How Smartling CEO Victor Fisyuk grew Smartling to $39.7M revenue and 500 customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest this morning is jack weldy he is the co-founder and ceo of a uh a company called smartling he's a technology early adopter serial entrepreneur software patent holder product evangelist and combat decorated air force pilot before founding smartlink he serves served as an svp of product at e-music and ceo and cto at she speaks and runtime technologies jack are you ready to take us to the top i am it's a long bio thank you nathan hey yeah of course we're glad to have you so you go from the air force to translation services how the hell does that happen i'm not sure actually that's a great question so uh you know i think there's a there's probably a pretty good explanation of that for one thing in the air force i grew up in the air force as a military dependent my dad was air force and then i was in the air force myself and i traveled all over the world i lived prob lived and worked probably 25 of my life outside of the u.s and so i think at some point the correlation between uh you know language and culture and how important those things are became very very clear and it became very obvious that hey there's a big wide world out there of people who are buying products and services and translation is important to that well thank you for your service jack now tell us about smartlink so so you hinted about what it does but what are you doing what's your business model how do you make money yeah so smartling is a software company we're a software company and we are we provide a sas platform a software as a service platform that helps companies to translate their digital content more effectively and more efficiently and so what does that mean it means companies have websites and email and support content and other marketing materials that if they want to reach customers around the world they need to translate into multiple languages and if you're doing that at any kind of scale it's just too hard to email things back and forth between an agency and then try to figure out where to put these in your content management systems in your marketing platforms and with software we can take care of all that for you the moment you create content that needs to be in 50 languages we can capture that content we can organize it we can route it to the right translators around the world and then we can deploy it right back where it belongs and put it in the hands of your customers faster that's what we and give me a sense of kind of customer sizes you like to work with what's the average customer paying you per month or per year yeah so our you know our customers pay us anywhere from you know ten thousand dollars a year all the way up to you know a couple million dollars a million million dollar plus a year and so it really depends on their particular needs um you know if you are a company that's producing a ton of content across 50 different languages and you're doing this a lot around around you know a dozen different channels then you're going to need more software if you're a smaller company or a two-person mobile app that's just starting out and you've got something that could potentially be a hit in the future and you're really just getting started with smaller content a smaller number of languages it doesn't cost quite as much so it really depends on what your particular needs are and how does the tech actually work are there humans involved or is it all kind of ai and natural language processing yeah so it's a little bit of both there's definitely humans involved and while while ai and machine translation you know computer generated translation like something like google translate you know has gone undergone some really incredible advances in the last year or so um translation is still one of those things that really requires humans particularly when you're talking about marketing content and high impact content that's mission critical to your operation but that said you know there are certainly things that we do to help to facilitate faster and better translation and we do that through a combination of software and people so we've got you know we have you know thousands and thousands of translators positioned around the world who understand full-time like what's your full-time team size we've got 200 people full time okay the rest are contractors yeah 10 000 contracted translators around the world yeah so the full-time people are largely around software and sales and customer service but you know when you're translating into french you probably want somebody who's working out of his or her home in paris if you're translating into chinese you want somebody who's working out of here's your home and say beijing and so it just makes more sense to be working with contractors who are working out of their home and wake up in the morning and say hey i've got eight customers eight clients that i'm working with i understand their brands i see the content that's coming in and now i'm ready to translate for that particular company and when did you launch the company eight years ago eight years ago we started the company 2009 huh 2009 yeah so we're just coming up on our on our eight year anniversary right now and uh it's been an exciting ride and what have you have you bootstrapped the company or raised capital uh we've raised capital we raised four rounds of capital we've raised 63 million dollars uh over this entire period um you know we started bootstrapped and if you remember 2009 that was a really challenging financial time so we definitely bootstrapped i put money in and my own experience as a software developer and we started building a team of other developers started building the platform and as we added more and more customers you know we said i know you like numbers here in the yeah this in this talk section of me jack yeah we started out uh you know we started out and said you know boy look i think if we could build a prototype and if we could get three customers three customers to use it and try it out and say you know hey this has actually been really really helpful to us it's helped us to grow our business internationally then we could use that to be able to go raise our first series a that's exactly what we set out to do and we didn't know how much to charge so we sort of tried to look at you know things like well how much costs are we avoiding for that particular company how much time are people spending managing this process by hand in a manual way that's just you know not very conducive to the kind of fast-moving you know bay area startup companies that we would typically work with how much time would be saving them how can we turn that into dollars we got three customers then we went out to the marketplace and were able to raise four million dollars and then from there we said okay now let's see what evaluation with those three customers that many years ago um well i think by the time we finished it up by the time we started the round you know i think we were and you know and we had by then about uh you know seven to ten customers paying us you know you know many you know tens of thousands of dollars on a on an annual basis up to you know a hundred thousand dollars then we you know that we were sort of in a six to ten million dollar sort of value in in that range that was a note or an equity round it was an equity round you know i think it was an equity round and uh and so we've just continued to grow from there and at every step in the process we've looked at what is the next thing we need to do and first it was about getting a prototype that worked and solved people's problems then it was about really perfecting that product and making the product better then it was about you know taking that that uh that product and making sure we could build a repeatable sales process and you know now we're at the stage we're really trying to uh you know to perfect things like you know every sas business is a subscription business you're asking people to pay you on a monthly or annual basis and the commitment we're making is we're going to continue to add new product features and capabilities to make our customers happy and the commitment we want back from our customers is keep paying us by the way jack what are you at today now in terms of total customers yeah so we're at we're at you know let's let's call it rapidly approaching about 500 enterprise customers right that's fine yeah seven to ten in years one and two that's pretty good not bad right it's great um but you know every year we churn some customers some customers leave for any number of reasons they churn because they are going out of business or because they you know they're having other troubles internally are you talking like five percent logo turn annually or 10 20 what is it yeah so that's a great question so you know we think about it both in terms of logo churn and we think about it in terms of revenue churn and realistically because we have a spread of customers that might be paying us ten thousand dollars a year all the way up to a million dollars plus what's really more important to us is revenue churn and so what we're trying to do there is make sure that we can retain as much revenue as possible from here and so look we're always targeting something in sort of the exemplary sash range of about you know eight to twelve percent something in that sort of sort of range is a really great place to be by the way we haven't always been talking gross revenue churn i'm talking about yeah i'm talking about that i i accept that we will not be able to keep every single customer so jack...