How Switchboard App CEO Amir Ashkenazi grew to $3.5M revenue with a 8 person team in 2023.

hey folks my guest today is amir ashkenazi he's the founder and ceo of switchboard his first remote only company and he's never going back he says he's a six-time entrepreneur at pioneered comparison shopping shopping.com ipo which is acquired by ebay programmatic advertising that was adapt.tv which is required by aol and ai assistance for meetings this is toki which is required by log me and emily are you ready to take us to the top ready to go let's go all right all right so you've had some success here just to be clear those three companies i just mentioned you founded all those correct yep yep so look i'm just gonna say this bluntly you're like a super rich guy you can do anything you want why get into remote cloud co-working i uh insist on doing what i love and what i love is building products that are absolutely innovative that you don't have right now and you really need so how would you describe this it's sort of a blend between what and what yeah so switchboard is a cloud co-working space it's the next generation collaboration platform it really allows people to do things together if the as if they were sitting side by side when you think about the way we collaborate right now mostly through video conferencing it's not very collaborative like we can see and hear each other maybe show a screen but when we actually want to do things together it seems to fall short mm-hmm yeah and there what's interesting is like you know we just had zeb evan's on we had eric wong on before zoom ipod so we've talked to a bunch of folks and like you know zoom just released a whiteboard and click ups trying to do this and like everyone sort of has their own version of this and i just look at all of them and i go who's going to win this space is it really going to be a technical breakthrough or it's going to be who dominates distribution or something else what's your take so let's focus for a second on the technical breakthrough so what we did is we developed cloud browsers those are essential elements that allow you to bring any tool that you already use things like google docs and figma and trello and jira and they become immediately collaborative even regular websites become immediately collaborative in this switchboard workspace and what it opens is a canvas that is completely interactive where all participants can engage with the content and not just start faces so we think technology is important but i absolutely agree with you it's just a starting point so tell me just you have to forgive my naive to naivete here what makes this a hard technical challenge why can you solve it and no one else can or or very few other people can well browsers were built as single-player applications they were basically built for one user to interact with the web they were not billed as collaborative uh applications and basically what we did is turn them to exactly that so they run in the cloud you don't need to share your screen they keep memory of your room so when you open a room in switchboard it starts exactly where you left it last time you don't have to prepare for it you don't need to summarize it because it's all in the room and uh the the difficult part is mainly around security scalability and the ux of how do you manage multiple applications within one browser tabs switchboard does not require to download anything or learn any new tools everything works in the browsers with the tools you already use very interesting okay so put this on on a roadmap for us here when did you write the first line of code for this platform so we really started two years ago it's very funny i'm a guitar player not very talented but really enjoyed that so with my guitar lessons moved to um online it was really terrible so you need tools like a metronome you need notes you need multiple videos and all i got is the instructor's face uh so that was the moment i said okay we need something else here um so that one we started it was may of 2020 uh quickly in june we started to write code for this i think it took us six months to understand that this is actually not for guitar lessons but this is the core problem that every remote and hybrid team is facing 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 it 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 valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner 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 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 raised 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 valuations than what you can get now inside of founderpath 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 valuation 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 and this makes a lot of sense now did you were you scrappy at the beginning of this did you want to you know a lot of second time third time fourth time founders to go you know what i hated working with a co-founder the first time i'm gonna own it all at the beginning just pay everyone a lot of money what route are you taking here this is your fourth or fifth venture actually your seventh eighth venture six it's only six six okay yeah uh it's i it's all about partnerships it's all about getting people that will join your journey and that are excited about this and can contribute to it so very quickly we partnered with the right vcs to accelerate our path and with the right uh first employees to build this thing i i don't believe that you can do great things um alone in a room closed it's all about creating this human connection and inspire people to go in a direction and believe that this is the future but you're burying the punch line here which is when i when i my research team research the company and prep for this interview you're the only one listed as a founder so you were you were day one guy there's there's no co-founder i am a single founder but but it's really um i view my leadership team as absolutely essential for this and they are uh partners to every decisions that that we made along the way who was your first partner in building this so what was my first point so my first photo is actually uh daniel portola daniel potoyo was the head of talent in greylock and i knew for many years and every time i met him he gave me you know the right connections and contacts and introductions and when i read it he's starting uh sweat equity ventures now it's called the general partnership i immediately called him so let's work on this together and uh it was transformational it