How Summaraize CEO Jay Desai grew Summaraize to $43.6K revenue and 30 customers in 2024.

guys Jay's a non-engineer who's launched a SAS tool called summarize.com Helping podcasts and YouTube hosts cut up their content summarize it and then Market it back out on platforms first non-line of code written in January this year he got going brought on a co-founder four months later they split Equity 40 at 50 50 monthly recurring Revenue today is called 2 000 bucks of which 30 customers paying 30 bucks a month is the recurring fee they do another pay-as-you-go model that makes up another 1K on top of that they've already grown this month in July 2023 they've already collected 3.4 million of Revenue his goal is hit 20 000 a month by the end of the year we will see what happened hey folks my guest today is Jay decides a three times first marketing higher previously helped a startup grow from six clients to 400 and under a year that's now exited currently co-founder of summarize he's built the MVP in one week through no code and a hundred dollars and now is head of marketing at Captivate Talent building uh Captivate Talent building out inbound from zero Jay you ready to take us to the top yeah let's do it all right so just be clear you're doing your own startup at summarize but you have a safety net you have a backup plan head of marketing at Captivate Talent huh yeah that's correct uh makes it a little bit easier I've done the uh founder role before without that safety net and uh it's not as fun don't you have to cut the safety net though so that you have no choice but to exceed at the start or succeed at the startup definitely but you know I have a lot of like personal like I guess risk factors as well so you know I just got a house with my fiance uh you know we have a car we've got other things to take care of bills and all of those things so it makes it a little bit easier where it feels like instead of coming from a place of like I need to start making Revenue like as fast as possible because I need to recoup my investment which is essentially draining for my personal bank account um to hey like we can actually make smart decisions think a little bit more long term versus like I need to collect as much cash as possible to to have that safety net tell us about the product uh specifically a customer that's using you today and how they use you yeah so we're used by a lot of podcast hosts content creators content marketing teams essentially what they'll do is they'll drop in either their podcast file or video content including like webinars customer interviews and we use AI to basically summarize that so we split it out we give you the time stamps quotes from each section overall summary title suggestions we turn it into LinkedIn posts Twitter threads blog posts uh just basically a bunch of stuff and all you do is like upload a file fill out a couple of items on a form and then we just deliver the content back to you in about five to ten minutes and what's the average customer pay you per month to use the tech so our average customer pays Us close to thirty dollars a month um I think our the last time I checked our uh average order value is about twenty eight dollars that's great and put this on a timeline for me when did you launch the business so I originally launched it back at the beginning of January it took me about a week to build out the MVP we get a break actually a Captivate Talent between Christmas and New Year so I spent that week building out a first version of the product uh launched at January 1st and uh the first version was built on no code I've brought in a co-founder about four months in and we've been working on it ever since together um what what Equity premium do you get over your other co-founder because you took the risk four months earlier we actually decided to split it down the middle and the reason for that is because a few other competitors started popping up as well around the same time and I don't have a technical background and these other competitors also had like two or three co-founders so for me I kind of had to make a decision like do I want to get 100 of a grape or 25 of a watermelon and I decided splitting it down the middle kind of a line incentives and I think that made the most sense for us well the big question is can the grape turn into a watermelon because if you know it can't then you'd rather own 100 of the grape right so let's dive into that a bit more growth right so you got your first customer earlier this year I got your MVP lab how many customers are using the platform today so we have about 30 customers on the actual subscription but we also have a pay-as-you-go model and we've acquired more customers through there so we have like a total of uh 70 customers around 70 customers that are basically have paid for the product at some point or another 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 the 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 connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your founder path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different valuation private Equity Firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when I hover over here here right so the teal is what a VC would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on YouTube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of SAS valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your evaluation 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 so on the recurring side 30 customers paying on average 30 per month would put you about a thousand bucks a monthly recurring Revenue how much do you make on top of that for the pay as you go stop in June last year last month so last month we did about two thousand dollars in net volume so that's after taking out all of our striped fees and obviously we have some other costs over there as well and then this month actually month to date we've already done about thirty