SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Team Collaboration Tool Hits 3 Pilots, $15k Each, Real MRR Growth next?
25 Aug 2021
Chapter 1: What is the main focus of the podcast episode?
I'm very cognizant of the fact that, you know, we're not the typical, you know, six months and we're out the door and then we've launched and then we've hit the hockey stick.
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We got to grow faster, minimum is 100% over the past several years.
Or bootstrap founders like Vivek of QuestionPro. When I started the company, it was not cool to raise. Or Looker CEO Frank Bean before Google acquired his company for $2.6 billion.
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Chapter 2: How did the guest's first customer come about?
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On the checkout page, you'll see an option to request free access. I grant 100% of those requests no questions asked. Hey, folks. My guest today is DS Benbow. He's building a great tool called Medici. It's helping folks in the workplace collaboration space. He got a team in Insights. He's your guy.
Chapter 3: What challenges did the guest face in product development?
He's a founder of the business and started focused. He started by focusing on delivering a world-class predictive work platform that passively collects and objectively assesses how people and teams work and collaborate. Before this, he worked in the capacity of product marketing and strategy at a number of enterprise companies, startups, and agencies, including Microsoft, AT&T, Zillow, and WPPDS.
You ready to take this off? Let's kick it off. All right, man. So if you want to follow along, the website URL is M-E-T-A, like meta, and then chi, C-H-I dot com. When did you guys launch?
It's been about five years now. It's slow growing. And then we just started to accelerate recently.
Tell me more about the growth, where the first customer come from. Do you remember?
First customer actually came from family.
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Chapter 4: What is the average revenue per pilot for the collaboration tool?
My mom had a consulting company at the time where she traveled a lot and had a number of distributed workforce. And this was our first place where we actually implemented the solution. The second was a friend of mine was running for mayor of Seattle.
And for his campaign, in terms of, again, a distributed workforce, we implemented Medici versus one of the more known name brand companies at the time.
So what year was that? When do you launch the first products?
Well, we've kind of been in, I would argue... incubation for a while we kind of slow rolled it because we were um bootstrapping um but then you know like five years ago we started to like spend more money add contractors and um then that's when it really started to take off so there's there's like the the start of the idea date and then there's like we're really going to make something happen.
Let me ask you this. How much, how much of your own money or investment did you spend or your bootstrap? So your own money, did you spend before you had your first dollar revenue? How big was the risk? Easily over a hundred K. And what costs so much software supposed to be cheap to get off the ground? Where, where was it expensive?
Well, it was, there's the hosting, there's contractors, there's the design work. And we spent money, on a variety of contractors in those spaces.
And now how many folks are full-time today at the company? Today we have two.
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Chapter 5: How does Medici enhance workplace collaboration?
Two people. Okay. And are you guys an engineer? Yeah. Are you the engineer or the business? Are you the engineer or the business?
I'm the product guy. And my engineer is literally a rocket scientist who went to graduate school in That is a master's in aeronautical engineering from the University of Mississippi.
That is great. Okay, so tell me, why are people so excited about you? What are they buying? Tell me about the product.
Sure. So one of the things that we've experienced in the pandemic, especially in 2020, is we have a distributed workforce.
Chapter 6: What are the key features of the Medici platform?
We can't help that. But how do we continue to maintain some of the operational capabilities either rigor or operational ways of doing things that we had when we were in person. And when you think about employee satisfaction, how would you measure that as with the exception of the kind of employee health report that comes out maybe once or twice a year?
How do you do it in a way that's more real time and more objective? And this is where Medici stepped in. We, again, provide passive collection of data based on how you work. We take that information and we turn it into kind of a dashboard of these are the types of projects I like. These are the types of teams that I like to work on. Here are the things that I'm successful at.
Here's kind of my own time delivery. And here's my sentiment at the completion of a particular project. So you start to build over time a profile of, not just an employee, but also of teams so that they can then understand where they're doing well, where they're not doing well.
And from a management perspective, it also gives you much more of a real-time view left to right in your organization in terms of how people are not just performing, which is super important in a distributed world, but also sentiment.
Chapter 7: How does the guest plan to scale the business?
So DS, what are people paying you on average per month to use this technology?
So right now, the pilots that we're still running are, there's a per seat license. And then we have what we call a management dashboard, which will give you a very deep dive view into employee behavior. We use about 18 different attributes to come up with some objective analytics that predict things like inclusion, predict things like on-time delivery.
Yeah, DS, I totally get the product. You're in a very hot space. That makes total sense to me. But I'm curious, are we talking like $6,000 pilots or $60,000 pilots? What's the average customer paying for a pilot?
The average pilot is between five and 10.
Okay, are they paying one time or is it monthly recurring, like an ACV? It's monthly recurring.
It's monthly recurring.
So 5K a month or 5K for a year?
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Chapter 8: What advice does the guest offer to aspiring entrepreneurs?
5K for the time of the product beta, which is typically three months.
Okay, so they're paying about $2,000 a month if they continue past the pilot.
Yeah, and that's assuming a certain type of size, and that's typically under $100,000.
Guys, if you're bootstrapped and want some extra cash to run experiments, don't forget to try my new business, founderpath.com. We take your monthly recurring revenue and turn it into upfront cash overnight. If you're doing 10 grand a month in revenue, you can get 30 grand today right away and then take more money as you need it every couple of weeks. Check it out today.
We do deals as small as 10,000, all the way up to 1.5 million. See how much you can get at founderpath.com. Again, that's founderpath.com. And talk to me about how many pilots are running today. Today, we've got three, three pilots. Okay. Got it. So there's about 15 K there and like total pilot revenue, right? How do you, I mean, you've been, you met us since 2016 though, right?
So like people listening are going to wonder like, wait, hold on. Is he doing this full time? Like, how's he paying his bills? Like, why isn't this growing faster? Why are you still in pilots in month six or year six?
That is a great question. Um, Two years ago, we kind of took a step back and did a redesign and rethought how we wanted to go to market in terms of our target audience based on feedback. And so that took a lot longer than we thought it would.
Um, and yes, I'm very cognizant of the fact that, you know, we're not the typical, you know, six months and we're out the door and then we've launched and then we've hit the hockey stick.
Um, but we're, we're not looking for a hockey stick in every business. Every business is going to hockey stick. You can build a great lifestyle business, but this is like six years and you still don't have 10 paying customers that love your product. And, you know, 10 true fans. Are you doing this on the side or is this full time? Like, how are you sort of supporting yourself?
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