← Liftoff with Keith: Conversations with Super Founders and Growth Experts sharing useful insights
Liftoff with Keith: Conversations with Super Founders and Growth Experts sharing useful insights
From $0 to $4M with AI Headshots: BetterPic Shares How They Bootstrapped Their Way to Success
00:27:56
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- [00:00]
Ricardo
Foreign.
- [00:06]
Keith
This episode is brought to you by the outstanding team at Compass Strategic Advisors, your trusted partner in driving strategic growth. Whether it's expanding into new territories, launching products, rebranding, or hiring key staff and board members, they offer expert guidance every step of the way. With a versatile approach and a proven track record, Compass is the go to resource for both startups and established companies looking to scale with confidence. Show some support for this podcast by sharing this appreciation and checking out their website at www.compass-strategic-advisors.com. okay, and we are live here with Ricardo from Better Pick Ricardo. Welcome to the liftoff with Keith.
- [00:53]
Ricardo
Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.
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Keith
It's so fun. You know, two things just to kick things off. I really enjoy sitting down with a founder who is outside the us Outside of North America, and capture their perspective about doing startups abroad. Now, we say abroad because we think we're the center of the world, right? This exceptionalism business of the us but let's leave that aside. I do want to lean in a little bit. And we're finding you today in Belgium, correct?
- [01:23]
Ricardo
Correct.
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Keith
How's that? I love just the fact you're in Belgium, which I don't get a chance to visit often and nor. Nor do I hear from a lot of people from that country. But at the same time, I read and I know there's a vibrant economy there as well and startup ecosystem. How are you finding it?
- [01:41]
Ricardo
So, funny enough. So there was a list, I'm not sure what the source is, but I can definitely look it up, is that we've. There was a quote or there was a ranking of the top TEC countries or cities in the world. And Ghent, which is in Belgium, was ranked number 19 worldwide, which I think is a really interesting case. And what's happening, which is the same thing that happened to San Francisco, but also happened against, is there's a few, you know, really good companies that want, you know, almost ipo, they have sold some companies. So. And these were all people based out of Ghent. And so there's this reinvesting back into the system, which is basically also happening in, you know, the States and all of these bigger countries. And that's exactly what's happening against. When I bought my house, which I'm in right now, I have one condition, which is I need to live close to Ghent. So it is a really, really vibrant ecosystem that's happening right now.
- [02:34]
Keith
Well, we talked about it a little bit casually last time, which is you need to get infrastructure. It's nice to have good Weather. But you also want to be somewhat near a university for hiring. You want to be near some capital that you can access to help grow the business, whether that's vc. Because it's hard, right, to come to the. To try to reach outside of your country, to go raise money, to go build a team.
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Ricardo
Oh, absolutely. We've just, you know, went through fundraising rounds, and it has been a hell of a story. We're, we're very close to closing our first round, so that's pretty nice to see.
- [03:09]
Keith
Oh, I'm excited to hear it. So let's talk. So, folks, Ricardo is the founder of Better Pick, which is an amazing a business. And. And you have to go check out the website. And Ricardo, this is really your photo, correct? I'm talking to you live. And that's you and your face.
- [03:25]
Ricardo
Exactly. We haven't done the AI avatar that's coming one day.
- [03:29]
Keith
You haven't stuck me with your AI agent yet. Well, all kidding aside, yeah, we know that's coming, but give me the, Give me the origin story of Better Pick, how you founded it to get it started and how you're building it, how it's going.
