How Viewst CEO Victoria Duben grew Viewst to $1.7M revenue and 15 customers in 2024.

guys she was doing 300 a month a year ago and last month she broke 15 000 bucks in mrr she's helping 15 Enterprise accounts these are accounts that spend 25 to 30 grand a day on ads she's helping them manage all their different ads right so Banner sizes add creatives mixing them on measuring results all of that on viewist.com she just closed a 1.5 million dollar pre-seat around that north of a 10 million dollar cap that was on a safe she's got a team she has a team of 11 and she turned down recently a 20 million dollar acquisition offer hey folks my guest today is Victoria Dubin she's an ex-pro tennis player and got our MSN physics and applied maths spent 10 years working in Investment Banking and then started from started from analytics and ended up with with trading and project management she's a second time founder he used to live in four countries and never gave up on our dreams now building views that's v i e w s t.com which is ADS production project management and scaling Victoria ready to take us to the top yeah thanks for introduction you bet you bet okay so tell us the story of a customer who's using you and exactly how they use you okay so like uh most of our customers are either like big brands or Performance Marketing managers but they have one thing in common so they're like media budgets start from like 25 30 000 uh daily so they have to produce a lot of different banners for different channels first of all and second you know they do a lot of testing and that's why they need a very simple and affordable tool in order to scale their banners their variations and run a lot of a b tests interesting okay so are you using AI to generate more creativist for them or is it more like they upload a CSV with a bunch of headlines and you mix and match all the things together okay so of course you know AI is a big topic right now and it's a huge evolving uh Trend but uh to be honest it's not applied to generating uh laid visuals as for now just either like plain images or uh very good quality texts but not actually like banners and we are working on it but we apply AI to small features like removing background one of them and also like resizing so whenever you have a mock-up of a banner then you can resize it to all different sizes uh perfectly so that's where we use Ai and we keep like improving this and uh yeah so that's about like AI That's great okay and so what is the average customer pay you per month to use this technology uh you know most of our customers are like uh uh corporations I mean like okay agencies and big Brands and so usually they sign up for a year and our Bay like basic Turf plan for Enterprises starts from twelve thousand dollars yearly but you know it depends on how many uh team members they invite to the platform so you know twelve thousand dollars is for five people and more you invite like more you pay yeah would you say though five a five person team is your sweet spot or is it more like 10 people is the average uh you know I would say it's like seven to ten okay so more like your average contract value might be like 20 000 a year or something like that yep that's very cool okay give me the back story here when did you launch the business what year uh 2020 20 were you still playing tennis at the time or no you know I still play tennis right now but of course you know not professional but I enjoy playing it and this is like my best uh uh way to network with uh different people that's amazing um were you I mean did you teach yourself how to code or like what came first tennis or or or software and coding uh tennis you know it's it started when I was like four years old and my first competition happened when I was like probably like seven years old and I earned my first smile and it was tennis when I was like nine years old oh my gosh amazing what was the highest rank you worked away to in the USDA rankings uh you know I quit when I was 15 because of the injury so like I I didn't get much unfortunately I'm not like I don't know see Brianna Williams for instance but uh yeah I played good and you know it helped me to uh um actually earn some money while studying at the University so I was coaching people and that was the best way to network as I as I told you oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built the into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out I'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your founder path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different valuation private Equity Firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when I hover over here here right so the teal is what a VC would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on YouTube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of SAS valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform I hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview that's awesome okay so you started going in 2020 how'd you eat your first customer oh you know I would say uh let's uh let's divide customers and like freemium users so initially we started with premium users and our first users came from appsumo of course they paid like lifetime deals but like it's one-time payment and our first corporate client came just recently you know uh in August actually so several months ago so how does that work I mean you know appsumo is really like it's there's not Enterprise customers hanging out on appsumo right so you're now serving a very different Niche than where you launched on that Sumo how did that work would you do appsumo again probably not but you know I would I would advise as a sales Founders to try appsumo because you know this is probably the easiest way and uh low hanging fruit to uh talk to your audience I mean to uh because there are a lot of there are a lot of users from like marketing especially and if you develop something for marketing I don't know uh email marketing or SEO marketing or some kind of tool for or production you know content Production Tool for instance it's uh it's a good place to test it and to get a lot of feedback and um you know when you build something for B2B customers anyway uh you need to develop product to a certain point to make it uh interesting and valuable for professional teams but on the way to this point you start with like small guys probably small businesses or uh Freelancers and absolutely the place where you can find a lot of them yeah okay now fast forward today how many customers are you working with now okay it depends if we're talking about uh like how many checks we've signed it's probably it's probably right now it's 15 starting from July this year but if you're talking about users these are none of them paid customers okay so like for instance one Corporation but they have several team members who are using it so that would be one paying that's one customer One logo yeah 15 right now 15. okay so 15 times 20 000 on average per year you're at like 25 000 a month in Revenue something like that uh less because we started with smaller teams and we lifted up our prices two times this year so uh the uh in in September in October it was like 15K ah amazing okay so fifteen thousand dollars a month last month and what were you doing exactly one year ago do you remember a year ago it was like I don't know 300 300 uh it's amazing okay so um so you're scaling nicely now have you bootstrapped or decided to raise capital uh you know we've just okay I would say that we are still in the process of raising but we've already collected uh uh what we were targeting to but we still have a lot of interest so probably will be how much did you already closed on okay