How Resurface Labs CEO Christine Bottagaro grew Resurface Labs 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...