How Vroozi leveraged two internal hackathons last year to add $1M new ARR

give it up for Shaw's Khan my name is Shaz Khan I'm the CEO and co-founder of rusi and uh bruzy is based in San Francisco I'm from LA and we are a autonomous purchasing platform and AP automation platform for large multinationals so all non-payroll spend that goes through a

company will actually run through our platform so anything from The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon to customers in Texas like HEB grocery stores we run our entire platform and sit on top of a number of different systems so uh today I'm going to talk about a little bit of what we've done in terms of continuous innovation just a little bit about our company we've got 55 customers uh we're in 15 countries right

now 6 billion annual throughput 30 000 users um and uh on track for 10 million ARR by next year that's where we're targeting hopefully we'll beat that and a little bit about what we do so oops so we'd synthesize the entire purchasing process for companies so

everything from digital purchasing on your smartphone you can get a boom mic you can get shelving units you can get helicopter rides um you name it it runs through our platform and then we actually pay suppliers digitally so in Corporate America a lot of people are paying by checks still so we actually digitize payments through ACH virtual cards and a number of other mediums and then we sit on top of any type of financial platform that you can

think of sap PeopleSoft netsuite you David and again some of our customers were very diverse we don't have a industry slant but we have three major areas Enterprise Fortune 1000 mid-market organizations we Define anywhere from 250 million to 1.5 billion revenue and um gpos gpos or group purchasing organizations that actually build costco-like discounts for their members

so that they can get really good pricing without having to be a big uh big company so um as a tech company I don't know if you guys all have tech companies or run SAS or software um you know there's a there's a dilemma that always plagues us how do we find ways to continuously innovate you know what are the what are the levers that will keep us relevant

in this market and as a company my advice and I talk about this a lot is that you cannot be complacent when you have a company um you have to be competitive in your core Market have to prove that you can win in new domains classic example is Blockbuster right Blockbuster was complacent then Netflix came right and stole their lunch nobody knows about Blockbuster unless

you have those uh laminated cards still which probably you can find on eBay now but the point is that you have to always be thinking about finding ways to innovate and so a couple of uh sources founder-led ideas well we all have ideas and we start companies based on those ideas right um I personally get kicked out of a lot of my uh product meetings now because I

just have a bunch of ideas and they just go we can't do any of this and then I come back and I say well what about those ideas that I just talked about so you always got to be thinking about ideas client business reviews great source of inspiration so talk to your clients talk to your customers talk to them monthly talk to them weekly I'm speaking with HEB right after this in the East Side village Hub because we're talking about going into Mexico right with all their Superstores and product

owners talk to your product owners give them incentive competition focus groups user groups white papers you name it right there's all sources of inspiration you can find to innovate within your company but what we did is a little bit um interesting how many of you guys know what a hackathon is okay great and have you guys run a hackathon internally or participated in one so we um that's great so we found that

hackathons have been incredible incredible drivers for innovation so a hackathon is a typically an event fixed period time about anywhere from 72 hours or less most hackathons are 48 hours and um they're fast paced so a lot of the hackathons that we run uh people don't sleep for three days straight I mean they'll

they'll nap at their desks we obviously staff them up with whatever they need stock them up with whatever they need pizzas sodas maybe some other Libations if they feel successful and it's a lot of fun um slack channels booming up a lot of animated conversations a lot of profanity um it's a it's a great great way to uh basically deliver innovation in your

company and so we have a hackathon framework first of all the teams minimum one person maximum four name your team make it creative duration three business days and we run them twice a year so we run them in December kind of slow period and then we run them in July and uh cash prizes we want to incentivize Innovation right and I think it's a great way we talked about profit sharing bonus plans

commission plans give money to Engineers I mean it's incredible what comes out of these two or three day micro sessions um and then team combination no restrictions so one thing with our hackathons is that we don't care what you're building it could be completely irrelevant to our business model right we want people to actually open up their mindsets open up their mind share and

think about new creative ideas where we can find you know value and so we mix up the teams in terms of uh Dev QA devops product owners a lot of our hackathons are just two people two people and you know could be up to 15 teams and so our rules uh on the technology

front no technology limitation so feel free to explore Implement whatever you want to and if you are using open source libraries and tools no plagiarism you will be disqualified right so if you are leveraging tool sets um for your project you must credit them in the actual hackathon

and then topics no restrictions and um you know we I'm a judge on the hackathon committee but um we want to see creativity so we want to see a lot of people putting together great ideas that we can actually potentially Implement in our solution and so what are you going to submit you're going to submit the working code plus the readme instructions plus a PowerPoint presentation right or

slideware right and you actually get graded on your slideware so take your slideware seriously that's part of the 72-hour Sprint okay and uh judging committee is made up of four to six team members so that could be uh executive committee that could be product owners that could be devops that could be a whole bunch of people there's no title right for us we just want to actually have a very

diverse group of judging members that doesn't have to be executive based okay and scoring criteria I have a lot of this already built out for you guys in terms of templates and Frameworks so if you guys want to I'm a late addition to this I can you can email me and I can send you uh the files and Frameworks it's really really really important that you guys look at this so scoring criteria one to ten ten being highest

