How Altogic CEO Ümit Çakmak grew Altogic to $733.4K revenue with a 4 person team in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is amit chokmak he is the founder and ceo of autogenic he's an ex management consultant from mckinsey and company and he also worked at chicago and istan in the istanbul and chicago offices today he's building altogether which is a back end as a service platform movement you're ready to take to the top yeah all right so what does that mean back into the service platform backhanded service platform is mean i mean if you think about modern applications web applications or the mobile mobile applications basically they've got two components the first one is the front end where the end users see and interact with and there's the invisible part which is the backend backend is basically where old business logic resides where you store your data where you manage your files etc so all the business logic all the functionality usually resides in the back-end site and because of this phase i mean are you doing this for a specific industry or just anybody not just for anybody there's no industry focus right now we have it's applicable across all different industries okay so i mean can we just for the sake of creating some focus here is there which customers are most popular what's your most popular use case our key key target or segment who who will be using this platform is basically the people that are developing applications those can be categorized into two main categories one of them is the classical developers people that are writing codes and the second category is the makers or the creators because altogether no code platform so it doesn't you don't need the code in order to develop backhand applications in outright with simple drag and drop operations you can model your data you can define your services and end point and so on makes a lot of sense okay and what are folks paying on average per month to user technology right now they are being nothing because we are still in private sorry public data today yeah exactly so we are in public right now but in couple of months time we will launch the plans we are still working on the plans and but i can tell you that our pricing model will be based on the execution environments because as a as a backend as a service platform you will be providing environments to run your applications so per environment for different let's say tiers you will get different let's say capacity and based on that one the pricing will be applied i mean how many folks are using it today how many are in the beta right now we have about close to one thousand so how did you sign them up it's basically friends and family initially during the private private beta periods it was mostly like friends and family are like close people but after the public beta we started to build a community around developers so we had we started to put a lot of resources and emphasis on particularly after the investment we get actually we started to build this community developer community currently in our local country but we will be going global global soon what's the url to the community how can we look at that so yeah what's the url so we can look at the community no you've got a discord channel autogeek and we've got another community community.altroject.com it's another page that we are using so those are the two key channels that we are using as the community where people can start asking questions and so on and we also started providing formal trainings all together trainings to the community members so we we get applicants in court based like first court second chord and third chord so we are right now in the second chords and this week we are providing detailed trainings how to use autogenic and we are getting applications training applications oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're going to get a different valuation a vc is going to pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when i hover over here right so the teal is what a vc would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on youtube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 to their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of sas valuations than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform i hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview how did you fill the community with the you know the first hundred folks in the community is it just hustle or where'd you find these people it's again i mean uh the it can't all be friends and family you don't have a thousand friends and family it's not it's not it's not so couple of channels we are using i mean i don't know how we are familiar but the developers are quite active in the twitter channel so the software developers or the coders and makers those are the guys that are quite actively using the twitter channel oh twitter twitter got it exactly uh so they are using that channel and our main communication challenge our advertising channel is that one that's one thing the other thing is that we also hire the community manager for this purpose specifically so he also have a large network of let's say access to other developer communities we have got so through those different communities we started penetrating or we started advertising our platform how are you measuring the success of this employee who's in charge of community is it number of active members number of beta users now what's how do you incentivize and measure them currently the active users number of interviews that are number of active users people that are actually using and developing applications in the platform okay and is this is this person is this mert mert mert is your developer advocate at that logic there are developer advocates we have they are our their community manager is gurkham his name is i see interesting okay this makes a lot of sense so um you're learning in beta uh when do you think you'll launch the paywall most probably by the end of this summer by july they will be launching the commercial plans we already completed we've already completed the pricing integration people don't see it but right now we already we already have the payment integration in the system we just need to set the pricing and turn on the switch music and when did you write the first line of code for this business i'm going to show you guys when did you write the first line of code for the business when you sign up code for this business this was i think in i started working on this one in june 2020 and it took about 14 months to launch to public beta so it was august 2021 we started with the public data still the platform is in public beta and and understand how have you funded it funding is basically from 2b venture capital firms uh are lead investors scalix uh and in participation from 500 istanbul so those are our key venture capital investors so how much did you break down the rounds for me what was the last round of funding you raised what year and how much we only had the one right this is the siege with one million dollars and they are basically majority of them from skeletons what year was that this year last year this year this year okay so you've only raised a million seed so if you ju again you started working this in 2020 so before