SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How he hit first $2,500/m in revenue after investing $25k of his own money in his OKR SaaS MVP
24 Dec 2022
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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 DJ. He's the founder and CEO of Worky.ai, spelled W-R-K-Y.ai.
He started his career as a financial analyst, built two startups previously in ed tech and healthcare, managed investments with an angel network, and then built a community of 15,000 student developers during the pandemic to help students and startups with internships and trainings. DJ, you ready to take us to the top?
Yes, absolutely. Thank you.
All right. So what is Worky? Tell me about a customer who's using you and how they use you.
Sure. Worky is helping companies to achieve their North Star. It's all about people, performance, and potential. We are working with SMBs to help them with their goal tracking and performance management. So we are helping small businesses, especially the IT-first businesses and startups. They're using it to keep a track of their goals and starting their goal tracking journey with us.
I love this. Okay, so companies like Pandora, First Sight, PayU, what are companies paying you on average per month to use Worky?
So we started with the nominal pricing, a bundle pricing of between $50 to $99 per month. Because we thought that with the first 100 customers, we'll spend understanding what pricing strategy is something which works for us, which works for the people, especially for the ones who are starting their journey with us. Of course, goals and performance journey was starting on our platform.
So it's a new experience for them as well. Yeah.
So the average customer today pays you about $50 per month. Is that right? Yes. Yes. Okay. And give me the backstory. When did you launch the company? What year?
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Chapter 2: What is Worky and how does it help companies achieve their North Star?
What do you need them to do in a free trial? Is it set up 10 OKRs? Is it send five emails? Is it add four team members? What do they need to do so that they're more likely to pay?
Sure. So in the free trial, we allow them to add one function or one department from their organization and run the OKRs for a quarter, where we help them in understanding whether this is going to work for them in the long run. So we are basically playing in their favor. They must realize whether this thing is bringing an ROI to their organization.
And then they are likely to stay with us for the next couple of years, where we believe three to five years, we are going to be deeply embedded into that organization. That's why we spent first three months in rediscovering.
And have you bootstrapped this business or did you decide to raise capital? We have raised capital. When did you raise and how much?
So we raised in the beginning of this year, around March, we raised an undisclosed round from a couple of angels from India and US. So this enabled us to build POC and onboard these customers.
When you say angel round, I mean, most angel rounds are under a million bucks. Was your round under a million?
No, no, no. Our round was pretty small. It was up to $150,000 US dollars.
Okay, so you did an angel round earlier this year for $150,000. Now, most founders are selling between 10% and 20% of their business in their pre-seed round. Did you sell about 20% of the business?
No. No, no, no. This is less than 10%.
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Chapter 3: What pricing strategy did Worky initially adopt for its customers?
And why did you need the capital? I mean, what makes this expensive to build?
Um... I mean, we made our tries in building that competency framework product where we spent the initial money that we have invested.
How much did you put in?
So we put somewhere around $25,000, me and my co-founder.
Did that make you nervous? Was that like all of your savings or what? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, all of our savings. You have to make this work then, otherwise you're bankrupt.
Absolutely. So actually, we came out of that bankruptcy thing.
Okay. So you and your co-founder put in together $25,000. That enabled you to build an MVP. You then raised $103,000 from Angels to keep growing. How did you and your co-founder split equity at the beginning? You just do 50-50?
So basically, I was holding 55% and he was holding 45%. But as we moved ahead, we realized that on what functions he's performing, on what functions I'm performing, what is our contribution. So we reached a point where we made the split equal.
Interesting. That's very nice of you. Yeah. Was that hard?
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Chapter 4: When did Worky launch and what were the initial challenges faced?
So we are a team of six people. And now we are planning to hire three more folks in the next two months.
That's a lot. Paying six people with $2,500 a month in revenue means you're burning money.
Yes, we are. But we want to keep the team pretty lean until the time we reach 100 customers. And then we will think of scaling the team.
But DJ, you're burning. It sounds like something like $20,000 in net burn per month right now, right?
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Is that true? You're burning about $20,000 of capital per month right now, net burn?
No, our burn is somewhere around $10,000 to $15,000 every month.
Does that make you nervous?
No, no, because we believe that we'll be able to, you know, compensate this thing that we are burning now by the revenues or the growth that we will bring in the coming months. And we are pretty sure of that.
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Chapter 5: How many customers does Worky currently serve and what is their revenue model?
They've got 50 customers paying $50 a month right now for $2,500 a month in revenue. They did $150,000 pre-seed round at about a $1.5 million valuation. They sold under 10% there. Now using that money to scale, net burn per month is about $15,000. They've got a team of six looking to move their 17 free trialing customers into paid plans as they look again to continue to scale.
All right, DJ, thanks for taking us to the top.
Thank you, Nathan, for having me.