SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Document Signing API Mindee Hits $1.5m in ARR, Closes $14m Series A
07 Dec 2021
Chapter 1: When did Mindee start and what was the initial focus?
When can you break $150,000 a month in revenue? Will that be next year?
It's going to be very soon.
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. Hey, folks. My guest today is Jonathan Granpion.
He's the co-founder and CEO at Mindy, an entrepreneur with a keen eye for technology disruption and addressing real-world enterprise challenges. He has a decade of tech experience on his shoulders, having held the CTO title for Thank You and Hector prior to joining Mindy. Jonathan, are you ready to take us to the top? Yeah. All right. So just to be clear, you said joining Mindy.
Are you a co-founder or you came in later? Co-founder. Co-founder. Okay. And what year was that? When did you guys get gone? Sorry? When, what year was that? When did you guys get going?
Oh, we started working on 90, like early in 2018 with two of my co-founders and everything restarted in 2019.
What do you mean by restarted?
Actually, at the beginning for the first year, we have been kind of trying to discover how the market works and what were the needs in terms of document processing in companies. And when we figured out there was a specific need on this area, we started working on the product in 2019.
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Chapter 2: What product does Mindee offer and who are their main customers?
And usually API businesses like this, you look at Snowflake, you look at Twilio, they have really high net dollar retention of way above 100%. Where are you guys at?
It's between 200 and 250% after one year. So that's great. That's something very good for our business.
So yeah, so the average year one customer doubles what they pay you in year two. But when you look at your full base, so you look at the last 12 months across your whole base, gross churn plus expansion, net dollar retention is what?
we don't have churn at all in terms of usage.
Jonathan, just to be clear, when you say you have no... The reason I push you on this, I find it very... Unless you only have like one customer, but I find it very hard to believe that there are zero customers that use you who last month signed 10 pages and this month, no one went down lower than 10 pages. In other words, your churn will be measured by a little downgrade in usage month to month.
You're saying no one ever uses less this month than the last month.
Okay. It happens, of course. During the summer, for example, we have obviously lower usage, but people are How to say that? The extension is so much higher than the slow of their usage.
The contraction. It's contraction and expansion. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I'm trying to measure, right? So you might have 10% contraction, but expansion is so big. Expansion could be 90%. So your net dollar retention is still 180%. That's what I'm trying to understand.
Yeah. The net retention rate of 250% I was talking about is including the contraction also of the usage. Maybe I don't understand your question well.
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Chapter 3: How does Mindee's pricing structure work for customers?
I don't even remember when we had this conversation. It was kind of natural to make the split. We came with a plan very easily and there was no discussion at all on this. I'm not going to give you the figures and how this is distributed in terms of capital between the funders. At the very, very beginning, we started with Mohamed, my chief of science, and the split was done between the two of us.
And then Olivier joined us the first month, and he's the co-founder as well, of course. And yeah, everything was super natural between us.
But what I'm trying to dig at here is every co-founder team has to have this conversation, right? So somebody owns more. Is it because they brought more capital, more experience? Take me into that conversation a little bit. Okay. No, I think we... Just focus on you and Mohamed. Just the two of you at the start.
We've been thinking differently. It was not my first experience as a co-founder of a startup, so maybe it was important in the discussion at this moment, at this point in time. And just because of the role as well, maybe it's important as well, like the CEO owns a bit more than the other co-founders, for example.
I see. Got it. Okay, so you own maybe a little bit more than everyone else because of these things. Yeah. One of the most common things I hear from SaaS founders as they're getting your MVP launched is you rely on your customers to send you a CSV or Excel file. And you don't want to spend your engineering time building a big bulky CSV importer. That's why this company Flopfile is growing so fast.
They make it really easy for startups to quickly embed and ingrain their customers' data into the web application without you having to spend engineering hours, your precious early engineering hours on building a clunky CSV import. You simply use Flatfile to import your customer's messy Excel file. Flatfile will clean it up and make it perfect for use in your new web application.
Now, the beautiful thing about Flatfile is it's free to any startup with less than a million in funding or less than five employees. Again, totally free. You can check it out at nathanlaca.com forward slash flat file startups. That's nathanlaca.com forward slash flat file startups. So you guys get going in 2018. Tell me about your first customer. Do you remember who it was and how you found them?
Oh, sure. An HRIS company, HRIS, sorry, in France. One of the leaders. They have approximately 1 million users. I think maybe more. They're called LUCCA. L-U-C-C-A. And they had an expense management solution, an expense management mobile application, and they wanted to improve the user experience when passing receipts. And they were using a company called Abbey.
I don't know the English pronunciation for that. A-B-B-Y-Y. And they were not okay with the performances in terms of response time and accuracy as well. So we built our first prototype with this client and the benchmark, the solution we were proposing to them against the AIB solution. And it was our first client, like deployed in beta version, maybe in March or May 2019.
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Chapter 4: What strategies does Mindee use to retain customers?
Yeah, we have a nice growth, man. We're growing 15% monthly only with organic growth. So yeah, that's not... It's not probably very, very strong fundamental in general. And yeah.
So if you're on track to maybe think, you know, break 150K a month, you know, pretty soon and you're growing, you said 15% month over month. That means about a year ago. Like how much MR were you doing about a year ago?
I don't remember. No, I'm not willing to communicate about the revenue part. We decided not to talk about this.
Just to be clear, I'm multiplying numbers you already gave me. So you said earlier 2,000 to 3,000 per month was an average customer and now you have 70 customers. We can just multiply numbers you've already given us to get revenue. So that's why I'm pushing here.
Yes, but you don't have the growth of the customer. And most of our customers start with a very low revenue because they just want to try to go to the solution and they are integrating it. And then they expand over time. It's a land and expense strategy we have overall.
No, I understand. I completely understand that. But my question to you earlier was, what's the average customer paying per month today? And you said $2,000 to $3,000. That's why I multiplied.
Yeah, okay. That's it.
So what you're saying is the average is under that because the first year customers are paying much less before they expand.
Yeah.
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Chapter 5: How did Mindee manage to bootstrap in its early days?
We tried something on the paid search acquisition channel that we started in Q3 this year, so we don't have enough data to be able to measure that. I'm not able to tell you any cost of acquisition today.
I mean, I would argue that a lot of your cost of acquisition is tied up in the development team building things like this live test feature you guys have built. It's a great tool, high utility value. You send traffic here, people convert, right? Yeah. Do you have any other tools like this you're looking at building right now just to attract in more users?
No, I think it's really about content. With the platform, we have very strong capabilities and we can work on any type of document-related use case.
So I think it's about content and showing people that they can pass birth certificates, certificate of incorporation, bank checks, bank details account, like tons of different documents and building those contents to have more visibility when someone is looking for This type of solution is the key for us and that's what we are working on.
Well, very cool. Well, hey, I want to congratulate you. It sounds like this year was the year you guys broke that million-dollar run rate as you look to keep scaling. And on that note, I hope you guys grow a ton next year as well. But let's wrap up, Jonathan, with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite business book?
Art Things About Art Things, I guess.
Yeah. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?
Jeff Lawson. Yep.
You're not in any acquisition talks with those guys, are you?
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