SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Ask Experts Anything Marketplace Did $1.5m Last Year, 20,000 Experts Paid, 80 Customers, $5.5m Raised
23 Feb 2022
Chapter 1: What is the revenue model of the expert marketplace?
But just for Pulse, is the $1.2 million correct? We don't announce the revenue numbers, but I think your math is pretty close for the net worth of Pulse, yes.
You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, CAC, valuation, or other metrics, 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. Hey, folks. My guest today is Cenk Sidhar.
He began his professional career 14 years ago. Today, he's the co-founder and CEO of Enquire, formerly Global Wonks. Enquire provides the world's leading enterprises with an AI-powered platform to leverage global subject matter expertise in real time. Follow along at enquire.ai. Cenk, you ready to take us to the top? Thank you. Thanks for having me. So who's paying for this?
So basically, our clients are mostly Fortune 100 companies and also some investment groups, private equities, hedge funds that require on the ground insights for pre-deal due diligence or any insights require research.
We basically work with mostly the head of portfolio managers and also head of research for different organizations, and they engage our platform when they need outside expertise and insights.
What does that mean? So, I mean, people know traditional firms like GLG, right? Where you can say, I need to know more about the waste management space. And GLG will go find the top experts in waste management and connect you on a phone call with them. Are you effectively doing that, but using code?
So, yeah, we automated most of the process, but also the way we deliver insights is very different than other traditional expert networks. Basically, we have about 40,000 experts and every single expert is searchable and transferred on our website. So basically, when clients sign on our platform, they can search an expertise and they can engage those experts on a real-time basis.
And we're not really focused that much on the expert calls. We provide expert calls. We arrange expert calls for our clients. But our core product is Network Pulse. platform and ask any business policy or security related question. And within minutes, you get real expert insights on the question to your dashboard automatically.
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Chapter 2: Who are the main clients using the platform?
The unification. How many made at least a dollar in the past 30 days?
No, actually, the amount that I gave you was like the number of people who got paid.
Oh, 20,000.
So here's the deal. So if you answer a question... and your answer got approved by our AI who is assessing the quality of the response and your expertise and your relevance to the question, it means you automatically got paid. So we don't make people work for no compensation. And I should also explain that. We only match questions with the people who have already expertise on that.
For example, if the question about SAS revenue models, you don't even need to do any work on that. You provide one paragraph answer within eight minutes. The average time that you spend answering a question is eight minutes. And if you make $50 in eight minutes, it's more than any other expert networks paying experts in an hourly basis.
Understood. So is this, you tell me if this math is right, then if you paid, you said the average expert gets paid 20 to 50 bucks per question. Let's just assume 20, the low end of what you gave. If you paid 20,000 of these folks, at least a dollar in the past 30 days, we can take 20,000 times 20 per question, right?
So you spent in the past 30 days, $400,000 paying experts to answer questions on the low side.
Before the last year. Yeah, probably.
That's the last year, not the last 30 days.
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Chapter 3: How does the platform differentiate from traditional expert networks?
I am curious though. So like in 2021, how many questions went answered total?
Again, I'm not sitting in front of my dashboard, right? But in average a week, and of course, the number of questions increase every week as we get, as we onboard more clients. But I will say last year in total, we have about like 35. So again, I don't want to give a wrong number. And we have about 4,000 questions answered last year, I believe. 3,500 to 4,000.
Questions answered last year? Yes.
Okay.
Okay. You just told me last year, 20,000 experts were paid at least a dollar, but they only answered 4,000 questions. Don't you need at least a one-to-one ratio?
No, here's the deal. Again, when you ask a question on a platform, you get minimum five, maximum eight responses. So that's the beauty about the product. So when you ask a question about regulation of Bitcoin in Russia, you're not getting one expert answering the question.
So you're paying 20 bucks to five experts if they all give a good answer to one question. Exactly. I see. Okay. And then the flip side of the marketplace, which I'm trying to build out here, that's why I'm asking all these questions. How many businesses spent at least a dollar to get a question answered on the platform last year?
We have about 120 onboarded institutions. Some of the clients only use expert calls. Some of them use only network pulses. Some of them use both. I will say about 80 institutional clients and I will say about 100, 110 users engage the platform and ask real-time questions to experts.
So is that a way of saying you have 110 free users, but 80 of them are really paying your big paying customers?
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Chapter 4: What motivates experts to provide quick responses?
In 2022, you think it'll be more diversified and a higher revenue number?
100%.
Exactly. Got it. Perfect. That's great. Have you bootstrapped this or raised?
We just closed our series A round. We raised about $5.5 million. A month ago, we closed the round. Before that, we did our seed. And two years ago, we did our angel round. So this is our third institutional, second institutional round.
third funding round, and we will be going towards our CSB round by the end of the year as our growth significantly increases with the new products I just highlighted. The seed that you did last year, how much was that?
It was 3 million. 3 million? 2.2 million. 2.2.
And what year was the 800? Oh, good question. I think it was 2018-19 period. And when did you launch? Sorry, you asked about the seat. The seat was 2020 March when COVID just hit at that point. When was the 800 grand? It was angel round. It was 2018 and 19. It was like not one round, but it was a continuous race.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And so you just raised a series A at 5.5 million. Most folks are selling between sort of 10 and 20% of their business in a series A. Were you sort of in that same range?
We are, but as I mentioned, we are making significant transition to become technology provider rather than to be like a professional services provider. So let me briefly explain what I mean with that. Our marketplace that we just talked about, the number of questions, the number of clients that have access to, is a platform that clients can engage the experts directly.
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Chapter 5: How many experts are actively engaged on the platform?
Lean startup. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?
Good question. I, you know, I always, I was like, I was like Jeff Bezos.
Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building Enquire? I love Salesforce. Number three or four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night? Probably like six. And situation, married, single kids? I'm actually single, divorced, two kids. Two kiddos. And how old are you, Cenk?
I'm 39 and the kids are seven and nine.
Wow. Okay. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.
starting a business is extremely rewarding, but also super stressful because I built that other business in the past.
Guys, there we have it. Launched in 2017, Inquire.ai is helping 80 enterprise accounts with 120 seats get big questions answered via their network of 40,000 experts. Those experts, 20,000 of them made at least a dollar last year in the platform.
They spent between, call it, $400,000 and $600,000 last year paying out those experts and generated about $1 million to $2 million in revenue from these customers asking these big questions. They're now moving more to a pure SaaS play, looking to scale up to $6 or $7 million in revenue this year.
Just closed a Series A, $5.5 million, selling about, call it, 20% of the business as Jenk looks to scale. Yang, thanks for taking us to the top.
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