How Skiff CEO Andrew Milich grew Skiff to $451.2K revenue and 1K customers in 2023.

hey folks my guest today is andrew miller he's the co-founder and ceo of skiff a private and encrypted web 3 native collaboration platform previously he was a henry ford ii scholar at stanford university and worked on autonomous vehicles at spacex andrew you ready to take us to the top i'm ready yeah thanks for having me nathan you bet what's the connection between autonomous vehicles and private and then encryption that's a great question so i've done some work you know unrelated on avs uh on security and on privacy before as well but i actually think for a lot of our team and some people also have backgrounds and working on autonomy and space and you know safety critical applications a lot of it is just loving to do engineering that is super intense you know the best testing the best security the best performance and i think that applies you know pretty clearly to working on stuff at spacex and autonomous vehicles and also to you know all the security and privacy work we do at skiff now if someone looked at your website and the screenshots you use they might mistake you for mo for notion right so like when you are in a sort of what a more private version of notion encrypted yeah i would say so skip's vision is to be this kind of web free native own your own data privacy first and encrypted workspace so a lot of that today is collaboration you know writing sharing sending documents and files but actually in a few weeks we're kind of broadening that vision significantly and bringing in kind of more aspects of the typical google work suite so you'll see that in the next few weeks um but yeah i mean we kind of built skiff from the ground up to be a lot like the collaborative products that have evolved today but significantly more private in its kind of foundations and the way the entire software is architected and also more importantly in the way the company is positioned where we don't have access to everything you write and you share and you're the only person who owns your data very interesting and so monetization model here would be what yeah great question so that's pretty similar to sas products you'll pay for a subscription or for kind of the storage and services you use i think skiff also has this option to sign in with a crypto wallet and we're kind of actually announcing some huge partnerships on that front you know in the next month as well but that opens up so many more possibilities for basically like monetizing a lot more in a granular way services that people really want to use you know your identity service is linked to your kind of financial services in this wallet and also to kind of more importantly public key infrastructure which which lets you actually communicate privately and securely with anyone else in the world interesting pre-revenue today or have to have a couple paying customers we have we have some paying customers a bunch of individuals and then um we're kind of we we have some kind of i'd say small to medium-sized businesses up to 100 people paying for skip and they're rolling out a self-serve enterprise option fingers crossed in the next couple days that's awesome it's a great it's a great time to be buildings that's exciting for you um what are folks paying average per month for it uh great question so uh for the individual plan people are paying i believe it's ten dollars a month or maybe there's an annual plan discount and enterprise is anywhere from um depending on the options you choose you know about double that okay got it so maybe 20 30. but you're talking about per seat or for the whole enterprise per person per month yeah per person per month okay um interesting and you know pricing is one of those things it's very tricky uh your boss elon is going thinking about this right now with twitter do you monetize do you not what happens but is 10 bucks a month the right price point how are you testing that how are you trying to get that answer that's a great question uh honestly from a lot of the entrepreneurs we've spoken with you know at this stage in the company you kind of throw a dart on the wall and look at just like the comps the comparables um so i don't know if you have any great pricing resources because we'd love to look at them but you know we've heard companies from evernote to google to you know many kind of um api products just kind of choose a really simple and you know intuitive number that divides nicely and is reasonable with comparables and then kind of take it from there so i don't know if you've seen any good resources on that either oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you 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products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform i hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview i mean i don't have any answers here i mean i think what where i do think there's a big gap here is what people never quantify with pricing is what you miss out on when you put up paywall in terms of engagement yeah what the opportunity cost is right and so like i think a lot of people put up a paywall because they want to make money if they've raised vc but ultimately if you have no paywall does your engagement go through the roof and you become the new defacto platform it's a hard balance yeah i totally agree with that i think a lot of the people on the team and you know the way the product is oriented today is to focus on growth and engagement and all that stuff like we specifically don't want to put paywalls on things that will make you kind of have a better experience on day one on skit so for example our templates feature which lets you kind of share and use antenna encrypted templates uh searching through antenna encrypted data which some other products and privacy monetize all of those are kind of just critical in migrating from any other product or you'd expect that and it's in your operating system or in you know all the kind of collaborative products you use today and so it'd be rough for us or kind of you know against our mission to monetize these things that let people on board on to skip and have a good experience so we don't want to monetize that i think a really interesting way to think about pricing but reverse engineering it for both you or anyone listening is to go is to ask yourself the question what percent of your users do you want to be paying and if you decide that it's one percent well then you go okay well what's the activation metric or the usage metric we're tracking yeah and how high does it have to be to only hit one percent of our power users so like for you might what that might be templates it sounds like or something like that yeah so one of the things we can monetize pretty easily is storage space people are probably paying for storage space in their life already whether it's on google or it's on dropbox or something else um and so that's something that's pretty common also it's you know it scales linearly with what you'd expect like you pay for more storage and you get more storage for your files so that's pretty simple um i think for us also enterprise and teams is really natural to monetize too of course one because like every...