- [03:42]
Ricardo
Yeah, I think to give some context. So I've always had an agency called Seismic, which is a B2SAAS agency. And eight years ago, we started out with a single concept of saying we're gonna operate a SaaS business, our own, but we're first gonna learn from the mistakes. And so when, with that philosophy, we always were positioned very closely to, okay, what is the next big thing we can, we can basically do. And so I've subscribed to all the newsletters, which is, you know, where you acquire, acquire.com, like all of these things. And so when I saw Better Pick actually passed by a newsletter and it was for sale, I was like, okay, that sounds like an interesting technology. I was there for really four years, but I've never seen something really pass by. And that was one of these things, you know, it's one of these things that I ask myself. I can call it the monkey brain question. Is it in five years time if I talk to my kids about going to photograph or going there for two hours, walking back, sweating, changing clothing just for one picture. And they could call me crazy, I think that, but there's something there. And so when I saw it passing by, I was like, probably the technology sucks right now, but if it, you know, at some point becomes good enough, then you have a gold mine, basically. And you can kind of see that in the Metrics as well. First months we were doing 1.5k when they actually acquired the business is 1.5k per month. We had 1.9 net 3. So it went very, very slow until technology actually caught up somewhere in September 2024. And suddenly we grew from about 20k to 60k to 80k to now we're doing about 281k per month. Profitable and bootstrapped in that sense. So it's been a wild journey, I would say.
- [05:28]
Keith
You know, Ricardo, it's always a roller coaster ride, but more dangerous or crazy than others. You've had a nice run up. So what do you attribute that to?
- [05:39]
Ricardo
There's a few things I would say. So one is, I think one is definitely like, you know, when the market goes up, everybody goes up. And I believe when I purchased the business we were doing, there was a surge volume on AI headshots for about 702,300 per month. Right now as of this month, that's one and a half years later, we're about 56k per month visiting or like people searching for the solution. So we've seen that, you know, demand just growing up or just, you know, going on that wave. So I think that's the first. Second thing is, and I think that's the reasons why we're in the top three right now, is because when I started and I looked at the market, there was about 100 competitors, which is like, you could call it a crowded space, but if you really deep dive into each company's financials, and I actually did that, I looked at everybody's financials, team structure, what are they set up? There was actually only two companies that were properly doing this. And when I say properly, it means building a team, building like a real infrastructure, like really taking it seriously. Because there was two players out there in the markets. First was bigger companies that just said, oh, we're also doing AI headshots right now. It's just this standalone thing, just do your thing basically. And then you have these indie hackers that just plug some things, solutions together and it's like, hey, here's the website, try it out basically. But nobody was really building like a whole team around it. And this is also why we're, we're now clocking out in June. I think we're about 20 people. Most people wouldn't realize that when you're just talking about AI headshots now. We're doing a lot more nowadays, but I think about three months ago we were about 15 people working on AI headshots basically. So most people don't realize that at some point. So I think the majority contribution I would say is really taking it seriously, building a business around it and really building a whole team on the structure.
- [07:31]
Keith
So was better pick a re platform around AI or do you feel like you're more AI native at this point?
- [07:37]
Ricardo
We're definitely more AI native now of course there's always these four models which everybody works on and that would be 20 to 30% of our business is just built on that core model. And then from there onwards we've built on top of that. So we would call ourselves more AI native because we always say if every API in the world dies, we still survive basically. So we're not dependent on any technology as of for now.
- [08:00]
Keith
What do you think about in terms of. Of a growth opportunity? So your relative tam kind of a question. Is there a point where this just levels out because everyone's got this access to taking a professional photo and you know, changing the photo not but any kind of photos. Right. What do you see as the growth opportunity?
- [08:21]
Ricardo
So the growth opportunity I think believes lies in Europe. You stay still. Like if you think about our time, 85% of our markets currently in the States, even our B2B customers, we closed Samsung last week, it's in the States. And so also when you see the search volume, it's the exact same thing. Like 85% of AI headshots is typed in into the States. Europe is unfortunately as always lagging behind on most of the newish technology, I would say. So even when you go in Belgium or even I was in Netherlands and we were in Italy last week. So like we asked these AI, what, what is AI headshots? So I believe the biggest opportunity is states a little bit and that will still grow. But actually the biggest opportunity lies in the time of Europe and Asia I think is a huge market coming in Latin America. Same thing. We just translated our website in Spanish. It's kind of the work. So it's all of these, you know, using the same technology on different markets which haven't caught up to the technology, I believe is the biggest time.
