SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Burning $55k/mo Building Freemium Tool for Developers, 15k users, $1.2m Raised
27 Mar 2022
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
So 50 paying customers at 300 bucks a month, you're doing about 15,000 a month right now on revenue, something like that? Something like that. You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, CAC, valuation, or other metrics, the easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool. It's like a big Excel sheet for all of these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com.
Chapter 2: What is Codiga and how does it help developers?
Hey folks, my guest today is Julian Delane. She's the founder of Codiga, a company that helps developers write better code faster. He was a tech lead at Twitter and Amazon Web Services before this. Julian, you ready to take us to the top? Yes. Thanks for having me today. Hopefully you have lots of Twitter stock and lots of AWS stock, right? I had.
But, you know, at some point you take the jump and when you make the jump, you need to sell your stock.
Okay. When did you jump?
Last year.
Ah, so you just launched the business last year.
Yeah. So I, you know, like many people that come from tech, I was doing the company a little bit on the side. And at some point I decided to go full time. So I left my job at Twitter and went full time.
At some point, I think it's really important to have an area of focus and it's really hard to be an employee in a large company like this, especially when you have responsibilities such as leading a team and making a startup. A startup is a full-time job by itself.
No, I totally agree. So this makes sense. Now, you were working on this by yourself. You took the leap and you quit. Help me understand, do you have customers today? And if so, what are they paying you for? What's the tool do?
Yeah, so we started with a tool that do what we do, what we call automated code review. So you push your code and then we detect vulnerabilities, coding style issues, all the issues you're going to have in your code. And so before you deploy your code in production, we find these issues. That first product attracted more than 15,000 users.
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Chapter 3: What challenges did Julian face when transitioning from employee to founder?
Do you remember? Oh, zero. Zero. Yeah. Okay. And have you bootstrapped this or did you decide to raise capital?
Yeah. So that's an interesting story. I went through Techstars Boulder. So I did that last year. I went through Techstars Boulder. I was on the fence about raising money. And at some point, when you really want to develop a great product, I think having VC capital coming is really helpful. So I raised capital last year. How much? $2.1 million.
Okay.
And I learned a lot by raising because you learn a lot about the different... Basically, fundraising is like selling. You sell yourself. You sell a story. You sell a future. And it's something that I had to learn. It was really interesting.
It took me a few months to complete the fundraise, but I'm really glad that we were able to raise with really known investors in the US, either angel or traditional VCs. And you have great support from them.
And so you raised 2.1 on a pre-seed. Was that on a note or a priced round?
It was a safe. So you have this safe from Y Combinator that is right now pretty used for all the startups. And we use a safe, which is really great because you can simplify the way you raise money.
So there are two kinds of safes. Ones are capped and there are others that are uncapped. Was yours uncapped?
No, no, no. It was capped.
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Chapter 4: How does Codiga's automated code review tool work?
But what I really want to do is having a bottom-up approach. So have the product go viral. Don't care about revenue. My investor would probably not like this. But try to focus on product market fit and retention.
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Again, both plural founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash valuations. So I guess let me ask some contextual questions and then we'll talk about retention. How many are on the team today full time? Today full time we have seven people. Okay, seven people and all engineers?
No, actually, I have one developer relation. I have some engineers. I have some people that also do marketing and write content. So not all developers. I think tech founders sometimes have an issue with only hiring technical people and believe that all the issues are technical.
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Chapter 5: What is the pricing model for Codiga's services?
And I think for tech founders, they need to learn how to do marketing. This is something I'm learning myself.
Well, how did you get 15,000 signups on your first product?
Oh, that's a good question. What I did is try to look online where people are looking for such a product. So do Google search and try to see where people are looking for you. So I wrote a bunch of blog posts and I put the product on different marketplaces where people are looking for such a product.
Name three of those marketplaces.
Yeah, so we are present on the GitHub marketplace. So what is that? Oh, G2? No, GitHub. Oh, GitHub. Yeah, GitHub is where you put your source code. So it's really easy for people to find you on the GitHub marketplace. We are also present on the Bitbucket marketplace. Acceleration is also a marketplace. And every ID here... What was the middle one? Bitbucket? Yeah, Bitbucket. Yeah.
And also every developer to have kind of a marketplace when you can propose your plugin and your extension to our present on this marketplace. And we try to retarget specific keywords for people to find us. So if you're using GitHub and you want to have code review, you type code review and we're here. Same thing for Bitbucket. For the IDE, the same thing.
You just go in your IDE, you look for code snippets or coding assistant and we're here.
So how many users has GitHub driven you?
I would say today... So it's really interesting because you see different types of customers. We have a lot of users from GitHub, but most of the users are free users. On Bitbucket, we have way less Bitbucket users, but these users come from companies. And these companies are more paying customers. So the behavior is different. But the GitHub users are driving growth.
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