we talk about Innovation is your idea interesting cool pitch how well did you present it the pitches are 10 minutes max if you go over you get you get dinged so again we run a pretty tight ship because if you can imagine evaluating in a four to six committee it's about six hours over a zoom and it's really really tenuous so

you have to you have to you know have some uh have some brevity but you also have to convey your message really really quickly right value is your idea solving a problem did you clearly identify the problem and um how well did you solve it and that can come out in terms of the actual PowerPoint that can come out in terms of a demo that you do so the the pitch doesn't have to be just slideware it can be a mix of the PowerPoint and a

quick uh MVP demo and then execution right so we actually grade one to ten on all of these and so here is a kind of sample uh sheet from one of our hackathons and so a lot of people desk demons call back assassins Innovation Hub bit Hunters creative chaos uh the people that actually won this hackathon uh were a team that combined their first names together Yaro Sam in the middle

and so we had five judges in this hackathon and again we just scored and then basically uh presented uh prizes and so again from a framework standpoint we encourage um if you're going to run a hackathon have multiple types of prizes and awards so that you can incentivize people so we've had team members that have actually won in three categories which

is your max you cannot win in more than three categories because then it's just really not not helping right you want to see a lot of ideas come through and our biggest hackathons have been about 15 teams total so we have a lot of participation from the company and by the way hackathons don't have to be engineering related right so you can have a hackathon or a concept for improving the onboarding experience for your clients you can have

a hackathon for you know better customer experience or customer service and leveraging tool sets to basically synthesize that customer experience so it doesn't have to necessarily be Tech related or MVP in terms of coding outcome and one of the key areas that we like is most likely to be business viable right so out of our first hackathon um well so we I'm sorry we'll just go

for prizes right so cash awards for first second and third place awards for category winners bonus cash award for any hackathon project that makes into the Brizzy roadmap and then um certificates and then infinite bragging rights and so our first hackathon was conducted in December 2019 the best overall project that we got and was actually business viable was a application of machine learning models to Auto suggest accounting information so what that

means is that when you actually buy something for your company it's going to typically get coded to a GL account right you don't know what that GL account is right so what this uh hackathon proved was the ability to take a description of what you were buying and auto code it to the right GL from a financial standpoint which was great from a controller standpoint these guys put it together in about two days and um the hackathon one we basically did

the machine learning hackathon 2 which was done in December now we've moved to two was a smart Administration module production release was December of last year and now this product in red bruisy intelligence was the result of our hackathon it's our fastest growing product right now we just hit one million AR on it in about less than a year

so what this does is it's smart document processing it takes any incoming document in terms of a supplier invoice whether it's handwritten whether it's machine generated and it's able to extract all the information basically put the information in the in the system route it for approval and then pay it without any human intervention zero human intervention and it started from

concept that a team put together in December 2019 and we would never have come up with this concept without that hackathon and so here's an idea right here's a here's a kind of concept that we see these are real invoices that run through our system I mean handwritten doctors Pharmacy type invoices right and without Rosie it takes up to 20 minutes for somebody to hand key that in figure out where it needs to go we actually process

these documents in 15 to 30 seconds without any any touch right and so again what we are talking about is um being able to take ideas that you build within your company find Wells find ways to cross find ways to upsell and find ways to implement these into your sales strategy and so we've crossed sold 50 of our existing customers and all new customers that purchase our

software get this baked in and of course price point ACV goes up based on the value of this right so um like I said one million uar that we've recently hit and uh key takeaways so provide a framework and Rule set for the hackathon again email me if you would like a copy of our framework it's pretty detailed it's fun designate one or two individuals to coordinate and run the

hackathon have some project team members that you trust doesn't have to be your head of engineering to be someone that's really just super organized can basically produce the hackathon and make it happen for your organization run it it's great team building it's really really great team building and what we see is that we see our Sprints and our quality of delivery and our Pace just go through the roof after hackathon because people have this Buzz right and then hackathons do not need to

be limited to coding exercises right they could be anything within your organization that you feel can drive value okay so thanks for being a great audience and uh if you have any questions please let me know yeah good

and pay in terms of cash um cash prizes can uh go uh starting at a thousand dollars and kind of trickle down to 500 250. um but um each team member gets gets the cash price yeah um I can uh I can share with you guys yeah it's uh do I have it on here let me see that's a good point there it is right there all right thank you so much yeah I'm sorry

uh we have uh 60 people and uh in five different countries so Nepal India Pakistan Argentina and U.S

oh yeah I mean everybody participates oh yeah yeah we have uh we have team members in Nepal and Argentina we have team members team members in U.S India Pakistan India Pakistan us it's a mix that's how we run our development pods we don't keep him constrained to a region the hackathon work remotely or do you do it do you get everybody together I would love to get people there physically

personally but um with obviously the last three years everything is remote typically but I mean there are teams that you know like to work together and so they'll come into the office [Applause]