SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How she went $0 to $35k MRR in 12 months selling SaaS to RIA's
04 Apr 2023
Chapter 1: What is Chantico Technology and its unique offering?
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. Guys, Chantico Technology is doing $35,000 a month today across five customers with 100 paid seats at $350 a pop. She's invented this idea called recursion partitioning.
They've got 1,000 events that help RIA advisors understand how their portfolios might perform if some combination of these 1,000 outputs, these 1,000 events combined together, helps them do sort of disaster planning in an efficient way. Just scaling here nicely, $425,000 pre-seed raise last year at a $5 million cap, raising a little bit more this year as she looks to scale with a team of eight.
Hey folks, my guest today is Ms. Gina Sanchez. She's the CEO of Chantico Technology and Investment and Technology Software Publisher. In addition, she serves as chairwoman of the Los Angeles County Employee Retirement Association, Board of Retirement, and as a member of the Board of Directors for Cedars-Sinai Hospital.
She also serves as an advisory board member for the UCLA Masters of Financial and Engineering Program. Gina, you ready to take us to the top?
Chapter 2: How did Gina Sanchez identify the problem that led to Chantico's creation?
I'm ready to do it.
You've got your plate full. You're doing a lot of stuff. How much time can you spend on Chantico?
Well, I spend all my time on Chantico, actually. So, you know, I have one last year as public service to LA County Employee Retirement Association, which I've done for six years. And, you know, I launched Chantico Technology actually last year in 2021, or at the end of 2021. And we got going in 2022 with fundraising and secured our first round of pre-feed funding. in 2022.
Chapter 3: What is recursive partitioning and how does it apply to portfolio management?
So this has been what I live and breathe for since that moment.
That's awesome. Okay, so tell us why you launched this. I mean, how did you discover this problem?
Well, so I actually ran a consulting company for a decade. And in that time period, and before that, I was a portfolio manager at American Century Investment Management, where I had started using recursive partitioning in addition to kind of your traditional regression analysis for data analysis.
What I found was that while regression was really good at guessing what the average expectation would be, recursive partitioning was really good at guessing the extremes. When you ask, describe your product in five words, we forecast extreme events. That's what we do.
Quite frankly, that's when we lose money as portfolio managers, and that's when we get hired as investment managers or wealth managers. You know, I started crafting this product in the form of a consulting product about a decade ago. So I spent, you know, once I had lifted out of Rubini Global Economics, where I had launched a consultancy that was profitable.
We were able to adequately spin that out. I earned him out over three years.
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Chapter 4: How did Chantico secure its initial funding and what challenges were faced?
And in that time period, I kind of gave myself the agenda and latitude to build the kind of research agenda I wanted to build. And with my client base, really focused on this technology and effectively created the prototype for what would then to become the IP that we spun out into Chantico Technology. And so that IP actually has 10 years of client testing behind it.
That's wild. Okay, I want to come back to the idea of recursion partitioning here in a second. But first, to get going in 2021, you mentioned a seed round, I think you said in 2022, what was the size of that round?
So we actually raised $425,000 in 2021, sorry, in 2022, from 2045 Ventures, Ulu Ventures, a handful of individuals. And we added to that actually early this year. And so we're just finalizing the second half of that seed round, which it's been the prolonged seed round. Anybody who's been raising money knows how painful it's been to find and secure pre-seed funding. But we
I think one of the things that have kept us in front of the early stage venture companies is that our product is the exact kind of product you need when markets are volatile. You couldn't get more volatile markets in the last few years. And strangely, we were really concerned that the meltdown in Silicon Valley Bank was going to be
was going to be sort of, you know, a real death blow to our funding process. But actually our funding sped up after that, probably because people actually came to us saying, hey, I know you're not fully built yet, but can we subscribe to whatever you have? And so we're actually pre-selling just access to the data engine to access to the analysis engine.
And so, you know, I think that's probably what has kept us in the game while other early stage companies are having troubles.
couple of quick questions here.
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Chapter 5: What strategies does Chantico use to attract and retain customers?
So most folks are selling, you know, 15, 20% of our company in pre-seed rounds these days. Are you sort of in that same range?
Say that again?
Most folks in pre-seed rounds today are selling 15 to 20% of their business. Are you in that same range?
