How Resurface Labs CEO Christine Bottagaro grew to $120K revenue and 4 customers in 2021.

hey folks my guest today is rob dickinson his comfort zone is right at the intersection of people and technology his technical leadership skills were honed at intel dell and quest software but his true passion is listening and learning from customers after 15 years of experience in the apm market he started re-surface dot io with the goal of creating first party observability solutions where customers truly own their data and where security and privacy controls are seamlessly integrated rob you ready to take us to the top let's do it bring it you bet all right you describe this as an api analyst in a box who's paying for this and what are they using it for yeah so there is a huge talent gap right now in the api security market um you can really see that this week with the log for j log for shell meltdown that we're seeing there simply isn't enough human talent to go around we're we're not creating those analysts fast enough and so what what the goal is with resurface is to empower the the analysts that are that are working in this industry to to have that next level of observability and guidance towards what's actually happening in these apis first systems now give us an update you came on gosh it must have just been three or four months ago you were serving up 36 customers how many are you at today i'm sorry you said 36 that's what you that's what you told that's what you told me yep 36. uh i don't recall that that number uh hold on resurface resurface dot io you told me 2 000 rp on average is that that's what you're paying you per month gosh are you sure we're not commuting this with another nope uh i am looking at re surface dot io did you do you work directly with christine yes yes okay okay christine came on oh oh okay got shots yes that's uh so we had so we had christine on and she gave a great interview uh so so that's why that's why so you're the co-founder she mentioned a co-founder you're the sorry i'm okay gotcha but you sounded surprised at 36 customers was that not accurate well no i mean it depends on what yeah i just want to make sure i mean especially a ceo i want to make sure i'm always answering the right question when it comes to when it comes to a question like that yeah so she so she she described the product which will dive into in a second but but she said you guys were serving about 36 customers at that time is that accurate those trial customers trial customers yes okay okay got it so when do you guys turn on pricing are you pre-revenue today uh we have our first paying customer we are taking revenue today um we're not publishly we're not publicly uh publishing our pricing uh right now on our website but we do have a ready to go uh pricing model and part of that is that we've just shifted from kind of a product led approach to really a concierge led approach a lot of what we're hearing um which is which is kind of different than than the customers that we were talking about you know when christine was on the program last time i'm sure what we've really narrowed in on is customers who are really explicitly looking to to run an oauth compliance program or run a quality improvement program where they need they need significant amount of services to to go with that and so we've done a little bit of a pivot there from uh more of a product led approach to more of an enterprise uh package that includes a lot more services and and so uh you know services are great you can usually get away with that if you're bootstrapped but if you've raised vcs hate services so have you guys bootstrapped the business or did you raise we raised to get to this point and it's it's basically what what where we're coming from this is that api security is so new that a lot of people are talking about it but they don't really understand what the components are that are even involved in that so there's there's a significant amount of guiding right now that all of the major api security firms are doing and if you talk to them privately everyone acknowledges this um there's there's still a lot of a lot of guiding that needs to be done here so i guess translate this to me let's talk more about the product for a second now christine shared you guys were targeting three key customer segments telco fintech and healthcare specifically to protect themselves they were looking at on-prem installations which you guys were actively pursuing is that still the strategy and you're saying there's just more services now on that installation uh correct correct so what what we're really focusing on is decentralizing the storage of this information and making sure that this information is stays in the hands of the api providers rather than handing that data off to a third party that then re-monetizes that data we don't think that that's that's the future of of data handling when you know what when it comes to these kinds of of use cases and you certainly hear that in banking and telco you know 5g especially um you know having that that computation and that uh that data storage at the edge and and not just limited to centralized services is really really important so rob i'm the bank of latke i'm signing up i want to use your tool right what are you going to charge me to start let's say i want to spin up you know i don't know seven nodes something like that right what are you going to charge me to set up and then ongoing our standard pricing is we charge per node and kind of our our opening gambit is 10 000 per node per year and that's for unlimited data capture on that node so that's going to compare very favorably with having to hire even one big data engineer to try to try to put together a solution like this and then you know you get the advantage of the you know all the all the years that we've put into to building this solution and our prior solutions so