How Skycision CEO Brendan Carroll grew to $132K revenue and 11 customers in 2018.

hello everyone my guest today is Brendan Carroll he's the co-founder and CEO of sky sition an award-winning technology provider that helps enhance the productivity and profitability of the global agriculture industry Brendan are you ready to take it to the top absolutely all right man tell us about the company and what do you guys do in how do you make money yeah absolutely so we help farmers enhance their productivity of their crops in their fields as well as the profitability their operation and we do that by basically giving them more of a real-time view and control of their operations so traditionally in farming they it's a very labor driven and reactive so they would have manual labor walking their fields or driving it by pickup truck hundreds of thousands of acres they take a sample generalize it a lot of times when they go to generalize that sample things go miss and that's when pass disease weed mould and physicians happen and that's when they lose crops and ultimately lose potential yields or a profitability that could be driving revenue for their operations so we leveraged image reflected by off-the-shelf drones as well as global satellites infuse that with sensor data from their fields to give them an idea of exactly how crops are performing in real time and also what are the driving factors behind that so does every one of your customers have to buy one of these drones then or no you rent them or something so so that's something that we can be iterated on this year so originally we integrated with the world's largest manufacturer the DJI who actually created the drums and we originally depended on them having one and they were very affordable but we've actually started contracting basis leaves third party pilots or like drone service providers that are using our analytics to serve farmers or we even have some pilots on staff that will go fly for them for a little bit more so really we want to give them the data and make that accessible as possible staff of kind of drone fliers spread all across the world to service your customers so it is in it would be if it was just drone pilots so what we've done is we've actually kind of fused them with a customer success role and so basically they'll have customers that they're managing they also have a territory that they might be flying for and in the meantime we're basically building out a pilot network of a third party that we also have a different customer success team for where we can base almost like an uber for imagery I see I see so what's it to what's the team ties today so right now we're only a full-time team of six ok ah we're in our third year of operation we started in September of 2015 2015 in our six of you where you guys all based so we're spread out a little bit there's three of us here in Pittsburgh one in California one in North Carolina and one in Boston okay and walk me through kind of the revenue model so is this a pure place task company what are the farmers pay for month on average so on average so it's based on per acre and then the number of flights that they have per acre and so we'll start at like say $3 per acre but if they want to do a ten or twenty five thousand acre contract that might break down to closer to $1 per acre kind of building data you can use a scale if you will that totally makes a lot of sense tying it directly to those numbers so what would you say the average is per month so the average per month per customer yeah I'd say they're probably paying about a thousand per customer okay that's great and so does that mean the average from is about a thousand acres that you're scanning about 500 500 okay great and there's just different volume discounts which make up for that um all right so 2015 was launch date what do yet today in terms of total customers you're working with so deployed over 200 different operations through 11 different customers so several of those are very large channels we have over 50 that's in our kind of a contract stage of our pipeline we're kind of just going into a year now where the technology is built has been validated and verified and we're kind of moving into that sales funnel as we speak so we're starting to see we're seeing 25 months over month growth since January and so we're probably looking at 35 to 50 by year's end yep clear though I want to make sure though I'm gonna have these numbers right so 11 customers out of grand a month you're doing about 11 grand per month right now in revenue correct yeah okay got it so you'll plan to get that add another five six grand of that by the end of the year yes correct okay why so Brendon obviously the the percentage seems really high but with low numbers it's actually not a ton of growth you should be growing like way fashion that what makes this why can't you grow this for x between now on the end of the year yeah absolutely no that's a good question so I think right now at this stage there's so in our third year there's certain efficiencies that we need to basically build out in terms of automation right there are certain things in the back-end processing that basically allowed this to infinitely scale where someone can just log in and automatically do this versus us having that somehow intervene manually right so we're automating that and then also the sales process at this point we have to have a manual clutch point and so eventually that's gonna move to more of a subscription model online as opposed to quoting everything out based on utilization why have you made the decision to kind of own the whole stack in other words the on the boots person representing the locate the Ocala customer support the actual scanning versus just owning the Tek and then putting the tech in the drone app stores for farmers right yeah so for us it's really important to have interface with the customer so one thing about actually delivering value to the customer if we remove one of those links that abstract us say from like the mobile app Webber's flying or whoever secure in that contract with the person who's