- [09:22]
Keith
It's interesting. So you start to segment your market between consumer purchases and business purchases and then how many people are reusing it? Like within my company, everybody's going to it and more. So you're getting that frequency of usage versus new businesses coming on board.
- [09:40]
Ricardo
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So we, we've got, we're putting a lot of bets on the B2B side and also it's also where we built most of the technology moats currently at this point. So we have now teams of. I think we're now in a con, like in a contract, all the way up to 21,000 people which we have to onboard in one go. You know, all of these businesses, they haven't realized that is the potential. So I think if you think about it from a tan perspective, it's really these B2B big businesses that basically need a solution for their entire teams. Because you can't get 21,000 people at the same spot at the same time. It's impossible technically.
- [10:17]
Keith
So before I kick off, a couple of new questions. Give a. Give a better example of a better pick today. The user, the value proposition you're sharing so the audience understands exactly where you fit in.
- [10:29]
Ricardo
Yeah. So we always say we help professional job seekers or remote teams create professional headshots in under 60 minutes from $35. That's basically the value proposition that we give. You win time because you don't have to actually go to the photographer and you save money.
- [10:46]
Keith
I'm in money. The huge, huge variables. And it's significant. It's not, it's not 10 time savings or money savings, which I think gets lost in the noise. Right. Hard to get signal through unless you have a very strong message. And that's a strong message. So you're seeing tremendous demand. I'm wondering what's the big step here. Ricardo too. There's obviously you're growing and people are signing up every day. Why doesn't LinkedIn make everybody or give everybody the option of going through better pick to put their. To put a headshot up? Or how about some of the other social sites or bigger sites pass through a better pick portal, add your photo to it. It would increase engagement. So the user benefits. It could make it a little bit fun if your avatar somewhere between your avatar, your gif and your real photo, you know.
- [11:40]
Ricardo
Yeah. It's funny that you mentioned because when we started the business we got the questions like imagine you had to exit. Who would you exit towards? And so my first reasoning was always LinkedIn. That's also why we reached out very early on. We actually got in contact with them. And I think there's two things here, right. The first thing that most big companies, which I would consider LinkedIn as is, are very, you know, they're very bad at innovation because they're kind of stuck in there. Like if it's not bringing in a billion dollars next year, we don't do it basically. So Anything that's smaller than that, they won't take that back, basically.
- [12:15]
Keith
Well, you know the Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen, you.
- [12:18]
Ricardo
Yes, read that. Exactly that. So they would rather purchase a business versus do operate and start from zero. They don't have that type of people to three start from zero, basically. And I think the second is, we call it the Valley of Ship, which is which all hedgehog players have to go through is first batches, like up to like we took seven months was just really, really bad. Like it was experimentation was bad. Refund rates were 10%, we're now at 2%. So you had to go through that journey of making it really bad. As a LinkedIn, you can really afford your reputation to say, okay, you know what, it is going to be bad for the coming six months and you know, we'll figure it out later on. So it has to be good. So if they would purchase something, it has to be really, really good or very close to be really good. So I think that is the reason why they wouldn't do it themselves. They would purchase a business doing that as a strategic acquisition, which I believe would make a lot of sense because we notice in our data whenever we ask them in the onboarding, like, what's the biggest reason you're actually using LinkedIn or your photo for. And the first reason is actually for their CV and resume. So it's people looking for jobs that are now using the recipes, which falls into the category of LinkedIn. So I think it would make a lot of sense for them to purchase the business like us or something else.
