715: This CEO Doesn't Care That VC Has Him By Throat

Ryan Sevey. He's the CEO of Nexosis, an artificial intelligence and machine learning startup focused exclusively on developers.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – The Hard Thing About Hard Things
• What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk
• Favorite online tool? — Aha!
• How many hours of sleep do you get?— 4
• If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – "Learn how to be true to yourself"

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 01:25 – Nathan introduces Ryan to the show
• 01:55 – Nexosis was launched in 2015
  • 01:59 – Nexosis offers a solution that big retailers are forecasting
• 02:24 – Nexosis has 300 developers who use their APIs
• 02:56 – Nexosis has developers from the retail space who have their point-of-sale data
  • 03:11 – Nexosis will take the developers data and give out a result
  • 04:13 – This result can help in the decision making for the future
• 04:34 – Nexosis gets people to be more proactive than reactive
• 04:52 – Nexosis found out how companies are using their historical data
• 05:14 – Nexosis adds more features to training
• 05:23 – Nexosis's add-on layers
• 05:41 – With sentiment analysis, one good example is Wendy's Twitter account
  • 06:00 – You can use the number of tweets as a numerical value that can go back to your data
• 06:39 – One huge case involves a Wendy's beside a convention center; Nexosis can predict future revenues
• 06:51 – Nexosis can predict future revenues and can understand the real impact of an event
• 07:23 – Nexosis focuses on the developer ecosystem
• 07:38 – Nexosis charges .10₵ per 1000 predictions
• 08:17 – Nexosis makes money once the developer talks to the enterprise and shows the API
• 08:43 – Nexosis charges the developers by consumption
• 09:24 – Average pay per customer depends on the data that they have which usually starts at $10K
• 09:42 – Nexosis was founded in 2015
• 09:53 – Ryan and his co-founder have been looking at machine learning since 2012
• 10:09 – Nexosis was originally considered an information security company
• 10:21 – Team size is 15 and they're based in Ohio
• 10:38 – Nexosis has millions of API calls per month but their focus is on the number of developers
• 11:30 – Ryan's vision is for developers to enjoy Nexosis, be it as a hobby or use in a professional way
• 11:55 – Nexosis is currently serving 100 different enterprise type of developers
• 12:26 – What Ryan sees is when a developer signs up, he'll make 1-2 projects then invite his friend to try Nexosis
• 12:57 – Most of the developers are already in a company
• 13:10 – MRR
• 13:20 – Nexosis has raised a little less than $7M
• 13:39 – The long term goal for Nexosis is to raise more
• 13:56 – Twilio has survived their early days with VC funding
• 14:26 – Nexosis measures expansion rate rather than the churn
• 15:37 – Nexosis aims for 100% month over month growth and at the moment, they're hitting it
• 16:30 – Consumption in terms of the number of predictions is over a million
• 17:55 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

1. There are companies who rely mostly on raising funds to scale.
2. Knowing the data for your FUTURE can help in your decision making TODAY.
3. No matter what—be true to yourself!

Resources Mentioned:

• The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
• Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
• Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you're doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
• Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
• Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
• Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he's driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives