How Treblle Hit $8K MRR and 200 Customers Six Months After Launch (Interview with CEO Vedran Cindrić)

Introduction and Background

Nathan Latka

00:00Hey, folks. My guest today is Vedran Cindric. He likes to say he's a developer first. He started developing with PHP and MySQL when he was 18 years old, and since then learned everything he needed to become full stack developer with HTML, CSS, and all the works. He also ran a development company for ten years and then started building a service for himself to help with daily development issues. He turned that into a product called Treblle and

00:22raised €1,200,000 to build it out. Vedran, you ready to take to the top?

Vedran Cindrić

00:27>> Yeah, yeah. Hi, nice to meet you and glad to be here. You for You the

What Treblle Does

Nathan Latka

00:33bet. So if people want to follow along, the URL is treblle.com. What's the company do?

Vedran Cindrić

00:40>> So we help you with APIs. What we like to say, we like to say that our company helps you stay in tune with your APIs. That's just a nice marketing word, but in an essence, we help you understand what's going on with your APIs and the apps that use them.

Nathan Latka

00:59What does that mean? Think a lot of people, when they want to connect to schools, they'll use things like Zapier or MuleSoft, these sorts of tools. Are you playing in that space?

Developer-Focused API Monitoring

Vedran Cindrić

01:07>> So we're more developer focused, which means essentially you add one of our packages to your API, and out of the box, we give you features like real time API monitoring, automatically generated documentation, error tracking, analytics, and a lot more. So that's how we tend to bring value. The services you mentioned are more geared towards no code solutions rather than actual developer created APIs.

Nathan Latka

01:35That's if my dev team at Founderpath relies on a bunch of API connections to keep the system running, we can install Treblle, and we'll get an instant notification the second an API had an issue.

Vedran Cindrić

01:47>> Essentially, if you have an API, your developers and have multiple connections to it, like an app, a website, 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. We help you with all of those things.

Nathan Latka

02:08What would I pay you to do that? What's your average customer pay?

Vedran Cindrić

02:13>> Because

Pricing and ARPU

Vedran Cindrić

02:15>> 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 anywhere between 50 to $100. 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, the more data we need to handle and the

02:43>> more data we need to process. So, essentially, if you have a company like Netflix, that could I'll let it.

Nathan Latka

02:49This is for people man that that have an API that other people are using, not people using other people's APIs.

Vedran Cindrić

02:56>> Exactly. Exactly. So if you have an API, essentially, and other people are using or you are internally using. So imagine, I don't know, like a game that you have on your phone, right? That's using API. So you can add Treblle to that API and you'll have better understanding what's going on with either your app or multiple apps for your API.

Customer Count and Beta Launch

Nathan Latka

03:20Got it. And how many customers are you serving today?

Vedran Cindrić

03:23>> So right now, we've got around 200 customers.

Nathan Latka

03:27And when did you launch?

Vedran Cindrić

03:29>> Literally, 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 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.

Fundraise Details

Nathan Latka

03:56How much did you raise in the seed?

Vedran Cindrić

03:58>> We raised $1,400,000.

Nathan Latka

04:02Okay, great. 1,400,000. And did you do that on a convertible note or a priced round?

Vedran Cindrić

04:07>> Price round.

Nathan Latka

04:08Oh, really? That's different. Most people do a convertible note this early.

Vedran Cindrić

04:11>> Just Sorry, a convertible note. Sorry, sorry. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

04:14Okay. And what cap did you use on the note?

Vedran Cindrić

04:19>> Could you What do you mean by that?

Nathan Latka

04:21Like, is it an uncapped note? Meaning they put in 1,400,000 at a cap, like a valuation essentially on the note.

Vedran Cindrić

04:27>> Oh, yeah. So they put 1,400,000 and valued the company at 5,000,000.

Nathan Latka

04:33Pre money or post?

Vedran Cindrić

04:35>> Pre money.

Nathan Latka

04:36Okay, got it. So 6,400,000 post. Yes. Okay, interesting. And how were you able to convince them to give you that valuation? Pre product, pre customers this early?

Vedran Cindrić

04:47>> It wasn't actually unlike a lot of other people, we didn't actually have that many problem raising the round. Our story is a bit We attended web summit last November and a bunch of VC companies started reaching out to us. We didn't even plan to do. We didn't even have a pitch deck at that time. So we kind of put together Everything

Nathan Latka

05:11was shut last year. Yeah.

Vedran Cindrić

05:14>> Yeah. So essentially, we put together a pitch deck and a business plan and a bunch of European VC funds mostly reached out. We got around three term sheets and we chose Naota, our partner, because they had a combination of a great team and the best deal.

Nathan Latka

05:34And who is we? How many founders are there?

Vedran Cindrić

05:36>> So there's me and my co founder, Darko.

Nathan Latka

05:41And then you guys split equity fiftyfifty?

Vedran Cindrić

05:43>> No, no, I have a bit more. He has a bit less because I do I essentially build the entire platform and he's mostly a designer and our operational officer.

