SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
He spent $15k on MVP now has first $1200 in ARR helping Engineering Teams Measure Output and Efficiency
22 Dec 2022
Chapter 1: What is Foyer and how does it help engineering teams?
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. Foyer.work, they're helping maximize performance of engineering teams. One design partner today paying $100 per month. They spent about $15,000 on the MVP. Three co-founders each own 33%.
They raised $900,000 in funding at a $7 million valuation. So they've got plenty of runway to grow here as they look to onboard four to five new paying design partners in the next three months with a team of six. Hey, folks.
Chapter 2: What problems do customers face before using Foyer?
My guest today is Pratyush Rai. He's the CEO at a company called Foyer. Foyer is a team of former IIT graduates building a virtual project manager for software engineering teams. You can find them at foyer.work. Pratyush, are you ready to take us to the top?
Yep.
All right. So Foyer helps maximize performance of engineering teams. What does that mean? Can you tell me the story of a customer that's currently using you?
Chapter 3: What metrics does Foyer use to measure team performance?
Yeah, so the kind of problems our customers bring to us is basically they are a small team of engineers who are trying to get a bit more process driven. Let's say a team of about 12 or 15 odd engineers, which was not following any sort of agile or sprint methodology and who are now trying to onboard in the right set of processes over Jira and use GitHub in the right way.
So what we help them do is to get them the right statistics over Jira and over GitHub so that they can start measuring them.
And also... What are those statistics? Is it number of pushes per engineer, number of lines of code written? What are those metrics?
So we do not go at an individual level metrics for things like number of lines of code are not the right target points for us. What we focus more on is at a team level, what are some of the aggregate metrics pertaining to, you know, comments per engineers, reviews per engineers, and, you know, some of the process-driven, process-related metrics, like are there any last deployments?
Are there any high priority tickets which are delayed? And all of these are at team level, not at an individual level.
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Chapter 4: How much do engineering teams pay for Foyer's services?
So we promote a more team level measurement as compared to an individual level measurement.
And what are some engineering teams paying for Foyer today? What on average per month?
Yeah. So we charge somewhere between $5 to $10 per developer per month. I think most of the existing tools are way too expensive. And we have heard a lot of our customers complain about that these are not affordable for startups. Their prior plans are already designed keeping enterprise customers in mind. And that's why we are charging what is more than we need for startups.
And what does the average team have when they sign up?
Chapter 5: What is the timeline for launching Foyer's product?
5 seats, 10 seats, 100 seats?
So we are targeting anywhere between 10 to 40 seats. And the most set of companies we work with are somewhere about 20, 25, 30 odd developers.
Okay. So 20 developers at 10 bucks a pop, they're paying you on average $200 a month, something like that? Yeah. And put this all on a timeline for us. When did you launch the business? What year?
So we launched our business this year.
Chapter 6: How does Foyer plan to grow its customer base?
So we launched our product in multiple stages. We followed a very lean approach. Our first version was launched somewhere about in August. Our latest version was launched somewhere last week. So we are like very, very new right now.
That's awesome. Do you have customers yet or are you pre-revenue?
Yeah, we are having two design partners at this point. And one of them is a paying design partner. Another is doing a trial.
Chapter 7: What funding did Foyer secure and how was it allocated?
It's going to convert into a paying design partner.
The design partner, what does that mean? How much do they pay for that?
Yeah, so we charge them a lower tier from our price point. And what does that mean is that we are going to co-build our product with them. We get to understand how they are using it. We have designed our product in a more flexible manner in order to cater to their specific needs. It's not a self-serve product which is there to launch globally for our customers.
We have a pipeline of three more companies whom we are approaching as design partners. So you can think of them as a customer, but a customer for whom we are going to, you know, sort of cater to in a much more closer way as compared to... But Prayush, what do they pay for that?
Chapter 8: What lessons did the founders learn during their entrepreneurial journey?
So for you to do engineering, are they paying $1,000, $5,000? What are they paying to be a design partner?
Yeah, yeah. We charge them the lower tier, somewhere about $5 for the moment.
Okay, but if you're designing something that doesn't exist, right? Why are they paying for a month for something that doesn't exist?
No, no, no. It exists. So when we go to the design partners, we have a product which is ready. What we do is that we iterate with them in case if there is a specific requirement, some sort of customization or personalization they would require, we follow that approach. So a design partner is a partner for us, which helps us build a better product. And we are sort of customizing our way.
So you have one paying customer today with 20 seats at $10 a seat. You're doing about $200 a month in revenue? Yes. Okay. That's great. Okay. And how much did you spend personally building the MVP?
Sorry, I think I should just clarify. It is $5, so it's $100 per month revenue. And how much we spend building our MVP? I think if I'm getting the number correctly, we spend somewhere about $15,000 to $20,000 in the last three to four odd months on our product part.
On our company expenses, there have been some fixed expenses like laptops and all, but otherwise we spend a very, very small amount of money building our MVP.
And who provided that $15,000? Was that your own money or did you raise money?
We raised some money from one PC fund in India and some angel investors. And how much did you raise? We ended up raising to the north of $900,000, somewhere to the north of that.
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