Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to build out all the specs that you were getting from these customers?

John Wallace: We were experimenting only for about a year and a half. Then we spent probably another nine months building the modelling platform.

It took us all the way through the pandemic to start publishing models. Then we were integrating the two, I would say that’s really when we had product-market fit. That’s when we could say, “Here’s a system that can wake up and tell you what to do on Monday morning based on last week’s data, and it can be calibrated and corroborated by these experiments.”

Nobody had that.

If the machine learning is only as good as the data that you can put into it and in some cases, the data for mixed models is not really modellable. I mean it’s very low signal data.

If we had attempted to build this in the other order, we would’ve probably failed. If we had built a mixed model so as to add some experiments later, I don’t think that would have been successful.

Sramana Mitra: So, the $2 million seed round plus whatever friends and family money you put in, did that take you through that first 18 months of experiments and the rest?

John Wallace: Yes. We had quite a bit of revenue from the Alpha customers.

I had bootstrapped DataSong, so I have a bit of a bootstrapping mentality. Once we had product-market fit and were funded, we had tight belts and built the modeling framework off of revenue from early adopters.

Then we hit product-market fit, and things started to snowball for us. So, we’ve been essentially operating as a bootstrap business ever since.

Sramana Mitra: So you didn’t raise any more money after that?

John Wallace: No.

Sramana Mitra: Fantastic. Wow. That’s awesome. So in 2021, you finished this whole set of course building.

John Wallace: I mean, we never really finished building.

Sramana Mitra: But, but at least you had enough of the functionality to be able to sell it as a product in that category.

John Wallace: Yes, the use cases, the case studies, the demo, the rollout plan – all of that was there. So, we then started to hire the talent for sales. It was founder-led sales, but we needed someone to help close deals and open doors. That team has now blossomed.

We have half a dozen people in sales. We’re able to invest in marketing. We had a very strong 2023.

Sramana Mitra: What is the sales go-to-market model?

John Wallace: It’s a fraction of their media spend.