Introducing Serge Salager, CEO of Visualping

(gentle music) - I'm Sarah Lindquist from Fuse. We're an early stage venture firm based right here in the Pacific Northwest. And just like the founders in our portfolio, we are just getting started. We believe that founders deserve more, more urgency, more community, more expertise, more reliability, more of everything, and we aim to deliver. Join me as I introduce each of our portfolio companies in the Fuse family to date. Today, you'll hear from Serge Sallager, CEO of VisualPing, one of Fuse's first portfolio companies. We will quickly fire through a few topics about the business, how it's been going and growing, and how VisualPing can help you leverage the internet as your own personal database. Let's get started. Thanks for being here today, Serge. It's so awesome to be with you. - Thank you, Sarah, likewise. Well, I appreciate you taking the time and I'm excited for you to share a bit about your story, to kick things off. It would be great if you could just share the quick overview of what VisualPing is and how it serves customers today. - Yeah, absolutely. So VisualPing, it's an online service that allows you to monitor and be alerted whenever there's an important change in any page that it's of interest to you. Our users range from consumers, they're using VisualPing for personal use, like tracking price drop or an availability for a pair of shoes, a ticket concert, your ex's social media profile, whatever. Whatever you think is interesting and useful for you. Whenever that page changes, we send you an email alert or a text message or an alert in Slack for you to be aware of that change and do whatever you're supposed to do with that. So you don't have to continuously refresh and wait for that change to happen. You're not clueless, you are under no, and that's a very valuable service on a personal level. On the business side, we do have Enterprise Great Applications where you can upload thousands of pages that you want to track on a daily basis and a weekly basis. We do alert via API, webhook, Slack, team notifications. So we actually do the entire range from personal use to enterprise use. And enterprises use this for also a huge variety of reasons, like monitoring changes in a low. We have lawyers that have plans and need to be aware of the latest changes in regulations and our service does that, have users tracking competitors to make sure that they are aware of changes in pricing or new features or launches, et cetera. We also have insurance companies tracking Facebook profiles of thousands of their customers, just to be aware of changes in risk, for example. Whenever some keywords appear in some websites, for example, a sushi place that closes at 9 p.m. has a different risk profile that one that actually starts having karaoke nights. - Right. Gotta track the karaoke night. - Exactly, so the insurance wants to know when this change happens because obviously, customers want to pay as low as possible. Sales enablement also, we keep salespeople aware of changes in their clients so they can reach out to clients when the time is right. For example, whenever they raise a CBC, obviously that's the time for you to reach out that CEO that has been a good silent lady. So you can see more receptive. - Yes, so we have about 1.5 million users. Those users are global, 190 countries around the world. So that's pretty much all the countries that they exist in. We also have users in 85% of foreign companies. So again, it touches everybody's lives and then we believe this is something that ultimately can reach, maybe not 3 billion new intranet users, but we'll try to get as close as possible. We definitely think we can be as known and used for as many users as Dropbox. - Well, it's an incredibly powerful tool. Yeah, making the internet your own personal database, right? And leveraging that. So congrats on all the tremendous success as far as search, it's really exciting. When did you know you needed to be a part of this? That you needed to be a part of building visual pain? What was that key light bulb moment for you? - Oh, it was competitive intelligence. I'm a firm believer on what Andy grew was saying that only the paranoid survive. And I am a paranoid myself. I was the CEO of a legal tech company before founding visual pain. And the company was for sale and one of our competitors actually made an offer to buy us but he also had the option to buy a competitor of ours. So I was a paranoid. I was really watching absolutely every move they were making, trying to be aware of what was happening and be able to drop the price of the acquisition as soon as possible as soon as I see some movement which might not be in the right direction. - So you are your own website change detection tool. - Yeah, I did some research. There were some tools out there that existed but they were not user friendly. They were full of false alerts, very noisy. I told myself that that's a big need. Being a known and the internet also I thought that the internet would also rule everybody's life. And that's ultimately what happened. I mean, with COVID, for example, everything went online like from grocery shopping to pharmacy appointments for your COVID shots, from e-commerce and also businesses. Everything now it's ruled online. All the marketing people that companies do it's online. So it's a good way to be the known and to know what's happening and not wasting time. - Totally. So you first hand experience a need for a tool like this when out in search and realize that, gosh, I need to go build something better. - Correct, that's great. - That's probably where you are today. It's awesome. And so Serge, I know you've assembled an awesome team around you. How would you articulate? Why is your team the team to do it? To make visual ping used by everyone around the globe? - Yeah, absolutely. My partner in crime, it's Xavier Raffin. He comes from Amazon. He was a senior solutions architect at AWS. When I met him, it's a funny story. We met Amazon had four floors out of five that were available. Back then when we were in our location, we both are from France. We kind of became friends. And then because only two to 5% of our users pay, we were really cost conscious. So everything we built was behind trying to have maximum profitability, maximum margins. And as a matter of fact, today we have close to 90% margins, which is pretty exceptional. - Wow, yeah. - Back then we were in bare bone servers in OVH in Europe. They were really inexpensive, really cost efficient, but they were bad. And all the stack we have built before was not scalable. And also the operations were not scalable. So Xavier came in to fix everything. I couldn't have done that without Xavier. And he's the one that actually made everything scalable. And we had a much more reliable service, no crashes, everything flows out flawlessly. He assembled a fantastic team of developers. We really focused on having amazing developers. He brought in other people from Amazon too. And yeah, having him there, it's absolutely amazing. He knows the