How Resurface Labs Reached $120,000 in Annual Revenue with 4 Paying Customers (Interview with CEO Rob Dickinson)

Introduction and Rob Dickinson's Background

Nathan Latka

00:00Hey, folks. My guest today is Rob Dickinson. His comfort zone is right at the intersection of people and technology. His technical leadership skills are honed at Intel, Dell, and Quest Software, but his true passion is listening and learning from customers. After fifteen years of experience in the APM market, he started resurface.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

00:23ready to take us to the top?

Rob Dickinson

00:25>> Let's do it. Bring it.

API Analyst in a Box: What Resurface Does

Nathan Latka

00:26You bet. Alright. You described this as an API analyst in a box. Who's paying for this, and what are they using it for?

Rob Dickinson

00:33>> Yeah. So there is a huge talent gap right now in the API security market. You can really see that this week with the Log four j, Log four 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

01:01>> of observability and guidance towards what's actually happening in these APIs first systems.

Clarifying the 36 Trial Customers from a Prior Interview

Nathan Latka

01:07Mhmm. Now give us an update. You came on gosh. It must have just been three or four months ago. You were serving out 36 customers. How many are you at today?

Rob Dickinson

01:16>> I'm sorry. You said 36?

Nathan Latka

01:18That's what you that's what you told that's what you told me. Yep. 36.

Rob Dickinson

01:23>> I don't recall that that number.

Nathan Latka

01:26Hold on. Resurfaceresurface.io. You told me $2,000 ARPU on average. Is that that's what you are paying you per month?

Rob Dickinson

01:35>> Gosh. Are you sure we're not commuting this with another

Nathan Latka

01:39Nope. I am looking at resurface.io. Did you work do you work directly with Christine?

Rob Dickinson

01:46>> Yes. Yes.

Nathan Latka

01:47Okay. Okay. Christine came on.

Rob Dickinson

01:50>> Oh, oh, okay. Gotcha. Yes. That's what it was.

Nathan Latka

01:53So we had so we had Christine on, and she gave a great interview. So so that's why that's why. So you're the cofounder. She mentioned a cofounder. You're the cofounder.

Rob Dickinson

02:00>> I'm okay. Gotcha.

Nathan Latka

02:02I'm But you sounded surprised at 36 customers. Was that not accurate?

Rob Dickinson

02:06>> Well, no. I mean, it depends on what you know, I just wanna make sure I mean, especially as CEO, I wanna make sure I'm always answering the right question when it comes to when it comes to a question like that.

Nathan Latka

02:18Yeah. So she so she she described the product, which we'll dive into in a second, but but she said that you guys were serving about 36 customers at that time. Is that accurate?

Rob Dickinson

02:25>> Those trial customers. Trial customers. Yes.

First Paying Customers and Pricing Model Shift

Nathan Latka

02:28Okay. Okay. Got it. So have when do you guys turn on pricing? Are are you pre revenue today?

Rob Dickinson

02:33>> We have our first paying customer. We are taking revenue today. We're not publish we're not publicly publishing our pricing right now on our website, but we do have a ready to go 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, which is kind of different than the customers that we were talking about when Christine was on

Pivot to Concierge-Led Enterprise Packages

Rob Dickinson

03:02>> the program last time, I'm sure, what we've really narrowed in on is customers who are really explicitly looking to run an OWASP compliance program or run a quality improvement program where they need significant amount of services to go with that. And so we've done a little bit of a pivot there from more of a product led approach to more of an enterprise package that includes a lot more services.

Nathan Latka

03:28And so 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 today or did you raise?

Rob Dickinson

03:39>> We raised to get to this point. And it's basically

03:44>> 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 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. There's there's still a of a lot of guiding that that needs to be done

04:14>> here. Mhmm.

Target Verticals: Telco, Fintech, and Healthcare

Nathan Latka

04:15So 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 health care, 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?