Nathan Latka

05:55I see. Okay. Got it. That makes sense to me. Maybe something more like sixtyforty plus your new investor.

Vedran Cindrić

06:01>> Yeah, exactly.

Nathan Latka

06:02Okay. And you mentioned an agency many times. Tell me more about the agency. Is that still running today or did you shut it down?

Shutting Down the Agency

Vedran Cindrić

06:08>> So one

06:11>> of the kind of prerequisites to the deal was that we would shut down the agency. That is what we actually wanted. We had the agency for roughly about ten years. We got it to a point where, you know, we've done 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,

06:39>> but we kind of developed Treblle because we need it personally. And we wanted to give Treblle 100% of focus, so that's why we kind of sunset the agency, transitioned all of our clients to either friendly agencies or somebody else, and we're now focused entirely on Treblle.

Nathan Latka

06:59And what year or how much did the agency do in its best year revenue wise?

Vedran Cindrić

07:05>> A couple of million and the best year was actually 2020. The COVID year was coincidentally the best year. I think everybody kind of went double down on everything web or app related.

Nathan Latka

07:19So a couple million. You're talking like $3,000,000 in 2020, something like that?

Vedran Cindrić

07:24>> Yeah, yeah, something like that, yeah.

Nathan Latka

07:26And how many folks worked at the agency?

Vedran Cindrić

07:31>> It was always the core team of four, and then we would have maybe three people more depending on the amount of job we had.

Nathan Latka

07:39And so what happened to the other two people? I mean, did you sell the agency off to them?

Vedran Cindrić

07:43>> Oh, no, no, no. So all of them are now working with us in Treblle.

Nathan Latka

07:49Why only two of you guys have equity?

Equity Split and ESOP

Vedran Cindrić

07:53>> Because

07:56>> the two of us are the only founders, right? The other employees have equity as ESOP, right? So we dedicated an ESOP fund for our employees and gave them ESOP shares.

Nathan Latka

08:09How big of an equity sharing pool, sorry, did you set up?

Vedran Cindrić

08:13>> 8%.

Nathan Latka

08:15Oh, 8%. Okay, got it. That's pretty generous. Okay, and so how many people are on the team full time today?

Vedran Cindrić

08:21>> There's four of us now.

Nathan Latka

08:22So four now? The

08:24same four people from the agency.

Vedran Cindrić

08:26>> We've literally just received the funds, I would say, twenty days ago, and we've literally just started the path to hiring.

Nathan Latka

08:36Vedran, a lot of people are going listen to this and go, Wait, this guy's just on a $3,000,000 agency to go into startup with no revenue? I don't believe him or what am I missing? They're going to think you're crazy.

Vedran Cindrić

08:46>> Well, again, we always wanted to do our own product. This day and age, it's really hard to find something that, A, you're passionate about and nobody else is doing, right?

Nathan Latka

08:58Why that? Not call the agency? Why shut down $3,000,000 worth of revenue?

Vedran Cindrić

09:05>> We

09:08>> took care of our biggest clients.

09:12>> Like I said, we found friendly replacements. We gave them to people who we know and trust, and that's it because we wanted to literally fully dedicate to Treblle.

Nathan Latka

09:23And that's how you got your first customers, is you sold your old agency So clients to

Vedran Cindrić

09:28>> essentially, we built Treblle together with them, I would say.

09:35>> At the early stages, they were using Treblle, it just wasn't named like that. And then they gradually, you know, started using Treblle. We gradually started making it better, and now every single one of them is still using Treblle today, and they're recommending it to everybody, you know, in their circles, if you will.

Monthly Revenue and Growth

Nathan Latka

09:54And Vedran, 200 customers you mentioned earlier at a $50 ARPU, which you mentioned earlier, multiplying those would mean you're doing about $10,000 a month right now in MRR. Is that accurate?

Vedran Cindrić

10:04>> We're actually doing a bit less, but something like that. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

10:09Okay. So more like 8,000 a month, something like that.

Vedran Cindrić

10:11>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

10:12Yeah. And where were you a year ago? Zero?

Vedran Cindrić

10:17>> Something like that. We actually had I think around six months ago, we had around $2,000 give or take. And then as people started using the system, as we got recommended more, gained more and more users. But again, we're just literally getting started with this whole story.

Nathan Latka

10:39Mhmm. Well, when did you You wrote the first line of code at the agency, it sounds like, which you launched back in 2011, almost ten years, eleven years ago. So you officially spun it out, I assume, when you got the funds and signed the term sheet. You're calling early twenty twenty one, even though you had people using this in 2020 via the agency.

Vedran Cindrić

10:57>> Yeah, exactly. You're exactly right. The thing with this is because the way that we built it, it really required a lot of testing. 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 10,000,000 monthly requests, we need to be able to handle that much traffic, right? So one of the things that we

11:26>> 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 kinda spent at least, I would say, six months testing, doing, developing, and perfecting. And once we're we were done with that, we're act then we we got more confident about Treblle and and what it can do.

Nathan Latka

11:51Great pricing plans for SaaS 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 currently on your homepage is based off number of requests and a length of log retention. Why are those the right two utility metrics?