- [13:38]
Keith
Well, and there are a lot of other players like LinkedIn, I mean, I'm using them as an example. But a lot of other social platforms, you know, where you don't put up a photo because you don't like your photo. Right. But if you gave me the option of doing all the things you allow the person to do, I think they'd find it very attractive. And again, I think it increases engagement and you know, seeing a fictional image. Anyway, that's just a thought. What is, what is the challenge that you're, that you, that you, that you found when you made that transition and you saw that, that leap in growth. Well, was it pricing? Was it. Did you open up a new market opportunity? How did you break through the, the inertia?
- [14:21]
Ricardo
Yeah, I think it's the first product got better. That's always there. So we, from marketing perspective, you can't really push the buttons the moment the product bats. So even if you Push it goes down. So we had to wait until September until figuring out how to push the buttons. So I think that was first. Second thing is that once the product go better, we can actually push some things on the metal basically. And I think there we already tested like seven months ahead, like different channels, things that we had to get around. So we had Google Ads, we had Facebook ads, we tested TikTok ads, we burned a lot of money just testing things out. And the moment we discovered three to four channels, we knew that we could push the button basically. So that was from September 2024. We knew, OK, we know exactly which buttons to push. And we started very early on on the SEO game knowing that because we have an average order value of about $44 thinking about how to grow a company and it's a one time purchase, you have to have the SEO game coming into play, otherwise you will never be profitable. So we knew that from the start. So we invested heavily on everything SEO related. So that's backlink building, making sure there's blog posts running out, you know, all of the SEO game that you had to do. We did it because we knew we had to do it to become profitable.
- [15:36]
Keith
Well, you, you recommend a strategy that I often tell founders that I work with. They're so eager to prove out their intuition that they'll invest heavily based on intuition. And I think you took the approach, maybe you came at it secondary, but test, test, test and then invest, invest. So it sounds a little cliche, but that's, that's the council, it sounds like that's what you did.
- [16:02]
Ricardo
Well, it's test, test, but test in a very economical, logical way. And what that means is that, you know, you could say, you know, LinkedIn professional photos, that is where the market is. So let's do LinkedIn ads. But from an economical point of view, these cost per clicks is way too high to become ever, to ever become profitable. LinkedIn Unless you're signing to B2B teamed large teams, you could get this profitable. So I like this CAC spectrum where if, you know, if you're selling something for $44 as an average, there's only certain channels that you can actually activate to become profitable. So you couldn't do LinkedIn ads, you couldn't do outbound email because that's way too expensive in order to operate the channel. So it's test, test, test, but in the right channels, which would make sense on the long term, basically.
- [16:48]
Keith
Well, and again, one of the things I underscore is how important it is today for the founders of the company to really have their hands on the gears to drive these channels and to understand the economics that underlie the models that you're driving and continue to challenge yourself by finding better, new, different. Right. We're always exploring at the same time driving, you know, what, driving the growth and the goals that you have for the business. As you look at your existing customer base, how ripe is that for the upsell, cross sell and reference cell to help you to evangelize your business to new customers? How are you activating that?
- [17:36]
Ricardo
Yeah, that's a very interesting story. So actually, if you look at our B2B offering, so we test a lot of campaigns around B2B and get your teams in and it completely failed. Like, we tried. It was really bad. But what we realized very early on is that we have people jumping on demos and that was great. So they jumped on them and they're like, hey, but can I test it for the solution? I'm like, yeah, technically. I was like, can you give it for free? Like, well, you know, there's an average contract value of X. You technically give one away. So we'll find. We'll give it away. And then later on, we kind of realized, like, you know, where is the biggest, the best customers coming from? Not just the customers, but the best customers. And the best customers that actually. People that came from the consumer side, they actually paid with their own money to test this solution. They loved it. And they're like, hey, this is great. How do I get this for my team? So that is still the majority, like 99% of our B2B customers is fully inbound. We don't do any outbound. It's fully inbound led, which is consumer first. They love it. They switch to the team span. They onboard their teams a little bit. You call it like a sun or slack that, you know, they. They come in, have two, three users use it, they kind of expand from there. We have a similar strategy because we couldn't afford doing the outbound game because we wouldn't be profitable in that sense. If you would have been VC backed, probably would have done that. But as we were bootstrapped, we had to find channels that were actually profitable in the long term.