let's say i'm wanting to spin up and pay you to again bank a lot go i want to spin up five nodes that's gonna be fifty thousand dollars per year it sounds like ongoing but what would my setup fee be and what will you do for me to make sure that installation goes smoothly uh we cover the the setup um our goal is to make this easy our goal is to have direct relationships with our customers there is there is no setup fee um services component you referenced earlier um we're going to provide a statement of work that that covers both the the cost of the software and the the schedule for the services that that go with it we want you we want to make it super easy it's all up front you can write one check and and be up and running with your with your program so you're almost sort of going backwards a lot of people would argue that the original the og sas folks were really like sla agreements what you're saying is effectively your service that you're you're adding on an sla agreement in addition to the cost per node well the the i wouldn't say it's an sla as much as there's a human component to this um you you you're what you're what you're buying is is not the product you're buying the intelligence right that goes with it and and we have an opportunity as folks who are doing a lot of work and working with with a number of customers the the more we can be involved in that process the more we can find immediate ways to to help and enrich that and also feed that back into the the product that we're building because obviously we're still we're still an early stage company so the model and and i know the traditional vc take on what i'm about to say and that and it's fine but what we're doing right now is we're directly connecting our engineers our product builders with our customers directly and we're getting that direct feedback so the the engineer that helps you with your onboarding is the same engineer who's going to be taking support cases and and also helping you get the get the full value out of the solution and we get as much out of that in terms of how much we can feed back into the product as as we uh we then are able to offer our customers with really having that continuity and really understanding the the customer use case what's the team size today how many people full time we are at five full-time people and we're uh we're growing okay so christine told me you guys were 11 back in back in october full time it's not 11 full time we are we do have a number of contractors that work with us but for legal reasons again i'm trying to make sure i'm always answering exactly the right question so if we're talking you know legally full-time employees um it's five right now and then yes we do have another i think it's larger than that that's 10 or 12. okay uh full-time folks engineers mainly uh it's a mixer mixture of engineering and sales but we don't really have account management or product management um you know we're we're engineering heavy now how do you get people paying the full price you want ten thousand dollars per year for all your live nodes because christine told me guys already had 72 nodes live but i don't think you're doing 72 times 10 000 a year yet in revenue so how do you get people paying your full price so the uh the the secret to that and i think it's and i think it's an open secret in in our industry but uh you don't get that in round one almost no vendor gets that in round one this is why every vendor whether they're sas or otherwise they have a free tier or some kind of uh you know some kind of free offering to start off with and what we've really focused on in at resurface but also in our previous businesses is really a land and expand model so our goal is to make it extremely easy to get your first api monitored with resurface and that could be either your your most important one or your most problematic one depending on what kind of referendum that is and we start with that we make that super easy we put a very easy price tag around that and then once we have that as our beach head then we then we can we can open the conversation around well where else should this be plugged into and what's the extra infrastructure that comes with that um we have understood we had years that we did this at dell where a majority of our sales went to existing customers where we had virtually no customer acquisition cost and you mentioned you have dozens on pocs right now how many are fully onboarded they're you know they're paying full price for at least one node oh gosh i don't have that in front of me right now but it's uh you know it's growing every day uh we tell rob are we talking like one or one or two of the 36 something like that we're at four or five i believe now okay well that's great and we've got and we've got to start somewhere right we've got and the thing is we have a lot of paper out for for next year yeah yeah but ignore the future projection i know future stuff is exciting and great but you've got four live today and how many nodes do you have across those four we are running i believe it's 12 nodes in production oh wow okay so what 12 times 10 grand a year you're doing 120 000 bucks annually right now that's that's about where we're dialed in yeah which was about where we hoped to be by by this point yeah no that's fantastic now are you guys looking at raising a series a next year and if so what revenue do you think you have to do that you know it's it's really interesting um there's there's a couple different ways to to look at this and and what's what's fun about it is that we raised our seed during really the height of the pandemic when uh i mean there's so much money floating around right now it's uh it's kind of it's kind of amazing so uh yeah we will be looking at at seed next year and there's a number of things that we're putting um we're putting in play right now to to build for that um but it's