How Sendbird CEO John Kim grew Sendbird to $40M revenue and 422 customers in 2024.

just got done editing this interview you guys are gonna love it before i do that though i want you to know that i'm going to be in the comments for the next 30 minutes or so answering your questions if there's additional questions you want me to ask the ceo next time i interview them leave them below or if you're just loving the data points i get ceos to share click the thumbs up button below that's your way of telling me you're loving this stuff and i'll get you more of it additionally again i'll be in the comments answering any questions you have all right for 30 minutes enjoy the interview hello everyone my guest today is john kim he's the co-founder and ceo of senbird a y combinator w16 class is a b2b startup providing a messaging solution for enterprises the platform currently serves tens of millions of monthly active users and many of the best known logos around the world like yahoo sports hinge and one of the most active websites in the world john is a serial entrepreneur and expert in the messaging space a little known about john is that he was korea's number one pro gamer for unreal tournament john you ready to take us to the top yeah all right that's good let's do it i'm not as cool as you so what does what is the unreal tournament uh real tournaments one of those uh earliest uh generation first person shooters uh like overwatch but just generations earlier so you were in like a massive competition in the finale and you had to message one of your teammates through the gaming platform and it broke and you said i'm gonna launch senberg to fix messaging once and for all right yep something like that all right in all seriousness so so what takes you from a gamer to a software entrepreneur when you come up with the idea for sunbird yeah um we actually started sun bird around the beginning of 2013 uh back then we were we actually started out as a species company we were building a community app for moms and uh we were trying to add a chat feature for our own application that's kind of when we realized there wasn't a decent like modern sdk which we could just plug in and play so we ended up building the entire chestnut ourselves and then started selling that on the sideline and that actually generated more revenue and more customers than our main b2c application so we had to pivot and then we fully launched at the y combinator so when was the mom site launched what year it was 2013. oh it was 2013. okay and is is like if i look up your llc right now for sun bird will it say like you know mom's org dba sandberg in other words the same cap table same company or no yeah same company uh same cap table we started out as small family and then uh we actually changed our name to sandberg inc uh many many years later i think around uh after series b okay it's been a like smile family for almost four years five years did you did you apply to yc as the mom kind of community or had you already pivoted so we first applied to i was a wood demon's application uh we didn't get in that time um but we after pivoting we applied again into the in late 2015 and that's when we were accepted as sunburn okay so give me some context at that moment in time so in 2015 uh or was your product basically what it is today at least the origins of it yeah so we started building what became sunburn around 2015 and then we were kind of doing the private you know access you know friends and family uh self-defense and families in the industry then we um fully popular product at the end of 2015 that's when we applied to yc with that idea that launched in january of 2016. okay now a lot of my listeners will be very familiar with obviously intercom like these kind of companies right that are kind of you know whiskey wig drag as you drop true or false you're essentially an enterprise version of this that's more like acts more like an sdk than a kind of javascript plug-in on a website is that accurate yeah uh two way to look at it one is it's a plug-and-play sdk an api for developers so we don't sell to marketers or sales or contact centers we sell to product managers and engineers and two our primary use case is user-to-user communication and that user could be two people chatting on a dating app or seller talking buyer in the marketplace food delivery person talking to the customer on their application so it's that easy to use or communication is what we do yeah me texting my uber driver saying i'm wearing a black cat standing on the upper level of the airport come find me yeah when when do you win the uber account uh we're we haven't yet won the uber account but we pretty much work with uber light companies all across the world uh we practically work with the number one companies in almost all countries except uber yeah so stay tuned stay tuned there you go okay let's dive into your pricing model so so what are companies paying on average per month or per year to use this technology it really depends on how uh how much volume you're uh buying so are primarily uh it really depends on how much and um yeah so if you have a couple thousand users the price per user would be relatively more higher than let's say if you're if you have tens of millions of users on a monthly basis and today we currently power about 100 million uh users that chat through a platform every month okay uh just because you have i'm sure you have so many different cohorts you probably have smbs mid-market and then large enterprise accounts give me kind of a sweet spot here right are we talking like a ten thousand dollar your account is pretty average or a hundred 000 a year you know very enterprise um so overall uh acv i would say is in the tens of thousands but as small as a couple of thousand bucks a month a year all the way up to millions of dollars a year yep so let's see let's uh the reason i want to do this is to use a real example so let's say that i'm signing up for your platform and i'm going to pay your sweet spot let's say it's 30 000 per year how many messages am i likely paying for going through my platform over that year so we don't charge per message so we highly encourage our customers to send as many messages as possible it just purely um depends on the monthly active users so usually our customers know their monthly active users numbers by heart so so what would my ma monthly active users probably be if i'm paying you 30 grand a year really depends on what kind of premium features you're picking could be 10 uh could be hundreds of thousands of users wait tens of thousands of dollars a month no no let's say i'm in your sweet spot you said your sweet spot acv is probably you know tens of thousands per year so let's say i'm paying you 30k per year that customer how many how many users do i probably have on my platform so it's a little bit more complicated than uh three shoot but uh basically it could be tens of thousands of monthly active users going up to uh a hundred thousand uh monthly active users okay fair enough got it so you're price you're up selling against two pricing verticals the your customers monthly active users uh along with any feature based upselling you're doing yeah things like if you have hipaa compliance or if you want to private dedicated servers instead of being on a multi-tenant servers if you unlock advanced moderation capabilities and so forth so there are certain features that a certain type of customers would prefer that are not really relevant to the entire customer base they will actually create a bespoke plan for them so 2013 mom site pivot in 2015 start writing lines of code for this sdk you get into yc with this idea uh when was your first dollar of revenue on the new idea um that was around may of 2015. uh 50 a month a small gaming studio uh then we had like 20 pain customers uh all over different pricing points by the time we applied to yc because it was our first time doing b2b we didn't know what we were doing yeah so 2015 it 20 customers total by the end of the year applying to ic getting in uh and then help us understand where you've scaled to today how many customers we have 422 paying customers 422. uh okay great 43 000 applications free applications yes so there's a lot of these 422 customers are like brands like maybe iac that run many you know social you know you know fishbowl uh tinder and another app so they'll pay you for those three and so that's the three thousand applications yeah yeah yeah okay very good so 422 customers uh okay nice growth here um help me understand how you went from 20 customers in 2015 to 400 today in other words what's your kind of go-to-market strategy is an outbound strategy inbound something else so it has evolved quite a bit since the year uh since the past couple of years so uh in the beginning we started out with content purely seo and targeting a couple of developer websites for the presex overflow and things like that so still to the state a majority of our revenue do come from inbound inquiries from developers around the world uh geo distribution wise we have customers in u.s about 40 percent come from u.s about 30 percent confirming yeah 30 coming from apex so it's very globally distributed now since uh a couple of years back when we start building the internal sales team we also started building the outbound engine so um i believe for the past about two years outbound engine has been continued to grow grow growth so right now i think it's a really...