How Altogic Raised a $1M Seed Round to Build Its Backend as a Service Platform (Interview with CEO Ümit Çakmak)

Introduction and Guest Background

Nathan Latka

00:00Hey, folks. My guest today is Ümit Çakmak. He is the Founder and CEO of Altogic. He's an ex management consultant for McKinsey and Company, and he also worked in the Istanbul and Chicago offices. Today, he's building Altogic, which is a back end as a service platform. Ümit, you ready to take us to the top?

Ümit Çakmak

00:17>> Yeah. Thanks a lot, Nathan. Alright.

What Is Backend as a Service

Nathan Latka

00:19So what does that mean back end as a service platform?

Ümit Çakmak

00:22>> Back end as a service platform is mean, I mean, if you think about modern applications, web applications or the mobile mobile applications, basically they have two components. The first one is the front end where the end users see and interact with, and there is the invisible part, which is the back end. Back end is basically where all the business logic resides, where you store your data, where you manage your files, etc. So all the business logic,

Pricing Model and Beta Status

Ümit Çakmak

00:47>> all the functionality usually resides in the backend side. And backend is big space.

Target Customers and Use Cases

Nathan Latka

00:51Mean, are you doing this for a specific industry or just anybody?

Ümit Çakmak

00:55>> No, just for anybody. There is no industry focus right now we have. It's applicable across all different industries.

Nathan Latka

01:02Okay. 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?

Ümit Çakmak

01:11>> Our key target or segments 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 Altogic is a no code platform. So you don't need the code in order to develop back end applications in Altogic with simple drag and drop operations. You can model

01:38>> your data, you can define your services and endpoint and so on.

Nathan Latka

01:43Makes a lot of sense. Okay. And what are folks paying on average per month to use your technology?

Ümit Çakmak

01:49>> Right now, they are paying nothing because we are still in private sorry, public beta.

Nathan Latka

01:55Okay, so pre revenue today.

Ümit Çakmak

01:56>> Yeah, exactly. So we are in public beta right now, but in a couple of months time, we will launch the plans. We are still working on the plans. But I can tell you that our pricing model will be based on the execution environments because as a backend, as a service platform, we will be providing environments to run your applications. So per environment, per different, let's say, tiers, you will get different, let's say, capacity. And based on

02:20>> that one, the pricing will be applied.

Nathan Latka

02:22Ümit, how many folks are using it today? How many are in the beta?

Beta User Count and Sign-Up Strategy

Ümit Çakmak

02:26>> Right now, we have about close to 1,000.

Nathan Latka

02:28How did you sign them up?

Ümit Çakmak

02:31>> It's basically friends and family. Initially, during the private beta periods, it was mostly like friends and family and like close people. But after the public beta, we started to build a community around developers. So 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 soon.

Nathan Latka

03:00What's the URL to the community? How can we look at that? Sorry? What's the URL so we can look at the community?

Community Building on Discord and Twitter

Ümit Çakmak

03:06>> No. You we've got the Discord channel Altogic, and we've got another community community. Altogic.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, Altogic trainings to the community members. So we get applicants in cohort based like First Cohort, Second Cohort and Third Cohort. So we are right now in the

03:33>> second cohort, and this week we are providing detailed trainings how to use Altogic, and we are getting applications, training applications.

Nathan Latka

03:41Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders, but imagine if we all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 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 Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you connect your

04:04Stripe account, you see your valuation real time. You can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna get

04:29a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation, Private equity firm is different. If you're gonna 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

04:51built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder share with us on the show. So traction 1,200,000 seed round 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna 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

05:16out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll 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 dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. 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

05:38you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link. This link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. 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. Alright. Let's jump back into the

06:04interview. How did you fill the community with, you know, the first 100 folks in the community? Is it just hustle, or where did you find these people?

Ümit Çakmak

06:12>> It's again, I mean,

Nathan Latka

06:14the It can't all be friends and family. You don't have a It's thousand friends and not.

Ümit Çakmak

06:18>> It's not. It's not. So a 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 decoders and makers, those are the guys that are quite actively using the Twitter channel. And we The what channel? Twitters. Twits.

Nathan Latka

06:35Spell that. Twitters.

Ümit Çakmak

06:38>> T w I t t e r, Twitter.

Nathan Latka

06:41Oh, Twitter, Twitter, got it.

Ümit Çakmak

06:43>> Exactly. So they are using that channel, our main communication channels or our advertising channel is that one. That's one thing. The other thing is that we also hired a 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.

Nathan Latka

07:09How are you measuring the success of this employee who's in charge of community? Is it number of active members, number of beta users? How do you incentivize and measure them?