four hundred dollars and what's your success rate in terms of converting one-off pay as you go projects into monthly recurring predictable fees yeah so it kind of depends honestly the pay as you go users end up sticking on closer to a pay as you go plan because their content needs are usually changing like we just had a customer actually today that just did uh another pay as you go so I wouldn't say like it's a fair even like conversion it's more of hey do I have like consistent content needs that I need to do repurposing or is my podcast video content going to fluctuate month to month and so that's kind of where a user would make a decision whether to go for a subscription or pay as you go interesting and have you bootstrapped this so far today or your race capital uh completely bootstrap my investment personally was about a hundred dollars which we've way more than over like CAT pack at this point so at this point I kind of consider it as I'm playing with house money essentially so what would it take for you to quit the full-time gig and go all in here because you have competitors to your point working and trying to kill you that are all in yeah so for me I think our goal for the end of the year is to reach about 20K in mrr that's our big like goal I think we're making a lot of progress over there and that can be it doesn't necessarily have to be 100 20K mrr it could be 20K and net volume sales like I said we're already done month to date 3 400 this month uh so that would get me to move in full time although we are trying to be a little bit smarter about how we allocate our capital and I'm really big on Capital allocation Capital efficiency so we are actually working with a lot of creators as well to kind of promote the product and kind of create some of that growth as well to kind of basically subsidize the fact that we we are not able to put in full-time work yet into it what's the mode I mean 20 000 a month divided by thirty dollars a month means you need to sign up over 600 customers up from 30 today that's a lot of growth I mean how do you go why is the customer going to pick you over all the other products that do this sort of hey podcast YouTube repurposing stuff yeah so we really focus in on the quality of the content so I've been a podcast host myself actually I grew a podcast from zero to about 100K Plus in downloads and then I've since left being that post position it's actually been acquired by the HubSpot like podcast Network as well so I've done that before I've worked for post-production before and I kind of know what quality is kind of needed as well to not just kind of check the Box off of doing the work uh but also kind of generate results as well and grow your audience and actually build and build something effective with your content so that's really what the mo is that we're going on is that we feel that we can solve the problem better than anyone else can a lot of these other competitors are kind of just checking the Box on content repurposing but that doesn't mean you're going to get extra results and actually drive revenue or customers at the end of the day and that's what we're really focused on and what are your all in expenses monthly today are you guys profitable yeah we are profitable so our monthly our burn essentially per month is about 250 dollars last time I checked this month that we might be actually closer to about 300 or 325 but yeah we are profitable everything that's coming in like well that's you not understand yourself and your co-founder it sounds like not paying him or herself either correct yeah that is correct so I guess how did you convince the cope whoever your partner is to effectively work for free yeah so we had actually worked on a project for a little bit a couple years ago uh so I worked on another kind of startup that kind of crashed and burned I got a decent amount of traction but wasn't monetizing at the beginning which was what was the name of my part swipely okay so I I started that and then I tried to see if he wanted to join on I found him through Indie hackers actually and he was like this project really isn't for me uh let's try something new from scratch uh this was kind of when I at this point I was I was drawing for my personal bank account and I was kind of put into like a stressful kind of position in terms of not generating enough Revenue to support what I needed and so we worked on a new product together for a little bit didn't really see much traction and I kind of took a full-time job that's the one that's like Captivate right now and then I reached out to him about four months into launching this new product summarized and I said hey I have like five customers over here here's the mrr value here's how much money I've made and I think this has a lot of legs on it there's some competitors popping up are you interested in getting in this space like getting involved and he was like yeah let's do it like I believe in the product I I think we work well together so that's kind of how we decided to uh partner up um you price you price per number of minutes so why is that so the reason that we do that is it's basically based off of our cost and also it makes a lot more sense for the end user if you kind of think about content repurposing and changing things up it takes way more time to go through an episode that's 60 Minutes long than it does for 15 minutes so that's one part of it and then even our costs as well how our costs come out our costs are generally fluctuating our variable costs are basically fluctuating based on how long content is and so it makes a lot of sense for us to charge per minute we actually did it first uh so I started per minute and then now basically all the other competitors are are also charging per minute uh as well I mean I it's hard for me to follow the whole permanent thing because like you don't want to charge for your time and it sounds like you're not using software necessarily to generate