$1m Raised, 800 Users, Here's how he's launching pricing

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The easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool. It's like a big Excel sheet for all of these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com.

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Startatom.com, they want you to install their application so that your Trello can talk to your Jira board or your Trello can talk to your Slack group or your Slack group can talk to your Microsoft Teams group if your team is split up. Once they own that, they'll then launch services behind it.

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So you can say, hey, in the Trello board at Startatom, we need a animated graphic designed for our product on launch. And he will jump in and do that. That's his bread and butter because he comes from Speedlancer where he raised 1.5%.

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All right. I guess first question, you spun this out of Speedlancer. So let's start there. What was Speedlancer and what year did you spin it out? Speedlancer started in 2015. Basically, my business endeavors started when I was 11 or 12, but I started in e-commerce when I was 14. And I couldn't hire people sitting next to me in high school and then university. So...

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I ended up being a big user of Odesk and Elance at the time, which merged to become Upwork. And so I decided to start my own freelancing marketplace called Speedlancer. And in 2015, there was no verticalized freelancing marketplaces. We were probably the first one after Fiverr, I guess, if you count them as verticalized.

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But we tried to eliminate the hiring, picking, choosing, recruiting process of freelancers. We built a lot of technology around that. We raised a little bit of money, but really VCs didn't really believe in us.

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How much?

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uh it was less than a million dollars over a number of years um a few different rounds but we did build amazing technology that we have a paid and pending on and stuff and so that led him to start adam because covid led to a proliferation of freelancing marketplaces i don't know about you but seems to me like every second business hobby business is a freelancing platform of some sort connecting people to companies now um

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And I guess I saw that trend start to shift. And so we decided to bring our technology out for other agencies and marketplaces and teams in general. So Start Adam is a communication and project management app without an app. We connect existing tools that you use together.

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So happy to talk about a bit of the thoughts that's going into that. But we have an API and then a sort of standalone product. What do you think you're going to launch in terms of what your pricing structure is? You've got a pricing page on the website. Yeah, we were looking at user-based pricing. And now I think we're looking at, we want to incentivize all users in the company to use it.

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So we're not so much looking at user-based pricing. Now it's more communication-based pricing. Are we going to charge per group, per channel that we create sort of thing? And so it'll be like affordable, but hopefully it'll scale up nicely as well for us. Well, so what happened with Speedlancer? Did you shut it down or someone else bought it or who's running that?

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It's operating, but to be honest, we're winding it down as we're focusing on the SaaS. So it's the same entity. And we actually raised that round four star, Adam, and our new investors are very supportive of our vision.

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How much did you raise in that round? We actually haven't announced it, but happy to announce it here. Let's go. 1.175, I think it was, in the last round. Okay. And you just closed it. The money's hit. You just closed it this week? No, the money we closed in April last year. And we just launched the product a couple of weeks ago on Product Hunt.

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It was a big build because we have a lot of integrations that need to be developed with basically underlying tech infrastructure that's built to scale. My CTO is an AI professor, retired AI professor from Brazil. He built out the banking infrastructure in Brazil in the 1980s. It's still used today. So our infrastructure is built to scale.

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And so that was a very... It was a long-winded process, but I guess that's how it worked in a way. So you raised a million. Between 2015 and today, you raised a million bucks for Speedlancer. And then you communicate to the board, this isn't working. We're going to do something new. They said, Adam, we love your vision. Here's another 1.175 million.

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So you've raised about, you call it 2.1 million to date across the combined entities. Yeah, 1.9 or something like that. Yeah. But it was actually different investors. So our existing investors, some of them followed on, but yeah, we had a different lead. I see.

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And then I guess when you did the original round in Speedlancer, most folks, even back in the day, were selling 15%, 20% of the business in the pre-seed round.

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Is that sort of where you were? Uh, we did pretty well. Um, I'm not going to talk like actual valuations, but if you talk about like our team being, you know, led by an AI professor, for example, uh, that was a big, a big deal. I think the fact that our journey has taken so long was actually kind of a benefit because the investors knew and trusted that we knew the problem set inside and out.

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And they really just believed in us. It also, uh, The timing was everything, right? So if you look at April last year... I'm not talking about the April round. I'm talking about the round before that, before you even had Sir Adam. Before that? Yeah, I'd say that was accurate, yeah. Okay, you sold about 15%, 20%. Yeah, I mean, look, most folks...

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I mean, you're five, six, seven years and eight years in now at this point into the combined sort of entity. So hopefully, we'll get a better valuation.

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Obviously, give up less percent of the company. I guess this begs the question, though, why not just shut down Spelancer and start from scratch at the clean cap table? I love these questions because they're not too relevant. The majority of founders listening wouldn't have to consider that question, right? So I love that you're asking it because...

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it's relevant to people who are in this similar position, but yeah, to answer the question, we did it to look after our investors for one. So we, we had these previous investors who are on us on an eight year, seven or eight year journey with us. Right. And backed us every step of the way.

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And so I, it was important to me that their notes actually converted into something and our new investors were quite supportive of that. The second thing is, Although we're building a SaaS now, our long-term vision is that we reintegrate services into it. So once we own the communication between, say, you and me, if we're communicating, we don't have to do that by email anymore.