How Uploadcare CEO Igor Debatur grew Uploadcare to $2.9M revenue and 870 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is igor dibatur he is a ceo at upload carries the second time founder previously scaled a web dev agency to a million bucks in gross revenue he's passionate he's a passionate back country skier and mountain biker based in st petersburg russia igor are you ready to take it to the top yeah all right thanks for joining thanks for coming on man all right tell us about upload care what does the company do and how do you guys make money uh basically we've taken the entire mess and complex world of file uploads processing servers content delivery networks and reduced it to a single api it was a solution for one of our major paints because until we developed up upload care we had a web development agency and launched more than 150 different products upload care is like a next level cdn that adapts content to end user context so it means a lot to us where a user is located like with traditional citizens but also we optimize the content because we know their browser the device etc we know a lot interesting okay so um who i mean paint the picture of your kind of average customer who's your power user uh we have a lot of smbs using upload care and also a lot of enterprises so the good example of the user is a cto who already tried to build a file infrastructure and since it's a lot of pain he wants uh to find a better solution and they found us and in terms of business verticals uh a lot of software resources using upload care like crms event scheduling and uh marketing automation services and also with uh online printing shops and e-commerce marketplaces classifieds do you compete with like with like uh with like file stack yeah file stack is a copycat of upload care okay they copy you yes who's winning who's doing more revenue uh i think they do more revenue but they had like much more invest investments how much have they raised uh several millions okay what have you raised right now they are backed by rackspace founders and uh we raised uh four and fifty uh 450 grand okay 450 000. that's great okay so let's look at let's go back to your business here for a second so what does the average customer pay per month uh the average customer pay per month uh 105 105 us dollars yes and about how many customers have you scaled to today uh right now we have uh 870 okay 870 that i mean that's good so that that would put you at about 87 000 per month in revenue is that right yeah that's good well hey congratulations on getting past the million dollar run rate mark that's a big deal yeah it's really a big deal i like the fact more though that your arr to funding ratio is two to one you have double the amount of revenue annually as what you've raised yeah and we target to scale even more until we fund raise that's good okay when did you when did you launch the company what year uh the initial idea was in 1211 and we launched the company in 20 2012. okay but so we started to get money from our users in 2014 and it's it was still like not a startup but uh another product of web development agency so i and my co-founder concentrated on upload care in 2016. okay and walk me through growth so you're doing kind of 90 000 per month today what were you doing 12 months ago oh let me check sure what tool are using the check uh i have a spreadsheet like a dashboard okay where i have all the information and also we have stripe but uh in stripe we have only recurring payments and we also have invoices and annual payments so the dashboard is better uh solution yep yeah just a second take your time [Music] okay it was about 50 something 50 okay so you're you're almost kind of 80 90 percent year over year growth yep that's great and then do you do you have on that spreadsheet what you finished how much did you do in december of 2018 uh december 2018 we were doing 78. 78. okay good that's nice growth so so break down the mousetrap for us how are you finding new customers uh we have a lot of content we have open source libraries for example in upload care we created uh the fastest uh image resizing algorithm in the world and it happens it's a good way for us to jump on top of hacker news or another like reddit also we rely on soft search engine optimization and until now we've grown organically okay right now we want to build a sales department finally because we need to scale and i see a good potential if you hire account executives at the beginning well it break down like a specific strategy though so let's let's focus on the y combinator one right so what when did you post on y combinator and how much traffic did you see from that post ah it's very different um right now i think i'm not the best person to find out how exactly much traffic we get from hacker news but we get a lot of social proof when we went on top of hacker on top of characters but do you remember that day i have the post up here it was august 28 2017 the subject was how upload care built a stack that handles 350 million file api requests per day um you got 130 yeah that's one of them it's a stack share post originally yeah yeah yeah but but i mean you did well here got 135 upvotes on hacker news do you have any idea that day how much traffic at your site and how many new trials you signed up um i need to find out but it was at least several thousands of good traffic visitors of with good results good parameters like time spent on site et cetera yeah okay so drove somebody without uh i remember about five to ten really interesting prospects uh and most of them became customers yeah five to ten prospects that's good that's good um okay very good anything else you're doing today i mean you said organic and inbound is there any particular keyword that you're really proud that you ranked number one for on google search like upload api if i remember correctly is that is that a really competitive keyword it's not really competitive but we do have some competition and we get some traffic from this keyboard we have several more yeah no this is great so by the way i just typed upload api into google so file stack pays for the ad on that keyword but you rank organically number one yeah so so that's good so what i mean are you do you have an seo background uh sorry regarding file stack just uh um we another uh source of getting new customers is someone who already tried different other solutions like file stack and migrates to upload care and for file stack we even created a special uh script and posted it on github because it's pretty common uh where someone from file stack come to upload care yeah why is filestack doing so well why are they bigger than you is it just i mean it's just because they have more money or what do you why do you think they spent more money they participate participated in y combinator but then their founders uh left the company so now file stack run run by external ceos hired ceos yeah interesting okay very good and then talk to me more about your company so you've only raised 450 grand are you profitable today yes okay like like 10 to the bottom line or 40 or more uh we spent everything on getting new hires every month highers or marketing experiments so we don't uh store cash so your break even basically zero yeah we basically break even okay and what's the team size so we can get what what's the team size today the gym size is 20. 20 people and where's everyone based uh some of them based in cis countries like russia and ukraine and like belarus okay and we also have a people in poland and indonesia and in washington dc okay very good i mean this is great what about churn turns critical in this space what's your turn look like uh our logarithm is about two and a half percent but uh uh since we are uh we have negative revenue we decided to find out why our turn is like two and a half percent uh what happened and we found out that the middle middle like check of our churned customers is about 25 to 35 bucks so we don't churn larger larger customers yeah so what is your what is your rout your gross revenue churn annually uh we have negative revenue well no gross so you can have net negative because you're adding back expansion revenue but what is your gross revenue churn per year do you know uh not not sure i need to check that's okay so when you let's just go to the number that you're talking about which is net negative churn how negative are you about 110 115 okay so basically what that means is let's say whatever you're churning in revenue you're making that up and an additional 15 on top of that so your net revenue retention is 115 annually yeah is that right yeah yeah that's great that's good congratulations on that now why are people expanding what's the what kind of pricing axis do you drive expansion revenue on uh at this moment we have a like hybrid pricing model we have price and tiers and we also have uh price for overusage so you can pay for example 25 bucks and you get something and if you spend more like more traffic more uploads more storage you need more you need more you just pay for all your usage okay what's the usage based off those literally number of api calls per month uh it's a traffic uh storage amount and the number of uploads okay store just storage amount measured by what just terabytes gigabytes gigabytes okay and then uh sorry what were the other ones uh traffic okay based off just...