How Tomi.ai CEO Konstantin Bayandin grew Tomi.ai to $2.7M revenue and 24 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is constantine bionden he's the ceo and founder of tommy.ki also ex-cmo of ozone the largest ecommerce player in russia he's an ex-martech senior director of compass xbcg stanford mba and spotted a 20 billion opportunity in digital ad optimization and real estate to now build tommy.ai one million pre-seed funding to turn lead gen businesses into e-commerce he's also an ironman finisher and theoretical physicists constantine are you ready to take us to the top yeah i'm really happy to be here and i'm a fan of your podcast nathan oh very cool why'd you agree you know people go nathan why do people agree to come on you ask him for so many data points why do you agree to come on uh we just you know to hang out with the guys from the industries sas and enterprise sas and you know expand my network uh in this way that's awesome that's awesome okay let's talk more about what you're building so so who's who's using tommy right now yeah so we have 24 customers in several industries we aim at businesses with long sale cycles and we are solving three major problems for this kind of businesses um along these long decision cycles for smbs or consumer customers offline conversions and very rare transactions and the the you know the best ice icp is a real estate developer or brokerage a bank an insurance company or automotive company and and so how do you price for this what do they pay on average per month we are an enterprise fast uh business and we charge a fee of uh five thousand dollars per month and yeah with them of 50 to 100 uh thousand dollars a year i see and so so is that your only price point or tell me tell me why someone will pay you way more or weigh less yeah so we have a tiered pricing system so if you uh optimize your advertising spend to a certain limit or for one hundred thousand dollars on google and facebook per month uh you pay the start starting um package of five thousand dollars per month if you go beyond that you get the next level uh packages with you know some discounting on the paper usage price so constantine just be clear five grand a month that's money to you or that's money they're giving you to spend on ads but we are a software so we don't run the ass ourselves we provide a solution to do it in a more efficient way to our customers they run as by themselves in google or facebook or they you know their agencies would do it for for them so that five grand is they're paying you to your software so five grand times 24 customers you guys are about 120 000 bucks a month right now in revenue yeah so we are we have some customers that are ramping up so we have we reached 1 million arr last december this december like the december last year uh and with 24 customers it gives us four to five thousand dollars that's great um so i guess if you're at like 90 000. it sounds like in january or this month you're gonna do about ninety thousand dollars right something like that yeah so we're we're still growing adding more customers every month and if you're doing about eighty or ninety thousand dollars per month today in revenue where were you exactly one year ago so one year ago we had uh around 20 250 plus uh er with four clients 250 okay interesting and and how do you so those four clients were they all from one specific niche or no no we we test a lot in the beginning so uh at that time they were real estate to e-commerce companies and one at ed tech company education technology company they're all still with you 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 gonna 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 to 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 and what you can get now inside of founderpath and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to 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 so what are you i mean give me a back story here you have a based off your bio a lot of different things you've had your hands on what year did you launch tommy yeah so i i had always been a data geek and you know sciency guy and uh turned into a marketer and i worked for more than five years in e-commerce in leading positions in marketing and at some point three years ago i moved back to united states to new york and worked at compass in paid digital marketing and marketing technology and i spotted a huge opportunity because you know doing digital marketing in real estate is is you know it's real pain and as i said the key problem is that long conversion cycles offline and very rare conversions that you cannot use for optimization for ads google facebook and i grasped the opportunity for predictive marketing approach where you can score every website visitor in real time and use this uh scoring uh the expected probability to to pay later and tell me what year was this though when did you launch the business the first paying customer was on april 2020 and when did you write the first line of code 2020 as well uh yeah so it was it was uh on the go the first customers used the mdp solution and right now we you know we wrote the solution completely with the engineers we hired and uh now we have the cloud-based uh solution for every customer uh the same what's the total what's the total team size today how many people so we are 19 people half of the team are technology engineers people uh and uh myself yeah and tommy and then constantine you know i'm gonna ask this bootstrapped are you raised yeah so it's an interesting story i i was alone for the first uh year in 2020 and i was able to get to the first six customers and 35 uh mrr 35000 mr and uh i started to raise money to hire the team i got you know my co-founder mithy who eventually who first was the uh angel investor and then uh converted as a co-founder and uh you know first things forward we are now four times larger than uh the company was than it was alone it i mean all right just just be clear i asked you earlier you said today revenue is 90 000 bucks a month i asked you what was revenue a year ago you said about 20 000 or about 250. 22 a month in december last year okay and then go back a year back to 2020. you just said revenue then was 30 000 a month so wait so uh december 21 80 plus and december 20 20 22 and i started the business in 2020. sorry i know you just said i thought i heard you say in 2020 you grew it by yourself to 30 000 a month in revenue was that right yeah yeah by by february march and i started to hire people february two years ago in 2020 uh i started to hire people uh in 2021 in february march so constantine sorry what i'm trying to get to then these i'm missing something or the numbers you said in 2020 you grew revenue to 30 000 bucks a month last year you you said 22 000 a month so you shrunk your first 12 months in business so i started in april 2020 was running it uh alone by december 2020 i had 22 000 a month i still run it alone and i started to hire people in february march last year 2021 and by that...