How Windsor.ai CEO Niklas Kolster grew to $2M revenue and 3K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is nicholas colster he's a serial entrepreneur and founder of finland's first voip company he worked with data science and algorithms for 10 years in e-commerce and large enterprises and a startup that was acquired by facebook he realized that algorithms were rarely the problem but data silos and were the real problem and so let's solve that problem with windsor dot a i will uh nicholas your idea takes the top yes okay so what year tell us what year you launched windsor uh we launched in 2017. we started started working with enterprise customers started to solve this uh this data silo problem for them and and uh yeah i've been going since then when you say enterprise customers i mean what was the size of your first deal that you closed do you remember uh the site or the first deal it was uh it was maybe uh 20 000 or so how did you do that i mean that's rare to launch and go from zero to your first customers a twenty thousand dollar deal uh yeah we started uh that was uh we started very very enterprise type sales so that we started started contacting conducting companies quite a lot we did uh we did a lot of sales back then we we met met so many different uh so many different companies decision makers and and uh yeah then we found uh found some very happy some very happy happy uh customers that that trusted in us of course there was uh there was quite a lot quite a lot of work to do there now fast fast forward to today are you still selling on average your plan size is twenty thousand dollars per year uh no that has been a big change that we have been doing so that we have we have been really really automating automating the product making much more self-service and i think it was uh maybe 18 months ago that we started to really focus on making the product more self-service much more low-touch because that that seemed to us to be to be like the way to to grow to really really separate like the the custom work from from the growth and and so on and and uh yeah i think there's some interview with the justin lemkin where he says that it's much easier to move up market more towards the enterprise tend to move down market and yeah yeah we noticed that it's always it's always greener on the other side every s everyone listening right now with the forty dollar average who wants to have a forty thousand dollar jar for everyone that's enterprise wants a bigger type of funnel wants to move downstream that's how it works yeah through true yeah yeah but uh yeah what's the so what's the average customer paying you now per day uh per month it's it's around 1000. okay thousand so you con you've come downstream a little bit um now have you done all this bootstrap or did you raise capital uh we are bootstrapped and uh yeah we have been profitable from the start and are still quite profitable so who's we do you have co-founders uh yeah i've had two uh two founders that that joined quite quite early on and how did you think about the equity split between the three of you that's always challenging early on yeah yeah but it was uh it was me who started uh started and was really the driver so so it was quite quite straightforward in that sense so do you still own more than call it 90 of the business uh not more than 90 but uh but a majority yeah okay got it cool so maybe more than 70 or 80 percent your two co-founders own some is there a stock option pool for employees uh yes yes uh we have really tried so that everyone everyone who who has been with the company for a while is also an owner tell us how you set that up that sometimes people don't understand how to set that up um we have we have a stock option pool that uh that everyone who has been with the company can join and and and when they have been with us for for six months or so then they can then they automatically become part of it and how many people are on the team today um we are 10 people today 10 people how many engineers um nine oh wow it's almost all engineers yeah yeah uh almost everyone almost everyone in the company can write sql and so on we believe that's quite important but of course now it becomes much more important to also focus on marketing and so on of course now how many customers are you serving today uh today it's uh it's uh 6 50 60. around that range 550 or 60 okay so i mean can i can i take 55 right times a thousand dollar rpu you're doing about fifty thousand dollars per month um yeah it's it's in that ballpark yeah okay and when you go back a year from today what was monthly recurring revenue it was um i think it was it was around 40 okay yeah so high i was hiding how did you get how did you get that growth is it coming from adding new customers or expanding old customers it's about it's both okay okay so it's coming from both but again a lot of this is happening in the product because you don't have a sales team so it's all it's all inside your product right yeah now you've done a great job setting up your pricing page at windsor.ai forward slash pricing there's a lot of things there's a lot of paywalls users can hit right based off the usage the utility value so number of reports number of users data source connectors destinations number of rows which one of these sort of number based upsells has been the most effective for you which one do people use the most yeah it's still it's still many times a little bit a discussion when when companies upgrade but but like the number of data sources uh the data volume and and so on that's and also a little bit how much support is is needed these are the drivers are you doing any upsells for setup setup fees uh no no we're not doing that but yeah yeah any plans to raise capital um not right no not right now i mean we have been uh we have uh been receiving quite a lot of inbound vc uh we see contacts but but uh we have not yet seen the case but maybe it comes someday what what in what inbound for you from abc was the most exciting did they name evaluation uh no we didn't go that far in the discussion what did they say um yeah quite many have been have been in like interested in the space and uh and so on but maybe there is some some correlation between some of our competitors raising capital and the activity is increasing they're mature who are some of your competitors that have raised uh it would uh yeah it would probably be be of course like a uh uh funnel.io and and uh maybe also rockgearbox because we also do the attribution modeling what box could it could be one from the us uh broncos yeah yeah because we also do the multi-touch attribution modeling we don't only do the data integration so this like the attribution modeling has been quite an important part for our customers also so you're doing about hundred thousand dollars sixty six hundred thousand dollars per year right now in terms of your annual run rate if someone came and offered you you know 10 million all cash up front today to sell the business would you sell um not sure not sure what would have to discuss of course also also in the in the theme and so on but yeah i definitely would think about it yeah what sorts of things would you need to think about like the yeah we would have to discuss uh would have to discuss a little bit uh like what are what what's a division and these kind of things very cool all right what's the next pro on problem product road map what are you guys releasing we yeah we uh we have been focusing so much on the ux uh improving improving the ux the onboarding and and now next we're going to to improve the whole all the features around predicting revenue predicting success for the campaigns and these kind of things so these are quite important and at the same time making integrating different data sources easier uh so that it becomes easier to also add crm data into the uh into the whole uh data stream and so on are you tracking churn at all nicholas uh not so much of course we we get very sad when we lose the customer but it has not been happening so much um maybe like one or two customers per month or so okay and how much revenue do they usually represent uh it it varies it varies many times they are small um got it all right and and you have real expansion revenue upselling yeah yeah uh a little bit a little bit uh some customers have been upgrading uh a lot and also expanding to different teams in the company and so on so that has been that has been quite uh quite good maybe 10 10 20 or so okay very cool nick that's good stuff man let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book um it would i would probably mention this this creative selection it's it's a little bit unknown unknown book but it it describes uh apples how they how they develop the iphone and all the challenges all the different engineering problems they have to solve it's really fascinating creative selection inside apple's design process during the golden age of steve jobs yeah all right number two is there a ceo you're following or studying i'm not following any any particular ceo i'm trying to pick up things from here and there as much as possible number three what's your favorite online tool for building windsor uh i would actually have to say that it's a discord we really like quite a lot on discord number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night eight and what's your situation married single kids i'm married with uh with two kids two kids how old are you uh i'm 42. 42 last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20. this is first when i thought about this it's it's very it's very uh easy to to not come up with anything but i think the stuff from from y combinator especially from sun sam eltman and paul graham that's really good to just focus on on talking to the users and building the product guys windsor.ai marketing attribution they've bootstrapped launched in 2017 just broke fifty five thousand dollars per month in revenue with their team of ten again completely bootstrapped 56 customers 12 000 average acv as they look to continue to scale nicholas thanks for taking us to the top and thanks for having me one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm 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 arpu 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 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m 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 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