really interesting i mean where where the seed market is going to be by next year i don't know i don't i don't have a crystal ball for that um i mean we see people raising money right now on very little revenue um compared to compared to you know what was going on during the pandemic for sure yeah what is not just revenue multiple it's very much more about the story you're telling these days and can you back it up with some historical execution to prove you can you can do what you're saying you're going to do but i agree with you things are all over the place right now multiple wise in the meantime let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book oh gosh uh how to win friends and influence people honestly i know it's like totally old school but yeah problem number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um specifically gosh i'm my network is really the the village network um and uh i really you know my fellow my fellow my fellow village ceos are really the the the peers that i look after the most number three what's your favorite online tool for building resurface squarespace number four how many hours of sleep to eat every night uh four to five that is not healthy why do you sleep so little don't you have to prioritize that a little bit um no it's just i've got i've got three kids i've got a very busy schedule just just got a lot of irons in the fire i feel you all right so i'm married with three kids yes all righty and how old are you i am 49. take us home last question here something you wish you knew when you were 20 rob oh gosh um i was 20. um fail a lot failure is good having opportunities to fail sooner rather than later are even better guys resurface dot io they're helping brands especially brands in the telco fintech and healthcare space take back control of their security by on-prem installation they can take over those api endpoints to make sure again they are safe they are secure they're charging per node right ten thousand dollars per year per node four customers live today with about call it uh call it uh 10 nodes uh right it's about 120 12 nodes 120 000 a year in revenues they look to scale deploying the two million bucks to raise in their pre-seed round during covet five folks on the team today is about to scale rob thanks for taking us to the top thanks so much appreciate it 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 and 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 support all right i'll be in the comments see ya

Introduction hey folks my guest today is christine buragara she is building a very cool company called resurface dot io she's a challenge seeker loves tech and is focused on building storylines teams and pipelines through sales and marketing functions she's happiest when she's collaborating and she marries strategy with execution with leadership roles at sybase sap rally rogue wave and compost her experience in databases customer connections acquisitions and api management is a natural fit for resurface where they're focused on api observability for security and quality christine are you ready to take us to the top i am thank you all right you bet okay when did you write the first line of code for this company ah boy um a couple of years back now i will say full disclosure i can demo um and i'm pretty dangerous with some cobalt but beyond that we've got a dev team that focuses more on that but about two years ago is when the effort began in earnest okay and would you consider that your launch date 2019 yeah yeah about that we closed seed in Raised 2020 which was interesting the covid financing round um so that really i think was more of our launch point tell me more about that how about you how much did you raise one point we raised uh just over two million in our seed round um and have some great investors we've got access ventures we've got first mile we've got sas and ellerian so some folks that are along for the ride seeing the future with apis and why did you need that capital why couldn't you bootstrap this um because i think we needed to develop the market a little bit more it's not a let me pull it off the shelf solution apis particularly when it comes to security and quality which is what we're solving for is kind of new i think people are very aware of appsec application security but how does that apply to apis it's a whole different world so we really felt like we wanted a long runway to be able to develop that to educate people to bring people along and to develop the product that would meet those needs as we go i see okay so you raised two million now did you do that on a safe for christine or did you price that round [Music] uh not sure do you remember what what the valuation was or how much you sold yeah we are you know that's it again sorry i don't no you're good maybe you're not on the numbers all the time i understand you're a founder though right yeah co-founder exactly okay so tell me how you guys split roles how many co-founders are there yeah so just two um and we had one of our uh investors slash chairman who was really driving that financing round so i will admit i came in relatively late on that and so a lot of those discussions that's you hopefully i'm not screwing this up for you no you're good take your time get some water christine get some water that's what happens get some water yeah and you can copy with that take your time take your time 2 million raised last year your co-founder the chairman led most of the round yeah in terms of just being able to structure the deals and making sure that you know we had the right cap table and everything was was working well okay so great tell me about customers right so so what are customers paying for so they are paying for the license for resurface so we are on-prem which is a little different which makes it easier to pass the legal and compliant scrutiny around sharing data when