it's a 1.5 million okay and so this would be like a pre-seed round basically uh you know I would like this 1.5 million came in saves but we are already in the conversation with the two uh like Air Tech receives and one uh big agency to make it price round okay but it's not priced yet so 1.5 million on safe should the saves have a cap yes so five 10 million cap all right how did you how did you get a higher cap with with 15 000 a month in Revenue uh you know to be honest uh like whenever I keep looking through a table at Founders found a path I'm I'm impressed you know how great are companies you are talking about like I mean in terms of their multiples how how far they managed to get while bootstrapping you know for me you're talking about an in founder path you go to the valuations page and you see a bunch of deals that recently closed yeah exactly so you know I love getting back to the to this table you know to keep me kind of like to see some benchmarks but I would say that uh whenever you even even during this uh current economic uh conditions and you know potential downturn uh the multiples are still kinda I would say hi of course you know they fell down since uh last year but I mean they're still high and especially when you when when you found quite a massive Market pain and uh like the growth over the last several months were good because in Revenue we we have grown like 76 months or months over the last six months yeah but just fair I mean you're going from a dollar to two dollars a month is 100 growth you know low base effect of course yes yeah yeah of course now I'm not trying to take away by the way from what you've built I think it's incredible right you've gone to 15 000 a month in Revenue but raising it I mean let's say it was a 10 million cap it's something was higher than that but that's a 55x multiple in your current Revenue right I mean let me ask you a question if someone offered you two million all cash upfront they to sell the business which you sell nope or two million all cash up front nope nope I was actually several months ago we were offered to sell the whole company for 20 million dollars Victoria come on that would be crazy for you now to take that cash off the table and go do something new because you know I love what you do what I do I mean then I see big potential in what I do yeah but you'll love it tomorrow to start it from scratch but now you're 20 million dollars richer no look part of this is my own War Stories right like I built build stripper 22 million bucks heyo right it's in my book right page six my tax returns and we got an offer to sell for 6.5 million all cash and I said no because I'm like oh I love it I'm building a big team you know what I slaved for four more years and barely grew and then flash sold it and wasted four precious years of my life when I could have been way richer way younger I just find it hard to believe that you could say no to a 20 million all cash upfront offer when you're doing 10 grand a month in Revenue yes sorry you know it's my fault it's not it wasn't like 12 uh 20 million like cash up front so it was partially cash and partially like equity in the new company like actually unicorn but anyway you know uh this is my second Venture uh probably probably I've mentioned about this and you know I really because I used to work for 10 years in Investment Banking and when I was like an employee and now I have the like creative freedom and I love what I do and I love people I meet and uh you know I see a big potential and I have a great team so I just want to keep working on this particular project what happened to your first startup did you sell it or shut it down or what oh I know I just shut it down and you know it was actually very painful and probably I should have done this like earlier several months earlier maybe one day uh earlier but uh you know when it's the first time you are too attached to what you do like a small kid of yours and you know even numbers were kind of screaming just you know stop stop but I couldn't so this is a one advice I want to give to other Farmers when members said say like you know it doesn't work means it doesn't work just don't do this it's funny all right how many folks are full-time on viewers today uh eleven eleven how many how many engineers uh seven seven wow okay and are you writing code uh like uh I used to but I'm not I'm not a technical founder or not anymore okay so 11 folks on the team you just raised 1.4 you're going to spend the 1.5 million okay so you know I I'm very uh inspired with the case of base camp so I don't want to grow a really huge team but I understand that I need to uh hide like several more Engineers maybe two to three and uh anyway we got to the point where we found our product Market fit and we need to invest slightly into uh go to market strategy like test some marketing hypothesis So currently we don't have we have zero marketing budget so all our growth is organic but you know we need to start testing some hypothesis and maybe uh to hire like some junior sales yeah well we'll see what happens uh we're at a time though in the meantime let's wrap up here with the famous five number one Victoria what is your favorite Business book well that's such a okay I I love one by Netflix um which is like how we build the cultural freedom and responsibility and it helped me a lot uh communicating the things to my team uh second probably you know by uh Horwitz the hard things about hot things yep yep that's very good two good ones number two is they're a CEO you're following or studying okay I don't have one you know okay number three what's your favorite online tool for building newest uh like uh could you give me an example so I'm just trying to a tool that you use a lot Trello jira Google Docs yeah um I don't know probably you know since I'm currently in the process of uh like market growth and development so probably you know HubSpot CRM it helps me a lot these days number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night eight hours not less I didn't and what's your situation married single kids uh married no kids no no kids okay and can I ask how old you are 39 39 years young last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. uh you know sometimes I think you know I'm a little bit jealous to those young entrepreneurs and maybe I should start building something earlier because I started when I was like 33 with my first Venture but on the other hand I think you know that experience I acquired while working for big corporations it has been a lot right now so I'm probably happy with like I don't know I'm I don't know what to change nothing guys she was doing 300 a month a year ago and last month she broke 15 000 bucks in mrr she's helping 15 Enterprise accounts these are accounts that spend 25 to 30 grand a day on ads she's helping them manage all their different ads right so Banner sizes ad creatives mixing about measuring results all of that on viewist.com she just closed a 1.5 million dollar pre-seater around that north of a 10 million dollar cap that was on a safe she's gonna have Timo she has a team of 11 and she turned down recently a 20 million dollar acquisition offer you have guts Victoria we love you thanks for taking us to the top thanks for waiting one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm 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 our poo CAC LTV you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every Thursday 1 p.m Central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM 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 nathanlacka.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 and 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