these videos There's real humans doing work here is that accurate or not yeah so we're using the software for it and then we actually charge per hour so obviously like we we have like an estimate per minute but it basically we charge per hour so you're either getting like two hours per month three hours per month and then we have like different bulk bulk pricing options uh smaller pay as you go options three hours of end produced video so if I get a 30 second video you know that counts against the three hour total allocation yeah so if you submit a 30 second video we'll take off 30 seconds from your account sorry what I'm asking is is three hours the time it takes you to do the work or is that the end number of minutes produced by summarize that's the end number of minutes so like essentially the way that we're charging so for this podcast episode if it's 15 minutes so typically what happens for a user is they'll basically go into their podcasts recording software if they're using Zoom or Riverside or something they'll record an episode let's say it's like 15 to 20 minutes maybe their editor trims out some parts of it let's say it goes down to like 15 minutes they upload a file uh that's 15 minutes long um we basically charge them for that 15 minutes against whatever either yeah subscription if you use if you you if you watch that 15 minutes summarize does and you then create a 30 second promo they're counted 15 minutes against the three hour limit not 15 seconds not the end timeline yeah so we're we're repurposing that whole episode so we're creating social content across that whole episode we're creating like a Blog across that whole episode so we look at basically all of the audio from that entire episode got it got it okay and just uh there's two of you today or is there more uh just two of us right now two of you guys great and um cool boots drop to date you have a couple hundred bucks of your own money in you're scaling you want to get to uh 20 000 a month by the end of this uh end of this um year I guess give me some Secrets here for podcast hosts that are listening in right you work with our friend Alina uh at chili Piper the the folks that are using short form content to promote longer form episodes what are they doing the best in terms of actually growing their number of downloads and audience so in terms of what they're doing uh they're just kind of posting in multiple places so that's like a big part of it as well and then also optimizing how you post so for instance we we provide keywords as well so if you use podcast hosting uh there's that section when you upload your episode where you can kind of put in your keywords uh having a good title also can make a difference having the right description can make a difference so that's a part of the podcast hosting even on the YouTube side we provide you like uh SEO or like a search optimized YouTube optimized description tags over there titles as well um and then kind of posting even on social we have very much invested in having the right structure over there to just perform versus like you know big chunk paragraphs or stuff like that I'm sure you've probably scroll past a lot of that stuff before even on the email side um everything is kind of built out to how actual humans read it and how it performs so it looks like I guess if I had to like pull a quote from a customer that you know it looks like it's been trained on the the top performing creators across all of these channels essentially okay on that note let's wrap up with the famous five number one your favorite book uh my favorite book is deep work number two is there a CEO you're following or studying uh uh I there is a lot that I am following I think uh for me being in the AI space definitely uh Sam from open AI so that's got to be the one number three what's your favorite online tool for building summarize my favorite online Tool uh probably actually you know I'd say there's a lot segment is actually a really good one we haven't actually implemented it I've done it on a couple of other products before um but it's like incredible for kind of matching that customer data together number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night I get about seven hours of sleep sleep is something that's super important to me I if you see me with four hours of sleep I do not function very well all right situation married single kids I think you're married right uh I have a fiance so engaged very cool no kids yet no kids all right I am 28 years old gonna be 29 in two months awesome and last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. something I wish I knew when I was 20 honestly just get started on things if you have an idea just get started and figure out the rest doesn't have to be perfect uh that's something I'm trying to get better and better at each and every day guys Jay's a non-engineer who's launched a SAS tool called summarize.com Helping podcasts and YouTube hosts cut up their content summarize it and then Market it back out on platforms first non-line of code written in January this year he got going brought on a co-founder four months later they split Equity 40 at 50 50 percent monthly recurring Revenue today is called 2 000 bucks of which 30 customers paying 30 bucks a month is the recurring fee they do another pay as you go model that makes another 1K on top of that they've already grown this month in July 2023 they've already collected 3.4 million of Revenue his goal is hit 20 000 a month by the end of the year we will see what happens Jay thanks for taking us to the top thanks so much Nathan thanks for having me one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm Central it's called Shark Tank for SAS we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back-end dashboards their expenses their revenue our poo CAC LTV you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every Thursday 1 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