Dr. Jeremy Weisz 22:25
Jeremy, there’s a couple. Things I want to unpack there because a lot was jammed in there. One pricing I want to get back to. Oh, it’s interesting. When you go to Vimmi.net okay. You can see there’s actually a free plan, right? Which is obviously a big conscious decision to do that, because no matter if someone is free and it still costs you money on the back end, it still costs you, you know, customer service, it still costs you everything for you to run these things. So I want to talk about pricing. I also want to talk about growth, you know, growth through partnerships.
So I do want to touch on that because in this e-commerce world and possibly Delphi may be a partner for you. Who knows. I’ll introduce you to Dara. But like Dara is the one I interviewed his video clone actually, and that’d be maybe interesting. So I do want to hit on partnerships, but you said something about, you know, your co-founder, right. And growing this team and you had experience doing this. So I want to talk about the evolution of the team first. How did you meet your co-founder?
Eitan Koter 23:40
Oh that’s a nice — that’s also a nice story. Probably, you know weeks right. As a website builder. So we went both of us went to meeting at Wix. I had a company in the video space. And also my co-founder also had a company in the video space. And we were like in the same phase of our career evolution and we were introduced by a VP in Wix that said, okay, well, maybe you do need to talk, right? So we were in the same we felt that joining the company. So Vimmi is a merger of two companies, right? The merger happened in 2014, and it was my company and my co-founder company. And we said, okay, yeah, let’s join forces. So we shared R&D, we shared support sales, All the customers, it was much more powerful proposition.
We I mean, I mean, technology is important. And because we went for this large enterprise focused initially, then in order to implement land and expand, you need to gradually in a very, let’s say, smart way, expand the capabilities and the functionalities of the platform, because these are really fully integrated platforms that are really connected to a lot of different customer platforms, to their billing system, to their customer support system, to their finance system. I mean, each one of our customers, we have customers that probably hundreds of people are just engaging with the platform every day. Okay. Like various stakeholders from different companies. So from different departments, again, in those large enterprises. And when you what this is working already, you hear a lot of and you do these daily calls with the customer. You hear a new demand and you say, fine, yeah, we can do that.
So some of that we do by internal development, some of that we do through acquisition, some of that we do through partnerships. Right. And this is why we introduce and we focus a lot on partnerships, not just for go to market, but also for the back end side of things, just making sure we implement solutions that we can provide to customers. And we know today that SaaS is really not enough to succeed. Right. And definitely an AI stage, the ability to, you know, do one thing that is really, really unique for a longer time is no longer something that, you know, we enjoyed probably 20 years ago, 20 years ago, we would launch products. We knew that that product is going to be sold for at least 5 to 7 years.
The same product, right? But it’s not the case anymore. Maybe it’s five to 6 to 7 months today or even weeks now, the way you.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 26:22
Have to be.
Eitan Koter 26:22
Constantly innovating. Yeah. What we did constantly innovative on tech, on tech functionalities, but also on services and managed services. We are in an era today of companies looking at their operational efficiencies, more focus on profitability. Just all that French fractional CXO is like on the rise, right? Trying to work with more external agencies or external service providers instead of hiring. And we know that all the companies are reducing headcount definitely because of AI and all those focus on just eliminating those business units or those tasks that are not contributing directly to profits. And they’re happy to give you a lot of tasks if you take a more done-for-you role within this.
This is a change that we are experienced over the last year or so, and we are working now on revamping the entire website just to move to a more video commerce as a service type of proposition, just providing all these type of managed services on top of the, you know, huge amount of technology that we have. And these services are ranging, you know, from just doing this video transformation, helping existing companies do the migration to a more of a video based type of approach, helping companies with social commerce, definitely all the AI related opportunities. Okay, so definitely like AI, content creation, AI, video, chatbot, shopping assistants, AI avatars, as you mentioned before, and go to a more managed service because this is something that the market demands. So we hear a lot from customers, hey, this is great. We would love to do that. But we don’t. We don’t know where to start and we don’t have any resources. Please. Here is the marketing budget that we have.
