Findo
Gary Fowler, co-founder and CEO of Findo, describes a problem almost everyone has: the average person has around 300,000 items spread across email, Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, OneDrive, and local laptop drives. Findo was spun out of Abby, the company of serial AI entrepreneur David Yang, in April 2016. Abby's core business was scanner manufacturing, and the team saw that file search was a much bigger pain point. They bought the IP from Abby after an independent valuation, and the purchase cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Findo is an AI tool that learns over time and offers predictive insights, such as flagging an email from an important contact. It delivers those alerts through bots in Facebook, Telegram, Skype, and Slack. The business runs on a monthly subscription: an Advanced plan at $4.99 per month, which covers six months of history, and an Ultimate plan at $9.99 per month, which allows searching the full history across as many accounts as you want. Most customers chose Advanced. The company has raised about $7 million, including a seed round and a later round led by Flint Capital, and has a team of 26 split between San Francisco, Russia, and Eastern Europe.
Findo came out of beta in October 2016. By January 2017 it had more than 80,000 registered users, and about 700 of them were paying, which is roughly 1% conversion. Gary said the company had spent a little over $100,000 on paid acquisition to reach those registered users, but was winding that spend down. Nathan Latka estimated about $7k in MRR from 700 customers at roughly $10 per customer, and Gary said the number was "something like that." Gross monthly churn was estimated at somewhere between 5% and 10%, though Gary noted that many users who cancel come back.
The clearest strength is the scale of the registered user base relative to the size of the team and spend. The company is also moving toward a partner-led model. Foxit will distribute Findo to about a million PDF reader users, starting in Australia. Gary expected revenue to rise sharply once that distribution took effect, though the numbers so far were still low. Churn and seasonal returning customers remain open questions.
As of January 2017, Findo was early but growing, with about 80,000 registered users, roughly 700 paying customers, and an estimated $7k MRR. The company was betting on partner distribution to scale beyond what direct acquisition had delivered.
- •Spinning out a product from a parent company whose core business is unrelated lets the team focus on a pain point everyone shares, and that focus shows in the product.
- •Converting about 1% of 80,000 registered users shows real demand for a tool that solves a problem people feel daily, even without a large marketing engine.
- •Distribution through Foxit's PDF reader gives Findo access to a huge installed base at near-zero acquisition cost, which is a far more scalable path than paid ads.
- •A small team split between high-cost and lower-cost talent hubs, backed by an AI-focused parent with a large engineering team, let Findo move fast on a capital-efficient budget.
- 1.Identify a pain point that is widespread and costly, such as file and email search, and confirm that people already feel it before building.
- 2.Launch a freemium-style beta to build a large registered user base, then convert a small percentage with a clear, low-priced subscription tier (for example, $4.99 and $9.99 per month).
- 3.Pursue distribution partnerships with established software that already reaches your target users, such as installing your tool inside a popular PDF reader.
- 4.Track churn and reactivation separately so you can tell whether cancelled users are seasonal, price-sensitive, or truly lost.
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