How Treblle CEO Vedran Cindrić grew to $1.7M revenue and 200 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is avendra and syndra keys likes to say he's a developer first uh he started developing with php and mysql when he was 18 years old and since then learned everything he needed from a full scout full stack developer with html css and all the works he also ran a development company for 10 years and then started building a service for himself to help with daily development issues he turned that into a product called treble and raised 1.2 million euros to build it out vedran you ready to take to the top yeah yeah hi nice to meet you and uh you know glad to be here thank you for the intro you bet so so that if people want to follow along the url is t-r-e-b-l-l-e.com what's the company do so uh we help you uh with apis what we like to say we like to say uh say that our company helps you stay in tune with your apis they're just a nice marketing word but in essence we help you understand what's going on with your apis and the apps that use them and so what does that mean i mean i think a lot of people when they want to connect schools they'll use things like zapier mulesoft these sorts of tools are you playing in that space so we're more developer focused which means essentially you add one of our packages to your api and out of the box we uh we give you features like real-time api monitoring automatically generate documentation error tracking analytics and a lot more so that's that's how we tend to bring value the the services you mentioned are more geared towards no code solutions rather than actual develop developer created apis so my dev team at founder path uh relies on a bunch of api connections to keep the system running we can install trouble and we'll get an instant notification the second an api has an issue essentially if you have an api your developers and have multiple connections to it like an app a website or something your developers probably today are having struggles with error tracking monitoring trying to figure out what went wrong when it went wrong how it went wrong so we help you with all of those things and what would i pay you to do that what's your average customer pay so right now i mean right now we have a lot of uh because our early customers were actually the clients of our agency our kind of pricing tiers are skewed because they pay a really higher amount but usually i would say you know to get you started you would pay any anywhere between 50 to 100 bucks but as your api becomes more popular you would pay you know upwards to a thousand dollars because you have to understand the more your api is popular uh the more data we need to handle and the more data we need to process so essentially if you have a company like netflix just a that other people are using not people using other people's apis exactly exactly so if you have an api essentially and other people other people are using or you are internally using so imagine i don't know like a game uh that you have on your phone right that's using api so you can add treble to that api and you'll have better understanding what's going on with either your app or multiple apps or your api and how many customers are you serving today so right now we've got around 200 customers and where when did you launch literally uh officially we didn't even launch but we exist for i would say the past six months we've kind of done i would say an open beta where we gave our internal uh clients the software and they just kept recommending it to other developers now we raised our first seed round and we're actually officially planning to launch in november this year how much did you raise in the seed we raised 1.4 million dollars uh okay great 1.4 million and did you do that on a convertible note or a priced round uh price round oh really that's that's that's different most people do here will know this earlier why sorry conver sorry convertible sorry sorry yeah okay and what cap did you use on the note uh so could you what do you mean by that like is it an uncapped note meaning they put in 1.4 million at a cap like a valuation essentially on the note oh yeah so they put 1.4 million and valued the company at 5 million free money or post uh pre money okay got it so 6.4 million posts okay and how were you able to convince them to give you that evaluation pre-product like pre-customers this early uh so it wasn't actually we unlike a lot of other people we didn't actually have that many problem raising the round like our story is a bit we we attended web summit last november and a bunch of vc companies started reaching out to us we didn't even kind of plan to do we didn't even have a pitch deck at that time so we kind of put together uh everything last year yeah yeah yeah so essentially we put together a pitch deck and a business plan and uh a bunch of european vc funds mostly reached out we got around three uh term sheets and we chose uh nauta our partner because they had a combination of a great team and the best deal and who is we how many founders are there so there's uh me and my co-founder darko and ninja split equity 50 50. no no i have a bit more he has a bit less because i i do i essentially built the entire platform and he he's mostly a designer and our operational officer i see okay got it that makes sense to me uh so maybe something more like 60 40 plus your new investor yeah exactly okay and you mentioned an agency many times tell me more about the agency is that still running today or just shut it down uh so one of the uh one of the kind of prequisites to the deal was that we would shut down the agency that is what we actually wanted uh we had the agency for roughly about 10 years we got it to a point where you know we've done uh a lot of work for a lot of international clients big name brands and we kind of naturally always wanted to have a product on our own and it just we i would say not stumbled upon it but we kind of developed treble because we need it personally and we wanted to give treble the 100 of focus so that's why we kind of sunset the agency transition all of our clients to either friendly agencies or somebody else and we're now focused entirely on treble and what uh what year how much did the agency do in its best year revenue wise uh a couple of million uh and the best year was actually 2020. the code year was coincidentally the best year i think everybody kind of went to double down on on everything web or app related so a couple million you're talking like three million dollars in 2020 something like that yeah yeah something like that yeah and how many folks worked at the agency uh there was uh at uh it was always the core team of four and then we would have maybe like uh three people more depending on the amount of job we had and so what happened to the other two people i mean did you sell the agency off to today oh no no no so the all of them are now working uh with us in trouble why'd you only why only two of you guys have equity uh because we the two of us are only found right the other uh the other employees have uh equity as as esop right so we dedicated a visa fund for our employees and gave them uh a sub shares how big how big of an equity sharing pool story did you set up uh eight percent oh eight percent oh god that's pretty generous um okay and so how many people are on the team full-time today uh there's four of us now oh the four the same four people from the agency we've literally just received the funds i would say 20 days ago and we've literally just started the path to hiring veteran a lot of people are going to listen to this and go wait this guy's just on a three million dollar agency to go into a startup with no revenue i don't believe them or what am i missing they're gonna think you're crazy uh well again we always wanted to do our own product right and in this day and age it's really hard to find something that hey you're passionate about and nobody else is doing right agency or or like why shut down three million dollars worth of revenue we kind of uh we took care