SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How she broke $25k MRR SaaS revenue by starting off as an OKR coach
21 Aug 2022
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
And 50 customers times $500 a month means you're doing about $25,000 a month in revenue?
Yeah, you're absolutely correct.
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. Hey, folks. My guest today is Vidya Santanam.
She's the co-founder of Fitbots and leads growth. She started the company after a 16-year career, her last company being Mindtree, where she led strategic talent and leadership building. Vidya, you ready to take us to the top?
Absolutely new.
All right. You told me before you listened to the show, so this should be a really easy interview, right?
I memorized all your questions, by the way.
So you should just do the whole show. I'm just going to leave here. All right. Tell us about FitBots. So what is FitBots? What are people paying you for?
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Chapter 2: What is FitBots and how does it help companies?
Okay. Very interesting. And then put this all on a timeline for me. When did you write the first line of code for the company?
Yeah, so we started the company in 2018, me and my tech co-founder, Kashi.
Chapter 3: What are the services offered by FitBots?
We launched the OKRs product in 2019. And from there, in the same year, we actually realized that many teams being new to OKRs used to come over to us and say that, hey, tell us more about OKRs and how to use it correctly. We're familiar with it, but we want to know how to use it correctly. So we got certified as OKR coaches, coached about 650 plus teams,
ran about 1,000 plus check-in meetings and built the product as we were close to users.
So from there... Wait, what did you get certified through? Like certified from who?
We got certified from the OKRs training US. They're one of the global best in OKRs. Also bringing the certifications into Asia Pacific. So the learning that we had, Nathan, was that not every problem in the world can be solved only with software. So you need some amount of handholding for teams as well so that they do it correctly. So that was our learning.
Interesting. Okay. So you think about in 2018, you really launched in 2019 then, right?
Correct.
And how did you get your first customers? Did this coaching company give you a bunch of early customers after you graduated as coaches?
Yeah. So we got our first customer through our own network. And from the first customer, we took that experience and we got the second customer. The first two were really through networks.
Okay, very cool. I love that. I love that flow. And now fast forward to today, how many customers are you working with?
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Chapter 4: How does FitBots charge for its services?
And how much has all of this marketing generated in terms of new signups last month?
We had about 40, around 55 trials and about 15 high quality demos which came in.
And how many closed new customers?
We closed five.
Five new customers. That's a 30% close rate on demos. That's pretty good.
Yeah.
Very cool, Vidya. And when you did the pre-seed round, how much was that for?
It was for 250K USD. 250K.
And can I ask what valuation that was at?
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Chapter 5: When was FitBots founded and what was its initial journey?
Do you have a term sheet? Do you have a lead yet? Or you're just getting started?
Yeah. So we just actually got started about a month ago and still looking for the lead at the moment.
Interesting. Yeah. I mean, valuations are so compressed right now. I mean, look, you're doing 25,000 bucks a month in revenue. We just closed $145 million fund this morning for bootstrap founders. We could get you like 5X of your MRR. It's not 2 million bucks, right? It's only, what is that? Call it 150,000 bucks, but you can come back and take more capital every like 30, 45 days.
Would you ever look at non-dilutive options?
Yeah, absolutely. I think, and they are a lot more founder friendly because you still have control of the company. And in fact, I just signed up for that just before the call.
Oh, for FounderPath? That's right. Oh, that's amazing. Well, I hope, let me just ping my team right now on Slack and say, give Vidya an amazing offer. She gave me a great interview, okay? We'll see what we can do for you.
Thank you, Nathan.
We tell founders all the time, we say, look, even if you don't take money from us, if you have an offer from us, you can use it as leverage with the VCs to try and get better terms from them. You know what I mean?
Yeah, absolutely.
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Chapter 6: How did FitBots acquire its first customers?
I'm 43.
Amazing. Okay. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.
I wish I'd learned how to scale a SaaS business. I wish SaaS was known when I was 20. And I wish I'd learned how to scale it back then.
Guys, she cut her teeth in corporate, then went out on her own in 2018, launching FitBot. She started by getting officially certified as an OKR consultant. They've coached hundreds of companies on implementing OKRs and said, you know what? Now we're going to launch software to help people do this. They've done that. They now have 50 customers paying for the software on average, 500 bucks a month.
So $25,000 a month in revenue. That's more than 100% year-over-year. They were doing 13,000 a month a year ago. They've done this all fairly capital efficiently. They raised $250,000 pre-seed back in 2020 at a $2 million valuation, looking now to raise a seed round, call it $2 million, willing to sell, call it 15% to 20% of the business. We'll see what happens next.
Maybe we can commensurate use founder path and non-dilutive capital. But in the meantime, Vidya, we're rooting for you. And thanks for taking us to the top.
Thank you, Nathan. It's a pleasure being here. Thank you very much.
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