quickly connected me with the right recruiters and advisors and so on so we got it off the ground very quickly it still took two full years of development in stealth mode to reach the point we're in right now so amir come on i want to know how painful this was if you had to quantify how much money you spend just on development before you ship the beta into the product launch can you quantify that we talked like a million two million five million to build it about eight oh my gosh eight million interesting i would have never guessed that much so what am i what am i missing what makes it so expensive uh what you're missing is that from a technical perspective this is a really difficult uh problem to solve um and uh i'll give you an example so in two years we already have five granted panels for the work that we do oh wow it never happened to me it usually takes five six years and the reason is that this is really difficult and really no one has done it to the level that we're doing it before um so yes it took a lot of work and some money too five patents have you defended any of those patents yeah all of those are granted and there are more in the pipeline but have you had to defend any of them or have you protected i mean not not yet okay no one is doing it right now so probably in the future very interesting okay and it's interesting you you mentioned uh you mentioned uh daniel now he was at greylock now did you already generate a big return from greylock from when you require companies no greater never had any investment or uh interesting he's just pure friendship uh with daniel interesting so is he full-time at the business well he's not full-time because you're in the general partnership he's a partner at the general partnership yeah yeah so who i guess sorry what i meant to ask was who was your first-time partner in terms of you know full-time employee yeah so i i obviously called some of the people that i uh knew and worked closely in the past with or not just name one because everybody's contribution is so important here but what i can tell you is that by adopting 100 remote work uh structure it really opened a world of opportunity for us a lot of flexibility flexibility and freedom to hire the right people regardless of where they are so that is really uh one of the key if you look at the structure of the team it's a very impressive team and this the key to it is really the flexibility the freedom to hire from uh anywhere how many are on the team full-time today so we're 22 people right now 222. okay interesting yeah i guess the reason i'm asking these questions is i'm curious from a guy like you that's done it six times what your order of operations are right who was the batch of first five and the batch of the second you know 10 and then 20. it actually starts with before people join with just validating the idea so what i would do very uh quickly with my very limited uh product design skills i will try to patch something that looks as real as possible and i will try it on potential uh customers so the first thing was to do that and take it to my guitar instructor and say would you use something like this yeah yeah we absolutely need it um well along the way we found that there are many more that are interested in this so we developed obviously it's mainly for uh companies and not guitar instructors but this is how it started i mean you were recruiting though top-tier talent right chris jones you know he had time at databricks he had you know as an advisor to companies that we know very well uh you know little bear labs dying aboard others you sort of lo it looks like you sort of lull him in in an advisor role and then before you know it he's joining full-time is this like the amir playbook should we all copy this yeah so um absolutely you should copy always partner with the best people you can find and what i found is that the best people are really not looking for just compensation of course you have to be competitive on compensation but it's really about the journey and about the mission they get excited about this and the best thing as a startup ceo that you can give these people is a front seat uh in this journey just completely expose them to everything that has happened don't shield them not from the bad days not from the good days just have them as complete partners to the journey that's a super interesting take okay now just to be clear again pre-revenue pre-revenue today right still building out the beta program what are you learning i mean imagine a guy like you you're doing a beta so you can accelerate your learning velocity so how am i in the beta today and what are you watching for yeah this is exactly the goal is to accelerate your learning velocity it's the most important thing when you run a startup is learning quickly and adapting the product based on what you see so the first thing that you learn is like who is it why are the personas who is even your target customers and whatever you think you'll always learn something new so for example um we knew that this is great for startup ceos we knew that this is great for design and product managers but we did not anticipate how many people from higher education are actually going to use that so this is one thing that we've learned it's very important to stay very close to the users uh that are using it um another thing that you learn is about the retention and the virality and usage patterns of the product and for a product like ours obviously the virality is critical this the main thing that people do the first thing that people do on the product is inviting other people you want to encourage it our marketing is based on that okay so i want to go deep here for a second what tools are you using to measure when key retention like activation usage things are hit in the app in the first sort of seven days you use like pendo or something else break down that tech stack for me yeah so obviously we monitor everything and we use uh snowflake flake and amplitude and datadog it's like the main tool to uh monitor everything that is going on the platform the key is not so much to collect the data but actually to spend the time analyzing the data um and gain real insights from it and what are you seeing right now i mean have you been able to nail down to a viral coefficient one user turns into you know three within eight days or what is it for you yeah we see it already and the numbers look great those are early signs so i don't want to uh share but those are real uh very encouraging signs of usage retention and virality and as