SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1672 How This Lawyer Pivoted from IP Protection to CAD Editing with NASA
21 Feb 2020
Chapter 1: What is FISNA and how does it simplify CAD design?
FISNA launched 2015, making architects, engineers, anyone using CAD, their life simpler. Started off trying to make sure and trying to prevent essentially copyright or fraud or IP protection, essentially. Now in a much different space, 15 enterprise customers doing about, you could call it pushing a million bucks per month or per year, sorry, in revenue up from nothing a year ago.
They've just really pivoted to this space. They are burning capital.
Chapter 2: What motivated the shift from IP protection to CAD editing?
They've raised about 2 million bucks to date, 15 people in Ohio, as Paul looks to scale the company. Hello, everybody. My guest today is Paul Powers. He's a Forbes 30 Under 30 Award winner, successful serial entrepreneur in B2B technology development and SaaS companies.
He's got a law degree from the University of Heidelberg in Germany and a member of the National Small Business Association's Leadership Council, now working on a company called FISNA in the CAD search engine space. Paul, are you ready to race to the top?
Chapter 3: How has FISNA scaled its revenue in the past year?
All right. Thank you. You bet. All right. What is a CAD search engine? What's that mean?
So Fisna is best thought of as like an autofill for 3D design. So if you're in the process of designing something, Fisna will try to guess what you're designing and search throughout your database, be it through CAD or PLM or whatever you use to see if you've designed something similar to that in the past so that you don't design things from scratch.
Interesting. This is kind of like when people use Gmail and Gmail autocompletes your emails when you're typing, kind of the same thing. Absolutely. Interesting. Very interesting. Okay. Walk me through the business model. How do you make money?
Sure. So we're a SaaS platform. So the way that we work is that we work with engineers and manufacturers. They pay us an annual subscription fee to use the software. Typically, FISNA is either used as an integration into whatever CAD software, PLM software they're using, but you can also use it as standalone. And we keep it real simple.
We don't care if it's used on the cloud or if it's an on-prem server that they're using. It's always the same fee, always the same arrangement. So they pay a one-time fee or an annual fee per user per year.
Okay, and help me get a sense on average, what's the company gonna pay you per year to get access to this?
It really depends on how many people they have. So to put it into perspective, we did some studies on what we were saving the average customer. We saved the average customer Thirty seven thousand four hundred and forty dollars per user per year that they're with us. But the average cost per user is going to be twenty five hundred. So it's a 15 to one ratio of savings to cost.
And I guess what I'm really asking is when an org signs up, typically how many seats are they signing up with? Are these for teams of three or three hundred?
Oh, it's all over the place. We have people signing up for a couple licenses. There are companies that have 30,000 engineers, and there are lots of them that we're seeing that have maybe anywhere between 50 and 500. I would say it seems to be the average number, but it really does scale.
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Chapter 4: What is the business model of FISNA and how do they generate revenue?
I was on the legal side. I have a law degree from Germany. My focus is in intellectual property law, and I was writing a dissertation about what's the biggest problem we're going to have with technology in IP law. And the answer was 3D. You know, we went through this with digitalization. assets. But we kind of adjusted, the market adjusted. We have iTunes, we have Netflix.
When it comes to 3D, the problem is that no one can really protect intellectual property. So we thought, okay, we can't just track a file down. We have to actually know what a file is, what it's similar to, what's in it, etc. So we have to actually understand what 3D models are. And we looked at all the technology that was available and we realized, bless you, we realized...
we realized that nothing was actually built to understand 3D from a 3D perspective. Everything was just a 2D technology like point cloud or whatever, trying to understand 3D. So we actually created something that would identify IP theft. And then we brought it to market 2016.
We showed it to a bunch of companies and they came back saying, well, that's great and all, but my God, we could use this in engineering. We could use this in just seeing if we can manufacture something.
Because it's all pattern recognition, basically.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Right.
Really interesting. Okay, so how many users have you scaled to today? How many folks using it?
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Chapter 5: How many users are currently utilizing FISNA's platform?
That's a great question. I actually would say that one of my favorite books is The Happiness Advantage. I think it's a great book to read, yeah.
Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying right now?
I... That's a good question. There are a lot of CEOs that I follow on LinkedIn. I've read a lot from Bill Gates. I think he's a great person to model a lot of the practices after. So I've read some stuff from him and I've been kind of trying to incorporate that into my work schedule.
Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building the company?
It's a great question. I would say right now, one of my favorite tools is actually Trello, which is kind of Um, it's just, uh, it makes it really easy to know what everyone's up to and where things are in the process. It simplifies things a bit for me.
Number four, how many hours of sleep are you getting every night?
Um, that varies quite a bit. Um, I would say I probably average around six, maybe five to six.
Okay. And situation, Paul married single kids.
I've been dating my girlfriend for eight and a half years, so we might as well be married.
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