How Doxci Reached $600K ARR and 8 Customers With AI-Powered Document Automation (Interview with CEO Austin Ambrozi)

Host Intro and Company Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Guys, doxci.ai launched back in 2021, won the Nashville startup competition, called a $120,000 there. We're doing about $5,000 a month a year ago, now doing 50. That's $50 per month across eight customers. They help you automate anything that relates to paper. Right? So they they say this as sort of like the GPT automated AI bot that takes care of all of your paperwork right now focused on sounds like insurance industry where there's a lot of paperwork

00:23that historically hasn't been able to be automated. We'll see where it goes from there. They're charging 15,000, $100,000 sign up fees, 75,000 pre seed round raised back in 2022 at a 10,000,000 cap. Hey, folks. My guest today is Austin Ambrozi. He's building an AI powered paperwork employee @doxci.ai. That's doxci.ai. Austin, you ready to take us to the top?

What Is a Paperwork Employee

Austin Ambrozi

00:45>> Yes, sir.

Nathan Latka

00:46Alright. What is that? What's a paperwork employee?

Austin Ambrozi

00:49>> So the official the official term used in the industry is intelligent document processor, an IDP. And effectively, the mission of the company is to put paperwork on autopilot. So that that could take the form of variety of ways. It depends on the nature of the paperwork and the workflow that it's associated with.

Nathan Latka

01:11And so give me an example of a customer that uses you today and what paper workflow they've automated.

Insurance Client Use Case Walkthrough

Austin Ambrozi

01:17>> So one of our clients is an insurance company. They get all of their applications for coverage to a designated email inbox. Typically, whenever someone applies for insurance, they send in some supplementary documents, you know, proof of address, driver's license, couple things like that. So doxci will monitor the email inbox. It will read, whenever an an email comes in for applying for coverage, it'll read that email. It'll read each of the corresponding documents. It'll then calculate a

01:42>> rate that can be offered to the prospect based on the information provided. And then since people are, you know, human and forget to submit things, it'll automatically draft an email back to them saying, hey. You know, this is the rate that we can offer you. If you submit x y and z pieces of additional information, we might be able to offer you a better rate. It sends the email, and that whole process is now automated. It

01:59>> doesn't require human involvement at all.

Pricing Model: Implementation Fees and Cost Per Page

Nathan Latka

02:01Wow. How do you price? What's the average customer pay per month or per year?

Austin Ambrozi

02:05>> So the pry the way we have our pricing set up is we have one implement upfront implementation fee, which varies from anywhere from 15 to a $100,000 depending on the the nature of the architecture that we're integrating with. If it's a newer system and it's just a few API calls, then it's on the the cheaper end of things. And if if it's some, you know, older legacy systems, then it's on the pricier end of things. And

02:26>> that's for the implementation fee. And then after that, there's no licensing fees. It doesn't matter how many people use the system. We charge based on throughput, so cost per page model. And we're in the process of converting to set tiers. So it'd be sort of like buying minutes for a a cell phone plan.

Average Customer Spend and Client Range

Nathan Latka

02:42And give me a general sense of what someone processing, I don't know, a thousand pages per month might pay.

Austin Ambrozi

02:50>> $250.

Nathan Latka

02:52Okay. Interesting. What does your average customer pay today?

Austin Ambrozi

02:55>> Honestly, that's that's that's tricky because we have we have have some clients that are, you know, only paying 3,000 a month, and we have other clients that that that's kind of our our floor, I would say, is is around the the 10 to 12,000 pages a month. It's kind of the smallest client that we've seen so far. And then we've also got we've got another client that's paying close to or well, they just signed, but they'll

03:19>> be paying close to a $100,000 a month per yeah. Once once they reach full maturity.

Nathan Latka

03:24Okay. What would they start out at, though?

Austin Ambrozi

03:27>> They're gonna start out at 12,500 a month.

Nathan Latka

03:29Interesting. And did you are those the two customers you have today, or do you have more customers?

Austin Ambrozi

03:34>> We have more customers. As far as the total number, I should probably know that off the top of my head by actual numbers.

Nathan Latka

03:38What's the range?

Austin Ambrozi

03:42>> Less than 10.

Nathan Latka

03:44Okay. Got it. So you you just when did you guys launch?

Company History: SlipBot Rebrand to Doxci

Austin Ambrozi

03:47>> We launched technically eighteen months ago, but we have been refining the product like mad. And we actually we started off as known as SlipBot, and we recently rebranded. So when we started, we were limited to one document type in one industry and that was the reinsurance slip, the reinsurance industry. And we we were making strides with that. We won startup showdown in Nashville. We beat there were 300 companies that entered. We came in first place, $120,000

04:15>> Panoramic Ventures, but we we still were only limited to the reinsurance industry at that time, and, you know, it was a great niche, but there was not we were not picking up steam like we are now. We started working with a management consultancy firm that is been largely involved in software purchasing decisions of several of the top 10 or top five reinsurance companies in the world. And so they brought us some of their, you know, toughest

04:41>> documents that people have been unable to crack throughout the years. And by the time that we refined the product to the point that it was able to handle those documents, we realized that we could take on any document in any industry. And so three months ago, we rebranded to doxci, and now we are now we're definitely picking up steam.

