SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
He pays senior engineers $30k/yr, building new Employee Engagement SaaS
10 Jun 2022
Chapter 1: What is the valuation of the company and how many customers do they have?
10 million valuation. Yeah.
10 million valuation.
Free money. Yeah.
Yeah. So how, I mean, that's a big valuation for 11 customers. Do you have revenue? I mean, how much revenue are you doing today?
Chapter 2: How much revenue is the company generating currently?
With consulting, we've managed an average revenue of about 15K per month.
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 these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. Hey folks, my guest today is Nishith Patek.
He's on a mission to reimagine HR using technology and drive workplace happiness while helping organizations improve productivity. After a career spanning two decades, of which 17 years were in senior HR roles, he founded WeSore.ai to break the status quo in HR using conversational AI. Nishith, you ready to take us to the top? Yeah, thank you. You bet. Okay, so who's paying for WeSore?
Is it folks, any company that's hiring?
Yeah. So we are a performance management platform and employee engagement platform. We have 11 paying customers so far.
Congrats on your first 10. That's great.
Thank you. In about one year of having some form of a product. Yeah, but the product is still getting built out. So we've got 11 paying customers. We've bootstrapped so far. We've got a couple of angel investors.
How much did you raise on the angel side?
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Chapter 3: Who are the founders and what is their background?
How many founders?
I have a co-founder who's an ex-colleague. So we used to work together in our last job for five years. And then we kind of decided to kind of put this up together. We have a third member in the team, a core team, who's our CTO. The CTO is based in India. My co-founder is based in Dubai. I'm based in London. So we kind of manage.
Just the two founders that put in 300K total. And did you guys split equity 50-50 at the start or no?
So I put in 260, my founder put in 50, my co-founder.
Okay. So you got more.
Yeah. And then I've also been on a no salary structure for two and a half years now.
Yep. So you started coding this tool back in what, early 2020?
Early 2020. March 2020 is when we had our first set of engineers, exactly three weeks before COVID.
Wow. Okay. And the range around you, 205,000 pre-seed round, what year was that?
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Chapter 4: How did the founders fund the company initially?
Yeah. So how, I mean, that's a big valuation for 11 customers. Do you have revenue? I mean, how much revenue are you doing today?
So all put together. So we have consulting and we have subscription. So obviously we've got two components and initially it's difficult to kind of ramp up subscription that quickly. So subscription is fairly small. We're talking about without any enterprise customer, we're talking about 15K ARR, but with consulting, we've managed an average revenue of about 15K per month.
Okay, got it. So you're doing right now, like last year, or I mean, right now, last month, you did about 15,000 in consulting, and about 1000 in true recurring monthly revenue.
14 plus one, let's put it that way. You know, we've done everything a bootstrap founder has to do in order to keep the lights on.
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Check it out today at founderpath.com forward slash products. That's plural forward slash valuations. Again, both plural founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash valuations. No, I think it's great. You've managed dilution nicely because you raised it at 10. I mean, my real question is, how are you able to negotiate a 10 million valuation with only 12k of ARR?
See, the kind of traction is not so much in terms of existing revenue. The traction is in terms of the partnerships we are trying to build. So our business model is a little bit different. We are not another HR tech startup trying to sell to SMBs. We are looking to sell to the enterprise space, and we are trying to do it through our partner network.
So in terms of the partner network, we've got Microsoft. We've got Oracle. We've got advanced discussions with SAP. And discussions with Workday going to commence next week. On the consulting side, we've got partnerships with PwC. a regional Middle East focused consulting firm. And we are in discussions with other firms like Aon and Mercer and Ernst & Young.
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