you raise this seed round how did you pay people how did you survive did you have savings are you a rich guy how did you survive well it was my personal personal let's say budget or personal spending uh after the after the seed funding we started hire people so after two months i mean two months ago we started hiring these developer managers and the dev advocates and so on before that when it was just me and my co-founders so we were together working on this thing and do you guys still have 50 50. majority of times coming from me not okay why is that because you put in you put in more money or something or what yeah exactly my shade is much higher and and so on so depending on how much how much money effort you put in and how much time you spend on that one that was my agreement with my co-founder so i said the chair that i have on the company is much higher than him and how many employees today are working at the company full-time right now eight people full-time okay how many engineers all of them almost except one people often are engineers sorry two people except two people all of them are engineers our developer advocates their their developer advocates are also engineers because we are targeting the developer segment and we are developing lots of example applications and so on so our developer advocate star engineering background computer science computer engineering background our development manager is he's not from the engineering background but he's more like the community building aspect and we've got another marketing specialist guy who doesn't have an engineering background but he's got a management background but we will be hiring soon like four or five people additional people joining us within the next couple of months so i think by july time we will be around like 12 13 people full-time people working online did you use any freelancers to build the product to where it is today to save money no no not not for the platform uh for building the product i didn't we didn't use freelancers but right now we are using freelancers because there are some couple of components a couple of parts that that needs to be coded that needs to be developed and we are using actually three freelancers right now from which site how did you find them it's again our network our friends network uh we've got access to some of the top developers in different companies in our local country so we reach out to them and it's i'm based in istanbul turkey uh okay so you didn't use like a marketplace to find these engineers in istanbul you you used your friends i used my friends but of course first for some freelancers for for graphic designs or for creation of videos and so on i also use some market places there are some local marketplaces that i also hired some people uh but for can you name can you name one or two of those i o n l uk dot com beyond dot com okay and did you hire i mean your your website is beautifully designed did you hire your graphic designer from beyond look i did i did it myself ah wow so multi-talented you code you develop you sell you do everything huh [Music] yeah that's amazing so what did you use beyond look for what what roles did you hire for there for the freelancers you mean yes what do they do at beyond look yeah a couple of things one of two of them are right now working on developing the front end of our for some of the key applications we will be launching the one application soon within a couple of weeks time they are working on the front end of it and you're using different technologies one of the guys is more technical he's helping us automating some of the back-end processes uh because altogether is running on kubernetes docker containers etc so we will be we will be automating process for uh setting up new environments so he's helping us on automating that process and besides that one we we will be also soon working with some ui ux designers it will be contractors they will be working with them we are in the selection phase right now we didn't select yet but we are creating demo demos from that but we will be working with some couple of ui ux designers very cool running short on time here but obviously managing your dilution is critical most people when they raise their seat are selling about 20 percent of the business were you sort of in that same range at the same rate yeah okay so 5 million valuations something like that something like that exactly that's great well eager to see what you build as with these next four hires and as you keep scaling and as you open up your beta to make it public uh in the meantime let's wrap up with the famous five what's the last book that you read that's the last book i read it was it was related to the power of the introverts i mean i met i'm an introvert guy i don't know what you know the maya bricks types i'm istj and i read a book related to the power of introverts how how introverts can be because typically if you are more extrovert people more social to going people you get your energy by hanging out with other people and interacting with other people but in terms of introvert guys we usually get our energy by thinking ourselves and spending the same more private time for ourselves so i was reading a book related to that there's that thing more advantageous for me to become introvert or should i try to be more socialized and so so it was quite interesting for me there were some quite different insights and all right it reflected a lot on me power of introverts very good and then rapid fire here for these last four quick answers if you can number two is there a founder you're following or studying i don't know okay number three what's your favorite online tool for building all project online tool for building our project using using an online tool for building called i think one of the key tools that we are using in terms of not exactly building but communicating slack we are using extensively okay number communication and so on and also the github slack and github number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night i think depends but on average i think five four or five hours and what's your situation me married single kids married with kids how many kids one ah okay and how old are you he's four enough no you you how old are you me me i i'm 45 45 last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20 i wish i had started altogether much earlier so i wish i had taken this journey much earlier guys there you have it all logic got going in 2020 they are now in beta thousand users he hustled his co-founder to build it up toward us today raised a million dollar seat at a 5 million valuation recently to move out of beta into public launch again they're going out of they're helping you build any back-end operations you want really back into the service effectively a thousand on that waitlist built from their community that they're building which they've hired a specific role for they've committed to it it's growing we'll see what happens when they launch the pay paywall here at the end of july ume thanks for taking us to the top thank you thanks a lot nathan one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 p.m central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews 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