Can you do something with it? And we are becoming like an extension of our customers in terms of sales, sales, platform, sales, acceleration services, let’s say, and just helping them deploy their products goods like all over the place in terms of their various marketplaces, social networks, publishers, and just helping them sell all over because they’re struggling to acquire new customers to, you know, struggling with retention. They’re looking for more ways to innovate. They do understand they need to try a lot of things. As we talked about iteration, being agile and just move, move fast, break things, you know, kill, kill things that are not working and try to evaluate what’s working or not, what’s not.
And this is probably increasing the use of, you know, how you analyze data, how do you work with analytics and create the right attribution for the various tasks that you do? And this is a lot of things that you can do on the platform today.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 29:08
Yeah. It sounds like, you know, there’s a white glove component to it. Someone may come. I mean, obviously there’s a software in you’re powering these things, but it also just makes it easier for onboarding. And it also makes it stickier because, you know, okay, if we get them up and running, then they can just use it and they’ll always be a customer because they’re getting sales through the platform. So we just need to get them up and running to and help them through that. So as there is a self-serve, there is also hey, like, let us help you get this up and running and working and things like that.
I remember I had one, the founder of Acuity Scheduling on Gavin, and he knew like the blockage points of like when people would churn, like if they didn’t do these things, they’d churn. They didn’t do these three things and they churn at this point. And so his goal was just to, okay, fix those little blockage points along the journey. Eventually he sold to Squarespace, which was interesting. But yeah, he was like amazing at finding those things and putting those processes in place there.
Eitan Koter 30:13
I think we are in a specific time that right now in the SAS evolution that we are reaching this saturation phase, there is a SaaS fatigue all over. Right. And I know that what I see and what I hear that a lot of companies are investing not in finding new SaaS, but just eliminating a lot of SaaS tools that they have internally. They don’t know what type of tools they are using because they just create all these subscriptions, you know, for the last three, five years, and they just want to eliminate everything. And this is an opportunity also, again, for the big, big companies to become bigger because just to acquire more startups and more sales just to include that with additional functionalities.
So if you have a slack or if you have a, you know, whatever, some kind of a workflow platform like a Monday.com or whatever, this platform will increase in terms of their functionalities and the ability to do things. It’s easier for anyone because you already have the subscription with them increase, you know, increase it in few dollars rather than just Evaluating a new startup and start the whole process. No one has time for that. So this is why this is also influencing, you know, the decision. And it’s like a something that needs to be well understood, you know. But a lot of SaaS companies out there.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 31:33
Talk about the kind of the evolution of the team for a second. So the two of you, you merge and then you’ve grown. What did what is the evolution of the team look like when we kind of fast forward from start till now?
Eitan Koter 31:45
I mean, for us it’s working very fast. I mean, we have a clear demarcation between what Amnon, my founder is co-founder is doing and what to me is just more on the R&D operation side of things. I’m more on the marketing, sales and finance. So this is foundational. It’s very, very important just to maintain this. It’s a very healthy process because there are no, you know, there are no conflicts or there’s nothing. Everyone is just responsible for his job. And there is a lot of confidence that things are being done in the right way. And then, you know, we analyze what we want to do in terms of planning, primarily R&D, marketing, right.
These are the major, you know, cash cows, right. Of funds. And then we analyze how it looks like in terms of cash flow for the next 12 months. And we definitely in the first years we just injected all this money 100% back to all these efforts. And primarily these investments are, you know, 90% of that cost is to just increase staff, right. So we can discuss, you know, department by department. But in the early days.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 33:01
We talk about the department. I’m curious.
Eitan Koter 33:04
R&D and the initial like ten years ago it was okay, we need to find the best Python engineer and we need to find the best C+. Plus. I mean, those no one talks about this language. This language is gone today, right? So who has the best experience to work with ChatGPT to create code. Right. So that’s the primary criteria. And we just we are not allowing, you know, teams and R&D that are not working with GPT or many other tools just for creating code. Right. And it was a process initially they were like, I’m not sure, but they figured out quite quickly that this is a fundamental way of doing things today.
In parallel, there is a huge investment that we didn’t plan in all the DevOps, you know, SRE all these type of, let’s call them IT or implementation engineers that are more responsible for managing, you know, cloud resources, you know, implementing stuff, you know, on our SaaS, just making sure that on the lower levels of the engineering layers of the infrastructure. These things are working very well, implementing those processes of moving from staging to production in a very professional way and just testing in QA. These are the most expensive resources, you know, for any company these days, right? So and then probably three years ago, data. Right.