Ümit Çakmak

07:17>> Currently the active users. Current.

07:22>> Of active users, people that are actually using and developing applications in the platform.

Nathan Latka

07:27Okay. And is Merit?

Ümit Çakmak

07:29>> Sorry?

Nathan Latka

07:30Merit is your developer advocate at Altogic? There

Ümit Çakmak

07:36>> are developer advocates we have. They are their community manager is Gurkhan. His name is I

Nathan Latka

07:44see. Interesting. Okay. This makes a lot of sense. So you're learning in beta. When do you think you'll launch the paywall?

Paywall Launch Timeline and Payment Integration

Ümit Çakmak

07:52>> Most probably by the end of this summer, by July, we will be launching the commercial plans. Already completed the pricing integration. People don't see it, but right now, we already have the payment integration in the system. We just need to set the pricing and turn on the switch basically.

Nathan Latka

08:13And when did you write the first line of code for this business? When did you write the first line of code for the business?

Company Founding and Product Development Timeline

Ümit Çakmak

08:23>> When was the sign of code for this business? This was, I think, in I started working on this one in June 2020 and it took about fourteen months to launch to public beta. So it was August 2021, we started with public beta. Still the platform is in public beta and

08:48>> How have

Nathan Latka

08:50you funded it?

Seed Round and Investors

Ümit Çakmak

08:52>> Funding is basically from two venture capital firms. Our lead investor is Scalix and in participation from 500 Istanbul. So those are our key venture capital investors.

Nathan Latka

09:05So how much did you break down the rounds for me. What was the last round of funding you raised? What year and how much?

Ümit Çakmak

09:09>> We only had the one round, this is the seed round, which is $1,000,000 and they are basically, majority of them is from Scalix and

Nathan Latka

09:18What year was that? This year or last year?

Ümit Çakmak

09:21>> This year. Okay.

Nathan Latka

09:24So you've only raised a million seed. So if you just, again, you started working on this in 2020. So before you raised this seed round, how did you pay people? How did you survive? Did you have savings? Are you a rich guy? How'd you survive?

Ümit Çakmak

09:35>> Well, it was my personal, let's say budget or personal spending.

Pre-Funding Survival and Co-Founder Equity

Ümit Çakmak

09:43>> After the seed funding, we started to hire people. So after two months ago, started hiring these developer managers and the dev advocates and so on. Before that one, it was just me and my co founders. We were together working on this thing.

Nathan Latka

09:58Do you guys split fifty-fifty?

Ümit Çakmak

10:01>> Majority of them is coming from me.

Nathan Latka

10:04Why is that? Because you put in more money or something or what?

Ümit Çakmak

10:08>> Yeah, exactly. My share is much higher and so on. So depending on 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 the share that I have on the company is much higher than him.

Team Size, Engineers, and Freelancers

Nathan Latka

10:22And how many employees today are working at the company full time?

Ümit Çakmak

10:25>> Right now, eight people full Okay.

Nathan Latka

10:28How many engineers?

Ümit Çakmak

10:30>> All of them, almost, except one people, all of them are engineers. Sorry, two people, except two people, all of them are engineers. Our developer advocates, 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 advocates have engineering backgrounds, computer science, computer engineering backgrounds. Our DevRel manager he's is not from the engineering background, but he's more like the community building aspect.

10:59>> 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 adding soon like four or five additional people joining us within the couple of months. I think by July time, we will be around like twelve, thirteen people, full time people working on this.

Nathan Latka

11:16Wait, did you use any freelancers to build the product to where it is today to save money?

Ümit Çakmak

11:20>> No, no, not for the platform.

11:23>> For building the product, we didn't use freelancers. But right now, we are using freelancers because there are some couple of components, a couple of parts that needs to be coded, that needs to be developed. And we are using actually three freelancers right now helping us.

Nathan Latka

11:41From which site? How did you find them?

Ümit Çakmak

11:44>> It's again our network, our friends network. We have got access to some of the top developers in different companies in our local country. So we reach out to them and we Where are you based? I'm based in Istanbul, Turkey.

Nathan Latka

11:58Okay. So you didn't use like a marketplace to find these engineers in Istanbul. You used your friends.

Ümit Çakmak

12:05>> I used my friends, but of course, for for for some freelancers, for for for graphic designs or for creation of videos and so on, I also use some marketplaces. There are some local marketplaces that I also hired some people. But for

Nathan Latka

12:20Can you name can you name one or two of those marketplaces?

Ümit Çakmak

12:23>> Beyondlook.com. Beyondlook.com.