system inside out. He's the right person to scale. On my end, I was a former VC. So I know and a former CEO of a B2B legal tech company. Prior to that, I was in marketing at Procter & Gamble. That was when online marketing was actually starting to be big. So I leave that transition from TV to online marketing. And yeah, we are both equipped to do both a B2C and a B2B company and grow this thing to be fully scalable. And again, hopefully reach as close as possible to three billion users. So we'll definitely leave scalability for that. - Well, we think so too. We think you're the team to do it. And so really quickly, if you had to pick one word to describe your team culture, what would it be? Top of mind. - Work hard, play hard. - I love that. - Yeah, it's a still a small team. We're about 20 now. We do have still 10 open positions. So recruiting has been a challenge. Obviously a lot of money being funding, great startups all around the Pacific Northwest and certainly here in Vancouver too. Things have been challenging, but we're very happy with the team well-being. And the culture is being built too. Sometimes it's top down, but everybody's actually aware that we have an executive team now which is complete and building that culture is going to be important. But yeah, we are go-getters. As in the start of this is one of the most important traits. It's like making things happen fast. We know if things are not perfect, we're not achieving perfection, but speed of execution, it's part of a priorities. - I love that surge. That actually leads into the next question I was going to ask you, which is kind of just about the start of journey in general. So being a founder and a leader of a company is hard work and comes with all sorts of challenges as you know. So what's kept you going? And on the opposite side, have you ever thought about just thrown in the towel? - What really kept me going is all the signups. I had to turn off the Slack sound from the very beginning. Every single signup, every single payment, I have a Slack notification behind it. And this is really what kept me going is a really firm belief that what we're doing could be used by everybody. I'm still waiting for my daughters who are still in secondary school, and I'm just basically waiting for the time when they come back from school and say, "Hey, my friend at the school recommended "to use visual pain to track my grades," or the teacher said something, and mom and dad, this is your company. - No, I love that surge. Proud daughter moment. - So I'm waiting for that moment to happen, but in the meantime, you can see all the signups coming in. We're delivering a very useful service for people. We had a run with COVID vaccines. People were very stressed. It was very hard moments. They were waiting for a COVID vaccine for their families, for the grandparents. And yeah, we had so many thank you notes. Obviously, we're charging because we are, for those high-frequency monitors, we were also giving away our service for some ONGs and we're actually helping other people getting vaccines, being aware of where the vaccines were available. So finding those vaccines was a way to keep people less anxious, less stressed. Again, we're doing something very useful. Those signups, it's a testimony of that. They're coming from everywhere. Most of our traffic comes from Google nowadays. That's what kept us going. And I never really thought about quitting, to be honest. Our growth has been stable. The beginning was very hard. We were not making a lot of money for a couple of years. But yeah, so we made some changes. One of the biggest early changes we've made is a subscription model before we're charging on a per-check basis. So people were actually topping up all the time and being very efficient about topping up. We introduced, for example, a subscription line, like if you paid them off the subscription. And that was a game changer. We literally went between three to five times of revenues used by that simple change. And it sounds silly, but we went from something like $1,000 a month of back then. So it was really, really to $5,000 a month overnight. And just because the subscription model makes so much sense, people are leaving also on a subscription, just like your cell phone. You're leaving a lot of checks. - Right. - A lot of gigabytes unused that we are charging for. I mean, those little things are compound dope to make sense. And at the end, you're very happy about the result. Before Xavion came in also, I was desperate because our system was crashing all the time because we're not scalable. And the volume of things that people were actually tracking was too high for our platform to handle. And yeah, I mean, having again the right team, that does matter in those events. - Oh, absolutely. And just having the key affirmation early on that, holy moly, there's so much pent up demand for this. And we got to keep building it. - That's absolutely. - It certainly keeps the fire going. Well, I appreciate that search. So in closing here, one final question for you. What do you need more of right now? How can listeners help and get involved? - We need more time and more resources. And this is something I tell the team frequently that there's more things that we need to do than we were able to do. And so being very strategic about making the choices we're going to focus on are going to be very key. You guys, a few have been fantastic at letting us running the operations, being super helpful when needed. I couldn't be more grateful and more thankful to have you guys on board. You've been great investors in that regard. That's fantastic. It's giving us time and giving us space to like focus on executing and doing that flawlessly. We need resources. So we have about 10 open positions on the team. Thankfully, most of the executive positions have been filled and now we're filling in the more junior positions. But yeah, any great talent, especially on the commercial side, which is the latest positions we're trying to fill in, marketing, sales, product management. There's great talent in Seattle. That's absolutely something I love to hear. For more investors, if they have any candidates that want to join Rocket Cheap, absolutely send them. - That's right. - Send them our way. - Well, absolutely. And listeners be sure to go visit VisualPings career page in LinkedIn and join an awesome company. That's just growing so fast. It's a rocket ship for sure. Serge, well, we're so grateful to be a part of this journey and help support you in any way. As you know, and so excited for you to keep harnessing this awesome team around you to go build a world-class company. Onward, my friend. - Thank you, Sarah. Great to be here. And I gave thanks for all your support. You guys have been fantastic. - Thank you, Serge. As Serge mentioned, go visit the website and try out the product today. Also be sure to check out their careers page to access the company's job postings. We will also have these accessible on the Fuse website in our careers page or in the portfolio section. See you on the next one.