How Synchrotab CEO David Talbot grew to $205.6K revenue and 1 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is david talbot he spent 25 years in global equity research in both senior banking and asset management roles he's watched the world's best presenters in action and designed a solution to enhance presentation impact while capturing all interaction deals uh details via his company syncro tab david you ready to take us to the top i am indeed yeah all right very good what's the company doing how do you make money okay company focuses on pitching face-to-face presentations quick bit of history essentially uh remote meetings have been the beneficiary of significant amounts of technology screen shares to virtual conference rooms etc but the face-to-face meeting hasn't changed in 30 years people pitch up with a paper deck and presented accordingly so what i wanted to do was take a look at that whole effort and change face-to-face meetings for good how do we do that well first of all um companies when they're presenting with a paper pitch deck have all sorts of shortcomings um some of those are essentially they have no flexibility to change the presentation on the fly they're spending enormous amounts of money on printing binding dispatch etc very little flexibility and the information exchange is less than efficient so what is it that we do essentially the presenter now has the power to carry all his presentations on his iphone he then uses ios peer-to-peer network to present those pdfs in high quality graphics to the viewer so just to be clear to you this is face to face though right this is face-to-face meetings only focus so help me understand this so you and i are in the same room together i'm pitching you on something let's say you're an investor and i want you to invest in my company usually i'll send you a powerpoint ahead of time you'll look through it and maybe i'll have my ipad on the table in front of us when we meet in person you're basically saying synchro tab is a better way it's a replacement for that ipad on the table in front of us when we meet in person instead you can hand out an ipad or preferably the client can download the app onto his ipad or his phone and watch the presentation on his device the advantages here nathan are that first of all the graphical quality is improved secondly you have the ability to pinch zoom focus really take the attention to the part of the chart or graph that's impactful you can draw the viewer's attention to the the material you need more importantly though the client then has the option to actually annotate notes inside of the pdf so at the end of the presentation he has both his notes and the pdf together but david isn't that weird to be like me pitching you in the middle of it you're going to say hold on i need to talk to my phone real quick and and take notes i mean i don't understand i'm trying to figure out how this would feel in person it'd feel very odd it might feel odd but in every presentation that i've given and received of which it's hundreds it's quite standard that somebody's sitting there with a notebook if i'm presenting information they're taking notes of course but it'd be way more awkward though if they said hold on please stop talking david stop the pitch i need to give a voice memo to my app real quick you don't need to give a voice memo you've got a a keyboard in front of you can take the notes some people may not choose to take the notes i do as an analyst it was how how i received and annotated information effectively into the document okay how do people pay for this is it a sas model it's a sas model yes okay what do they pay on average per month they can take a free download for two presentation devices as a freemium model they then pay ten dollars a month for multiple device presentation or there's an enterprise version um we have our approach to market has been very explicit we chose the what i would consider the biggest and most profitable investment bank in the world and we targeted them as a potential client it's taken two years we're in the final testing phase at this stage ahead of an enterprise-wide rollout initially it was targeted at equity investors and equity analysts that's now expanded to the wealth management group and to the investment banking group so david just to be clear the average customer is paying you about 10 bucks a month for this average customer will be paying 10 bucks a month the institutional group will be paying um something slightly higher than that on uh an enterprise-wide basis okay and when did you launch the company what year uh the company was started in 2015. okay and what have you scaled today in terms of total customers total customers as i said to you we are at this stage with the largest uh investment bank in the world yeah but it hasn't closed yet i mean current customers well he's paying me so it has closed but it's not in uh he's paid for all the development and that's where the first revenue checks are coming from which i've just checked cashed this month so yes they are paying and they are effective and they they're considering a full-scale role so how many paying customers today in addition to this gentleman or this is a bank you you've referenced nominal because i'm not going to market until i have the largest bank behind me because that becomes my go-to strategy i have a joint venture with the largest supplier of research into the institutional market they are my joint venture partner we've spoken to a number of investment banks and they've said when the major lead player gets uh the final rollout approval we want to be part of okay so let's say let's dive deeper spending any money i'm not spending any money on marketing because when this happens 20 000 wealth advisors will be out in the market using it if it's successful if it's not then i don't care yeah david i understand my marketing approach i understand so let's dive deeper there uh this bank is this the one that you were with internally before you left uh no it is not it was uh it was essentially one of our very significant partners as a global asset manager okay and have you bootstrapped the company or raised capital uh largely bootstrapped with friends and family okay so the the the this deal you're about to close you said that they were essentially bankrolled the development are they actually on the cap table or they're basically prepaying for a subscription prepaying subscription okay this is this is magical you're able to do this because you said they've been doing this for essentially three years you launched in 2015 uh we launched in 2015 and we uh have one had one capital raise from friends of family of 120 grand okay uh and we've bootstrapped it from there we've got cash in the business and the chance of a of a major world scale so david what you've done what you've done was very rare right so convincing a potential big customer to pay upfront in in your case many years up front to fund the development is very rare people would kill understand how to do that so let me get some more metrics around this i mean how much have they put in to date pre you actually having this thing ready to go i mean are we talking 10 grand or 100 grand or a million bucks or we're talking in total about 150 up to last year and a further 50 just come in now so about marginally over 200 grand at the moment but not on the cap table they're essentially