Nathan Latka

04:56But the company back when you filed with Delaware or wherever, when was that? 2021?

Austin Ambrozi

05:00>> That was yeah. That was yes.

Nathan Latka

05:022021. Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders, but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 interviews I've done manually. Saves you a lot of time. Well, we've done this. We've built it into the beautiful interface inside of Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second. But you log in, you

05:27connect your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time. You can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're

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07:28into the interview. You fund yourself early with a 120 k from the national startup competition that was also in 2021?

Austin Ambrozi

07:34>> That was in 2022. That was actually this past September.

Funding: Nashville Startup Showdown and Angel Round

Nathan Latka

07:37Okay. And have you have you bootstrapped since then, or have you raised any equity?

Austin Ambrozi

07:41>> We raised $75 from an angel investor. That was, I believe, July 2022

Nathan Latka

07:48or June. Okay. Was that do you, you know, how do you determine the, you know, the cap on that or the paper that they sit on?

Austin Ambrozi

07:57>> It's on a we're the tool the vehicle we're using is a safe with a $10,000,000 close money evaluation and then Okay.

Nathan Latka

08:0310,000,000 cap, 20% discount?

Austin Ambrozi

08:06>> No. No. No. I was say I was gonna say 24 month conversion date.

Nathan Latka

08:09Oh, interesting. Is there a discount there or no discount?

Austin Ambrozi

08:12>> I do I had no discount.

Team Size and Co-Founder Equity Split

Nathan Latka

08:14No. That's that's great. Okay. Cool. So you get that you get that in. And and it was a strategic value there? Like, why obviously, you wanna keep as much equity as possible. Why why even let an angel in?

Austin Ambrozi

08:23>> We we knew that we had we knew that we had a ways to go with product development, and it it was just it made it made the most sense, you know, raise money when you need it. Yep. When you don't need it.

Nathan Latka

08:34Who who's we? You keep saying we. How many co founders?

Austin Ambrozi

08:37>> There's two two co founders, Isaac Hicks and myself. And then total total employee count now, I believe that we're at 11 full time, and we've got an additional four or five part time contractors on the sales side.

Nathan Latka

08:51Mhmm. Did Isaac and when you were negotiating with him, the hardest part about co founding is negotiating equity at the start. Did you guys just split fifty fifty?

Austin Ambrozi

08:59>> No. Isaac has Isaac has more than I do because he's the he's the real he's the technical one between the two of us, and he's the the the real wizard with

Pages Processed and Current MRR

Nathan Latka

09:07Like, sixty forty kind of split? Yeah. Okay. Very cool. That felt fair felt fair to you at the start? Yeah. Very cool. Alright. Moving forward. Again, you've got 11 folks now. You've got eight customers. How many how this would be interesting. Across your current paid customers, how many pages are you processing monthly?

Austin Ambrozi

09:26>> Total monthly I believe that is somewhere is that oh, let's see here.

09:33>> Shouldn't answer that as well. I honestly don't know the answer to that. Let me think about that.

Nathan Latka

09:39Is it in the millions or hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands?

Austin Ambrozi

09:41>> It's in it's in the hundreds of thousands.

Nathan Latka

09:43Okay. Hundreds of thousands hundreds of thousands per month. Okay. And so what does that mean in terms of translating that to revenue? I mean, I take eight customers, you know, paying, well, know, somewhere between 3 k and

Austin Ambrozi

09:53>> 5 k. What about 50 we're at about 50 k MRR right now. With the client that we just signed on, whenever they reach full maturity, that number will be at about a 150.

Nathan Latka

10:05And if you're at 50 of MRR today, where were you exactly a year ago? Do you remember?

Austin Ambrozi

10:09>> Exactly a year ago. Let's see here. It's it's exactly a year ago, I think we were only at, like, like, four four or five faster.

Competitive Landscape and Mid-Market Strategy

Nathan Latka

10:19Yeah. Well, that's good growth. It sounds like the rebrand is working nicely, which is great. Talk to me about the setup fee though. This feels to me like that would make it really hard for anyone to try you and sign up. They have to spend 15,000 to a 100,000 just to get set up.

Austin Ambrozi

10:31>> Yeah. So it's the you know, it's actually a lot cheaper than what our competitors are charging. One of our competitors well, I'm not gonna name our competitors, but one of our competitors is charging like 200 to $300,000 for implementation. Another one of our competitors, probably the market leader, they have like a million dollar minimum. So they are

Nathan Latka

10:51Who is that? The market leader?

