SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Bootstrapping Through War to $6M ARR: A SaaS Founder Story
17 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: What challenges did Vlad face while scaling SpeedSize?
You obviously went through a crazy story here. What's the closest you came to running out of money?
We were less than two months of the runaway. Some people were drafted to the army. There was the ongoing war in Ukraine where our R&D stayed. So we were panicking. The first decision we made is even before that happens, we stopped all the salaries to both of the founders.
Like enables your built-in mechanism of survival because you know that, okay, they may have no salary in two months, but we do not have it already today.
You're doing about $6 million of revenue. If someone came and offered you a Forex multiple today, so $24 million all cash up front to sell the business, do you take the deal?
100% no. It's definitely worth way more than that.
Hey folks, my guest today is Vlad Malanin. He's an MD, PhD, and is a surgeon turned AI scientist and CTO, co-founder of Speed Size Today, which is an award-winning startup transforming media optimization, think metadata, for 200 plus global brands. He blends tech, neuroscience, and real world impact together and is a Forbes Technology Council member shaping the future of AI.
Vlad, you ready to take us to the top? Yeah. All right. So give me a sense or two what Speed Size does.
So Speak Size basically does something that is in one or two sentences, we do AI media compression, even one sentence.
AI media compression, guys, to translate that for those of you that are not neuroscientists, we all visit websites with e-commerce brands more now than ever. These e-commerce brands are not using just still images. They're using rotating animated graphics for products or things that change colors when people scroll or things like that.
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Chapter 2: How did SpeedSize achieve $6M ARR with a lean team?
How many people are full time today and how many are engineers?
Yeah, so we had, I would say that it's not the standard yet natural for me, especially way to handle the team. So two years ago, we used to be 50 people. And we decided to focus and make a leaner team. So now we are around 20, 25 people and a couple of contractors. And the tech subdivision out of that is around 70%. So we are mostly tech people right now.
And before that, when we used to have 50, it was less than 50% of technical people.
All right. So 25 on the team today, about 16, 17 of them are engineers writing real code. Explain to us how customers pay you, right? You guys have a lot of engineers. I'm sure you have some business and marketing folks. What does your pricing look like today?
Yeah, so we do not work with SMBs. So our main audience is the mid-markets and small enterprises and ideally big enterprises. So we do have some big brands, yet not that long. Fortune 100. Well, besides Philip Morris International, I guess, that lies into that category. But other than that, Googles of the world are not yet working with us. So... The pricing works very simple. We have two units.
One is the amount of data that you need to transfer in gigabytes and the amount of assets, original assets. Not all that's hidden charges with transformations and all the other words that people do not understand. Just the amount of SKUs that you have on your products. You can estimate how much you need to use. That's it. The... The average customer pays us lower than five figures a year.
It's annual contracts. So as simple as that.
So just when you say low five figures, is it fair to say an average contract price might be $50,000 per year?
A little bit lower. So $50,000 is like lower to your mid-market, like to general ones. So those which are closer to the S&B category, they pay around probably $10,000 to $20,000 a year.
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Chapter 3: What is the pricing model for SpeedSize's services?
They have no other options. They cannot solve this with Shopify or any other tool.
Okay, so tell me, you're mostly engineers, but you're selling expensive, you know, on average $30,000 ACV kind of contracts. How is your sales team structured? What do you set their quota at?
So we made a pivot and we decided instead of heavily relying on direct sales, we decided to go focused on partnerships. So we are fully based in AWS and we are a premium partner of AWS. And AWS, since they do not have native... image and video compression, AWS offers SpeedSize as a solution for image and video compression as well. And we have a variety of partnerships, we have the
We have the agencies which are promoting speed size.
And we- Todd, really quick, sorry. On AWS, I brought it up, but it looks like you don't have any reviews here, which signals to me that very few people are using it. Is this the right page for the partnership?
Yeah, it's the right page. And it's very natural for AWS Marketplace because this is just the generic requirements to become a partner. And in this case, you cannot buy us like this. You cannot just go to the Marketplace and buyers, there is no like real way to buy this. So it will still redirect you.
Okay, are there any other top growth channels besides Shopify and AWS?
Yes, so we are right now being adopted by IBM Cloud as well. And it's early in the process as IBM also is restructuring their cloud services. They're changing their CDN and they want to become big because they kind of lost the race early in the days, even though they're a huge company. So it also looks promising.