Rob Dickinson

04:33>> Correct. Correct. So 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 remonetizes that data. We don't think that that's the future of data handling

04:59>> when it comes to these kinds of use cases. And you certainly hear that in banking and telco, you know, five g, especially, you know, having that that computation and that that data storage at the edge and and not just limited to to centralized services is really, really important.

Pricing Walkthrough: Per Node, Per Year

Nathan Latka

05:20So, Rob, I'm the bank of Latka. I'm signing up. I wanna use your tool. Right? What what are you gonna charge me to sort of let's say I wanna spin up, you know, I don't know, seven nodes, something like that. Right? What are you gonna charge me to set up and then ongoing?

Rob Dickinson

05:33>> 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 put together a solution like this. And then you get the advantage of all the years that we've put into building this solution in our prior solutions.

Setup Fees and Services via Statement of Work

Nathan Latka

06:01So let's say I'm wanting to spin up and pay you to, again, Bank of Latka. I wanna spin up five nodes. That's gonna be $50,000 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?

Rob Dickinson

06:13>> We cover the the setup. Our goal is to make this easy. Our goal is to have direct relationships with our customers.

Nathan Latka

06:22So there

Rob Dickinson

06:23>> is no way fee? There is there is no setup fee. What services

Nathan Latka

06:27component you referenced earlier?

Rob Dickinson

06:31>> We're gonna provide a statement of work that covers both the cost of the software and the schedule for the services that go with it. We wanna make it super easy. It's all upfront. You can write one check and and be up and running with your with your program.

Nathan Latka

06:48So you're almost sort of going backwards. A lot of people would argue that the origin the OG SaaS 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.

Rob Dickinson

07:01>> Well, I wouldn't say it's an SLA as much as there's a human component to this.

07:11>> What you're buying is not the product, you're buying the intelligence that goes with it. And we have an opportunity as folks who are doing a lot of work and working with a number of customers, the more we can be involved in that process, the more we can find immediate ways to help and enrich that and also feed that back into the product that we're building because obviously we're still an early stage company. So the model And

07:40>> I know the traditional VC take on what I'm about to say 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 engineer that helps you with your onboarding is the same engineer who's going to be taking support cases and also helping you get the full value out of the solution. And we get as much out of that

08:09>> in terms of how much we can feed back into the product as as we we then are able to offer our customers with really having that continuity Understood. And really understanding the the customer use cases.

Nathan Latka

08:20What's the team size today? How many people full time?

Team Size: 5 Full-Time and Contractors

Rob Dickinson

08:23>> We're at five full time people, and we're, we're growing.

Nathan Latka

08:29Okay. So Christine told me you guys were 11 back in back in October full time.

Rob Dickinson

08:34>> It's not 11 full time. 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 legally full time employees, it's five right now. And then yes, we do have another I think it's larger than that. It's 10 or 12 contractors.

Nathan Latka

08:57How about five full time folks, engineers mainly?

Rob Dickinson

09:00>> It's a mixture of engineering and sales, but we don't really have account management or product management. We're engineering heavy.

Nathan Latka

09:10Now how do you get people paying the full price you want, $10,000 per for all your live nodes? Because Christine told me you guys already had 72 nodes lives, 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?

Land and Expand Growth Strategy

Rob Dickinson

09:24>> So the the secret to that, and I think it's and I think it's an open secret in in our industry, but you don't get that in round one. Almost no vendor gets that in round one. This is why every vendor, whether they're SaaS or otherwise, they have a free tier or some

09:46>> kind of free offering to start off with. And what we've really focused on 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

10:16>> put a very easy price tag around that. And then once we have that as our beachhead, then we can open the conversation around, well, where else should this be plugged into and what's the extra infrastructure that comes with that?

Nathan Latka

10:34We

Rob Dickinson

10:34>> 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.

4 Paying Customers and 12 Production Nodes

Nathan Latka

10:42And you mentioned you

10:43have dozens on POCs right now. How many are fully onboarded? They're paying full price for at least one node.

