Introducing Serge Salager, CEO of Visualping
Sara Lindquist:
I'm Sara 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 Salager, 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!
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Sara:
Thanks for being here today Serge! It's awesome to be with you.
Serge:
Thank you Sara, likewise.
Sara:
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.
Serge:
Yeah, absolutely. So Visualping it's an online service that allows you to monitor and be alerted whenever there is 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 concert ticket, 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 and that's a very valuable service on a personal level. On the business side, we do have enterprise grade applications where you can upload thousands of pages that you want to track on a daily basis, on a weekly basis. We do alerts via API, Webhook, Slack, Teams notifications. We actually do the entire range from personal use to enterprise use, and enterprises uses for also a huge variety of reasons like monitoring changes in law. We have lawyers that have clients that need to be aware of the latest changes in regulations and our service does that. We also have users tracking competitors to make sure that they are aware of change in pricing or new features or launches, et cetera.
Serge:
We also have insurance companies tracking Facebook profiles of thousands of their customers just to be aware of changes in risk, for example and whenever some keywords appear in some websites, for example a sushi place that closes at 9:00 p.m. has a different risk profile, one that actually starts having karaoke nights.
Sara:
Right, got to track that karaoke night!
Serge:
Exactly! So, 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 Series C, obviously that's a good time for you to reach out to that CEO. Yeah, 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 exist. We also have users in 85% of Fortune 500 companies, so again it touches everybody's lives and then we believe this is something that ultimately can reach maybe not three billion internet 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.
Sara:
Well, that's an incredibly powerful tool. Making the internet your own personal database. So, congrats on all of the tremendous success thus far, Serge! It's exciting. When did you know you needed to be a part of this? That you needed to be a part of building Visualping, what was that key light bulb moment for you?
Serge:
Oh, it was competitive intelligence and I'm a firm believer of what Andy Grove was saying – that “only the paranoid survive” and I am paranoid myself. I was a CEO of a legal tech company before founding Visualping 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 really 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 would see some movement, which might not be going in the right direction.
Sara:
So, you were basically your own website change detection tool?
Serge:
Yeah, yes exactly. I did some research. There were some tools out there that existed, but they were not user-friendly or full of false alerts, very noisy. I told myself that's a big need, being in the know on 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 your pharmacy appointments for your COVID shots from E-commerce and also businesses, everything now is ruled online. All the marketing people, the companies do it online, so it's a good way to be in the know, know what's happening and not waste time.
Sara:
Totally - so you had firsthand experience of a need for a tool like this, went out and searched and realized that, gosh, I need to go build something better.
Serge:
Correct, that's correct.
Sara:
So that's what brought you to 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 Visualping used by everyone around the globe?
Serge:
Yeah, no absolutely. My partner in crime meets 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 in our location. We both are from France. We kind of became friends and then because only 2 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.
Sara:
Wow, yeah.
Serge:
Back then we were in barebones servers in OVH in Europe. They were really inexpensive, really cost-efficient, but they were bad and all the stack we have built before in there, where it 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.
Serge:
On my end, I was a former VC, 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 led that transition from TV to online marketing. 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 need scalability for that.
Sara:
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?
Serge:
Work hard, play hard.
Sara:
Yes! I love that.
Serge:
Yeah, it's still a small team. We're about 20 now. We do have still 10 open positions, so recruiting has been a challenge and 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 we're building and the culture's 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 a startup, 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 perfect, but it's about speed of execution. It's part of our priorities.
Sara:
I love that, Serge. That actually leads into the next question I was going to ask you, which is just about the start up 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 throwing in the towel?
Serge:
What really keeps me going is all of the sign-ups. I had to turn off the Slack sound from the very beginning. Every single sign-up, every single payment, I have a Slack notification behind it and this is really what keeps me going. It's a really firm belief that what we're doing could be used by everybody. I'm still waiting for my daughters - they're now in secondary school - and I'm just waiting for the time when they come back from school and say, "Hey, my friend at the school recommended to use Visualping to track my grades or the teacher said something - and mom and dad this is your company!"
Sara:
I love that Serge. Will be a proud daughter moment right there!
Serge:
So, I'm waiting for that moment to happen, but in the meantime you can see all the sign-ups coming in. We're delivering a very useful service for people. We had a run with COVID vaccines. People were very stressed. It was a very hard moment. They were waiting for a COVID vaccine for their families, for their 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 NGOs that 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 sign-ups, it's a testimony of that - they're coming from everywhere. Most of our traffic comes from Google nowadays. That's what keeps us going and I never 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 were 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. Like, you paid a monthly subscription and again that was a game changer. We literally went between three to five times our revenues used by that simple change and it sounds silly, but we went from something like a thousand dollars a month back then. So it was a really big jump to $5,000.00 a month overnight, and just because the subscription model makes so much sense. Just like your cell phone, you're leaving a lot of checks.
Sara:
Right.
Serge:
A lot of gigabytes unused that we are charging for. I mean those little things are compound though, and at the end you're very happy about the results. Before Xavier came in, also I was desperate because our system was crashing all the time because we were 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 does matter in those events.
Sara:
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!
Serge:
Absolutely.
Sara:
It certainly keeps the fire going. Well, I appreciate that Serge. So in closing here, one final question for you: What do you need more of right now? How can listeners help and get involved?
Serge:
We need more time and more resources. This is something I tell the team frequently that there's more things that we need to do than we are 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 at Fuse have been fantastic at letting us running 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 been fantastic. It's giving us time and giving us space to 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 about - from all our investors, if they have any candidates that want to join our rocket ship, absolutely send them our way.
Sara:
That's right. Well absolutely - and listeners be sure to go visit Visualping's career page and LinkedIn and join an awesome company that's 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!
Serge:
Thank you, Sara. Great to be here and again thanks for all your support. You guys have been fantastic.
Sara:
Thank you Serge.
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Sara:
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!