And our idea is that we want to be in the places in the cloud suppliers who lack the native image and video compression and delivery. So think of AWS, of course, Google Clouds, Microsoft Azure, because other suppliers like CloudFlare, Akamai, they already have the built-in one, which is not great, but for most of the customers that works.
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Chapter 4: How does SpeedSize leverage partnerships for growth?
So that was the annoyingly tragicomical, I would say.
You know, and I hope everyone's okay, obviously. Power team. I mean, I work with a lot of Ukrainian founders who are just crushing it. Same thing with ex-IDF folks from Israel. Just incredible genes and incredible blood, incredible vision, incredible founders. So to round out that story, first year sales in 2022 was $400,000. And you said you doubled in 2023 to $800,000 of ARR? Yes.
A little bit different. So we in 2023, we were around 1.5 mil or something like this, because we started the sales somewhere late 2021, early 2022, right before the war started in Ukraine. So we technically had some sales in 2021. Interesting.
But $0 to $1.5 million of ARR in about 18 months is obviously still impressive growth. So the war starts, you're having to manage multiple priorities at this time. 2023 is $1.5 million, and then 2024 you said was $3 million? Something around that, yeah. And you've about doubled this year at around 6 million now today as we're recording. Yeah, something around that.
And you've done all this and have you bootstrapped or raised money?
We did raise the money. So we raised less what we have in ARR right now. And so we are still very effective. So me and my co-founder, we have more than 70% of the equity. So we are technically pre-series A, and we didn't know whether we want to raise the series A. So I guess how much total have you raised between pre-seed, seed, et cetera?
So around $5 million. Around $5 million. And what year did you raise that money?
So the last big round was 2023, I guess.
And how much was that one?
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Chapter 5: What strategies does SpeedSize use for customer acquisition?
Is it meaningful more than five grand a month?
I guess so. Yeah. I don't really know, to be honest. So we mostly focus on the other channels. So I would say that's the biggest profits that were brought by partnerships. So this were the biggest ones that we did.
So tell me more about that. The reason I'm going to dig here is because, you know, I interview thousands of founders and I plot all the growth tactics they give me here on my screen. And one of them that they bring up, obviously, are app exchanges and partnerships.
But many of them wait until they have scale because partnerships usually take more time and they can be expensive to execute if you're doing custom integrations. You actually chose to do this, though, scaling early on. It was one of the first growth tactics you used. Tell me more about what those partnership agreements look like and why you decided to go after those first.
So partnerships agreements are usually actually not that easy to do, especially with big organizations like AWS. There's a lot of bureaucracy, there's a lot of limitation, and there is a lot of frustration. So when you're here and that marketplace is one of them. So you cannot be a premium partner unless you have the marketplace entity. However, nobody, because we do not work with SMBs,
And they simply did not buy the product like this on the marketplace. It's intended to be for the SMBs. And Enterprise, they couldn't care less about the marketplaces. They want the fine-tailor deals. They are very aggressive in terms of the negotiations and all that. But it pays off. It pays off 100%. It took us almost two years to fully enroll the proper partnerships with AWS.
Let's talk a little bit about AI before we wrap up. We've got about a minute and a half, two minutes left here. You're obviously very technology forward, right? Deep technological roots, great engineer. So just to be clear, people still have to input some kind of image into your system and then you're making it better. I guess, why do you think that's the future?
Won't people just create images from scratch using nano banana and other technologies?
We're not making images better. The thing is that every other solution makes them worse. The idea of speed size is not to enhance the images. The idea is to make sure that the original colors, details, the original clarity and quality of the images
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Chapter 6: How did the war impact SpeedSize's operations and decisions?
And some people were drafted to the army. And there was the ongoing war in Ukraine where our R&D stays. So we were panicking in a way, but eventually everything went well.
And how so just to confirm, how low did your cash get?
So that's probably less than three hundred thousand dollars.
And what were you feeling at the time? Did you know you were going to come out of it? Were you actually nervous? Were you having conversations about shutting the business down?
Yeah.
The first decision we made is even before that happens, we stopped all the salaries to both of the founders. I know that's nothing with given our salaries. We're very modest and I had the salary lower than our developers actually, but this is the first action.
And that kind of, you know, it's like enables your built-in mechanism of survival because you know that, okay, they may have no salary in two months, but we do not have it already today. So it's time to act.
Yep. Well, hey, incredible story, Vlad. We are obviously rooting for you. Just wrapping up here with a couple of questions. How old are you? I'm 35. 35. And situation, married, single, kids?
Yeah, I'm married. I have two beautiful kids, six and seven years old, son and daughter.
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