How Syndy CEO Pieter Van grew Syndy to $2M revenue and 100 customers in 2019.

hello everybody my guest today is peter van gerpen he's the founder of cindy the online platform that simplifies e-commerce product content delivery for brands to retailers today thousands of brands in europe and asia use the company to streamline product content delivery to online retailers with a strong focus on the fast-moving consumer goods industry noteworthy clients include unilever nestle and many many others like coca-cola and mars peter you ready to take us to the top yeah let's do it all right so what exactly does e-commerce product content exchange mean help us understand that all right um so uh you know how we buy products in store uh like you know the nike nike shoes that nike cap you're wearing and these are all physical products and but online these products are made out of content uh retailers rely on on brands to get that content because it's way too expensive to build it and you know photography commercial tax all that stuff yep so they asked brands to fill to kind of give them that content and what we do is we distribute the content for brands to retailers and what we really do is we sit between the different systems that brands and retailers use to store content internally like product information management tools erp uh kind of systems and we're like a middleware company that connects uh brand and retailers to kind of convert content from brands to retailer needs okay so if if a if a brand i mean let's use mars bars for example they have a picture of one of their candy bars and they have four pictures of it photographed from different angles and they have certain metadata you're essentially taking the metadata from that the mars website when they sell that to target and target listed on their website you're helping that metadata flow correctly exactly man that's exactly it interesting why is this difficult and we we kind of refer to it as the forgotten problem of e-commerce like no one wants to think about this stuff because it's it's really boring and sexy but it's such an important you know um part of of e-commerce because you know without without go to getting the right content of retailers it you know there's you're not able to sell these products and the difficult thing is that walmart versus amazon versus you know macy's all those different researchers you have in the us or you have on a global scale i mean same goes for in in china with alibaba and jet or jd they're all having different systems that that and brands need to work with and all those systems have different requirements so you can imagine it's it's very similar to how um the banking system works if you want to pay someone in nigeria for example there's actually a process that we don't know about as consumers that happens to convert um you know your your money in the u.s to the to to like the banking system in africa or in nigeria yep so who peter sorry i'm going to cut you off but i want to make sure i get your full story here so who's paying for this the the mars bar production company that mars or target the retailer no a great question so it's the brands it's the brands because at the end they're getting retailers in most product categories are still you know they still have the upper hand so they're the dominant the dominant party and they basically tell the brands listen we need your content give it to us like this and you deal with it so the brands are most most of the time they're just like filling in these excels and there's a lot of manual work happening so we're taking that inefficiency away from jane and totally automating everything creating as we call it an end-to-end flow so from the brand all the way to the retailer with total transparency internally you know what content goes to which retailer and this just sets brands up to to really dominate in e-commerce yeah i know i think the product is crystal clear i think my audience will totally understand what you're doing there's a big there's a big need for it and it's unsexy so i totally get that help me understand some of the economics around it right so so brands how how do you price are you pure place ass um it's uh it's difficult because unfortunately there's still a lot of custom work from our end required so we have a we we kind of have a service model uh combined with a licensing fee so pure play sas for for the platform and based on the number of retailer channels you connect so imagine in the us as a mars bar you know you want to sell to let's say 20 different retailers we actually price on based on the number of channels that you connect to each product okay and what are people ignore the consulting stuff for a second if we just look at the pure play sas you know on average what are these brands paying per month or per year for this um it's about a thousand bucks per retailer per uh per year okay and that gets them access into wait hold on for retailer for the brand for retail for a brand they pay about a thousand bucks to push the one we did for a year yeah yeah so sorry the reason i asked the question the way i did is because i don't know how many retailers one of your customers pushes to on average so on average what how much is a brand paying per year on on average uh a brand pays about uh 20k a year okay so on average they're connecting to about 20 retailers per year yeah okay interesting um does anyone do do you um is there any other variable pricing that allows you to drive expansion revenue besides getting them to connect to more retailers yeah well anyway it's it's markets but in a sense that's also retailers so we also price per market so if you're in the us and you're in canada um we actually there's two different you have to pay for for for the us and canada but clearly at the end you can you can you know distill it down to the number of retailers because in the end it's going to be 20 retailers in the us 20 retailers in in canada so we're the same as having 40 retailers in the us um but why i mean basically a mars bar has different content in the u.s and in canada yeah you know it's really strange but it's these are these these little details that again we don't want to worry about but um the the recipe of a mars bar can be very different in canada versus the us so yeah yeah americans want more sugar canadians are more health conscious there's less shorter yeah it needs to be bigger right the mars bars yours are twice the size all right and and put this on a timeline for us peter when did you launch the company what year uh i launched it well i pivoted twice so uh we we kind of did we started this in 2013. and when did the sas launch well three years ago we got we got you know companies paying 2016. yeah 2016 we had our first customers paying and how long were you like developing the product before that well two years and before that we had another two and a half years developing something different which was the basis of our new product it's very much an advertising model i won't go go into the details okay we use that to kind of to kind of take this to another level and we've had to you know we've had a chicken and the egg problem so a brand would come up to us and say which retailers you have connected and a retailer would come up to us and say which brands you have connected and you know you're working with some of these you know companies are the biggest companies in the world we've got unilever as a client of us and you know walmart is a partner of us so peter what actually fill out that marketplace for us right so today what are you at on both sides how many retailers how many brands well we have four thousand over four thousand brands those are they're all paying you right no no oh there's a free model yeah there's a free model as well what's the free model so the free model is on the other side when we we work with certain retailers retailers can invite their brands to get free access to sydney let's see with with that brand skin so really what we are all about is is we're playing the platform game and i think that's really where we've done some exceptional things like the you know product led growth that's really where our strength lies like creating a network effect and the the virality yeah peter hold on i want to push you i think i get this maybe you call me if i'm wrong but i want to push this for our audience here the way you solve the chicken and egg problem is you gave for and you needed retailers who don't pay you the brands you but the way that you got retailers you said hey walmart sign up for sydney and we'll give all your a thousand you know brands access to sydney for free making your metadata and updating your website easier right and then that walmart account let you then go try and close more paid brand accounts is that right that's the model exactly interesting it took a while to figure it out and we've tried both sides but exactly the way you're explaining it right now is how it works and how many retailers now um well not too many like five five yeah yeah yeah so so let me ask you a different question if if you sign up a walmart that and they they work with loads of brands let's say they sign up 5 000 brands for free right i'm making that up doesn't that cut out a massive chunk in the market that you can then never make money from no because what what the brand gets is a perfect city like just the perfect environment but it's just streamlined...