How Vidalytics CEO Patrick Stiles grew Vidalytics to $697K revenue and 250 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is Patrick Stiles he is a high school dropout turned serial entrepreneur he started eight companies and has been the CEO of a public one he sold several million with video online plus frustrated with the existing video platforms so he found that his current company Videla Dexcom which is the highest converting video platform for online marketers he also wakes up to the eye of the tiger every day you don't a mess of this guy Patrick are you ready to take it to the top yeah man let's do it all right how do you know it's the highest converting video platform for all my marketers yeah well that stuff that we Peter split tested internally or we've had our users do so they come back with that data sometimes we can't always publish it but that's where we're getting that interesting and and walk me through what are they converting what's your typical customer your perfect fit customer what are they using you for so a lot of like so our ideal clients right now are direct response marketers people that are really video centric in their businesses they tend to be SMB so they're small businesses but they're able to do you know hundreds of thousands or even millions of plays a month so it's a little hinge that swings a big door in their business so that's why we've kind of built this tool for them because it has the aggressive features and tools for converting visitors and understanding how that works inside of the videos interesting and give me a general sense of what on average one of these customers pay you per month well our average is a hundred bucks a month but it can go up to a thousand for some of our users okay and then put this on a timeline for me when did you launch the company so we launched about a year ago okay good so fairly at 2017 mm-hmm and bootstrap today you're on money bootstrapped it how's that feel it it can be intense but you know it's rewarding to have that freedom so I'm a big bootstrap guy I've talked to investors I haven't found the right fit so I'm not really counting on that Avenue how committed are you how much money of your own money have you put in it's six figures okay good but less than a million yeah it's like okay but Stillen what was the public company you ran all right so actually I'm currently the CEO of that company it's gray cloak tech um it was a SAS Kunda before I showed up and then I have a background in health companies so we started some things some businesses in the CBD space so is that what that companies it has nothing to do with fiddle it X nothing at all okay got it wait so why why hold that spot why not like get out I wouldn't want to be public sea of a publicly traded company all they admin to work that comes along with it yeah well we're still bootstrapping bid oolitic sand you know it was an opportunity that made a lot of sense to me at the time it was enticing so you know I went for it and that's kinda how I got involved in that you know what I mean hearing you say is you get a salary there and that's kind of a nice buffer for you while you get bit a little off the ground that's part of it but I also have an equity stake in that public company that's that's sizable so and then I actually do on a supplement company as well that's still running in the background I see how much trailing twelve months how much rubber do that public company do um I don't have that number in front of me but it's not very much well like less than a million be sick like yeah less than a million wait why is it public right well I didn't take it public but I started the CBD company that was acquired to buy it in an all-stock transaction so it's a penny stock thing so it's not like a Nasdaq like you know high-flying kind of public company so it's its stock price right now is below a penny so it's a it's more of the kind of wild wild west as far as public companies go interesting okay interesting by the way if I was in that position I would also put that in my bio it sounds really really good but it's nice to understand the economics behind like why it's that way right so I do know that diet and nutrition in the supplement space a lot of these guys make Bank off video a/b testing so it makes perfect sense to me why you ended up where you're at today and it's cool to see you going into the SAS space did you just hear from friends the margins were way better than supplements and said I got to get in uh no so I've had a supplement company for last eight years and I tried I've started several different health companies and it's just always an issue with either merchant accounts with traffic compliance you can also run into some government agencies with three letters in their name yeah and some things like that so SAS is just you know it's way more scalable it has the perceived value of a physical product but at the end of the day it's basically an info product it's intellectual property on a server and it doesn't have those compliance issues and then also I'm kind of geeky I like tech so I was building custom tech in my supplement companies and that's kind of how I found my CTO and how I felt fell into this space okay so you in in your kind of founder relationship your the business guy not the developer right interesting and your CTO is he or she is doing all the coding yeah that's great interesting yeah him in a team yeah yeah well what's the team size today so the team size is 5 - those people are contractors that are we but we've hired and fired 20 people to build this product okay uh why why what I'm trying to forget to phrase that question what why do you lead with our we hired and fired 20 people to build the product well I mean if you hire them and they're good why not keep them Patrick my ending question there was yeah my question at the end there was if you hired him and they were good why not keep him oh they weren't good but yeah or their job ended you know like say like UX design and we like build out the platform and stuff like that we don't need to keep cranking out like new pages and things like that so see there's a kind of per project kind of hire yeah yeah yeah either yeah their completed their job or they didn't cut it got it and and fast for so 20 you launched about a year ago fast-forward to today how many customers are you serving now so we have about 500 users okay and how many they were paying ah I'd say last in half okay so call maybe 200 something like that somewhere in that range okay and why do you walk me through what a user gets we're like how much can they get out of the platformer before you make them pay well we killed our free plans and nothing so all they can get right now is a two-week trial without pain okay guys so you've got you've got 500 people you're sorry you've got 200 that are active paying customers which means you've got 300 or so on a trial right now and about you know in some time where the next 14 days they'll have to decide whether to pay or leave no no no no sorry those 300 people a lot of them are actual free plans we had a freak freemium model that we tried for a while and then we just kind of killed it off we didn't think that it was working okay okay I'm confused so how many people are paying you today on a monthly basis uh you know I don't have that exact number and I also don't want to get too specific with some of those numbers so I would say less than half so it's it's gonna be in that 250 or lower the range okay 250 well but by the way I like these numbers because people appreciate they always say Nathan you always have CEOs that are too far down the line it's not actionable for me I want to get someone that has just turned revenue on cuz I'm about to launch my first paywall so the more transparent gonna be the more valuable it is for my audience I know that for sure so I appreciate you doing that so look 250 folks if you got him paying a hundred bucks a month I mean well you're somewhere around 20 grand a month right now in revenue yeah I mean we're below that but yeah it's in that range okay like can we say between 10 and 20 um yeah below 10 yeah so it's it's gonna be around that 10 mark okay ten mark good that's good by the way like I everything starts to zero right so like I appreciate you saying that even if it's uncomfortable to say so around ten grand right now walk me through what the first sign up was like the first paid was it something I went through a trial then you converted him or what did that first sign up feel like that first sign up was somebody that just found his poem a Facebook ad we're dabbling in paid traffic about a year ago and it was and when we launched the product a year ago it was just video analytics since then we've kind of pivoted a little bit to add a lot more things that have to do with more conversions on the front end and not analyzing the videos after the fact so it's a more robust platform so at that time that person was just really blown away with our analytics and you know that was enticing and that's kind of what ever experienced was that some of the people that found us and really liked us for geeky...