Vedran Cindrić

12:07>> That's what we think at the moment that are right. You have to understand that, like you said, I am coming from a developer background. And And one of the things that I hate is complicated pricing. Right? If if I see a product, and I've seen many products, the worst things that I I could see is you want feature a, and that feature is only available in the highest plan. That's just gonna turn me off. So, the

12:33>> 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 so nobody loses money and you get both of both words. Now,

Nathan Latka

12:51the counter that will be a customer who signs up for you and then goes sign up on your $70 a month plan for 500,000 requests. A year from now, they're doing 10,000,000 requests, so now they're paying you 500 or maybe more than that per month. And in their head, start resenting you a little bit because they go, You know, our API is growing, but it's not because of Vedran and Treblle only. There's a bunch of other

13:09stuff growing our number of requests. Why are we paying Treblle so much more? How would you think about that problem?

Vedran Cindrić

13:15>> I think if they grew that much, Treblle would be their best friend because in that amount of time, we would have provided so much value and saved them so much money and time to them and their developer just on everything from debugging to writing documentation that they would be actually happy instead of sad.

Churn and Expansion Revenue

Nathan Latka

13:37All right, fair answer. What does churn look like today? Has anyone signed up and then canceled?

Vedran Cindrić

13:43>> So far, no. So far, we haven't heard bad word about it.

Nathan Latka

13:47Well, so just to be clear, everyone who signed up and was paying for our call six months ago is still actively paying today?

Vedran Cindrić

13:54>> Yep. Yep.

Nathan Latka

13:55Have you been able to measure expansion revenue yet? People moving from 70 to $500 a month?

Vedran Cindrić

14:01>> We're trying to set that up, but we have seen a lot of cases where people, usually when expansion happens is like you mentioned, when somebody's API becomes popular. So usually what we see people do is they start with lower plans and then move to higher plans as their API scales. 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

14:29>> and if you have a successful launch, your API is potentially used by thousands, if not millions.

Customer Acquisition Cost and COGS

Nathan Latka

14:34Yeah, very good. And then what's it cost you? What's your cap to get a new $50 a month customer? Do you know?

Vedran Cindrić

14:41>> Roughly around 8% to 10% of that amount is our cost.

Nathan Latka

14:48Of that annualized value or the $50 a month?

Vedran Cindrić

14:51>> Monthly value, yeah.

Nathan Latka

14:53So you're paying $5 to get a new $50 a month customer?

Vedran Cindrić

14:57>> Exactly, something like that.

Nathan Latka

14:58Where are you spending

Vedran Cindrić

14:59>> Sorry, that on services, sorry. I thought, so we pay, that's the COGS value. We don't know exactly with our employees, but this off of $50 that we pay, we spend like maybe, like I said, five to 10% on other services that we have to pay. Everything else is, you know, we haven't calculated in the amount we spend on our employees. As far as marketing goes, we haven't done any marketing yet, 50 nothing to dollars account.

Nathan Latka

15:33Per month, you're spending $10 on COGS that you just need to make the thing run, and then you have employees not spending anything on marketing yet, so still too early to tell.

Vedran Cindrić

15:43>> Yeah.

Famous Five

Nathan Latka

15:44Vedran, great story here. Let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite book?

Vedran Cindrić

15:49>> The Steve Jobs biography.

Nathan Latka

15:51Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Vedran Cindrić

15:56>> Phew. Let me just think.

16:02>> I do like the new Microsoft CEO, so I've been following him a lot.

Nathan Latka

16:07Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building your business besides Treblle?

Vedran Cindrić

16:13>> Trello.

16:14>> Trello.

Nathan Latka

16:15Number four, how many hours of sleep do get every night?

Vedran Cindrić

16:18>> I try to get at least seven, eight hours of sleep.

Nathan Latka

16:21And what's your situation? Married, single, kids?

Vedran Cindrić

16:24>> I'm about to be married in less than a year.

Nathan Latka

16:27Oh, congratulations. And no kids?

Vedran Cindrić

16:29>> So far, no kids. Yeah. After we get married.

Nathan Latka

16:33And how old are you, Vedran?

Vedran Cindrić

16:35>> I am now 33.

16:38>> 33.

Nathan Latka

16:39Last question. What's something you wish you knew when you were 20?

Vedran Cindrić

16:43>> That I don't know everything.

Closing Summary

Nathan Latka

16:45Guys, they launched an agency brand back in 2011, did $3,000,000 in revenue on the agency last year, then shut it all down when they got a $1,400,000 from an investor just thirty days ago at a $6,400,000 post money valuation for their tool, which helps you manage your API and make sure it's never going down up to a 100,000 requests, and you can scale nicely with the team. They're now doing about 10,000 a month in we'll call

17:08it 8 to 10,000 dollars a month in revenue from $2,000 a month just six months ago with their team of four. Vedran, thanks for taking us to the top.

Vedran Cindrić

17:17>> Thank you. Thank you.

Nathan Latka

17:20One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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

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18:56See you.