How Scoop CEO Guillaume Decugis grew Scoop to $10.2M revenue and 250 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is zack rose and he pioneered the first large-scale drupal website for the howard dean campaign in 2003 and then co-founded the world's first drupal development shop civic space he then went on to co-found a successful drupal development shop chapter 3 and also co-founded mission bicycle what started as a professional website development epiphany we're doing it wrong evolved into an all-in-one platform after he and a few trusted colleagues got together and started solving problems we're gonna jump into pantheon today zach are you ready to take us to the top sure all right so tell us about the company what's pantheon doing how do you generate revenue yeah so we are a website operations platform for wordpress and drupal so we host websites but our our real value is our developer tools and we're built for marketers who want to iterate really quickly on the websites got it and so how are you different than like a wordpress or weebly or wix or squarespace yeah so the website industry is very it's very large industry it's about 200 billion dollars a year so as an industry we spent more money on our websites than anything else more than digital advertising and there are a few different segments of uh a product so on one end of the marketplace you have the wixis weebly's squarespaces and those are built for uh companies where the business owner typically is building the website themselves so you're choosing a template buying domain name and then launching website in a you know a couple hours so we those are not our customers so we work with companies where they have professional marketers on staff and the marketers are designing and building the website to drive the business and uh and then it was an enterprise part of the marketplace where uh your customers who spend upwards of three four five million dollars on a single website implementation okay so if you're playing only in the enterprise space then and it's a sas model we're much more in the mid market okay okay is it is revenue model wise is it a pure play sas model yeah it's all fast okay so like i mean what on average you are paying you a grand per month or what's the average would you say it's a wide range so it ranges from you know a few hundred dollars a year you know 20 30 bucks a month up three customers though you know in the millions okay got it but so i mean those are you know developing in terms of your engineering resources for 20 a month customer versus a million dollar your customer very different product roadmaps i mean where are you generally focused smb or or the million dollar plus range it's actually you'd be surprised so the product the core product is the same for our million dollar customers as our uh 25 a month customer and it's because uh we built it for web teams so the commonality is the the uh smaller customers are serviced by agencies so the agency has a web team that's you know building dozens of websites or hundreds of websites that can service you know customers of that scale and then the larger customers the websites are bigger and have you right there are some product differences there's you know security compliance scalability performs all that kind of stuff uh that they have but you know it turns out folks who who have small businesses care about performance as well so it's essentially the same product what i mean but there's there's a reason someone's paying you 30 bucks a month versus 30 grand a month right is it mainly like number of seats on the team is it an sla agreement i mean what is it yeah it's a good so good question so it is a combination of number of sites traffic of the sites and then support requirements around the site okay fair enough got it good let's go back here and get more of the back story so what did you launch the company officially in so we got to market in 2012 uh and it came out of the consulting work that we were doing so we specialize essentially in devops for large-scale website projects so we helped rebuild the economist uh and projects for the nbc where uh you know they pay upwards of a million dollars just on the devops infrastructure and we did that all by hand we give it back to the it teams at the end of it and typically the customers really did not have the skill sets internally to manage the infrastructure themselves you know i.t teams typically they have the skill sets to manage servers and slas around them when you get in the world of website devops you you have cdns caching apm you know like you know the whole lamp stack and then you have dev environments test environments deployment systems caching systems it's a very long spew of technologies that you have to master and so what we would see the pattern would be basically that the the website developers themselves would have to do the devops because the it teams just didn't have that background uh which wasn't any fun for them so it'd be like hey jen you know the only one we trust to deploy changes guess what your new job is you're now going to deploy everyone's changes which is pretty miserable uh for jen so uh eventually the light bulb went off we you know did that project you know about a half a dozen times uh and exactly what was what was the consultancy revenue before you started thinking about sas when you're doing two million a year five million or a million a year yeah it's around five million five million a year okay and then in 2012 you said we need to we need to productize this uh yes a little before that we need to productize this and turn it into a sas service and so we incubated it inside the uh the web agency for a little bit and then took them there yeah it's a smart way to do it um you've got a built-in customer base with your agency customers now what are you at today in terms of team size so uh panther's about 150 people okay based where uh many of us are in san francisco uh but we we have to be global so we have you know team we have a couple of offices around the world and we have uh folks in everything essentially every continent you're you're in san fran though yeah we're based in san francisco okay well then i have a thing i know they answer the next question but i'm gonna ask it anyway and maybe you'll surprise me uh bootstrapped or if you raise capital wait we raised capital yeah of course so how much have you guys raised to date uh it's all public so about 50 million okay five zero and where i mean the first round of capital what year was that and would you use that primarily on so that was back in 2011 i think we closed our c round uh and it was invested mostly in the product it took us a while to get to market it took us a couple years because from the get-go uh we knew we didn't want to be constrained with the typical uh kind of problems that hosting companies run into so the way most of our competitors do this is they put you uh on a biscuit vm uh and then on a virtual machine yep uh and then uh but if you wanna iterate on your website you know develop on it uh you safely you want to have you know a different dev environment so then they have to spin up a second vm and then when you actually deploy the website in the live environment uh and deal with you know lots of traffic you probably want to cluster with high availability and then you have basically the spew of servers uh and so you end up running if you're running at our skill you know in the tens of thousands of of servers you have to manage and and then you know scaling between them is very complicated they're all a little bespoke so it's hard to manage them at scale so we we knew we wanted something uh an order of magnitude more efficient and so we uh took the time to build uh build what we saw was kind of the right way of doing it which is to do it on a containerized platform so we we're the only ones who have a a multi-tenant um operations platform for drupal and wordpress where we can scale you really smoothly in containers from a tiny website that pays you know in the 20 month range to very very large websites that get you know many millions of visitors uh and the other piece of it is we uh knew we wanted to work with what so we we think that the way actually most marketers build the website is completely wrong uh the way most websites get built is you have a uh essentially a website relaunch project where you you know you don't like your current website so you go in and hire you know the marketer goes and hires an agency to do a big rebrand uh or uh so we do all the messaging information architecture the the design phase on those projects is typically like three to six months and then uh and then you have to develop which might be another uh six months of time or a year of time and by time you launch the website for most large organizations you're you're a year or two years into it and then when marketers launched a website and they think it feels you know the website they launched it feels outdated already that's because yeah you designed it two years ago um and then for most companies that the killer is that the website is there uh and you maybe got 60 of the things right in the website we lost before you ran into budget but the 40 that's wrong kind of steers you in the face for months and months months and then people get really angsty about it and then kind of repeat the process yeah so zach let's let's get just because we're running short on time here so the...