SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
He's Raising $135k on $2m Valuation for K12 Software Training Program
13 Mar 2023
Chapter 1: What is the SaaS Open event and why is it significant?
Guys, SaaS Open is our next big event in New York City. March 16th and 17th, we'll have 1,000 SaaS leaders all sharing how they built their companies. Our keynotes are Henry Shuck, Marie Martins from Tally.sao, Serby from Symbol, Christopher of DocHub, who had a big exit. Again, hundreds of speakers, 1,000 plus attendees.
And we've got folks bringing their entire executive teams because we have stages for founders, founders,
heads of product head of finance mbd cmos and cro's and then people in hr stage it's gonna be special prices are increasing every week so you don't want to wait go to sasopen.com right now to see what the ticket price is and lock in your spot today again that's sasopen.com march 16th and 17th in new york city tickets are almost sold out
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. edums.com launched back in 2021.
They're doing $2,500 per month in revenue right now by helping 60 schools educate their students on how to do software development. He's trained thousands of students and is now codifying that in his platform. Looking to raise $135,000 right now at a $2 million cap. We'll see if that happens. 10 people on the team. Hey folks, my guest today is Chiki Okoli.
He's got 12 plus years experience as a software developer and trained over 500 students in software development. He's now building edumess.com as a training platform. Okay, Chiki, you ready to take us to the top? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Good to have you here. I'm glad to be here. You bet. So who is paying for edumess? Is it the students or employers or somebody else?
Okay, so employers basically are paying for Edumas K-12 schools, and they were expanding to accommodate coaches and traditional institutions who go into the business of educating others. So basically, Edumas is a software that helps educators of all sizes, that manage all sizes of school, simplify their work processes, and we implemented AI to help make these processes very seamless.
And so what does a school pay on average per month to use your training program? Okay, it ranges from $48 to $1,200. And so our model is such that, okay, when we come to a school, for basically the K-12 school model, the students range from $200 $250 on average, based on our numbers. And so each student pays, in Nigeria, it's between $500 to $1,500.
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Chapter 2: How does Edumess help K-12 schools with software training?
How much are you looking to raise? So we're raising $135,000. $135,000? Yes, in SAFE, yeah. And what's the cap on the SAFE? $2 million valuation cap. Why are you worth $2 million? So we put a couple of things in place. And so we look at the market size, we looked at the team that's playing, we look at also, we look at a couple of factors that we used and looked at the projection as well.
And so within the next five years, we're looking to do over $20 million in revenue. Got it. Do you have a lead yet on the note to save? Well, I wouldn't say he's a lead, but we have an investor who is also on board of our advisors. who has indicated interest to invest $10,000. And so we also have our other board advisor who wants to put in 5K.
And so we are due diligence stage hoping to conclude that phase. That's great. And you keep saying we, how many folks are on the team today full-time? Okay, so I have two other co-founders and I have three engineers. And so that three engineer, the CTO is one of them as well. And so then we have two sales persons who helps to do the sales and marketing. So Chiki, just make it easy for me.
Total employees of the company today is how many? 10. 10. Okay, great. And then there's three co-founders. Okay, got it. And what is your role? Are you business development, marketing and sales? Or how do you split roles? I'm the CEO, and I also double up as the VP sales. So you're doing all the selling. So what's your plan? How do you go get 60 more schools?
Well, we've been trying a couple of sales channels. And right now, we do online ads. But we recently discovered something that worked. We noticed that the school owners are aggregated on WhatsApp platforms. And so we began to run ads. We convinced them to begin to set our ads directly on their platform.
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Chapter 3: Who are the primary customers of Edumess and how do they pay?
And so nationwide, we've been putting ads on their WhatsApp platform, putting our ads directly in their face. And it's been giving us a massive ton of leads. Can you name some of the WhatsApp groups that are the big groups that K-12 schools hang out in? Okay, so they have an association called NAPS, National Association of Private School Proprietors of Nigeria.
And so they have another one called APSUN. APSUN? APSUN, yeah. Can you spell it? The first one is A-P-S-O-N. APSUN, and it's a WhatsApp group in Nigeria that schools hang out in. they created that group. So it's like a body, a governing body. So there are two. One is NAPS. National Association, NAPPS. And so they created a WhatsApp group, and so we approached them.
We said, okay, since you guys are here, I mean, in Nigeria alone, we have over, in the FCT, we have over 2,000 of them, you know, in different WhatsApp subgroups. And so we're targeting them. In Nigeria alone, we have a total of 77,000 private schools, just excluding the government-owned schools. Understood. That sounds like an exciting growth plan.
So you're looking at raising, you've got 60 schools today. You mentioned churn is really high. If the students are liking the platform, why are the schools churning? Okay, so we discovered something that we are changing our model to help us. And so the students like it, the parents like it, but because we were depending on the school owners to pay us,
So it's B2B, then since the school owner has the appropriate students, and so the school owner includes a bid on the fee. So we discovered that depending on the passion on the educator in question, even though they're solving a problem for them, sometimes they collect less money and there's that temptation to go back. And so what we've done is we've
evolved our app in such a way that it gives the parents updates from time to time. So using what we call... communication book so the parents get so because of that we notice um that has that has started declining children has started declining and so that was the issue where the the school owner has carried expenses and and oh suddenly he realized that this hasn't been factored out and
And, uh, suddenly, so we were changing that.
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Chapter 4: What is the pricing model for schools using Edumess?
Understood. We're certainly rooting for you. Uh, we hope it goes well in the meantime, now let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite book? Ooh, my favorite book. Advanced strategy by Brian Tracy. So I think that book has had the most impact on my life. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? In Nigeria? I wouldn't say that I have one right now.
I'm just studying my competitors. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building edge MS? Well, HubSpot. Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night? And what's your situation, Chiki? Married, single kids? Married, two kids. Two kids. And how old are you? I'm 38. 38. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20?
I wish I knew how to build a fundable startup on time. Guys, there you have it. edumess.com launched back in 2021. They're doing $2,500 per month in revenue right now by helping 60 schools educate their students on how to do software development. He's trained thousands of students and is now codifying that in his platform. Looking to raise $135,000 right now at a $2 million cap.
We'll see if it happens. 10 people on the team. Cheeky, thanks for taking us to the top. Thank you, Nathan. Pleasure to be here.