Everyone talks about data analytics. So you need to have these. We’ve launched this data science team right. So you hire PhDs and try to hire those data engineers that are helping to analyze data, enrich data, create segmentation of the data and come up with recommendation. And then recommendation is machine learning AI. And then analyzing the models out there and what can be used to create smarter decisions in terms of content recommendation, product recommendation, variety of business KPIs that are important for our customers that makes a difference for them. How to use the data, how to collect the data, enrich it and take smarter decision around primarily recommendation a variety of things, right? Yeah. So this was the evolution on that side of things.
And as we grew as a company, more resources towards 24 over seven, you know, type of support bug fixes help desk. And we are as a bootstrap, you know, the first thing that we look today we are looking for are we going to hire or are we going to implement AI for that. Right. So for everything, for chatbots, for support for 24 over seven NOC that we have. Right. We have big NOC with screens just monitoring videos all over the world, you know. So we, you know, are millions of users are watching videos and they are, you know, people just uploading content and stream content from there, from anywhere. So you need to make sure that on the engineering level, this thing is working right. It’s not just an application that enables you to do something. It’s there are bits moving from one side of the world to the other, and they move in high capacity and high volume.
You need to make sure that everything is smooth working, and it’s kind of a that layer of, of like call it layer one in the, in the engineering or RIT side of things. It needs to work and perform. So definitely things are being done more efficient in a more efficient way. Now in the marketing side, as you know, eventually for a growth company, marketing is the largest item in terms of budgets and the PNL of every company. You know, mostly you hit a point where marketing is like double the cost of R&D because you want to just use and exploit those opportunities all over the world. And for us, as a bootstrap company, you don’t have that kind of budget for marketing, right? You have a budget for R&D, for supporting customers, customer support. But marketing, you need to be very, very smart. So this is where we launch our partnership, our indirect type of go to market, which is very, very powerful because it gives you the ability first to learn a lot about the market.
And we have two types of partners technology partners and business partners. Technology partners are like Shopify, like Fourthwall, like various companies that are providing, let’s say, e-commerce services or related software, or a SaaS solution to businesses or to creators or to different type of customers. And they require some kind of a video solution for women just to complement their entire solution. So Shopify were on the marketplace with other companies. We did like a deep integration that we are in their internal backend or dashboard or console, let’s say. And these are the technology implementation that we did and it usually works around them, introducing us to customers, opening accounts and Vimmi. And obviously there is a kind of a revenue share engagement with between us and them.
Business partners are primarily agencies like marketing agencies, e-commerce agencies, variety of, yeah, variety of business partners that are just promoting our stuff to their prospective customers. But and in parallel, we have the direct approach primarily to large enterprises. So that’s our, let’s say, our go to market right now, which is very, very focused. It’s not we’re not doing PPC, we’re not doing any advertising. It’s really working hard with the with the internal team about, you know, leveraging their existing relationship we have with our partners and with our customers and just trying to work very small through organic content like LinkedIn and through variety of industry experts and consultants that we are always communicating and engaging with some of them just to introduce us to more and more enterprise style of opportunities. And this kind of a holistic go to market works for us very well.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 39:15
So anytime we’re looking here at the partner page right. So we’re Vimmi.net/partner from the technology side, if someone has a platform they can kind of integrate it Vimmi into it like Shopify, WooCommerce and.
Eitan Koter 39:29
Exactly we.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 39:30
See any website Wix, Google Merchant and the business side, you know, e-commerce agencies I could see that benefits them. It also benefits you because they could have a new product they can offer clients and also boost their revenue. So e-commerce age. I’ve had a number of e-commerce agencies on the podcast for sure, and I can see how they’d be like, yeah, like this is another stream that we can help our clients. Obviously, you know, they charge for that, right?
And so they can manage it, hopefully making your job, the customer support job at Vimmi a little easier because they can manage ten, 20, 50, 100 clients on the platform for that, for that client. So are there any other ideal partners like on the business side? So obviously e-commerce agencies. Is that the main one or are there any other type of?