- [19:03]
Keith
I get it. I like that. I like the bootstrapping approach. I think that builds it more steady, sturdy foundation.
- [19:10]
Ricardo
I would agree. Now it puts your mindset differently, I would say.
- [19:14]
Keith
So now your mindset is you're on a good foundation, pushing the channels. You're stepping on the gas a little bit. How does your role change from what you used to do 612 months ago to what you're doing now in the next six months?
- [19:31]
Ricardo
Yeah, good question. That's actually a cool question. So I would say I'm a pretty hands on person. So if you look at the marketing automation, all the automation flows, asking about NPS for, asking for trustpile review, the onboarding emails, all of that was done by me. So I'm quite technical in that sense. So I've set up all these things. So I think I'm a lot in the setup now as we grow into 20 company team. You know, I could do that in the weekends because I'm just having fun with it but I can't do it as a, as a day to day job anymore. You know that your role changes into setting out a vision, you know, raising funds. I think the last two months has actually been dedicated part of time I would say in raising funds. We're now closing up around, it's going to be about 1.5 million that we're raising right now. A little precede round to grow further. So that has been the majority of my role right now. And you know, it changes Into Team Management vs Operational Management I would say. And I'm pretty comfortable with that I bet.
- [20:33]
Keith
And you sound very comfortable, very humble person as well. But I also know from my experience in talking to hundreds of founders that there's something that changes a little bit when you get to that point now maybe it'll, it'll still be a little bit down the road, but where you become, you put on a new hat, right? From the developer and the, and the, and the growth manager and the fundraiser to now you're the evangelist, right? You're out in the market recruiting team members, talking to existing team members and making sure they're feeling great about their work and their productivity. Have you started to, have you started to own that a little bit more?
- [21:17]
Ricardo
Yeah. So it's funny because when I started out like you know the startups I did before was I was the one that built the products, market the product, built the website, set up a tracking like, like doing everything. So I know hands on how to do it. And then when I grew into role, so I sold my agency back in the days and then we went from a team of 10 people all the way to 130 people when I left. So I saw that transition of you operating all the way to you managing and you delegating a lot basically. So I'm actually quite comfortable in two positions. I like both probably On Sundays, you'll see me, like, doing marketing automation flows. And during the week I'll be like, you know, management. I now have more.
- [22:00]
Keith
There's way too much fun in Belgium for you to be working in an office on a Sunday.
- [22:04]
Ricardo
Oh, you know, I don't see myself doing anything else, to be honest. Like, I love what I do. I love building things. I love creation of things. Like something that didn't exist today, some exists tomorrow. I love that fact. So, you know, if we don't see me on the, on the office, I'm probably on my bike.
- [22:23]
Keith
Your bike. Or a boat with a buttery croissant or something else. Delicious.
- [22:30]
Ricardo
I'll take that one. Indeed.
- [22:32]
Keith
I love it. So, so let's, let's, let's share an insight about all the. The AI headshot business. And we're.
- [22:42]
Ricardo
You.
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Keith
You have something that illuminated in your brain as you were. As you were on this journey that, that just kind of blew you away or something that really provocative happened on the, on the, on the Progress. We've shared several stories.
