SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1019 The Tool Tesla's Data Analysts Use Hits 3,000 Customers
09 May 2018
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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.
It was $160 million, which is the size of many IPOs.
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?
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.
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Chapter 2: How did Plot.ly grow to 22,000 customers?
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.
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.
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.
That's good. And what's the business model? Is it a SaaS model?
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.
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.
It's literally an on-prem solution.
Fascinating. What percent, go ahead.
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.
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Chapter 3: What unique features does Plot.ly offer for data visualization?
Yeah. Okay.
That's the minimum to get started.
And cloud?
Cloud, the starting plan, is much cheaper. It's $400 a year to start.
Okay. And do you, I mean, if you look at your whole revenue pie as 100%, what percent of that comes from cloud versus on-prem?
Interestingly, it's about 50-50. Okay.
Okay, fair enough. Yeah. And so give me more of the backstory here on you. I mean, what year did you launch the company in?
I started working on it in 2012, started writing the software. And then we incorporated, you know, at the very end of 2013.
And who's we, what's your team size today and what the founding team look like?
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Chapter 4: How does Plot.ly's business model work?
Um, most of it the vast majority of it is just on product and specifically the open source libraries um the only way that this company can work is if everyone is using our charting libraries and they're they're truly the best thing out there so early on that was pretty much all we spent money on and all we focused on um for go for go to market the most
efficient way that we found to spend that money for our product and industry was just making our content marketing and our documentation really, really, really good.
So no paid spend, no Facebook ads, no Google ads, nothing like that?
Yeah. And full disclosure, we tried it. You know, we did all the experiments. How much did you experiment with? You know, I would say since 2013 um we probably spent 20 grand total on paid ads trying different things it just didn't work it didn't really work um there are a few um blogging sites where we've done banner ads and they're the sites are so niche that it works but it's not um
It's never been as great as the content marketing SEO strategy for us.
The niche stuff is hard to scale. You have to keep finding new niche places to put the banner ad for it to work, right? Yeah. Yeah. So what do you got today in terms of total customers? And let's just talk cloud, not on-prem.
Yeah, so we have several thousand cloud customers.
Okay. Is it fair to say maybe between 3,000 and 6,000? Yeah. Okay, good. And then I imagine you have a much lower number of on-prem, but it's 4x, well, 10x the revenue. Right. So is it, I mean, what, you have about 300 in on-prem?
You know, in terms of the number of users at these companies...
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Chapter 5: What challenges does Plot.ly face with on-premise solutions?
That's not logos. That's users inside of all the logos. For cloud, yeah. For cloud, okay, got it.
The three to 6,000.
Yep. Yeah. Yep, that's fair. Now, I mean, you told me earlier, the cloud makes up about 50% of your revenue. And if we just take minimums from what you just told us, you're half smiling because you know where I'm going with this. But if we take minimums with 3,000 customers at 400 bucks a year, that puts you guys at what, about 100 grand a month or 1.2 million a year just on the cloud.
If I double that, that puts you about 2.4 million in ARR. Pretty healthy, huh?
It's a little bit less than that.
Um, but higher than two.
Um, it is, it is around there.
Yeah. Yeah. I was gonna say, you have 15 days left in the year. You think you'll, you'll break two by the end of the year.
Yeah. We broke in two overall.
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