Eitan Koter 40:25
No. As I said, it’s a mix of I mean technology partners. It’s an ongoing work. I mean like every week we are working on making those integrations just to make life easy for their customers, just to click a button and do this OAuth, you know, with our platform. So this is something very, very quick. It’s a very structured process. You know those API documentations are available. And you know any technology company can quickly do the integration. And we see demand like from various sectors, not just e-commerce site builders, but also, you know, creators, platform influencer marketing platforms, I mean variety of categories that are just we are being introduced to more and more categories that find our solution interesting.
So we see a big growth over there in terms of, you know, the other side of the things. The more agencies, yeah, more marketing agencies, more businesses that are like agencies that are just a complementary solution for them. Also for them just providing service. They realize that there must be a technology component both for improving margins but also for probably improving valuations of the things that they do. Right. And just to help customers. And also the trigger for them is just making just, you know, launch this kind of a recurring revenue streams, right? When you know, with agency you have like a projects maybe and it’s very limited in time. But with SaaS and technology is just keep going on and on.
And this is another evolution of the agencies out there that are starting to use, you know, software as a service to, to just as an additional revenue stream and delivery to their customers.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 41:57
Yeah. That brings me to the pricing part. Right. So I remember I had the Jotform founder on and they have a free plan. And I mean, it costs money obviously to do that.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 42:09
Talk about the decision for free and like in the pricing here. Right. Because I’m sure a lot of time went into this.
Eitan Koter 42:18
Yeah. So the free forever plan is obviously costing us money but it’s a marketing expense. This is how we look at it. Right. And obviously you have a bunch of paid customers paying customers and a free customers and paying customers are the profits or the gross margin should be fine or should be enough just to finance those marketing expenses on the free plan. We are now being asked because we are starting to serve more and more categories in the industry. So this is a pricing that we thought about might be relevant for a mid-market customer, but we were introduced through our technology partners to more of a I would say, let’s say small businesses or even solopreneurs like content creators.
I mean, they are paying for the entire e-commerce, probably 20, $30, and they’re expecting the video solution to be something on, on that, on that volume. So we are launching also an SMB pricing to support that. And of course, on top of this pricing, we have the enterprise cost, which is usually a custom. Proposal to go into some kind of a discovery session. Some of the discovery sessions are taking longer time, which is fine because there are a lot of things that needs to be defined. And in some of those opportunities, we also provided the entire e-commerce platform itself. Right. Vimmi is also a Shopify and Adobe partners and also Salesforce and some of these opportunities. We also provided this entire store itself, including the video side, and even with built marketplaces. Right.
Also, so this is another thing that we are very proud of, that we’re able just to evolve. And this is something we do on the pool mode. And we don’t do it on a push mode. So right through discovery we said, hey, we can build this Shopify for you or we can build this Magento for you. So yeah, we can do that. Let’s just throw it into the subscription and it’s fine. It’s already, you know, when let’s go. So it makes life easy for customers. And this is an evolution of having all these discussions, you know, with this with these enterprise customers, which are more kind of a custom made implementation. But anyhow, always using our SaaS, using our software as the same software that all the other markets is using.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 44:44
Yeah. No, it’s interesting because I could see, you know, if you’re a product someone wants to hook in, someone get them using it, and then if you using it more and more, you find it more valuable. You have to pay like so. If you look at some of the features here, obviously as you have want to do more lives per month, you have to pay. If you want to do longer lives, you have to pay. If you want to go on more social media channels, you have to pay. But like there’s there. And also what’s interesting I find is the views, right?
Like if you have 50 concurrent viewers, you could still be free if you have a thousand views. But once you have an influencer who’s got like a million views on something, you know, they’re going to hit the free plan pretty quickly. But like, that’s value because they’re going to sell more. So great. You can afford to pay if you have a million people watching this thing and a certain number of people buying it. So it’s just interesting to go through to see the different plans and like how they progress here, you know.
Eitan Koter 45:43
Yeah. And the customer I mean, we also have a variety of use cases like we have customer that has a wants like four lives per month, but it has 10 million visitors on his website in a month. So it remember we are the CDN. We are the content delivery network. We stream that content to a video player on the customer website, and we are responsible for that streaming. And we need to make sure that everything works. And some of these events has ten, tens of thousands of concurrent users. These are like mega events. We need to make sure we are responsible for these events to work 24 over seven. And if something fails and something not working, we need to fix it.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 46:21
So all these things is interesting because I’m sure at some point it’s like, oh yeah, let’s offer. I’m not saying this is the case three lives and like, oh God, this person did three lives. But they got we need to add views to this thing because we’re going to lose our shirt. So each of these lines was probably something happened. You’re like, okay, we need to have a different tier for this. We weren’t thinking of this. Yes.
