning components with speed right because you only have so many resources on a machine so i think that is the hard part and they spent a good two years dealing with different elevations of cameras and different viewports and different angles right so being able to accommodate all of that into machine vision algorithms is a lot of heavy lifting and i think that is is done now and so now we're getting very nuanced into you know snaps and runs versus pass and things like that so we're getting into some really interesting stuff now and so you're raising today how much are you targeting uh we're raising three and a half million right now three and a half million on a 12 pre i think you'll get it yeah absolutely um who are you looking for strategic to lead are you gonna go traditional vc route uh we have some strategics that are already uh in uh so we'll you know mostly now we're just kind of filling it around with uh with interested parties angels and stuff like that yeah interesting okay um so you join again you come in the business 2019 ceo 2020 um early customers it sounds like we're these guys wanting to you know get hired to their favorite teams but how many customers do you now work with today uh 128. 128. okay interesting and how do you guys think about churn uh we haven't really seen much at this point i think we've lost two customers uh in the last two years that i've been with so we we don't see it because once it becomes part of their program it's really hard to remove uh it's a workflow tool right so they get used to their distribution being automated uh primarily you know like the the sids on a college campus will be able to you know get their highlights out to their twitter feeds and out to their social media whereas before they'd have to call the truck and try to get a cut and and that's painful and so other people like you said would get a you know a feed off the web somewhere or they would uh you know have somebody and say to him that would take a picture and that would go out to social and the schools wouldn't wind up owning the conversation around their games and so that was a big deal it also gives them a tremendous amount of ad space right new ad inventory that they can sell to their sponsors because you know all that content is going out to their social do you have ad spend flowing through your platform today correct we do how much like annually uh that's this that's up to the schools i'm not gonna go into that but eastern individual school's a little bit different i mean do you take a cut of the ad spend that goes through your platform nope oh i do not why not uh because we're just not there yet right like once it becomes programmatic and we have enough wide enough right that we can offer that then we would got it it's not code it's okay if it's not programmatic it's difficult um okay got it so 128 customers if they all look like george mason 300 hours per year that's twelve thousand dollar contract values i mean i can multiply that into an r but you guys are doing 128 000 bucks a month right now in revenue uh we're doing well is that math core is that math would that math not work for any reason uh well yeah it varies by customer right and everybody's doing 300 games right so it's it's in that ballpark we're doing somewhere around there okay can we just maybe quantify and say north of 100 000 bucks a month sure what do you think you'll break next year uh i think we projected 3.1 million uh for 2022. and what do you have to do to get there say again what do you have to do to get there is it expanding current customer contracts or brand new ones no so we most of our customers are renewing so we continue to expand into that space we're also moving into we've done a lot of work over the last 12 months on the esports side so we're seeing a lot of growth on that side uh we just signed a deal with a company called challenger mode which is a major platform out of europe that has two and a half million uh users and runs about 15 000 uh tournaments per month so we'll be kind of getting all those contents and packaging it up like espn style highlight reels and stuff like that so we'll see a lot of growth out of the esports space and the sports will continue to grow you know this year it's a little bit tough just because everybody's recovering from the loss of dollars from cobit you know so you don't see the same growth that you would but i think next year that'll bounce back i want to go more to that in a second related to nfts but first finish the revenue story for me so if you're above 100k and mr today where were you about a year ago so you can calculate growth rate uh almost zero because our customers were shut down because of coven right okay but you couldn't have had zero revenue you had couldn't have zero revenue and then at the same time be doing a seed round valuing it four million when you just churned your whole customer base so you didn't actually you didn't go all the way down to zero well yeah we because all sports cut down right so they were stopped we did no revenue you did no revenue last year yeah well in the fall of 2020 through you know because they weren't playing sports so we weren't signing any deals you didn't have any spring sports in 2020 so how did you raise that one how did you go raise a 1.8 million seed when you just your whole customer ratio is churned you went down to zero revenue uh we have good investors that understood that this was a a small thing right it was a blip because we were already running prior to the pandemic and the pandemic just shut it down what were you pre-pandemic in 20 i guess 18 19. 17 18 000 i think they were doing oh interesting okay got it got it got it got it okay so fair to say that most the growth has been over the past like six months seven months correct basically zero to a hundred thousand bucks in mrr fairly quickly that's fast growth you just need to change your start date and just say start date with january 2021. that'd be nice wouldn't it yeah i can't do that unfortunately okay cool got it that makes sense um that's still compelling i i have never i mean yeah you do have great investors who led that 1.8 uh stadia ventures which is a big sports tech and uh esports uh fund an accelerator interesting why are you doing this i mean it looks like you have a ton of history here i mean i would have this thing goes to zero i would have said see i'm gonna go work at a bigger firm where their equity is more valuable uh you know it's i i love this you know i'm a big gamer i've played sports all the way through college you know so i just love the space and a friend of mine is one of the big investors and sits on the board and gave me a call and said hey i need some help with this would you would you mind doing it and you know just decided to do it right how much do the original co-founders still own the business uh i think they're still like 40 oh okay okay fair and i assume your friend gave you what 10 20 to incentivize you i've been incentivized properly how do you incentivize a ceo coming in to run sort of a basically a turn-on operation though yeah it's i mean i it's all tied up in the company itself right so i don't i don't take a salary i'm i'm here to uh to exit the company and do a good job with it and sell it and you know hopefully everything works out interesting all right uh but let's wrap up here with the famous five daniel actually before we do that real quick flush out the team how many total people uh we have eleven eleven how many engineers uh six and touch on nfts for a second that that to me is like where this gets extremely interesting right everyone's creating these nfps now you don't actually own the content but you could charge every team like a gas fee effectively on auto generating these nfgs for these live reels are you looking at that yeah we've looked at it you know when when uh when all the stuff hit with top shots and all of that earlier this year and dapper raised the 350 million or whatever they did obviously our phone kind of lit up because we can do these things in real time right being able to craft these things in real time we've kind of taken a hands-off stance right now because i'm not really sure where this is going to land long term uh some of it's kind of scammy right and and kind of interesting uh to see the space i want to see where it kind of lands and then we'll go but we've done we've dabbled with some of it on the esports side because that's the other thing being able to pull out those real-time graphics and and have them minted right then and there is is interesting on the esports side all right daniel let's wrap up the famous five number one favorite book uh thinking fast and slow by daniel kahneman number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh elon musk number three what's your favorite online tool for building really oh envision number four how many hours of sleep you get every night uh seven seven and situation married single kids uh married uh five kids holy cow you're busy how old are you uh 49 49 last question something you wish you knew when you were 20 uh to invest sooner is there there you have it really.ai he joined the business to help his friend do you want to turn the thing around they're doing 18 000 bucks a month in revenue pre-code but went to nothing during code raised a 1.8 million dollar seed round and a four million cap to sort of restart the business hold it through coba now things have kicked off nicely basically zero to 110 000 bucks in mrr in the past call it you know 12 months they're now raising a 3.5 million call it seed series a ish out of 12 million evaluation we'll see if they don't get it done again it makes it easy for you to see and get and for teams to manage the clips real time as action happens daniel thanks for taking us to the top thank you it's great to be here one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas 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 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathan lacka dot com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive i am on these shows but i do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that i appreciate your guys's support all right i'll be in the comments see ya