you're looking at api data there tends to be a lot of pii or relatively sensitive data it could be financial it could be phi health information so we wanted to have a solution where people could use resurface and gather the the data but not worry about the risk that we would be able to access that and see it so that was very purposeful on our part and it's solely self-hosted so people can deploy the workloads wherever they would like and be able to get the richness of api data without paying a penalty for either exposure or the cost penalty and so what's the would you say the average customer is paying you per month to use the on-prem installations so we it depends so it depends on how much data you have how big your payloads are and then again how long you want to retain the data so owasp recommends 180 day retention for audit trails and traceability so again we leave that to the customers we are priced per node and it's published on our site we are at 5k in node and then how many nodes you need to go into a class 5k node per month uh per it's annual per year okay yep yep but how many nodes you need per cluster is really up to the customer to font to define what that payload looks like and what they want to capture what would you say like your sweet spot is there are people launching with five nodes one node a thousand nodes yeah it's probably gonna be between five and seven um just because early you know and there's going to be probably a phase right you may not want all of your apis right away we run in production so that can be a healthy amount of data and you may not want that same level of detail around all of your apis so that's where there's some variability um and as you add new partners etcetera that volume will likely grow i see so christine let me start three and five i'm gonna say five nodes on average at five grand a pop you're talking like twenty five thousand dollar of contracts the sweet spot okay fair and um and let's see tell me the story of how you got the first customer that's always a good one usually yeah yeah so um it a bit of our origin story i'll give you that very quickly and that is that a very large hardware manufacturer fruit-based hardware manufacturer had a precipitous drop in their online store once they launched a new version couldn't figure out what it was rolled in there with our solution and tracked and logged all of the calls and was able to then say where are they failing what's happening so we knew what process and then being able to say how are these alike and figuring out what that cohort looked like and it turns out it was also clustered around a zip code failure so it was a trailing zero error which means that anything in a zip code ending in zero would fail and so people kept trying to buy and it would say nope nope not a valid zip code um and it turns out that six percent of the zip codes in the u.s end in zero so that was a six percent revenue drop so it became really clear not only the value in the data to be able to root cause but to say let's reach out to everyone who is impacted so that's the beauty of the data to say nathan tried to buy something he didn't report a problem he just didn't buy so then we could remediate and reach out to each of those affected people and say come back buy again so that was our origin story and then that's sort of the the storyline that we're seeing is those silent failures or security risks that people need to know about in real time so that was company and customer number one how many customers are you serving now today Currently serving 3 customers so we've got i mean we're early days but we've got a couple dozen that are active in all states of you know hey we're trying this out proof of value through in production and again with apis they carry some degree of scrutiny in terms of they can carry revenue or again customer data yeah i would say a couple dozen is a lot considering how young you are and the sensitivity of the data how many nodes is that actually installed nodes um it depends so what i would say is the way that we quote that it depends on their implementation can you look at what you've already implemented across the 36. see that's that's where we don't have visibility because we're not sas but the way that we're priced is annual so it could be you know again taking the average of like five nodes per okay right so wait i don't understand how do you know what to build them if you don't know how many nodes they're installing well we we price annually but they can increase so we may have to do a true up at the end of it well that's what i'm trying to figure out but so you don't know right now how many nodes you know you have installed across the 36 customers yeah it'd be about 72 oh 72. okay cool you do know that and what you're saying is they may be adding other ones right now and you won't know to the end of the year when you sync it all up yeah yeah and that's part of the challenge right in our is that we don't always know exactly how they're deploying um but you know obviously we've quoted him at the beginning of the year and then we'll true up as we go forward yep yep yep and christine can i do the math if you have 72 live nodes at five grand to pop you Monthly recurring revenue guys are doing about 360 000 a year in revenue right now yeah that you know we're priced so that we could get early input so that we can get our steering council so i i would not do that math i don't think that's really fair when can you break that do you think you can break that next couple months that revenue you know it's probably going to be here's the trick nathan is that we realize that we're playing a little bit bigger in the organizations that we thought so some of those implementations may be larger which means our sales cycle could be a little bit longer i think to work through uh different groups that have opinions and ideas and ownership