realizing the value from that data we're removing ourselves from the value realization of the client as well and so what you're driving at is correct that it may slow us down initially but down the road it's gonna substantially we've already seen it enhance our ability to ensure the success of our customers deployments overcome hurdles that others in the industry may be experiencing is your tech really really remarkable is it do something that no other drone technology can do it is I say that there's probably about three or four companies that are competitive with what we do today but it's um it's one of those four in the market that are on the cutting edge crap oh yeah it's just cuz this seems like I mean you are your ex football player you know about competition it this seems like you're competing on many different fronts and these aren't little battles these are multibillion-dollar battles so the if here's my other question right so if you don't feel like your tech if you have if there's other tech options three or four that are like yours but you know the challenge is that they're also probably having with getting all the local farmers across the u.s. in the country what if you did the other end you just actually did a roll up strategy and you owned and you built a team that owned essentially all of the relationships with every farmer in the US and then you've sold through and license other people's tech that way you're only competing on one front I'm trying to get in your head understand while you're competing on two fronts here so that absolutely an opportunity that we could evolve into in the future right now we're one of the focuses our tech stack is deep but it's highly nuanced in focus right so the drone industry which is you today is you see a lot of drone manufacturers that are creating drones that can do everything from forestry to utility and asset inspection to construction to mining sites and there's a lot of companies that are developing an apps that are meant to serve the whole drone sector a whole industry across all of these industries we're specifically focused within agriculture and not even just within agriculture but we're really focused on nuanced high-value profits and so in terms of actually thinking the imagery and applying computer vision functions that extract nuanced capabilities where food is time dominated in each and then expanding on top of that and once we do that then we might look at how we can actually catalyze other components of industries say so-and-so has a fantastic platform maybe one of our computer vision applications can go through them and scale that way but we're very focused on dominating in each to start off and winning something that we can absolutely deliver value on and then it expanded into networks from there how do you go so obviously understanding a a scan I'm making this up of a three acre forest from above and understanding that in the upper right quadrant there is a termite infestation that someone has to take care of your ability to recognize that nuance from a map that is generated from your technology is directly dependent on how many times you've done that because then the patterns feed your machine and your machine gets smarter there's obviously significant network effects there for a company that already has a thousand scans done if you've only done ten scans how do you ever overcome those Network effects yes so it's not also just the volume of scans but also the quality of scans right so when you think this is a field called remote sensing so when you think of remote sensing a drone is just a platform you can also have a manned aircraft or you could have a satellite aircraft that satellite both battle problems say with like cloud cover or distance from the ground where join imagery is a little bit more highly accurate and so the quality of that data and a lot of data cleansing to even enable those network effects is basically enriched from that the other thing also is if you're talking about for example with termites they actually train the data set to say recognize this each and every time do not have a substantial amount of forces data sets from item to stations to do that with a high level of confidence and so by focusing specifically on specialty projects that are very high value we're putting ourselves in that position to do this we're gonna see others are really much more flat it that's about Rania's what nice you're going at so name some of these crops they were focused on so our biggest market right now is in vineyards we started off in Napa Valley we have over I think close to 180 different vineyards that we're working with currently we're now these are well up though 211 though cuts actual customers to own multiple vineyards correct so what you see is a lot of times you have like a manager like contract labor like a vineyard manager pest control adviser so on and so forth and so these customers will actually a lot of times deploy our solutions to 80 to a hundred different farms at a time or you know forty fifty to pay on the size of them and so we have and have our client tell us basically those kind of you know claps that's interesting um let's talk about let's go macro level here for a second like the drone industry overall you know there's an opport you know when when photography and photos came out and now you have all these sites like snapper where you can go hire a photographer on-demand anywhere in the world the opportunity cost is then you'd have to go buy your own camera right do you think there will be I mean or it doesn't already want to exist will there be a network like that but for go you know rent a drone anywhere in the world whatever you want versus consumers buying them directly that meant that vineyard manager just buying their own drone so so there's two elements here one is the impact of commoditization drones are becoming so affordable and accessible um that any kind of grower could go and buy their own drum the problem is because comes when it really want to use just like an enterprise scientific tool you have to use the right types of sensors