SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Why he spent $8k on his MVP and how he got first paying customer today
23 Dec 2022
Chapter 1: How did Roland spend $8,000 on his MVP?
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. Guys, we're rooting for Roland. He spent $8,000 to build his MVP called BrandRex.io. It helps you track brand assets, build your funnels, have everything in one spot.
He built a waitlist of 115 people and just got his first paying customer today who's paying $6 a month. Hey, folks. My guest today is Roland Yumekoro. He's a business innovator and designer who works with multiple brands.
Chapter 2: What features does BrandRex.io offer to its users?
He's developed and created multiple platforms of insights and co-owned Flinioid, Texio, and Lulutech, and the founder today of BrandRex, which is helping brand building at SaaS companies to generate brand assets. Roland, you ready to take us to the top? Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
Chapter 3: How did Roland acquire his first paying customer?
So explain to me how a customer uses BrandRex. Okay.
so we just um going to private data today and uh how our customers use the platform is uh you know uh the system in which um people create a brand after first of all they look for a name the next the uh proceeding creating a logo that uh does a little bit of a story or professional logo any of them maybe a word mark or a letter mark which of them and um after that
They go on trying to create content for their brand. And then they're trying to visualize and put a vision of what their brand is there for. So we have a kind of streamline where this can be done on the platform by just creating an account, going to the brand wizard, and you have the option to create all these things in just in a step. Understand, Roland.
And how many, walk me through sort of when you wrote the first line of code for this. That has been over a year.
Chapter 4: What challenges did Roland face in funding his MVP?
Okay, so you started coding this. So how have you funded the building the MVP? Did you bootstrap or raise? Yeah, I still am bootstrapped, yeah, but we're trying to raise funds on that. How much are you looking to raise? Yeah, we're looking to raise 500,000 US dollars. At what valuation? Yeah, at 1.3 million US dollars in 15 months. Pre-money or post-money? You say?
Pre-money or post-money evaluation? Yeah, pre-money actually. Okay, so $1.3 million pre-money, which would be $1.8 million post-money. Why is Brand Rex worth $1.8 million? Yeah.
Chapter 5: What is the current valuation of BrandRex and why?
Apart from what we're going to raise and apart from our bootstrap, we have the time spent on the platform by the teams also. So putting these data together, yeah, it's worth that for 15 months, yeah. Roland, to be clear, you have no revenue today, right? Yeah, actually, we just had the revenue today. Yeah. You literally turned on your paywall today. Yeah. Amazing. Has anyone started paying?
Yeah, that's why I said we had one, just one. So at least that's... Okay, this is amazing. So you have one customer paying. How much are they paying per month? Yeah.
Chapter 6: How did Roland build a waitlist of 115 potential customers?
It's not a kind of monthly subscription platform. It's a pay-for-what-you-need subscription platform. Well, how much is he paying for what he needs? No, pay-for-what-you-need. I'm just paying $6. Okay. So what does he get for $6 a month? Yeah, okay. What he gets for $6 is using our AI tools to generate... A vision statement and about us for the brand and also an email account. Okay.
And how many people are on your waitlist? How many customers can you take off your waitlist and grow to by the end of the year? We're looking at 115. 115?
Chapter 7: What insights did Roland gain from surveying potential users?
115. How did you get 115 on your waitlist? Yeah. Before starting working on the platform, we were already a kind of branding agency before. So we worked for some brands, but we created them professionally, having to do them manually. How much did the branding agency do in revenue in 2021? Yeah, that was about $3,000 plus. $300,000 or $30,000? 300. 3,000.
Chapter 8: What are Roland's future plans for BrandRex?
Roland, how much revenue did the agency do last year? 300,000? No, 3,000. 3,000. Yeah. Okay. How do you know that you've found a real problem if you were only able to convince your agency customers to pay you 3,000 over a full year? That doesn't sound like there's a lot of people willing to pay. Yeah. Yeah, that is how it is for when you're looking at it from the U.S.
currency type or the country where I am, which is Nigeria. Yeah. Actually, a dollar is worth up to $700. Yeah, so the value of it is kind of high here where I am. So we have to offer... How many Nigerian Naira did you do in revenue last year at the agency? Okay, how many now? We did 2.7 million plus, yeah. Yeah, so that's about $6,000 US. Okay. At the current...
Yeah, it's about 6,000 US dollars, right? So same question. I mean, I have companies and founders that I interviewed that do a million dollars in agency revenue before they launch a SaaS tool. Why have you launched your SaaS platform so early? You haven't proven you can sell the product yet via the agency. Yeah, the thing is that we took a lot of surveys. We took a lot of surveys.
We took a survey of more than having 2,000 plus people And we got a kind of response. How did you get 2,000 people to fill out a survey? Yeah, I'm kind of connected to some of my clients. Though I'm not working, I never worked. I don't just do branding agency. So I have some clients which I've been working with on different professional levels. And they helped me take on this survey.
How many people? So 2,000 people answered the survey or you sent it to 2,000 people? 2,000 people, 2,000 plus people answered the survey. How many actually filled out the survey? Yeah, that's what I'm telling you. 2,000 plus people filled out the survey. And what did the survey ask them? Yeah, the survey question is, sorry, it's been a while, but I'll just give you some of the questions.
The survey question, one of them is, if we have a platform I can do this for you. How much are you willing to pay for that? And what do they say? Yeah. Now, most of the responses came to me. Sorry, I'm going to give you the value, Naira, so I don't make a mistake in dollars. So most of the answer is, some people are willing to pay $700 just for logo, which is less than $2. $700,000, Naira?
Yes, $700, Naira. That's $1.60. $1.60. Yeah. So, and then we have, how much are you willing to pay for a professional email? Now, most people in Nigeria can't. Wait, but Roland, Roland, Roland, sorry, Roland, hold on, hold on. First of all, Roland, getting a survey response of someone saying they're willing to pay $2 to have you build something is not a profitable business.
That's nothing, that's no money. Yeah, yeah. When you're saying it that way, yeah, but I'm coming, I'm giving, I'm still getting to my point. Yeah.
so now most of them ask when we ask them how much are they willing to pay for professional email and some of the response came in they are willing to pay 3 000 a month some 2 000 a month for professional email now we have other lots of questions and we need a calculation and evaluation we discover um we can't just service nigeria alone because the money that will be generating from nigeria
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