Eitan Koter 46:46
Yes. I mean, there are a lot of permutations, right? In the industry. We are very open to discuss this.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 46:52
No, it makes sense. Yeah, it makes perfect sense. like things are going to cost you money and time and resources like you have to charge for it. So I do want to get to some of the content piece, right? And some of the mistakes people make as well. And, and use cases like you have some great, really good content. So I encourage people to check out Vimmi.net here. We’re in five shoppable TikTok video formats. I mean, this is any not just TikTok, but any, right? We have product demonstrations, unboxing, product reviews, influencer live streams, behind the scenes content. So I encourage people to check this out. But what are some of the mistakes you find people are making with video?
Eitan Koter 47:32
The main mistake that people are doing is that they just stop, right?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 47:37
They’re not doing it at all, you mean?
Eitan Koter 47:37
Yeah, consistency is key. I mean, I usually recommend to start with short form videos, you know, create a list of customer pains, provide information about the industry, about trends, provide case studies, testimonials, and you can create a list of 50 content ideas, right? Just from top of your head. If you concentrate for like 30 minutes and just create content around that, no one cares about the background or the production value or the editing. You need to have good sound and just showing yourself out there. That’s it. Don’t spend too much time on editing. Probably add captions and remove some, you know, pauses and hums.
And there are so many AI tools there that you can do it in one click. Okay, so some of my greatest successes I spent like ten minutes on this video. It was one shot on iPhone, two clicks on editing, and that’s it posting all over. And it works in a very like a hockey stick way. It’s not a gradual growth. Right. And you can see you can spend a few weeks with not a lot of views, probably 1020, but suddenly one video will get you 50,000 views and then one month later you get 100,000 views. And this is the way it works. It works like a hockey stick.
Don’t spend too much time analyzing initially the data and just focus on consistency and an authenticity showing yourself out there. What works very, very the best today is founder led content or employee generated content. Don’t spend too much money on influencers or content creators. Just do it by yourself. And if you’re afraid of camera or find someone in your organization who is happy to do that, even incentivize him giving some bonuses of making actual sales from these type of activities. And today, of course, you can clone yourself to an AI avatar and you through text. You can create videos, right? And no one knows about it. So that’s another tip like a pro tip, right? And again, many, many tools out there that you can do that can do that for you.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 49:29
No, I love that you said that because I tell that people all the time just do it. They’re worried about the video quality, like all this stuff. I’m like, just go out and start doing it. You’ll get better as you do it. And it is consistency and authenticity. And I mean, the videos I did, the podcast interviews I did 15 years ago, when I look at it, I’m like, oh my God, that’s terrible. But, like, it was fine. You know, it actually was just authentic.
And it, you know, I find and you probably find this too with influencer videos, some of the ones that pull better when they just flip on their phone and, and record as opposed to like a professional video shoot because people can sense, oh, you just flipped on your phone. You’re you don’t have your hair and makeup done and it’s believable. Yeah. You know, last question, I a ton is some of your favorite episodes in your podcast here in my podcast.
Eitan Koter 50:25
Oh so many.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 50:27
I see Martin Grafe. I’ve had him on too. He was. He’s a good one. Who are some of your who are some of the favorites?
Eitan Koter 50:35
I’m here, you know Samir. So it was so I mean, this episode with Teresa Zimmerman, right? Like talking about, you know, how to navigate retail challenges and what’s the I mean, retail is so important, like brick and mortar is 80% of overall retail in the US, right? Still. 80% of the business is done offline. So plenty of opportunities over there and definitely for omnichannel. Yeah, I mean I love all the episodes. It’s very difficult for me to we try to work very hard to try to qualify and onboard probably the best, you know, experts in their respective niche.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 51:11
So first of all, Eitan would be the first one to thank you everyone. Thanks for sharing your journey, your stories. Everyone can check out Vimmi. Vimmi.net to learn more and we’ll see everyone next time. Eitan, thanks so much.
Eitan Koter 51:27
Thank you so much, Jeremy. It was a pleasure.
