How Trufan CEO aanikh kler grew Trufan to $2M revenue and 75 customers in 2023.

hey folks my guest today is annette clary he's 23 years old and the co-founder of trufan a company building products to improve brand engagement while compensating users for their data he's passionate about gaming and esports and is also an investor in the fuzzy clan anik are you ready to take us to the top hi i'm nathan how you doing what is what is that the fawzi clan am i even saying it correctly uh it's faze clan so um obviously they're an esports organization they uh been probably around for well i'm 23 and i've been watching them since i was like probably 11 12 years old so probably like 10 11 years um and yeah actually they recently just announced they're going to be going public soon which is super exciting the first uh in my opinion like major esports organization to go public so yeah i'm super excited and again like i grew up being a master of call of duty nerds so to be able to kind of join them as an investor almost two years ago now was really awesome all right tell me about true fan what's the company do and who are you selling to yeah absolutely so true fun as a basis is talk about the bio like really what we aim to do is help enterprises collect compliant consumer data in a way that you know really cuts the the consumer into the data equation so we work with large enterprises like netflix or the nba to essentially allow them to better understand their audience through data so the main areas we focus on are web data first party data like emails uh phone numbers mailing addresses and social media data like a user's data on instagram or twitter and what do these these customers on average pay you prompts to use the technology yeah so you know we definitely range like we have um you know uh subscription plans that you know a small business or many influencers use on our website that range from like you know 200 bucks a month to 500 bucks a month and you know enterprises we definitely have some large you know larger enterprises that you know are probably our acv is anywhere from 2500 to about 5 000 per month on average for an enterprise customer so your largest is what 60 grand a year uh no we have a we have a few customers who are kind of outliers that are more along the lines of like 140 to 160. oh wow interesting okay so so really truly full span here but sweet spots maybe like a grand a month something like that um i'd say we heavily weight towards the enterprise side so probably i think our actual acv number between uh enterprise and transactional is around 1900 um okay okay interesting fair enough and then what's the back story here when did you write the first line of code for the platform yeah so true fan was you know really started about three and a half years ago and it was really the the brainchild of kind of my co-founder swish um you know he is an amazing amazing guy really awesome background but he was in new york and he'd been building media companies so his uh his project he was working on before trooping was this media company called dunk and they essentially own instagram accounts twitter accounts snapchat accounts all regarding basketball content and they had about 11 million followers across the network so wait hold on there's this is too much coincidence here basketball his name is swish his name actually swish uh so his name is swaroshish but his pe teacher in sixth grade couldn't pronounce that and nicknamed him swish i got it okay this makes it so this was this was the the nickname was long before he got into any of us that's hysterical okay so you guys start writing code in like 2018 um how many customers are now serving today yeah so right now i think we have about 75 enterprise customers and in total probably over oh man i'm probably going to get this wrong i think like 300 to 400 customers i'm probably i'm honestly probably getting the exact customer amount wrong but i do know about 75 enterprise customers so if we just look at these enterprises at like two grand a month on average i mean what you guys are north of 150 grand a month right now in revenue correct yeah okay very cool and maybe double or triple that right if you add in all the smaller users right yeah yeah our our our arr is you know probably you know in terms of where we're at you know it's definitely north of like 1.5 1.6 so if you're feeling uh feeling pretty good yep yeah yes yeah so i mean 1.6 would be okay well hold on so like 150 grand a month would be almost a 2 million run rate but you're you said you're closer to 1.5 million rate correct yeah okay okay fair enough cool so so talk to me a little bit about this other thing you're working with just surf how did this sort of come out a true fan are they related yeah absolutely um i think you know really to be to be honest with you nathan a lot of what we've done over the last couple years is really just try to understand where consumer data is going i think you know if you say like what am i obsessed with right now i really you know outside of like you know probably like skiing or diving which are like passions or hobbies um i'm really obsessed with consumer data and like what does the future of consumer data look like and the last couple of years whether we were building trufan we were really just trying to understand like what does that look like and what we realized is we believe that the future of consumer data is opt-in and it's a value exchange meaning that if a consumer is going to give data to a brand they need to get something in return long gone are the days where you know your privacy and your data was the admissions price for entering the internet we don't believe that that's what the future of the internet is going to look like and thus you know all of the last couple of years and working with these different customers we started to understand that we started to understand that you know brands wanted better data on their audience but they also wanted data that they could use you know moving forward and you know that they would actually be able to use with gdpr ccp anyways long story short surf was our way of saying we want to reward consumers for their data and we want to provide brands compliant data that they can't get from other sources so what surf is it's a browser extension that anyone in north american can download and you get points for browsing the internet and you can use those points for items gift cards whatever you want then all the browsing information you share is anonymized so what that means is that by actually being on the internet you can earn from sharing your data and your data you know instead of just being taken from other large companies you can learn from it so so help me understand like can you quantify like what do you measure gmv through surf or like what's the key metric there yeah for us in terms of you know key metrics with surf right now are really just daily active users um you know launched about a month and a half ago and we're at about 16 000 daus which is really really exciting for us over 35 million urls shared so you know then you know really great feedback like close closing in on i think 300 reviews on the chrome store which is really exciting as well compared to other you know browser extensions that have been out a lot longer than us uh we've had really positive community feedback and people being excited about this idea that they can earn from their data mm-hmm and uh you launched on product hunt as well how many sign-ups did product hunt drive yeah i think product con was our first like our first real day you know where we weren't just you know giving it to friends and family i think we got like 600 something uploads from product hunt i think you know at the end of that day we were at like maybe four or 500 users so i think product time was definitely a massive driver of that at least you know three 400 users most likely at least saw us from product content yep and how do you make so what's the plan i mean how do you make money on surf yeah absolutely so i think the best thing to understand about surf is we're really aiming to disrupt kind of you know web analytics so if you think of companies like comscore you think of companies like similar web or nielsen um you know these are the companies that we're looking to disrupt and again like neil's uh similar web went public they do about 250 million in annual revenue so for us our goal is just to continue to acquire users continue to reward them for their data and then essentially you know monetize that data to brands through insights how many rewards have you sent out so far yeah i think we are at about 40 000 that we've given back to our users in terms of point redemption so users were deeming points for rewards and we actually uh well yesterday was the last day but any user downloaded surf was entered to win a tesla so we're actually going to be giving away a model three probably we'll be announcing the winner in the next couple days because the contest or the the giveaway just closed yesterday evening so the big game with gift cards like when target does black friday gift cards is you're betting effectively that people forget they're on their walls and they actually use the gift card so you never actually have to like provide that thing so when you say 49 points given back to your community how much of those have actually been redeemed for real things so on our side we don't necessarily like we pay for the gift card in...