SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How to Sell $50k Contracts on Day 1 of your Startup
07 Mar 2022
Chapter 1: Who is Shafiq Balas and what is Brainboard?
I mean, can I take 10 customers times the ARPU you told me earlier of $12,000 a month? You guys are doing about $120,000 a month right now in revenue.
Yeah, not exactly that, but something similar.
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.
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He's the founder of Brainboard and former CTO of Scaleway, the French cloud provider.
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Chapter 2: What challenges do cloud architects face with existing tools?
He's an engineer with 15 years of experience in building infrastructures at large scales and solving problems. Now building brainboard.co, visually build and manage your cloud infrastructure. Shafiq, you ready to take us to the top? Yes. Okay. Tell me who's paying for this. Who's paying for your tool today?
So the customers that we have are mainly cloud architects. I mean, when I say cloud architects, are engineers building infrastructures inside companies. So because just to give an overview of these people, as an engineer, the brain board comes from our own frustration.
Chapter 3: How does Brainboard simplify cloud infrastructure management?
So we got a lot of tools to deal with infrastructures, and we got a lot of cloud services. And the engineers struggle between both of them and glue the different tools and processes to make things work inside companies. So Brainboard, make it easier. You got one unique platform where engineers can build their infrastructures.
Interesting. Okay. And what do they pay on average to use a tool per month?
Yes, it's per month. The pricing plan is per user per month. So we want it to be predictable. You know, one of the pain points now using the cloud is the cost and the prices are unpredictable. You know, when you use cloud infrastructures, you do not know how much we're going to pay. And we want to do it the other way around. It's predictable. It's paid per user per month and simple and easy.
So Shafiq, when you look at all your customers today, what's the average company paying you per month, would you say?
Yeah. The average company is between 12 and 15K a month.
Okay. Okay.
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Chapter 4: What is the pricing model for Brainboard's services?
So you're an enterprise sales motion then?
Yeah. We can say it's still SaaS. We're not in that enterprise module. It's still SaaS, but it's between 12 and 15K.
Well, yeah, you can be SaaS and selling to enterprises. I'm just saying your price point is high where it's an enterprise sales motion. That's true. Yes. Interesting. Okay. Put this all on a timeline for me. When did you launch the business?
We launched it in 2019. So actually we started working on 2019 and we launched in January, 2020. Okay.
And how did you fund yourself in between those 12 months when you had no revenue?
Yeah, this is an interesting question. It is our own funding. So I founded Brainboard with my co-founder, Jeremy.
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Chapter 5: How did Shafiq fund Brainboard before raising capital?
So we were self-funded and we stayed like that for almost two years. Then when we realized that we got a lot of traction, we got paying customers, and we said, okay, now it's time to move on. And we raised fans last year.
Okay. So in 2021, you raised, how much did you raise in 2021?
We raised more than 1.2 million USD.
Okay. And that's sort of your seed round or pre-seed?
Yeah, we call it pre-seed, pre-seed round. So this is like to build the first team and yeah, get the first team, build a product for enterprises. So that's why we call it pre-seed. We're not seed yet.
Awesome. And how did you manage dilution? What cap did you raise at or what valuation did you raise at?
Yeah, this is, yeah, one of the biggest questions, you know, when you start fundraising is economics and control. And we, yeah, the valuation is more than 4 million.
Soā¦ Post-money or pre?
Pre-money.
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Chapter 6: What strategies are used to acquire early customers?
So 5.2 post.
Yeah, something like that. I mean, you have ASOPs and so on, but this is something small.
Yeah, so you sold about 20% of the business, something like that.
Yeah, not that much, but close to that.
Yeah. Very cool. Now you mentioned you guys funded it yourself at the beginning. How much of your own capital did you put in?
Actually, we had more than 150K.
Wow. So 300,000 total. Yeah. How did you guys get that money? Were you guys rich or your parents are wealthy or what? You had an early exit in high school or what?
none of that you know we got a we were based in france and we got a system in france you know when you work for more than six years you can you can take like two years off and you got all 60 something like that of your salary so we took advantage of that we used it and to fend ourselves which means we had like 60 of the former salary to fund ourselves for two years.
I see. I see.
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Chapter 7: What lessons did Shafiq learn from raising funds?
Okay, that makes sense. Talk to me about customers today. How many customers are paying you?
Yeah, we do not have a lot of customers now. We are just starting. So we have more than 10 customers. And we are like, we joined YC a month ago, two months ago. And we are noticing a lot of an increase in the users that we have. and the increase of the paying customers. So the first, we got a few customers that we have more than 10, and we're seeing growth coming.
And we got a few interesting customers that we are talking to, prospects that we are talking to, that we hope will close in the near future, in the next coming days.
That's awesome. I mean, can I take 10 customers times the ARPU you told me earlier of 12,000 a month? You guys are doing about 120,000 bucks a month right now in revenue.
Yeah, not exactly that, but something similar. Because, you know, we have kind of discount for the first customers because they accept to test the product, give us feedback. So it depends. But this is like the price in pallet, we can say.
But what are you actually doing right now in terms of MRR? Is it more like $100,000?
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Chapter 8: What are the future plans for Brainboard?
Yeah, no, not that much. Lower?
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay. So I asked you earlier what your average price was. You said $12,000. But if you have 10 customers today, then you have $120,000. So you're lower because you're onboarding people. You're just getting started. I get that. But what is monthly revenue today? Is it more like $40,000, $50,000? Yes. Something like that. Yeah. I see. I see. Okay.
So how do you think about discounting these early folks? You're giving big 50%, 60% discounts.
It really depends on the customer and the number of seats they take. As we price per seat, so like for a customer taking 50 seats, it's not the same thing for a customer taking five seats. So what we usually do, we apply between 15% and 25%. But in return, we take either an engagement for a year
or they accept to give us a regular feedback like we do with them regular points like meetings, either once a month or once each two weeks. So yeah, it depends on how we work with them. And some of them, they proposed for us to be partners with. So we started this partnership. We didn't thought about it
the beginning but now as we're seeing people and companies asking for it so we start our first partnership a week ago very cool okay so this makes sense so if you're doing about 40 000 bucks a month today in revenue where were you a year ago so we can calculate growth rate i mean in 2023
No, a year ago.
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