of our biggest clients we found the i like i said we found friend really replacements we gave them to people who we know uh and trust and that that's it because we wanted to literally fully dedicate to tribble and that's how you got your first customers as you sold your old agency trouble so essentially we built treble together with them i would say the at the early stages they were using treble it just wasn't named like that and then they gradually uh you know started using treble we gradually started making it better and now every single one of them is still using treble today and they're recommending it to everybody uh you know in their circles if you will and bedroom 200 customers you mentioned earlier at a fifty dollar rp which you mentioned earlier multiplying those would mean you're doing about ten thousand dollars a month right now on mrr is that accurate uh we're actually doing a bit less but something like that yeah okay so more like 8 000 a month something like that yeah yeah and where were you a year ago zero something like that and we actually had i think around six months ago we had around 2000 dollars of give or take and then we as we kind of as people started using the system as we we got recommended more we we gained more and more users but again we're just literally getting started uh with this whole story well well when did you you wrote the first line of code at the agency it sounds like which used launch back in 2011 almost 10 years 11 years ago so you officially spun it out i assume when you've got the funds and sign the term machine so you're calling exactly early 2021 even though you had people using this in 2020 via the agency yeah exactly you're exactly right we the thing with this is because the way that we built it it really required a lot of testing be one of the things that we do of course again is we have access to every single request that is made on your api so you can imagine if you have an api that has 10 million monthly requests we need to be able to handle that much traffic right so one of the things that we needed to make sure that we could actually scale is the volume scalability and that we could do it at a cost right so that's what we kind of spent at least i would say six months testing doing developing and perfecting and uh once we were done with that we're actually then we we got more confident about treble and and what it can do great pricing plans for sas are usually a combination of like a flat fee for feature upgrades and then also utility-based upselling the utility-based upselling you choose to use current on your home page is based off number of requests and a length of log retention why are those the right to utility metrics that's what we think at the moment that are right uh you have to understand that like you said i am coming from a developer background and one of the things that i hate is complicated pricing right uh if if i see a product and i've seen many products the worst things that i could see is you want feature a and that feature is only available in the highest plan they're just going to turn me off so the thing that we wanted to do here is we wanted to give everybody all the features and you only pay for essentially what you use we think that is the fairest offer we can make uh so nobody loses money and you get both of you know both of both were worms sorry now the counter that will be a customer who signs up for you and then goes you know they sign up on your 70 a month plan for 500 000 requests a year from now they're doing 10 million requests so now they're paying you 500 maybe more than that per month and in their head they start resenting you a little bit because they go you know our api is growing but it's not because of the drawn and like treble only there's a bunch of other stuff growing our number of requests why are we paying trouble so much more how would you think about that problem uh i think if they grew that much they that treble would be their their best friend because in that amount of time we would have provided so much value and saved them so many uh so much money on and time to them and their developer just on you know everything from debugging to writing documentation that they would be actually happy instead of sad all right fair answer what does trend look like today is anyone signed up and then cancelled uh so far no so far we haven't heard a bad word about it well so just be clear everyone who signed up and was paying for a call at six months ago is still actively paying today yep yep have you been able to measure expansion revenue yet people moving from 70 to 500 a month uh we're we're trying to set that up but we have seen a lot of cases where people they usually when expansion happens is like like you mentioned when somebody's api becomes popular so usually what what we see people do is they start with lower plans and then we move to higher plans as their api scale so while you're developing you probably don't need the highest plan because your api is being used by a couple of people but by the time you launch and if you have a successful launch your api is potentially used by thousands if not millions yeah very good and then what's it cost you what's your cap to get a new 50 a month customer do you know uh so roughly around eight percent of that uh eight to ten percent of that amount is our cost of that annualized value or of the fifty dollars a month uh my monthly value yeah so you're paying five dollars to get a new 50 a month customer exactly something like that where are you spending sorry uh sorry on services sorry uh i thought uh so we pay that's the cox value uh we don't know exactly with our employees but this off of 50 that we pay we spend like maybe like i said five uh to ten percent on other services that we have to pay everything else uh is uh you know we haven't calculated in the amount we spend on on our employees and as far as marketing goes we don't have we haven't done any marketing yet so yeah absolutely i think you'll know per month you're spending ten dollars on cogs that you just need to make the thing run and then you have employees not spending anything on marketing yet so two is still too early to tell yeah they're drawing great story here let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite book uh the steve jobs biography number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh pooh car let me just think uh i do like the micro i do like the new microsoft ceo so i've been following him a lot number three what's your favorite online tool for building your business besides trouble uh trello trello number four how many hours i'll sleep to eat every night i try to get at least seven eight hours of sleep and what's your situation married single kids i'm about to be married in less than a year oh congratulations and no kids so far no kids yeah after we get married and how old are you vadrona uh i am now 33 33 last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20 uh that i don't know everything guys they launched an agency brand back in 2011 did three million dollars in revenue on the agency last year then shut it all down and they got a 1.2 million 1.4 million dollars from an investor just 30 days ago at a 6.4 million dollar post money evaluation for their tool which helps you manage your api and make sure it's never going down up to five uh 100 thousand requests uh and you can scale nicely with the team they're now doing about ten thousand dollars a month and we'll call it eight to ten dollar that ten thousand dollars a month and revenue from two thousand dollars a month just six months ago with their team of four bedroom thanks for taking us to the top thank you thank you 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 1pm 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 to let me know what you thought about this episode if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive i am on these shows but i do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that i appreciate your guys's support all right i'll be in the comments see ya