How webz.io CEO Ran Geva grew webz.io to $11.9M revenue and 300 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is run Jeeva he's a serial entrepreneur with over two decades of hands-on experience in software development and leadership positions after Finn founding um gilja searching for online online discussions and co-founding bazzill a-- one of the top web monitoring and analytics companies in israel he went on to co-found web Hosea his current project it's a leader leading global provider of structured web data where he serves as CEO and lead technologists Ron are you ready to take it to the top yeah all right tell us about web host what do you guys do and how do you make money well we sell data feeds we turned a web into machine readable data feeds and either individuals or companies tap into this data to feed their analytics applications so it could be from brand monitoring PR applications to service security financial applications anything basically leveling the playing ground letting anyone have access to data from the web interesting and what's the revenue model is it per API cars or a peer place asks what's the revenue it's a sauce or data service a subscription-based you can go ahead and then it's a freemium mall basically anyone can sign up for free get access to 1,000 API calls for free and then you can upgrade downgrade can send me time we don't shackle you into long term contracts because if you see value you will keep on using us that's what we saw and that's how we go so we have private users developers and we have enterprises using our software and give me a general sense because I know you having you have multiple kind of pricing levers on your monthly subscription plans or any from news blogs and reviews to e-commerce product in a broadcast media transcripts so do people have to choose what kind of data they want and then basically if they want multiple forms move those levers up on each category exactly yes so they can start very small and scale up down very logically elastically we basically we see us doing today web data or data provisioning what Amazon to do - server hosting so you can go ahead and scale very fast and low as you need you don't have to go ahead and buy a plan upfront into so to avoid going down kind of every customer cohort just quickly give me an average customer we talk in a grand a month ten grand a month a million a month generally speaking where you at well I use it to pay or money or a revenue per customer per month on average so whatever it would be between one thousand to three but we have enterprises that pay and tens of thousands per month and we have and it doesn't really depend on the company we have startups that are paying a lot or we have enterprise to pay us 50 dollars depending on the use case and for the small you know for the small clients it's a cell phone boarding process we don't have to invest anything in in support or customer success we have of course well support customer success but we have tens of thousands of users not all of them are paying more freemium but we don't have to invest a lot of customer success and support because it's a very very very simple system what's your team size today we're about 20 ok and none of those people are dedicated to sales or onboarding no we have two salespeople we have two says support people okay all right now give me more the back story here you've had success obviously in the space what year did you launch web hoes so well who is this kind of a long story because we started mentioned in the beginning I started baking those seven even further I was a self-employed developing those sort of p2p software and the platform yeah file sharing applications and and it were quite successful but I didn't see really create career going forward with it so then I went ahead and thought about maybe I create something for businesses and all those applications had message boards on them however people chatted and I thought to myself what people are speaking and talking companies might be interested in other people are saying about it about them so I when I hadn't created kind of the first challenge was to create a system that will gather this information that was the first basic technology didn't know what to do it within short credit on Gilly b2c search engine basically and again subtractions got a VC calling me I know what you're doing that I know you know what a VC was even eventually my specie from Israeli was interested to to invest seed funding of about six hundred thousand dollars but no one else in Israel believed in the you know in brand monitoring market I could never know V Israeli VC ever invested in this field so so what happened to that company did you just shut it down or you sold it for a nice price or what so another company that we together decide to go ahead and build bazzill and eventually that company papazilla acquired on kili got it and kind of was too late to go to the international markets so we succeed in the in the Israeli market but failed going global and the last application does project that we tried to before weather is one that we tried to launch was a application called PR track II that was supposed to track what happened with pasilla so did you shut that down are gonna soft landings working it's doing very well in Israel but we try to go global and failed who's running that now how did you remove yourself a CEO and keep it going we have multiple founders so one of the founders stayed and kept on running and keep on running Mozilla and how much how much money has that company raised oh 1.5 million something like that so you laugh you didn't think it was the future you knew your other founders wouldn't do a great job with it and you did what so we started developing another application and the reason it failed was because it was supposed to track PR online and the main issue was companies told told us that they couldn't find or found mentions via Google not via application via PR track it and when I tried to find a solution who will help us increase the coverage I failed you know it all Google is closed garden in that sense they are they're excellent for humans but for machines that want to tap into their index there's no way so that's where we set our focus to go ahead and create a basically a repository database that will open the closed garden that Google has and provide these access to anyone that's where we said to create web hoes and start with news blogs message boards but and what year was that so about 2015 2015 it was a spinoff and what have you scaled to today in terms of total customers so we have hundreds of customers paying customers no longtail most of them and small customers so about so most of customers are small or between 50 to 2000 dollars a month but we have some dozens and enterprises that are about 30 about 70% of the income our enterprise yep when you say hundreds I mean are we talking three hundred or a thousand fifteen and what do you what do you grow in a company i right now a year over a year would you say like a hundred percent fifty percent ten percent yes so between 2016 2017 one hundred percent but it's easier when you have low e low lower income yeah now we expect to grow about seventy percent we are really accelerating as we are providing more benefits for example we recently launched the dark web data feed and we see a lot of cyber security interest so we security companies that word money's bigger there and we see more more brands tapping into this data so if on the brand monitoring you had marketing departments using our customers more and more brands since they're hiring internal data scientists they want access to the data so they come straight to us and not necessarily through our clients so for marketing departments it's excellent but for data scientists they need the data Iran going back real quick to growth so a hundred percent year-over-year the past twelve months ideally seventy percent over the next twelve months here through 2018 give us a sense of where you're at today in terms of M our our $206,000 yep and that's about right you know if I take you know 300 customers x a $900 a month price point you get about 260 or somewhere around there yeah that's great and then since you grew a hundred percent year-over-year over the past twelve months that means back in December of 2016 you were doing what somewhere around 130 grand yeah yeah interesting yeah interesting and what's driving most of this growth where are you getting these customers from so it's organic we actually we're now increasing our sales team because we're not doing our boundary don't want to do our bump but most of the our our leads are coming inbound so from AdWords but also organic or from our clients because of the method of the freemium model you have a grassroot approach you are the goat we are weathers is the go-to place when you wit need content or web data so developers are talking about us and projects are being published using our data so providing a freemium solution is also a great marketing approach you mentioned some ad spend give me a general sense of how much you're spending per month on direct paid $4,000 lots so very little known in that paid Channel on average what are you spending on on CAC to acquire these guys oh that's a good question I have no answer for you but we just are installing our BI system to help out with the numbers that you are requesting which system did you did you install out of curiosity I think Microsoft bi has taken okay I'm interesting about my age so you so right now you don't really know what your CAC is no no it's very low because we don't rely on on other words to really to get our customers it's mostly organic so...