over those apis so i would hesitate to you know forecast out what that looks like but we expect that in the next year we'll be able to you know aggressively move that needle that's good that's exciting tell me more about the team today how many folks yeah so we are just under a dozen people and some of those are fractional we've got developers all over the world that are helping us build the product and then we've got some folks on the sales marketing side that are doing the outreach but a lot of that is you know us us founders reaching out to our networks and and having those good early conversations how many engineers so we've got five engineers okay very cool and the sales reps are mainly you guys well are you targeting any sector i mean i imagine financial institutions are probably a big one maybe governments who are you targeting yeah um right now it's people that are api first so i think the early movers and that tends to be pretty horizontal we're looking though at some heat maps that are sort of coming true around telco um less financial services but i would say fintech is probably the better more precise definition and then healthcare uh just because a lot of that now has moved to online with the fire protocols i think apis are a world that where they need to feel more comfortable and that's where we can help is by exposing the data they need to understand very cool now have you had anyone install you know five nodes a year ago and they've downgraded to three nodes do you have any churn having seen that we've seen the opposite not yet in in let's talk in a year because they think that that could happen there's always the risk when you have software of it being little used or disused right but we see the opposite which is where we were in the operations center and now we're talking to the people who own the online platform itself and said we want to be part of this our customers are asking for api audits and we need to be able to satisfy that so moving from ops to the product side is an interesting pathway for us and we're just now starting that i see very cool okay talk to me about funding moving forward you guys have enough runway in the bank to last yourself a year are you raising now we do um that that clock is ticking for sure and we're thinking we're about 12 months from series a it could go faster just depending on the climate and where we think we're ready but we're in acquisition mode for customers and users right now again to get that feedback loop we really want to understand the problems that we're solving for people and if there is a vertical spin on that meaning will there have to be different versions are they going to look at different protocols we want to make sure that we're conversant in that before we start really ramping and scaling makes sense managing burnout is really critical for an early team when you look at your total expenses per month right Profits now what are they about yeah you know i'd hesitate to to quote on that but i will say that we are managing it very conservatively um let's quantify that christine what does that mean does that mean you have 15 months to run away in the bank right now or five or what it's probably again back to 12 you think it's 12 okay we got in a little bit plus or minus but just spending in terms of like marketing programs being conservative there and making sure that those are things that we can measure and that are you spending on marketing right now a bit yes um we had a couple of pilot programs and you know enough results to say this is something we want to move forward with but right now it's content creation um a lot of events because that's where we can get in front of people we don't expect that they'll come to us right away google ads you know sort of the the more traditional method some social um and then on our uh you know team side being able to have some fractional contributors helps us fiverr for design work like again just being really cautious frugal makes sense makes sense this is a good story i'm going to see where you guys end up six 12 months from now to be fun but in the meantime christine we're out of time let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book um challenger sale number two is there a ceo you're following are studying right now oh that's a good question i just was reading last night recency effect on masterclass the founder of masterclass and that pathway is interesting number three what's your favorite online tool for building resurface oh um maybe just think about what you use this morning would you what a lot of zoom unfortunately but um zoom's a good one number four how many hours of sleep did you get every night i i'm i'm an eight gal that's good and what's your situation married single kids uh all of the above noah married and kids very cool how many kiddos i've got two boys oh wow very cool and can i ask how old are you no no i like it and honest the reason we ask is the next question is take us back to your 20 year old self what's something that you wish that she knew that um that it will pay off the hard work does pay off that that sometimes it doesn't seem like it but it will and it adds to your experience and your knowledge base even if it's good or bad guys christine building resurface dot io launched in 2019 they raised 2 million pre-seed last year and are now helping all kinds of customers call it healthcare fintech and telcos install on-prem installations to manage internal apis that might have sensitive data on them they price per node about 72 live nodes they price anywhere between saw two three four five thousand bucks a year per node as they look to scale hoping to break 500 000 bucks in revenue coming up here next year we'll see what happens christine thanks for taking us to the top yeah thanks 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 support all right i'll be in the comments see ya