Rob Dickinson

10:49>> Oh gosh. I don't have that in front of me right now, but you know, it's growing every day.

Nathan Latka

10:56Are we talking, Rob, are we talking, like, one or one or two of the 36, something like that?

Rob Dickinson

11:00>> We're at four or five, I believe, now.

Nathan Latka

11:02Okay. Well, that's great.

Rob Dickinson

11:03>> And we've got we're gonna start

Nathan Latka

11:05Gotta start somewhere. Right?

Rob Dickinson

11:06>> We've got and and the thing is we have a lot of paper out for for next year.

Nathan Latka

11:10Yeah. 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?

Rob Dickinson

11:20>> We are running I believe it's 12 nodes in production.

Nathan Latka

11:23Oh, wow. Okay. So what? 12 times $10,000 a year? You're doing about a $120,000 annually right now?

Rob Dickinson

11:28>> That's that's about where we're dialed in. Yeah. That's great. About where we hope to be by by this point.

Nathan Latka

11:33Yeah. 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 hit to do that?

Rob Dickinson

11:41>> It's really interesting.

11:45>> There's a couple different ways to look at this. And what's fun about it is that we raised our seed during really the height of the pandemic.

Plans for Additional Seed Funding

Rob Dickinson

11:56>> I mean, there's so much money floating around right now. It's kind of amazing. So, we will be looking at seed next year and there's a number of things that we're putting in play right now to build for that. But it's really interesting. I mean, the seed market is going to be by next year, I don't know. I don't have a crystal ball for that. Mean, we see people raising money right now on very little revenue compared

12:28>> to what was going on during the pandemic for sure.

Famous Five: Books, Sleep, and Lessons Learned

Nathan Latka

12:31Yeah. Well, it's 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 do what you're saying you're going to do. But I agree with you, the things are all over the place right now multiple wise. In the meantime though, let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite business book?

Rob Dickinson

12:49>> Oh gosh. How to Win Friends and Influence People.

12:53>> Honestly, I know it's totally old school, but yeah.

Nathan Latka

12:57Problem. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Rob Dickinson

13:03>> Specifically?

13:07>> Gosh, my network is really the Vistage network.

13:14>> I really my And fellow Vistage CEOs are really the peers that I look after the most.

Nathan Latka

13:21Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building Resurface?

Rob Dickinson

13:26>> Squarespace.

Nathan Latka

13:27Number four, how many hours of sleep do get every night?

Rob Dickinson

13:32>> Four to five.

Nathan Latka

13:34That is not healthy.

13:37Why do you sleep so low? Don't you have to

13:39prioritize that a little bit?

Rob Dickinson

13:42>> 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.

Nathan Latka

13:49I feel you. Alright. So I'm married with three kids?

Rob Dickinson

13:52>> Yes.

Nathan Latka

13:53Alrighty. And how old are you?

Rob Dickinson

13:55>> I am 49.

Nathan Latka

13:56Take us home. Last question here. Something you wish you knew when you were 20, Rob.

Rob Dickinson

14:02>> Oh, gosh.

14:07>> It was 20.

14:11>> Fail a lot. Failure is good. Having opportunities to fail sooner rather than later are even better.

Nathan Latka

14:19Guys, resurface.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 care of those API endpoints to make sure, again, they are safe, they are secure. They're charging per node, right? $10,000 per year per node. For customers live today with about, call it 10 nodes, right? It's about 12 nodes, dollars 120,000 a year in revenue as they look to scale deploying the

14:43$2,000,000 they raise in their pre seed round during COVID. Five folks on the team today as they look to scale. Rob, thanks for taking us to the top.

Rob Dickinson

14:50>> Thanks so much. Appreciate it.

Nathan Latka

14:53One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM Central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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 one

15:18p. M. Central. Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at two 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 SaaS world, whether it's

15:39an 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 wanna take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS founders. You wanna 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

16:01saying. Sign up for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty 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

16:21those people. We got to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. Alright, I'll be in the comments. See you.