SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
They Shut Down $3m Agency to Launch API SaaS tool, Hit 200 Customers
18 Sep 2021
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
We're actually doing a bit less, but something like that. Yeah.
Okay. So more like 8,000 a month, something like that.
Yeah. Yeah.
And where were you a year ago? Zero?
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. Hey folks, my guest today is Vendran Sindrik.
He likes to say he's a developer first. He started developing with PHP and MySQL when he was 18 years old and since then learned everything he needed from full stack developer with HTML, CSS, and all the works. He also ran a development company for 10 years and then started building a service for himself to help with daily development issues.
He turned that into a product called Treble and raised 1.2 million euros to build it out. Vendran, you ready to take us to the top?
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Chapter 2: How did the founders transition from an agency to a SaaS tool?
That's using API. So you can add Treble to that API and you'll have better understanding what's going on with either your app or multiple apps for your API.
Got it. And how many customers are you serving today?
So right now we've got around 200 customers.
And when did you launch?
Literally, officially, we didn't even launch, but we exist for, I would say, the past six months. We've kind of done, I would say, an open beta where we gave our internal clients the software and they just kept recommending it to other developers. Now we raised our first seed round and we're actually officially planning to launch in November this year.
How much did you raise in the seed?
We raised $1.4 million.
Okay, great. $1.4 million. And did you do that on a convertible note or a priced round?
Priced round.
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Chapter 3: What unique features does Treble offer for API management?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So essentially we put together a pitch deck and a business plan and a bunch of European VC funds mostly reached out. We got around three term sheets and we chose Nauta, our partner, because they had a combination of a great team and the best deal.
And who is we? How many founders are there?
So there's me and my co-founder Darko.
And then you guys split equity 50-50?
No, no. I have a bit more. He has a bit less because I essentially built the entire platform and he's mostly a designer and our operational officer.
I see. Okay. Got it. That makes sense to me. So maybe it's something more like 60, 40 plus your new investor.
Yeah, exactly.
Okay. And you mentioned an agency many times. Tell me more about the agency. Is that still running today or did you shut it down?
So one of the kind of prerequisites to the deal was that we would shut down the agency. That is what we actually wanted. We had the agency for roughly about 10 years. We got it to a point where we've done a lot of work for a lot of international clients, big name brands. And we kind of naturally always wanted to have a product on our own. And it just...
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Chapter 4: What pricing strategies are used in Treble's business model?
The thing with this is because the way that we built it, it really required a lot of testing. One of the things that we do, of course, again, is we... have access to every single request that is made on your API. So you can imagine if you have an API that has 10 million monthly requests, we need to be able to handle that much traffic, right?
So one of the things that we needed to make sure that we could actually scale is the volume, scalability, and that we could do it at a cost, right? So that's what we kind of spent at least, I would say, six months testing, doing, developing, and perfecting. And once we were done with that, then we got more confident about Treble and what it can do.
Great pricing plans for SaaS are usually a combination of like a flat fee for feature upgrades and then also utility-based upselling. The utility-based upselling you choose to use on your homepage is based off number of requests and a length of log retention. Why are those the right two utility metrics?
That's what we think at the moment that are right. You have to understand that, like you said, I am coming from a developer background and one of the things that I hate is complicated pricing, right? If I see a product and I've seen many products, the worst things that I could see is you want feature A and that feature is only available in the highest plan. That's just going to turn me off.
So the thing that we wanted to do here is we wanted to give everybody all the features and you only pay for essentially what you use. We think that is the fairest offer we can make. So nobody loses money and you get both of both. you know, both of both words, sorry.
Now the counter to that will be a customer who signs up for you and then goes, you know, sign up on your $70 a month plan for 500,000 requests. A year from now, they're doing 10 million requests. So now they're paying you 500 or maybe more than that per month.
And in their head, they start resenting you a little bit because they go, you know, our API is growing, but it's not because of the drawn and like Treble only. There's a bunch of other stuff growing our number of requests. Why are we paying Treble so much more? How would you think about that problem?
I think if they grew that much, Treble would be their best friend because in that amount of time, we would have provided so much value and saved them so much money and time to them and their developer just on everything from debugging to writing documentation that they would be actually happy instead of sad.
All right, fair answer. What does Treble look like today? Has anyone signed up and then canceled?
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Chapter 5: How did the founders secure funding for Treble?
I am now 33. 33.
Last question. What's something you wish you knew when you were 20?
That I don't know everything.
Guys, they launched an agency brand back in 2011, did $3 million in revenue on the agency last year, then shut it all down when they got a $1.4 million for an investor just 30 days ago at a $6.4 million post-money valuation for their tool, which helps you manage your API and make sure it's never going down up to 500,000 requests. And you can scale nicely with the team.
They're now doing about $10,000 a month in, we'll call it eight to 10, that $10,000 a month in revenue from $2,000 a month, just six months ago with their team of, for. Bedron, thanks for taking us to the top.
Thank you. Thank you.
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