you can tell by my smile that your audience cannot see is that we're super excited about what we build and no they can see it it's audio and video they'll be able to see it you know that okay you should have worked on my background too that's a great background it's a great background um okay last question here before we wrap up um you know i wouldn't expect a first-time entrepreneur able to go out and do what you did which is launch a beta pre-revenue and raise 13.8 million bucks right so there's something to be said for sort of amir's life as a founder right when you look back at just your history over the past 10 20 30 years what were some of the early things you did in sort of your your startup sort of life that you think worked really well now 20 you know 10 20 years later so i think it's absolutely critical to raise money from external investors even if you can fund it or you think that you can fund it your ability to raise money is the number one thing that will determine your future success and um i use every round as a way to validate the our assumptions and to check the strategy um and if you cannot raise money then you need to go back to the whiteboard and ask yourself why before investing more of your personal money on this so this is something that uh guides me along the way those are uh the vcs are not only funding the company they're important partners to building it is there anything in a lot of a lot of second time third time founders will tell me nathan i wish i just sold my first company faster to get an exit under my belt to just learn even though it wasn't i wasn't didn't get the best price possible are there any lessons like that you wish you did earlier on or no no you look in total i sold three companies and in general i um regret not holding each one of them a bit longer uh we had the shopping.com that was a pioneering e-commerce partner comparison shop would ebay pay for that in 2006 630 something million dollars and you were how much had you guys raised uh it was a little bit difficult to calculate because there was deal time that raised money and then we acquired a company called opinions and another company called better even better um so i can do the math but i i see i see and what about adap did you bootstrap that one or no no adaptive also raised money i think it already raised 48 million dollars and that was acquired by um aol for about 400 and something million dollars sounds like a great unless i'm missing unless that's a 3 000 year earn out for 99 of the deal sounds like a pretty good exit and then fast forward to toki rook did you bootstrap that one or no uh that one it actually we add in the first um one in one day we had a term sheet from a vc and a proposal to buy the company so we actually the plan was to get vc money but we got the card so quickly that we didn't have enough uh so that was a nine months your other twos were five six seven years that one was nine months so interesting story all right when can you share are you open to sharing how many folks are in the beta today or you're keeping that private we're obviously keeping that private you know that i don't know we get a lot of people share better numbers we need a lot of people share that um i guess what what will make you come out of beta are you trying to hit a million users or like what's the thing no we are we we we focus on on love on users love on how many of those are frequent users how many of those would recommend this to um you know people they know that's the focus for for this year uh and we are making fantastic progress towards that we already have a community of really passionate uh users we're looking to grow this a little bit before we get into monetization um and scaling customer acquisition all right amir let's wrap up here with the famous five number one last book that you read last book of that i'm really ashamed to admit it but it's very tactical um it's called the mom test uh it's how to do user interviews it's very tactical but it's very good it will teach you how to get the truth from anyone you speak with about your product you said the monk like priest right mama the mom mom the mom this it's called the motherfucker's mom imam because even your mom will not be able to lie to you i love that okay the mom test number two is there a ceo you're following or studying oh there's so many there's so many the best ceo i've seen was actually my co-founder for shopping.com his name is the home shark monies unfortunately not with us anymore but he's uh still with me and i think about him every day when i make decisions number three what's your favorite online tool besides your own for building switchboard yeah i really like loom one because the ceo is an investor uh in a switchboard but two because it's a fantastic tool for asynchronous collaboration number four how many hours of sleep to get every night i'm not a big sleeper i think it's like you know it's important to sleep well i would say six to seven probably my number yeah fair and what's your situation you're married single kids married three kids oh wow and how old are you i'm 51 and a half 51.5 very cool last question something you wish you knew pre-shopping.com days when you were 20. oh so many things uh in general i think that we were fortunate to see the internet evolve in such a dramatic way and we were excited about this in the beginning but probably did not see one percent of the overall um directions that the internet is gonna take so um i wish i could have seen more uh but i'm just grateful to be part of this journey and experience and experience it experiencing it firsthand guys switchboard.app when you visit the website you go this looks very simple and then you listen to this interview and go oh he has five pounds and spent 8 million bucks on the mvp there's something very special here they're still in beta tracking usage metrics he calls them the love metrics as we all do we'll see what happens though hopefully coming out of beta soon so more folks can use it uh successful six-time entrepreneur so he knows what he's doing reading the mom test to do better user interviews amir thanks for taking us to the top thank you so much it was a lot of fun one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm 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 arpu 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 p.m central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathan lacka dot com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free 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