1019 The Tool Tesla's Data Analysts Use Hits 3,000 Customers

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Top Founders 18 min 2 speakers 5 chapters transcribed

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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?

Nathan Latka 0:00

This is the Top Entrepreneurs Podcast, where founders share how they started their companies and got filthy rich or crash and burn. Each episode features revenue numbers, customer counts, and other insider information that creates business news headlines. We went from a couple of hundred thousand dollars to 2.7 million. I had no money when I started the company.

Jack Parmer 0:26

It was $160 million, which is the size of many IPOs.

Nathan Latka 0:29

We're a bit strapped. We have like 22,000 customers. With over 5 million downloads in a very short amount of time, major outlets like Inc. are calling us the fastest growing business show on iTunes. I'm your host, Nathan Latka, and here's today's episode. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Jack Parmer. He is the CEO of a company called Plot.ly. We're going to jump into it today. Jack, are you ready to take us to the top? Yeah. All right. So tell us about the company. And do you say it Plot.ly or Plotly? People say it both ways. I personally say it Plotly. That's like annoying as hell. I figure, do you ever drive you crazy?

Jack Parmer 1:08

No, it's all right. I figure, you know, Plot.ly has a little extra information how to visit the website. All right. So what's it do? So we make the fastest growing charting libraries for the web and for data scientists. So if you make websites and you're looking for a charting library or you're using a charting library, there's a good chance you already use us. And our libraries are open source, so they're completely free.

How did Plot.ly grow to 22,000 customers?

Jack Parmer 1:36

If you're a data scientist, you probably program in R, Python, or MATLAB. And if you make charts, there's probably a good chance that you come across this or you're already using us.

Nathan Latka 1:47

And are these charts people, like the data scientists inside of a team, will use to present at board meetings or team meetings? Or this is actually visualization for like in a blog post that consumers are reading. They're using it for onboarding.

Jack Parmer 1:58

It's both, but it's mostly the former. So internal. Exactly. So a good example is the data science team at Tesla uses us. So they all program in languages like Python, R, or MATLAB. And Plotly is this communications platform where they make their graphs in Python or R, and then they can share them through Plotly with the rest of the team, other departments at Tesla, internally with themselves.

Nathan Latka 2:30

That's good. And what's the business model? Is it a SaaS model?

Jack Parmer 2:34

It's both on-premise and SaaS, which is a little bit unusual. On-prem, interesting. Why? Yeah, well, we wanted to be a cloud company, but most of our customers are either... they're in like aerospace, finance, or even someone like Tesla won't use a cloud product for their data science teams. They want something completely behind their firewall.

Nathan Latka 2:57

So you're literally going out to the office, installing a server room, helping them set all this up. I mean, it's literally an on-prem solution.

Jack Parmer 3:04

It's literally an on-prem solution.

Nathan Latka 3:05

Fascinating. What percent, go ahead.

Jack Parmer 3:08

We use a, just a quick shout out. We use a service called replicated to build our on-prem servers and They're a really great service based in Los Angeles, I think. And anyone who does cloud and is thinking about doing on-prem should look at replicated.

Nathan Latka 3:24

Now, is the on-prem model still monthly recurring? They pay you a monthly fee to keep it going? It's yearly. Okay.

Jack Parmer 3:32

And our cloud plans are yearly also.

Nathan Latka 3:34

Okay, good. So the model is still the same. One just has higher costs. So your margins are lower because you have to pay for the installation.

Jack Parmer 3:41

Yeah. And it's the same, it's essentially the same software too. You know, we take our cloud server and package it up in a Docker container and that's our on-prem product.

Nathan Latka 3:49

Interesting. Okay. What is the average customer pay per year, would you say?

Jack Parmer 3:53

So for on-prem, it starts at about $2,000 a year for a minimum of five users. And then as you scale the more users... So wait, so it's 10 grand a year minimum?