How Skycision CEO Brendan Carroll grew Skycision 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...