Zira
Zira was built to solve a problem Anur Ravan saw between data and decision-making. Retail investors, and people investing on behalf of venture capital and private equity firms, had plenty of company data but were stuck doing collection and manual research before they could judge whether a company was worth investing in. Zira set out to automate that middle step.
The team launched its service in alpha in August 2015 and offered it for free at first. Its engine pulls from about 85 sources, including directories, company websites, patent offices, and job boards, and crawls articles that mention each company to extract sentiment and competitors. A business rule engine of roughly 300 rules flags risks and opportunities, such as hiring sprees or engineering headcount advantages, and a comparables function estimates valuations and exit chances. Every report is still proofread and curated by a team of four content researchers before delivery, because the founders believe a product called a "report" should be quality controlled.
Users were moved to paid plans gradually. Early users got free credits that were not taken away, but were not renewed. When credits ran out, a paywall appeared. The first offer was $49 for a single report or 10 reports at a discount, but the team found a monthly subscription worked better. Monthly plans were priced at $99 for angels and $499 to $1,299 for private equity firms. The founders said about 85% of users moved from free to paid, which they read as a sign of product quality. By early 2017, revenue was split roughly 50-50 between monthly plans and one-off reports, and 40 to 50 habitual users were buying single reports at a pace similar to a subscription.
The most effective upsell was the due diligence report, priced between $1,000 and $3,000. Buyers of the $49 screening report were offered it when they were moving forward on a deal. The company also used its customer base to find new investors, since most of its customers were investors. Its 2016 revenue was about $450,000, below the earlier goal, so it was pursuing distribution deals to increase deal flow.
By 2017, Zira had crossed $50,000 in MRR, served hundreds of customers, covered about 100,000 companies, and had 15 employees in Tel Aviv. It had raised close to $3 million, mostly from angels, including a group led by Microsoft executives, with AOL and Verizon Ventures joining. The founders targeted $5 million in annualized revenue by the end of 2017 and expected to become profitable that year.
- •Converting free users into paid customers at roughly 85% shows that the product delivered enough value to justify payment, which made the paywall a low-risk move.
- •Sourcing from about 85 data streams and layering in a curation step gave customers a finished narrative rather than raw data, which helped justify premium pricing.
- •Because most customers were investors, each report sale also created a path to the next deal, so the customer base doubled as a sales and investor-network channel.
- •Selling a $49 report first and then upselling to a $1,000 to $3,000 due diligence report turned one-time buyers into high-value accounts at the right moment in their deal process.
- 1.Launch a free version that solves a clear pain point, and track how many users actually come back and rely on it.
- 2.Replace free access with a limited credit allotment, then stop renewing credits so that a paywall appears naturally when users run out.
- 3.Offer a low-cost entry product (such as a single report) and a monthly subscription, and watch which one converts better before scaling either.
- 4.Add a higher-priced deep-dive product to the delivery of the cheaper report, timed for when the buyer is most likely to need it.
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