From Developer to Entrepreneur with $20M in Bootstrapped Revenue: Julien Salinas, CEO of NLP Cloud (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Your customers are all developers?

Julien Salinas: Less and less, but still most of them.

Sramana Mitra: Is there a specific genre of developers? Are they developing a particular platform?

Julien Salinas: Initially, it was mainly machine learning engineers that use Python. All the machine learning engineers are Python developers. They taught me a lot of things. Then gradually, I started moving to a more global developer market. Today, I have developers who are developing on any platform and language.

Sramana Mitra: What is the positioning today?

Julien Salinas: Basically, we take the best AI engines available from the open-source community and we deploy them into production so developers can use them easily. It doesn’t sound very complex. You just take what’s best from the open-source community and you deploy it in production through an API so developers can plug into it in a reliable way. There are tons of DevOps considerations about scalability and high-availability. That’s why developers don’t do it by themselves.

Sramana Mitra: How many such AI engines do you support?

Julien Salinas: Today, around 30. We have a special one for sentiment analysis and another one for the automatic summarization of a piece of text. Another one is for paraphrasing. You can write a whole blog article automatically thanks to a specific model. You can do chatbots. When it’s about having a machine understand text automatically and do something out of it, you can use one of the models on NLP Cloud.

Sramana Mitra: Are you still finding your customers from Reddit?

Julien Salinas: Yes and no. Today, most of our customers are coming from Google SEO.

Sramana Mitra: That’s because you write about these topics on your blog.

Julien Salinas: Yes, a lot. We still have customers coming from Reddit. Today, they’re coming, more and more, from Google. Three-quarters of our customers are coming from our blog articles that are well-ranked on Google.

Sramana Mitra: How many customers do you have?

Julien Salinas: Today, we sent an email to all our customers. It was 15,000.

Sramana Mitra: 15,000 customers. Are they in a self-serve mode?

Julien Salinas: 90% of them are in a self-service mode. We pretty much don’t do anything. Most of them are actually free customers.

Sramana Mitra: Free users.

Julien Salinas: Yes. Some of them are on a pay-as-you-go plan. Some pay upfront for a specific number of requests per minute. We also have more advanced key account customers now. In that case, we do much more advanced things like consulting. We take care of many things for them. It’s a bit different but it’s a small fraction of our customers.

Sramana Mitra: The 15,000 users, what percentage of that is paying something?

Julien Salinas: I would say that three-quarters are free users. One-quarter are paid users.

Sramana Mitra: On average, how much are they paying?

Julien Salinas: I can give you a range. It goes from $20 a month to $10,000 a month.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a big range.

Julien Salinas: It’s a huge range. It’s mainly due to the fact that, recently, some very advanced AI models called GPT-J and GPT-X were released. These models are amazing, but they are also very expensive. Our prices for these models are very expensive. Of course, entry-level customers can’t afford to use these models on a regular basis.

This segment is part 2 in the series : From Developer to Entrepreneur with $20M in Bootstrapped Revenue: Julien Salinas, CEO of NLP Cloud
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