Austin Ambrozi

10:54>> I mean, I guess it's up for debate, but there's you know, you have Instabase, Indigo Data. Those are those are probably the two biggest.

Nathan Latka

11:02Okay. So they both you're just comping based on what they do. One's 250,000 setup, one's a million minimum.

Austin Ambrozi

11:07>> Well, I mean, com comparing in terms of, you know, the the you know, expensive is relative. Right? So, like, you know, they're they're definitely trying to gear towards enterprises where though we plan to serve some enterprises, we're we're taking a slightly different approach because one, we wanna go after a lot more mid market opportunities especially as, you know, the the public awareness around AI continues to grow. So we're definitely trying to target mid market more. And

11:31>> then also, just with the the sheer the multiples that we're seeing in this industry, the multiples are so high that we would rather we would rather try to reduce the upfront cost as much as we can just to, you know, and some get grow our MRR.

Nathan Latka

11:45Mhmm. Now that makes good sense. Okay. So $50,000 per month. We'll see what happens. What do you think you'll finish this year at?

Burn Management and Path to Profitability

Austin Ambrozi

11:52>> Honestly, I have no idea. We have we have we have a couple 7 figure, deals in the pipeline right now. So, I mean, there's those are those are with enterprises. You know, there's a million ways that those could could fall through. So I don't know. I try not to think about that stuff.

Nathan Latka

12:06How are you managing burn today?

Austin Ambrozi

12:11>> By just living very lean. Lean startup for life.

Nathan Latka

12:15So you're not you're not paying yourself?

Austin Ambrozi

12:17>> I I took my first paycheck.

12:22>> I think it was less than a month ago. It was a couple of like, two, three weeks ago, took my first paycheck out of the eighteen months that we've launched.

Nathan Latka

12:28So are you guys burning money today? Are you profitable?

Balancing Profitability and Team Morale

Austin Ambrozi

12:31>> With this new client that we just signed, we will be profitable here in, like, I think it's should be about a month.

Nathan Latka

12:37Okay. Very how do you think about that, you know, balancing profitability versus growth?

Austin Ambrozi

12:43>> I I try to keep a very tight gauge on team morale. And so, you know, there I don't think that we need I I'm much more I'm much more concerned with making sure that that people are happy with their their salaries and the people are feeling good about the their their upward trajectory with with what we're doing here than I am about, you know, paying for big PR releases or paying for, you know, the flashiest, you

13:07>> know, software packages and things like that. Actually, there's a bit bit of a balancing act there because, know, you give your team better tools. They're going to be, you know, they're gonna be feeling happier with with work, actually. But that that I try to I I it's it's definitely about the people.

Famous Five Rapid Fire Questions

Nathan Latka

13:21Yep. Alright. Very good. Let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, favorite book.

Austin Ambrozi

13:26>> Favorite book.

13:31>> I'm gonna say the monk who sold his Ferrari.

13:34>> Yep.

Nathan Latka

13:35Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Austin Ambrozi

13:37>> CEO that I'm following or studying? A lot. I can't boil that down to one.

Nathan Latka

13:42Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building doxci?

Austin Ambrozi

13:52>> I wish I had a less cliche answer, but Slack.

Nathan Latka

13:55Number four, how many hours of sleep do get every night?

Austin Ambrozi

13:59>> That varies. We'll we'll we'll call it we'll call it seven.

Nathan Latka

14:03Alright. Fair enough. In situation, married, single, kids?

Austin Ambrozi

14:06>> Single. So yeah. Gosh. I can't remember.

Nathan Latka

14:10And how old are you?

Austin Ambrozi

14:11>> I'm 27.

Nathan Latka

14:12Alright, Austin. Last question. Something you wish you knew seven years ago when you were 20.

Austin Ambrozi

14:16>> The AI was going to revolutionize everything.

Nathan Latka

14:19Mhmm. Guys, doxci.ai launched back in 2021, won the national startup competition, called a $120,000 there. We're doing about $5,000 a month a year ago, now doing 50. That's $50 per month across eight customers. They help you automate anything that relates to paper. Right? So they they say it as as sort of like the GPT automated AI bot that takes care of all of your paperwork right now focused on sounds like insurance industry where there's a lot

Closing Recap and Outro

Austin Ambrozi

14:43>> of paperwork that historically hasn't been able to be automated.

Nathan Latka

14:46We'll see where it goes from there. They're charging 15,000, a $100,000 sign up fees, 75,000 pre seed round raised back in 2022 at a 10,000,000 cap. We will see where they go from here. Austin, thanks for taking us to the top. Thanks, sir. One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. We call

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