SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Resurface Is On Prem API Management for HealthCare, $5k/year per Managed Node, $2m Raised
07 Nov 2021
Chapter 1: What is the main focus of Resurface.io?
And Christine, can I do the math? If you have 72 live nodes at five grand a pop, you guys are doing about $360,000 a year in revenue right now.
That, you know, we are priced so that we could get early input so that we can get our steering council. So I would not do that math. I don't think that's really fair.
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 Christine Bodegaro.
She is building a very cool company called Resurface.io. She's a challenge seeker, loves tech, and is focused on building storylines, teams, and pipeline through sales and marketing functions. She's happiest when she's collaborating, and she marries strategy with execution.
With leadership roles at Sybase, SAP, Rally, Rogue Wave, and Compost, her experience in databases, customer connections, acquisitions, and API management is a natural fit for Resurface, where they're focused on API observability for security and quality. Christine, are you ready to take us to the top?
I am.
Thank you, Nathan. You bet. Okay. When did you write the first line of code for this company?
Ah, boy. A couple of years back. Now, I will say, full disclosure, I can demo, and I'm pretty dangerous with some COBOL. But beyond that, we've got a dev team that focuses more on that. But about two years ago is when the effort began in earnest.
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Chapter 2: How much funding did Resurface.io raise and why?
What would you say like your sweet spot is? Are people launching with five nodes, one node, a thousand nodes?
Yeah, it's probably going to be between five and seven just because early, you know, and there's going to be probably a phase, right? You may not want all of your APIs right away. We run in production. So that can be a healthy amount of data. And you may not want that same level of detail around all of your APIs. So that's where there's some variability.
Um, and as you add new partners, et cetera, that volume will likely grow.
I see.
So Christine start three and five.
I was going to say five nodes on average at five grand a pop. You're talking like $25,000 a year sort of contracts is a sweet spot. Okay, fair. And let's see, tell me the story of how you got the first customer. It's always a good one usually.
Yeah, yeah. So a bit of our origin story, I'll give you that very quickly. And that is that a very large hardware manufacturer, fruit-based hardware manufacturer, had a precipitous drop in their online store once they launched a new version. Couldn't figure out what it was. rolled in there with our solution and tracked and logged all of the calls and was able to then say, where are they failing?
What's happening? So we knew what process and then being able to say, how are these alike and figuring out what that cohort looked like. And it turns out it was all clustered around a zip code failure. So it was a trailing zero error. which means that anything in a zip code ending in zero would fail. And so people kept trying to buy and it would say, nope, nope, not a valid zip code.
And it turns out that 6% of the zip codes in the US end in zero. So that was a 6% revenue drop. So it became really clear, not only the value in the data to be able to root cause, but to say, let's reach out to everyone who is impacted. So that's the beauty of the data to say, Nathan tried to buy something. He didn't report a problem. He just didn't buy.
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Chapter 3: What are customers paying for when using Resurface.io?
That clock is ticking for sure. And we're thinking we're about 12 months from series A. It could go faster just depending on the climate and where we think we're ready. But we're in acquisition mode for customers and users right now. Again, to get that feedback loop, we really want to understand the problems that we're solving for people.
And if there is a vertical spin on that, meaning will there have to be different versions? Are they going to look at different protocols? We want to make sure that we're conversant in that before we start really ramping and scaling.
Chapter 4: How does Resurface.io ensure data security and compliance?
Makes sense. Managing burnout is really critical for an early team. When you look at your total expenses per month right now, what are they about?
Yeah. I'd hesitate to quote on that, but I will say that we are managing it very conservatively. Quantify that, Christine.
What does that mean? Does that mean you have 15 months to run away in the bank right now or five or what?
It's probably, again, back to 12. You think it's 12, okay. We got in a little bit plus or minus, but just spending in terms of marketing programs, being conservative there and making sure that those are things that we can measure and that- Are you spending on marketing right now? A bit, yes.
We have a couple of pilot programs and, you know, enough results to say this is something we want to move forward with. But right now it's content creation, a lot of events, because that's where we can get in front of people. We don't expect that they'll come to us right away. Google ads, you know, sort of the more traditional methods, some social. And then on our...
team side, being able to have some fractional contributors helps us. Fiverr for design work. Again, just being really cautious around our spend.
Makes sense. Makes sense. This is a good story. I mean, you got to see where you guys end up 12 months from now. It'll be fun. But in the meantime, Christine, we're out of time. Let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite business book?
Challenger Sale.
Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying right now?
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