- [22:58]
Ricardo
Yeah, I've got a few, to be honest. I think the first, which is the most fun one, I would say is the fact that AI hatchet is very. Let's say that you do AI headshots, right? And you'll see your 60 pictures and you will look at the picture and say, oh, that's exactly me. Like, I love my picture there. But you put that next to your wife, she will tell exactly the opposite story. So that's a very funny concept of how we perceive ourselves versus how other people perceive themselves. And taking a headshot, basically, because I did the same thing with my partner. I was like, oh, yeah, that's me. It's like, absolutely. No, that's not you. And she's like, no, this is you. It's like, that's. No, no, that's not me. So it's a very funny story. And it's the exact same thing that happens to us when we record our voice for the first time. You're like, you have a certain perception in your mind of how your voice works, and then suddenly you share that and it's like, wait, that's not me. Absolutely not. So we have the exact same thing happening in the eye space. And sometimes for our customers, we're like, they're like, oh, this is absolutely not me. And we look at the picture like it's absolutely you. Like, it's one on one. And the opposite happens as well. They're super happy when look at it. It's like, no, that's absolute. Absolutely not you. But you know, if you're happy, you're happy, right? So it's a very fun concept that is coming into the AI headshot space.
- [24:19]
Keith
Wow, I love this space. It is fun. Again, I want everybody to take a look at this website and give it a try. The. And speaking of that, I mean, you mentioned your fundraising and closing up around. What else are you looking for in terms of. Of partners, investors that will help grow the business even faster.
- [24:38]
Ricardo
Yeah, so we're building AI hatchets and we're quite comfortable in where we're headed in that space. We're actually building a new company. I don't want to call it a new company because it's technically the same company, but it's an extra revenue driver, which is better studio, which is applying the same technology we've developed for the last two years almost into the fashion industry, where fashion brands can actually just upload their clothing, pick some models, pick a background and get the photo shoot done, basically. So we're really moving into a much bigger market, a much interesting market I would say as well. And so that is the, you know, if there's any connections there, that would be really cool because we're now fundraising. We have some really cool angels coming on board that have very strategic value and that's basically what we're looking forward to even further expand around. So we, we're keeping some budget open for really interesting people in the fashion industry.
- [25:32]
Keith
There's a lot of opportunity in fashion because of the quality of the brands and the number of technologies. I've been to several events where I saw some very innovative things of, you know, virtual try ons and the whole supply chain's got a lot more efficient as well for buying and selling and trading and returning and, you know, all that good stuff. Well, this is exciting. So what has you most excited about the second half of the year?
- [25:58]
Ricardo
Second half of the year is really that this new technology on the fashion market and us moving into the model marketplace. So that means that we're really working with real models right now, digitalizing them, putting them onto the platform and you can actually select them as a model for your shoot. And I think that's really cool because you're taking the best of technology and the best of, you know, humans putting that together and really bringing it to market, which I think is really cool. It's a unique angle that we've always believed in, that humans and technologies should play together, not just like replacing the humans. This is also why we have 24. 7 support with real humans behind everything, so you can actually talk to human24.7. So we've always believed in this human versus tech, whereas most players actually just think about the technology. And I think that's the exciting part where we can really blend the two worlds together. So I think that's what gets me most excited for now.
- [26:54]
Keith
Wow, that is exciting. Ricardo, I'm going to talk to you some more after this interview, but thanks so much for taking time to speak with me today. It's been really innovative conversation, really thought provoking, excited for you and what's coming down the road. Any last comments you want to share, by the way?
- [27:12]
Ricardo
Yeah, I would say, you know, thanks for having on the podcast. If you ever want to try an AI headshot, feel free to reach out. Happy to give some for free. And if you're looking for a new job, feel free to reach out.
- [27:26]
Keith
Maybe, maybe I'll have a podcast with my AI agent and I'll need a new photo for sure. So yeah, let me try that. I'm gonna do that.
- [27:35]
Ricardo
Perfect. Thank you very much.
- [27:37]
Keith
Career, I think my fashion career. I missed that window. I'll be honest with you.
- [27:44]
Ricardo
I think so too. On my side.
- [27:48]
Keith
You can go do it. Well, Ricardo, thanks again for joining. I really enjoyed our chat.
- [27:52]
Ricardo
Thank you very much, Keith. Thank you very much.