That's exactly what we're doing. Yeah, we're exactly doing that. So we've filled 10% so far. We're selling the other 10%.
That's great. Yeah. So something like a two, two and a half million valuation, something like that.
So we're actually selling at a $5 million valuation.
Okay, so then you're selling less than if you're only, if you've, okay, well, I guess 500,000, right? Got it, got it, got it. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So going, SVB is obviously, and for context to the audience, we're recording this on Wednesday, March 22nd. So SVB, you know, call that, what was that, 10 days ago, something around there.
Gina, I mean, that is the definition I would say of, you know, recursion partitioning and extreme events. So people are going to be wondering how, if no one else in the world can predict these things, how is Gina saying she could predict it?
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Chapter 6: How does Chantico's technology respond to market volatility?
So how would your technology have identified and told portfolio managers about SVB ahead of time?
Well, it's not going to tell portfolio managers about SVB. What it tells portfolio managers is how their portfolios respond to different, to different economic events and what happens when they happen in succession right so while people understand how their portfolio might act when interest rates rise.
What we do is we help them understand what is the exact set of conditions that will lead to the worst performance that they will have and so what combination of events and that's really where we don't have to predict the event we don't have to predict that the pandemic will happen we just simply have to predict that oil prices will go up.
um that interest rates will go up and that the Fed balance sheet will start to retrench that tends to be a death blow to a number of portfolios it doesn't matter what caused it and so I think a lot of people try to focus on the crystal ballishness of it we're not in the business of focusing on the crystal ball we're just basically trying to say whatever event happens if you get a series of events this is the combination that you want to be aware of right
On the flip side, if you're investing for growth, you know, so if we're looking at deal by deal investments into a venture portfolio or PE portfolio, we look for the series of attributes or aspects that will lead to outsized performance. And so, you know, this goes in both directions. It actually handles both tails.
And so it sells in both markets, but in those down markets, when people are getting really nervous, sometimes you have to reset expectations and say, Hey, If interest rates are rising, and that may not be the case anymore, but it was for the last year, and the Fed balance sheet is not expanding, our expectations have to be lower.
So let's reset your expectations so that you don't terminate us, even if we're doing really well as a manager. Right.
Isn't the hard part here? I don't mean to cut you off. It's just where it's a fast show. I don't want to get a lot in. Isn't the hard part the creative energy required to think of the craziest things that can happen?
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Chapter 7: What are the revenue goals and growth projections for Chantico?
And if so, how do you? That's what we do. can you possibly so let's say tomorrow, I'm making this up a Russian submarine hits the internet cable line in the Atlantic Ocean and cuts internet communications off between, you know, Europe and the US? I mean, how can you possibly think of all the crazy things that could happen tomorrow across geopolitics, economies, everything?
Yeah, but let's take that crazy example that you've just put out. Well, what would naturally happen? You'd have a natural fall in e-commerce almost immediately. That fall in e-commerce is going to result in at least a temporary fall in profitability. Depending on how long that outage happens, that temporary fall in productivity could actually manifest into other elements like a fall in labor.
So you could see labor cuts, right? You could see wages.
Chapter 8: Who are the key team members behind Chantico Technology?
And we can tell you how your portfolio will act in those. So it isn't about guessing the event. It's about guessing how the event is going to evolve in terms of elements that can be predicted.
You have a list of labor shortage, interest rate rise. You have a list of 300 items. You don't care what events cause.
We have a list of over 1,000 items actually.
It's a standard set then. You don't care about what the event is. You care about here are the thousand potential outcomes of any random event. And if you combine event number, outcome number seven with outcome number six and 999, that would be bad for your portfolio.
Precisely. And the other thing, Nathan, is that we also, not every portfolio cares about all of those events. So sometimes that happens and your portfolio is immune to it, right? That's also valuable information.
So what we're looking for are the events that cause the biggest differences in your expectations and focus you on those six or seven things and anything that could cause those six or seven outcomes, right? So now you as a manager can stay focused and you're not worried about every number that flies at you.
This sounds very valuable, right? If it works, what's the average customer paying you today to use the technology per month or per year?
So we're actually selling this into three different channels. And so if you look at, we're selling this with the SaaS product and the SaaS product has the standard kind of fees, you know, $350 per user per month, right? So think about that as about $5,000 per user per year.
And are most signing up just one user or is your average customer signing up 10 users?
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