pre-paying for seats to the software absolutely how did you how did you pull this off that's remarkable because i i saw the need that was there having witnessed firms like that and many others doing this it was clearly a need and my we actually took this to market with my asset management business and we proved up concept internally it was only then that we decided to go to market and see if we could uh get um a uh get a a global partner to back it okay um but free revenue today right pre-revenue today besides this one deal you're about to close and what they've pre-paid uh those there's virtually none i've got a few subscribers on the app store but it's you know it's it's it's a handful it's not anymore okay like are we talking like a thousand bucks a month in recurring revenue something like that david you cut out there you put it out there briefly i said you're talking about a thousand bucks a month are we talking like something like that uh we're not even talking that much yet it's it's it's normal it's it's literally a handful yep okay very interesting all right and what's the team size look like today how many people um the development team are my joint venturers um there's three people in that team uh dedicated to synchro tab it's not full-time for them but they're also working on an ai business the founder of that development team he has built a number of companies sold his last company for 170 million to a large public company so they're very experienced in delivering technology um so that's really my workforce i've just taken a partner so just be clear david sorry for four people you and the three-person dev team absolutely yeah okay and are you like they're obviously getting paid are you paying yourself or no you're waiting to the big deal closes i'm waiting till the deal closes before i pay myself i've just signed up a partner to take on in germany he's somebody who was looking to do this sort of technology reach out to me and we decided to work together he's putting an additional hundred thousand dollars into the business and will be my distribution arm in europe how much equity he will be he will be on the cap table uh when that money comes in and he will be buying ten percent of the business for a hundred thousand so we're valuing the business at a million dollars on that that's pretty good considering the products not to market yet right uh i'm i'm pleased with it nathan i'm pleased with it yeah no it's great and you said he's gonna be sorry your cro um i haven't really given him a title essentially he's coming in as a partner with me to build a business out in europe together what's it gonna do though like distribution or product or engineering or what distribution uh distribution interesting um and so why why do you have to wait for this big deal to close i mean this is a high-risk strategy why not i mean people i think would buy this even prosumers at you know vc firms why not go try and get some sales that way uh because i think we're in the right position to wait um i the joint venture i did with this other group and i can tell you that is it's a firm called blue matrix they have relationships with a hundred investment banks in in mostly in north america but some international through them i have been able to reach out to their clients and i've got good discussion going with a number of them who are waiting to see the proof of concept and the moment we do i think we'll get significant traction from there again i'm a i'm a return on capital guy i spent 10 years allocating capital to other people's business the less money i raised the better and going out prematurely building sales was just not an exercise that i wanted to fund i've just never heard david anyone say it's too early to sell never in the history of my 3 000 ceo interviews have i ever heard anyone say it's too early to sell well i think about things differently nathan the only thing that i care about is can i get a return on my capital to date i've put only a very nominal amount of my own capital into this and if this kicks off i'm going to have a very very high rate of return but if it doesn't do that if it doesn't your backup plan could have been you have a thousand people paying 10 bucks a month because you've been selling already uh i could have been but um you know i'm waiting because i'm patient because i'm absolutely convinced nathan that i want 20 000 people out there selling if this doesn't i'll tell you this much the reason this won't work is because broad-based acceptance from the wealth community doesn't follow i believe it will because the head of technology at this group has told me that he really believes this solves their problem i believe that too but i'm going to be patient and see what happens i'm not being taken off track because i'm going to get a very high return when this happens yeah but david i think sorry you're saying you're almost making it binary like you can only do one or the other i'm sorry i'm very i'm very happy to make it binary if it's successful this was designed for a very very significant group of users these are very high value users nathan these are investment banks if welford wealth advisory is the most popular business in finance at the moment david sorry i get it i totally get it you're just you're missing the point i'm trying to make is you have relationships here why put all your eggs in this one big deal basket why would you wait to sell put hundreds of thousands of dollars in when you could be selling to other investment banks directly right now i've approached other investment banks as i mentioned to you and there's a very straightforward answer that comes back again when it's proven and successful come see us that's scary i've had that i've had that uh i've had that feedback and i understand what you're saying absolutely at high risk all right very good i'm not afraid of the risk it sounds like you can afford to take the risk you've obviously had success in your in your career so you can afford to kind of uh be patient in that way so that's good good for you there um let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book my favorite business book um right now uh reading um the truth machine number two is there a ceo you're following or studying right now pause number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company uh part number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night eight and what's your situation married single kiddos married with grown kids how many are you talking like five ten one three three kids and how old are you david how old am i yep older than i need to disclose to you okay well the reason i ask the question is take me back to your 20 year old self what do you wish he knew interest rates we're going to fall from 18 percent to zero guys very good david again launched syncro tab really a very specific use case hope chasing after a big big big deal if it pays off it'll work he's gotten this company to pre-pay 200 000 bucks to essentially fund development team of three including himself obviously burning capital as he tries to close this deal the next couple of months uh presentation software that uh really does more than than what we currently have including note taking understanding slides going in and out understanding consumption of the presentation as well david thank you so much for taking us to the top nathan thank you for your time much appreciated