EP 401: Quit $180k Microsoft Job to Launch Own Startup with KarmaCircles CEO Deepak Goel
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have.
I'm now at $20,000 per top. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark.
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Okay, Top Tribe, this week's winner of the $100 is Rich Jones. Okay, Rich Jones, he is stuck in corporate. He wants to break free. He's binging on the show. For your chance to win 100 bucks every Monday morning, simply subscribe to the podcast right now on iTunes and then text the word Nathan to 33444 to prove that you did it. Top Tribe, this is episode 401. Coming up tomorrow morning, you're gonna hear from Keep.com founder, Brian Wong. He's just 25 years old. He's raised $32 million and at $11 million in transaction volume in 2015 alone, of which his company made 5 million, at least, of profit. Top Tribe, good morning. Our guest today is Deepak Gol and he is the founder and CEO of Karma Circles.
Prior to that, he was co-founder and chief technology officer of Packback, a Chicago-based startup funded by Mark Cuban and other notable angel investors, where he built their product strategy, online marketing, and engineering team. Before that, he was the chief product officer of India Homes, which was backed by NEA, Foundation and Capital, and Helium Ventures, where he built and led product management, marketing, and engineering teams. Prior to that, he was director of product management at coupons.com, where he created and grew several multi-million dollar products. He's also been a senior executive at Microsoft and Nokia. Deepak, are you ready to take us to the top? Absolutely. Okay, so tell us about Karma Circles.
What does it do and how does it make money?
Karma Circles is a peer-to-peer micro mentoring platform. Essentially, it started with my own experience of advising more than a thousand entrepreneurs over the last six years. And so essentially the way the platform works is you download the app on iPhone or Android, and then you request for time. You can search for people by specific skills, companies, and stuff. And then you send a meeting request to them, which can happen on Skype, phone, or in person. And once the meeting is over, the only expectation is that you will write a thank you note for them, which goes on to their profile to build their online reputation. Interesting. Yeah, so the consumer version of the product is entirely free for both.
But we have launched an enterprise version of the product very recently. And that allows business schools and corporates to run their own peer-to-peer mentoring program within their own company or business school. And that is actually a paid version of the product.
So are you making any money right now or are you pre-revenue?
So we have started doing pilots with a couple of business schools and a couple of corporates. And we have some understanding that if the pilot goes well, they will actually move on to the paid version. And that is when we'll start making money.
Okay, so what year was the business founded in? January 2015. Okay, January 2015. And I always like asking this, what was your first year revenue? It's usually a very embarrassing number.
So first year, we didn't make any money because we came up with the enterprise version only this year.
And what is the business model? I mean, is it a marketplace? Is it a SaaS business? How would you categorize it?
It is, you know, if you look at the business model, it is very much like Yammer.
Okay, I don't know. Educate us. How does Yammer work?
So Yammer is basically Facebook within an enterprise. So an enterprise buys the license and everyone within the enterprise can use it.
Is the license a monthly fee though? So where it's like a SaaS model or what?
Yeah. So it is essentially a SaaS model wherein an organization will pay like, okay, if I have 100 users within the organization using Karma Circles, then I will pay $1 to $2, $3 per user per month.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–6:59
2
What is KarmaCircles and how does the app enable peer-to-peer micro-mentoring?
6:59–10:47
3
How is KarmaCircles experimenting with free pilots versus paid enterprise SaaS pricing?
10:47–14:31
4
What is KarmaCircles’ pricing model and how do you calculate per-user revenue?
14:31–15:38
5
Which pilot customers are you running and how do you validate willingness to pay?
15:38–21:07
Speakers
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