you have to calibrate there's certain data collection standards that you have to follow that's can be painful and at that point in time there's more so instead of a drone rental network there's a drone service provider network where there's basically licensed pilots these guys are professional basically surveyors and really quality results are delivered and so you do hire a pilot to come in and then fly for X amount of hours X amount of acres or however they price and that's kind of more so the model that you'd be looking at and can you sue someone who owns a vineyard listening right now might be thinking well listen I'll just get like a basic drone with a camera on it I'll fight over my vineyard and I'll see that without having to walk every morning each row I'll see that row three in the first two hundred feet like things are turning brown right something's wrong there let me go walk out and look at it name something that your tech can do that it won't that is not it's not a visual indicator it's some other indicator you've picked up no so so an off-the-shelf drone would be great for that you see exactly it's a basically give you a bird's eye view of visual imagery just the way you you and I see what we are looking at though is actually near-infrared light spectrum but the human eye cannot detect and it's in this spectrum that is hypersensitive to chlorophyll content and photosynthetic activity in the crop and so what happens is we're actually measuring reflectance profiles and some windows drop rapidly many times it can indicate pest or disease about two weeks earlier the human eye can even detect it and so not only that but we're actually calibrating it for the intensity of light so you can imagine that a very bright day likely reflects very heavily versus of cloudy day and so one day our cups look healthy one day they look dead we don't have the right sensors or the right data provider like sky decision your stress and injuries are just going to be wrong because you're not accounting for basically statistical variability so ours is calibrated to the same scale at every single time so we can also measure the emergence of change and the difference between flight one flight students like tack and why does that data capture have to have a drone perspective I mean if this tech exists why don't people just go install little pods on the ground or something to track this stuff so it does not have to happen from the drone perspective we started with the Thrones and I'd say it's believed most of the premium solution we also leverage satellite imagery and much for like much larger acreage scale operations if you will but the resolution is a hundred times less as well as you can't really see the visual industry at all in most cases kind of cloud cover atmospheric interference things like that from a ground perspective we see a lot of basically sensors being installed in a hack today there's a weather monitor whether it's a soil moisture probe but it's a point of source data collection unit right and so we know exactly what the measurements are with that location but if it's a thousand acre operation we can't necessarily extrapolate that to hundred acres in the other direction yep and so really kind of a layered aerial plus ground solution is where the industry needs to go and kind of work the still updating our direction dr. Brennan let's wrap up here a quick questions bootstrap Derby raised we breeze 1.1 million ok got it so you have raised some capital that's good stuff and then let's let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book this book is locally shaima's you're the one by Peter Thiel really enjoy it I just challenge you to think outside of you know traditional perspectives number two is their CEO you're falling or studying right now following or sodium I guess you know Elon Musk is always in the news and so it's hard not to be following him I definitely follow Travis County through kind of some of the stuff that he went through with uber on the way out I thought that was really kind of interesting from a case that you perspective but I'd say probably those two from the top of mine number three with your favorite online tool for building your business favorite online tool we use HubSpot pretty religiously so as our CRM as well as kind of our marketing follow saw so forth so number four how many hours of sleep are you in every night uh varies but I'd say on average between four and six when it's more so towards the four side there's some power naps during the day but for six yep and what's your situation married single kids girlfriend we just actually just moved in this past weekend so we're just settled under the new plays stops and yeah that's great no kiddos yet no kiddos yeah and Howard are you Brandon I'm Quinn 7:27 last question what do what your 20 year old self knew with twenty years son when your little self um I'd say to make it like light-hearted I say Do Not Disturb button on emails um you really kind of get in the work forces is a huge distraction and productivity hack if you can just really cannot partition your day gonna stop on those so that's taught me a lot recently I agree guys there you have it from and again founded sky sition throwing his hat into the ring of the very popular drone industry can be dangerous you can get lost very easy and find yourself competing with big companies he's hedged that risk by going and hyper focusing on high yield crops where if he solved the problem it's worth a lot of money specifically is focused on napa valley and even more specifically obviously there on vineyards and vineyard production and output especially on indicators that you know farmers or folks working these vines can't see by themselves visually so good stuff they're currently working with about eleven different brands across many hundred different farms thousands of acres each farm or each brand paying about a grand per month so eleven grand in revenue growing fast hoping to you know double or triple that here by the end of the year brandon thank you for taking us to the top awesome thanks so much appreciate it