Paddle Billing
ProfitWell MetricsAI SaaS tool, vidyo.ai, has been able to put a stop to payment failures, capture more customers through true localisation and offload its sales tax at the same time, all thanks to Paddle.
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What happens when demand for your product explodes unexpectedly?
The launch of ChatGPT in 2022 set off a tidal wave of AI demand, thrusting little-known AI software from behind the scenes to center stage in a very short space of time.
India-based vidyo.ai was one of the start-ups caught in the wave.
Launched in late 2022, vidyo.ai enables video creators from across the world to take their long form content and very quickly chop it into short form content which then they can use to promote their podcasts, vlogs, or other digital material online in the form of TikToks, LinkedIn videos, Facebook reels, Instagram stories and more.
“There's a lot of work involved in video editing,” explains Vedant Maheshwari, vidyo.ai’s CEO and Co-Founder. “Using AI, we automate the entire process of taking a long form video, captioning it, understanding which are the most interesting parts, and then making short form content from it. As a result, we save content creators countless hours.”
“We've got a monthly active user base of about 200,000 people and a daily active user base of over 10,000 people,” he says. “We have customers in every country in the world and process millions of hours of video every month.”
A game-changer for social media creators producing TikToks, Instagram reels, LinkedIn posts and Facebook videos, vidyo.ai originally catered to a niche group of podcasters and video creators until ChatGPT propelled demand for vidyo.ai’s software worldwide in early 2023.
“We saw a real spike in users following the launch of Chat GPT,” he explains. “We started seeing users from outside of our niche market – users that were not our ideal customer persona and people from geographies that we weren't even targeting – using the product organically. It then attracted the attention of influencers who began telling their viewers about the product.”
But with rapid growth comes rapid growing pains
vidyo.ai’s growth was snowballing, which meant its small team of 12 was working furiously hard to service customers.
Within just seven months of launching, vidyo.ai was processing millions of hours of video for 200,000 monthly users in over 200 countries (with paying customers in 75 countries).
Scaling so fast in so many geographies was not something that we had planned for. It's not easy for a small team to keep up with the kind of demand we are experiencing. We’ve had to stay on top of customer support and scale up our technology bandwidth to reach every corner of the globe.”
Vedant and his team realized that, if they wanted to continue to be able to scale at pace, then they needed a solution that could help future-proof their business.
To keep on top of such rapid growth while also juggling development needs, vidyo.ai integrated with Metrics to give them insights into their SaaS business.
“We needed a source of truth for our metrics,” Vedant says. “As a SaaS business, the most important metric for us to track was our monthly recurring revenue (MRR) and churn rate. Our research showed us that Metrics was one of the most trusted tools to help us with this, so we signed up.”
Integration was quick and easy. “We were up and running in just a few days,” Vedant says.
The metrics not only got the whole team on the same page by providing a single source of truth for vidyo.ai’s huge MRR and new customer growth, but it also revealed some worrying insights about vidyo.ai’s churn rate.
“That’s when we discovered that our delinquent churn was higher than industry standards.”
Plugging a leaky revenue bucket by tackling delinquent churn
Unlike voluntary churn, which is usually a result of product failings, delinquent churn is the loss of customers due to payment problems. The most common reason being delinquent credit cards on file. “We knew we should be able to solve this,” Vedant says. “So, we decided to sign up for Retain.”
Vedant and his team saw results in a matter of days. “We recovered the money spent on the first month of Retain in the first week,” Vedant says. “That gave us reassurance that it was definitely the right product for us.”
And then came Paddle. The second most common reason for delinquent churn is bank decline and this was also the case for vidyo.ai too who’s bank decline rates were high. vidyo.ai didn’t have the resources to resolve the issues with banks or card providers by setting up local banking entities in the countries they operated in or chasing banks directly.
“Since we were using both Metrics and Retain, it made sense for us to explore Paddle too,” Vedant says.
As a global SaaS company, we had some trouble with bank decline rates being too high. I think some of this was because we are incorporated out of India, but much of our client base is in the US. These were issues we couldn’t solve ourselves. On top of this, we were growing so fast that we knew we needed to start thinking about compliance in different markets – we didn’t want this to come back and bite us in the future.”
Taking away the compliance headache
To avoid tripping up over their own success, vidyo.ai looked at Paddle to optimize their payments infrastructure for selling overseas, minimize payment failures and solve their compliance fears in one stroke. Since Paddle acts as a Merchant of Record (MoR), it enabled vidyo.ai to be sales compliant in every country from day one. Its tax liability issues are fully taken care of globally, no matter how much growth it experiences in the future.
“As a small business and as a technology company, we'd like to stay lean and we'd like to stay focused on what our core value proposition is, and not get lost in the legal mumbo jumbo of dealing with taxes and compliance,” Vedant says. “That's not the best use of our time and resources. Once we wrapped our head around the entire concept of having a merchant record, it made complete sense to switch over to one.”
Paddle’s value was immediate.
Paddle reduced the bank declines that we were seeing across every country by 2-3x. What’s more, our conversion rates in specific countries have gone up because we're able to offer pricing in their respective currencies.”
As a result, vidyo.ai brought in over $100K in new revenue in the first 30 days of using Paddle.
Future-ready advice for other AI SaaS businesses
As a result of his experiences with Paddle, Vedant wouldn’t hesitate to recommend the solution to other AI businesses like his.
“If you are a SaaS company that might find yourself growing overnight like we did, then you need to find a way to future-ready your business,” he says. “You need to ensure your stack is extremely scalable, and that you are able to comply in every geography that matters to you. And even if there are some geographies that may not matter to you, you might see traffic and users from there. So, you've got to be prepared for that too. I highly recommend Paddle as the solution – without it our growth would have been simply unmanageable.”
Going forwards, Vedant is happy that Paddle will be busy taking care of his administrative burden so that he and his team can focus on their business. “Paddle’s been working out really well for us so far,” he says. “We are happy that we have the right set of tools in place to not only serve our customers better, but to manage our day-to-day payments administration. We now have the time we need to add new people to our team and begin rolling out even better features to our product. I’m excited about what the future holds.”