How Wochit CEO Dror Ginzberg grew Wochit to $3M revenue and 500 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is jor ginsberg he's the co-founder and ceo of watch it he's also a pioneer in automated video creation developing the platform to help brands and publishers produce short form video content at the scale and speed needy needed for today's video first mobile audiences draw are you ready to take us to the top absolutely all right tell us yeah you bet tell us about watch it so uh what's it do and then what's your revenue model so watch it as a video creation platform in the cloud helps anyone who wants to tell a story to make it quick and easy it's a combination of i would say three elements very quickly it's automation we automate some of the process that said uh it's not about complete automation because it's about video storytelling but there's a lot that you can automate such as i know you have a 16x9 video and you want to turn it into square that's something that we automatically do but clearly lots of lots of stuff on there um creative tools which are needed meant for non-videographers to produce amazing results but without any prior knowledge and last but not least is is content raw content when you want to tell the story you need to have the raw footage uh so we you know teamed up with the likes of kitty and afp and reuters and ap and then and so many others to have basically sold two problems one we cleared the licensing on all the content being used on a platform and then we cleared the redistribution right so you can put the assembled video on here in a way but we basically get all of our content and makes it accessible to our clients you put all these togethers automation creative control content into one platform basically enables you to turn a story into a video within about 10 minutes and are you working mainly with enterprise brands doing this at scale or like or like vloggers and lifestyle kind of creators yeah i would say top down mostly with a big with the big guys okay so i mean give me a sense on average and what's an average customer paying you per month for this oh you know it varies it varies but uh um i don't want to get into specific pricing because really it made you know differs from one client to another yeah i'm just talking about i'm gonna draw i'm just talking about an average i mean are we talking a grand a month a hundred thousand a month ten grand a month um it varies uh it could be first of all it depends eventually on volume uh and usually our clients commit to a certain volume of production so it could be that they pay on an annual basis anywhere from 50 grand but it can go up to uh close to a million okay it's fair to say though your minimum generally speaking is around 50 grand more or less okay and what does that get what are people committing to in terms of how much video they're producing for that amount of money very much differs uh you know we work with both publishers and brands usually publishers need more volume uh brands or agencies if they essentially would require less volume uh although you know the use cases are completely different one of them is a bit more editorial the other one is a little bit more for content marketing purposes yep how are you measuring volume though is it like number of minutes or is it size of file or what but just based on on a per piece basis so to speak usually again usually the content being created on our platform is short form it's anywhere between 30 seconds to three minutes uh so we don't get into the we don't get you know nitty gritty and uh on the details on on if these are in 60 seconds or 65 it's just on a product i'm just curious what you measure your utility metric around right is it number of videos created is it storage space what is it right the number of stock videos number of videos created okay number of videos created great and these are these are typically again and are more enterprise folks top down approach tell me more about the back story here when did you launch the company we launched the company in 2012. okay yeah 2012 uh started you know with a with a uh with an idea originally and we built a product and then we wanted to see so to speak if the dogs need to talk but we started basically bootstrapping it creating um content ourselves and syndicating it out there just to see how it works it did pretty much work very well and very soon after we started basically opened up the platform for our clients to use it on so to speak on a sas basis as i said we sell it on a volume of production basis but essentially it's very close to a sas business uh and then moved on to publishers and later on we started marketing the platform or similar platform to uh agencies and brands okay so 2012 was a launch date and now have you still bootstrapped or if you raise capital uh no we've raised capital basically from day one uh it wasn't um for me my co-founder wasn't the first company so we had some of our own cash so we put some of our own cash but did get you know a first million from uh from a seed investor okay you half kind of smile when you say that why oh no no that's like um not only not anything in specific but we did eventually you know okay good so so so you rate now you put some on your own money and you got a million from a c now is that all you raised today or have you raised additional capital no no we've raised uh we had a few rounds ever since we've raised a total of 29. okay so far that's what i was looking at so so raise a total of 29 total not including the founders money correct okay got it so 29 29 million raised um launched in 2012. okay so tell me more about the team size uh a group of about 60. uh the r d is based out of israel tel aviv uh where i'm right now and we have our headquarters actually in new york city okay uh where most of our you know marketing sales and customer success teams are and we have a similar size team in uh europe actually in london um covering the mia and the asia-pacific regions and what is the the team in terms of the breakdown are you guys leveraging an inside sales team of drive swings enterprise deals what portion of the team are sales versus engineering versus something else so as i said the tel aviv team is about half the size of the company um it's a most most of our dealer not necessarily inside sales most of it is direct actually um clearly you know some of the clients who we have usually fortunately we have more leads than we can take so clearly some of them remain within so to speak the inside says uh realm uh that said as i said we started the business top down uh eventually so you know working with the big brands or publishing breads originally so these usually require some reach out george just to be clear though you said that the team is in tel aviv but i don't know what function they are is that your engineering team is in tel aviv yeah engineering is in tel aviv yeah okay engineering television the rest kind of spread out good and then before we tell before we kind of jump in more kind of to the story and maybe some customer stories uh what have you scaled to today so how many customers are you working with hundreds hundred okay hundreds hundreds and it's all enterprise clients clearly got it all enterprise i mean look so so hundreds at a minimum fifty thousand dollar acv we can kinda back into a minimum you know ar runway you guys are north of five million at this point right way more than way more than that north of 10 i won't ask another one after that but north of 10. okay what year do you think you break 30 in oh we're not so far away i was going to say come on this that's when you call up and you say nathan we're going to break it this year and this is the year when i say not so far away it could be that it could it could be this year okay very good so tell me tell me more draw about how you how you landed some of these enterprise clients first off did you have prior relationships with these enterprise folks from previous companies so uh not necessarily but uh some of the content providers we've worked with i had in you know relationship with my previous startup which was acquired uh seven years ago uh so that clearly helped but these are more partnerships rather than than clients um regarding some clients i can give you maybe one example yes directly related to your question now one of our biggest clients is ganette uh you know the owner of usa today and probably 140 other properties across the u.s i think that what was um what was very unique about their kind of relationship we built with them um is that even though they're pretty big uh they were i would say we were lucky enough and they were smart enough to try us early on okay uh and they and they literally helped us you know more for product into something of a much better product market fit um and it's in it you know on one hand it was very courageous so to speak and very uh we were completely uh uh amazed by how much they were willing to uh to on on a product that was you know early days but eventually um they have contributed a lot for themselves from the whole process but we contributed for the whole industry again making our product a much better uh fit for the market we're in did you let them invest no they never invested although by...