Nathan Latka

12:29Beyondlook.com. Okay. And did you hire I mean, your your website is beautifully designed. You hire your graphic designer from BeyondLook?

Ümit Çakmak

12:35>> I did I did it myself.

Nathan Latka

12:37Ah, wow. So multi talented. You code, you develop, you sell, you do everything, Yeah. That's amazing. So what did you use BeyondLook for? What what roles did you hire for there?

Ümit Çakmak

12:47>> For the freelancers, you mean?

Nathan Latka

12:49Yes. What do they do at BeyondLook?

Ümit Çakmak

12:51>> Yeah. 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 one application soon, within a couple of weeks'time. They are working on the front end of it, and they're using different technologies. One of the guys is more technical. He's helping us automating some of the back end processes because Altogic is running on Kubernetes, Docker containers, etc. So

13:18>> we will be automating process for setting up new environments. So he's helping us on automating that process. And besides that one, we will be also soon working with some UI UX designers. It will be contractors. We be working with them. We are in the selection phase right now. We didn't select yet, but we are waiting demos from that, but we will be working with some couple of UI UX designers.

Nathan Latka

13:44Very cool. Running short on time here, but obviously managing your dilution is critical. Most people when they raise their seed are selling about 20% of the business. Were you sort of in that same range?

Ümit Çakmak

13:53>> It's the same range. Yeah. Similar to the Okay.

Nathan Latka

13:55So 5,000,000 valuation, something like that?

Ümit Çakmak

13:57>> Something like that. Exactly.

Famous Five: Books, Tools, and Sleep

Nathan Latka

13:59That'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. In the meantime, let's wrap up with the famous five. What's the last book that you read?

Ümit Çakmak

14:11>> What's the last book I read? It was it was related to the power of the introverts. I'm an an introvert guy. I don't know if you know the Myers Briggs types, MISTJ. And I read a book related to the power of introverts, how introverts can be. Because typically, if you have more extrovert people, more sociable going people, you get your energy by hanging out with other people and interacting with other people. But in terms of introvert

14:41>> guys, we usually get our energy by thinking ourselves and spending let's say, more private time for ourselves. So I was reading a book related to that one,

14:54>> whether that team has more advantages for me to become introvert or extrovert. Should I try to be more socialized and so on? It So was quite interesting for me. There were some quite different insights and it reflected a lot on me.

15:06>> Power of introverts, very good.

Nathan Latka

15:07And then rapid fire here for these last four quick answers if you can. Number two, is there a founder you're following or studying?

Ümit Çakmak

15:14>> Right now, no.

Nathan Latka

15:15Okay. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building Altogic?

Ümit Çakmak

15:19>> Online tool for building Altogic, using an online tool for building Altogic. I think one of the key tools that we are using in terms of not exactly building, but communicating Slack, we are using extensively for communication and so on. Also the GitHub.

15:37>> Slack and GitHub.

Nathan Latka

15:38Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?

Ümit Çakmak

15:42>> I think depends, but on average, think five, four, five hours. And

Nathan Latka

15:46what's your situation? Mean married, single, kids?

Ümit Çakmak

15:48>> Married with kids.

Nathan Latka

15:50How many kids?

Ümit Çakmak

15:51>> One.

Nathan Latka

15:52Ah, okay. And how old are you?

Ümit Çakmak

15:54>> He's 4.5.

Nathan Latka

15:55No, you, you. How old are you?

Ümit Çakmak

15:57>> Me, I'm 45.

15:58>> 45.

Nathan Latka

15:59Last question. What's something you wish you knew when you were 20?

Closing Reflections and Wrap-Up

Ümit Çakmak

16:03>> I wish I had started Altogic much earlier. So I wish I had taken this journey much earlier.

Nathan Latka

16:10Guys, there you have it, Altogic got going in 2020. They are now in beta, a thousand users. He hustled with his co founder to build it up to where it is today, raised a million dollar seed at a 5,000,000 valuation recently to move out of beta into public launch. Again, they're out of, they're helping you build any backend operations you want, back end as a service effectively. Thousand on that wait list built from their community that

16:30they'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 Paywall here at the end of July. Ümit, thanks for taking us to the top.

Ümit Çakmak

16:38>> Thank you. Thanks a lot, Nathan.

Nathan Latka

16:42One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM Central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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 1PM

17:07Central. Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM Central. To make sure you don't miss any of that, make sure you click the subscribe button below here on YouTube, the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live. I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a big

17:29fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or something else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if you wanna take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS founders. You want to get in there. We've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing. You can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying. Sign up

17:51for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, but I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people. We

18:10got to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. Alright, I'll be in the comments. See you.