How SKYPAD CEO Jay Hakami grew SKYPAD to $11.8M revenue and 500 customers in 2025.

founders what's going on you guys know i love in-person events and they are back the recording you're about to hear is from our most recent event where we had hundreds of founders come together share intimate details templates kpis okrs about their business and it was something special something special we'd love to meet you in person if you want to see the next live events we have coming up via our schedule the link will be down below in the description if you're listening on itunes check this out on youtube you'll see the links in the description or you can just google founder path or latka next event we'd love to see you in person in the meantime though enjoy this recording it's a good one good morning everyone who's from new york new york city very few i'm three blocks down from and i was late um so good morning everyone uh my presentation today would be great actually it's actually great to follow henry who does what 500 million with my ten million ten million dollars but um but i will take you through our company our success story um can you hear me okay okay good um anybody know what bootstrap what's what the term came from please anybody know bootstrap i looked it up i'm not that that smart so bootstrap you know it's the little things on your boots that you kind of help pull your boots up so back in the 18 19th century um it used to be called bootstrap with means that you have to can you lift yourself with your bootstrap which is basically impossible can you imagine going down and lifting yourself with your boot trap is impossible in the 20th century meaning today it's making something out of nothing okay so take that take a note mention to your wife you sound smart so let me take you through my um my story here um let me see if i can work this here we go so um the next 20 minutes i'm going to go over a couple of things number one um three three big moments in our journey everybody has their own war stories i'll give you hours the second thing is uh hitting the targets how do we get how do we get to 10 million from uh from from from zero i guess and then the three matrix the three kpis that we look at as a business that may help you down the road um our growth we started back in 2010 and it's a it's interest it's a beautiful graph it goes up and hopefully we'll continue to do so we're bootstrapped we did not take any outside money uh not from the banks not from a1 i own 100 of the company um and basically we we we started and we had along the way uh some great successes and a lot of hiccups as well uh the three big moments that i'll take you through is number one idea to action so how we come with the idea um it was actually a real napkin actually there's a picture of the napkin right there see if i can go back okay so the what we do is we are a hub between the retailer the large department stores neiman marco sacks nordstrom macy's and the brands and their suppliers what we found we found the problem an issue with the way they're communicating the sell-through between the retailers and the brands and we solved that problem by allowing the brands to gain access to the sales data from the retailers what we do is we collect the data we cleanse the data and then we populate it into a ui so you can see what's selling what's not selling and so on and so forth the business has evolved since then so we started back in 2010 uh our first customer was theory everybody knows theory that company theory jackets suit okay uh theo still our customer by the way um and the way we came to them is with not this but we came with this let me show you with this we're going to take we're going to collect your data from the department stores you're in we connect we're going to collect the data from your erp system we're going to bring it into a sky into our database we're going to cleanse it we're going to match it because there's a lot of matching with colors and and so on and so forth and then we're going to give you a ui you can actually see what's selling what's not selling by any combination of product attribute which is seasoned color size time dimension last week versus this week as well as geographic location so we came to theory with this uh with this idea there was no there was nothing there was no product there was nothing out there and they had they had something they tried to do in-house and we said oh we can do we can build a much much better mousetrap for you and that's how we got started this is this what happened so theo was our first customer we moved on and then what happened is that we actually developed a real dashboard that enables you to see key metrics on your business so it goes through i mean it's basically click and go you you want to see your top top retailers you want to see your top styles you can just click you go in in sub second response time it gives you the information back you can do it by time dimension you can do it by geographic location you can do it by um product attributes okay i think you get the idea so this was all great now let's talk about the hiccups okay i mean anyone here did not have issues starting a business i'm sure most of you did not uh so i'll show you i'll share with ours or uh first churn was a small company called tommy hilfinger anybody knows them okay mr tommy came to us he was a second customer after theory by the way theory and i mentioned that to nathan did not have a contract it was a handshake we know the we knew the owner andrew rosen we handshake we knew me for years he said i'm just going to do it um so nathan was saying where's the contract what's the contract with i said anything there's no contract there was a handshake g3 was actually the third customer but tommy was the second customer who were so excited about tommy a huge customer this is our second customer within three months defunct the data was wrong the information was incorrect they threw us out you know the tail you know belief on feet we just walked out of that business we just did the poor very very poor job that was our first big turn and you have to remember this is a small industry um once you once you deal with um once you deal with a retailer or a brand and you don't succeed everybody else knows the second hiccup we had was neiman marcus so think about this for a second just imagine you're collecting data from all these retailers right nobody has agreements with you the retailers do not know you're collecting these data that's data on behalf of the brands and all of a sudden we get a call not a call we got a letter uh from neiman marcus cease and deceased okay what's going on they're saying you're collecting our sell-through numbers you're giving it to the brands we're doing that also why are they using you and paying you rather than use hours the first thing obviously you can imagine we had about maybe four or five customers maybe ten customers by then uh and ceasing the seas knocking off new marcus would be a big impact on our business so luckily three weeks before this love letter i met i met with the ceo at the time his name is jim gold uh i did not meet him he presented and i was sitting all the way in the back somewhere i'm not really shook his hand or anything and he presented something about quality and integrity and yada yada so i wrote him a letter remember those you know not an email a letter um for those of you who remember how to write letters so i wrote him a letter and i sent it through the mail to him and i told him look this is what we do i i heard your speech on the integrity and and uh that your company has and i'm so excited and we do the same thing now business he did not know what to make of that letter so he said uh why don't we turn it to your right i called him up after that follow-up um not once not twice three times four times and the fifth time he picked up um and i told him again what we do and so on and then j real quick can we spice i'm to your left in the back can i spices up for a second how big was this season i mean did they threaten you like how big was the lawsuit the lawsuit was basically if you don't stop collecting data from us we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna hit you with a million dollar fine a million companies doing that that's my profit last month i can handle it yeah well not really when we're doing 25 million dollars in mrr i'm not sure how we can afford it um so neiman marcus um you know neiman marcus was the uh the hiccup we had but we turned that to an opportunity after the conversation he did not did not know exactly what we do didn't understand what we do and he turned me to the cio okay so we had a conversation sarah forget the last name sarah we had a conversation with her she said okay if you're collecting data and the brands are happy with it why don't we sign an nda with you so india sounds good let's get the nda on board we got the nda we signed the nda we collected we continued to collecting data from them and then i said wait a second um why don't we get together i mean you're in dallas we're in new york it's only a plane away we got together with them we...