Bennudata Funding (2023)

[00:00] Pablo is building venue data. They have three pilot customers currently in the Berkeley batch, which invested $200,000 for a 7% stake. They raised $400,000 in their seed round. The company helps with automated cloud discovery backup platform. He learned a lot at his first company, Bridge No More, scaled it from 0 to $40,000,000 of revenue, but then ended up having unprofitable sort of lines of business. Ultimately, couldn't keep up and had to sort of shut that company [00:21] down, learned how to liquidate, which was painful, but good lessons to learn. We're obviously rooting for him rooting for him here. Hey, folks. My guest today is Pawel Danilov. He before cofounding Ben Udata in November 2022, he's cofounder and CEO of Fridge No More, an ultrafast grocery delivery company. They scaled that from zero to 40,000,000 of revenue, 30 dark stores, eighty five zero customers in New York and Boston from 2020 to 2022. Before that, he worked [00:45] in an investment banking for eight years, and we're excited to have him on today. Pablo, you ready to take us to the top? [00:50] >> Yeah. Thank you for having me. [00:52] You bet. I have to talk about the ghost kitchen stuff because we had I had many people on, many people on in 2021, 2022. Alex Kantor at Ordermark is one that rings a bell. These guys were crushing it. And then all of a sudden, ghost kitchen just went off a cliff, and, you know you know, Alex basically shut the company down. What happened at your company? Did you see any of these patterns? [01:14] >> So my business was not the technically speaking, Ghost Kitchen. It was a dark store, so we were selling groceries. And but I think the trend is similar. The market is well, the economics is very hard. The very operational business and a lot of costs. And the main problem is courier courier related costs. So you pay them per hour, and it's very high. So basically, it's really hard to get to the breakeven. [01:45] >> And every time you start a new new new store, it's a new market, you start from zero, you need to reach this breakeven. So you you grow fast, you end up with a bunch of stores making losses, and only a few stores already profitable. So it's hard to deal with that without, you know, extra capital injection. And in '21, you know, beginning '22, it changed. [02:06] So how much did you guys raise raise at Frigid No More? [02:09] >> We raised around 35,000,000. [02:12] 35,000,000? Yeah. Okay. And what hap you guys shut it down, flash sale, big exit? [02:19] >> No big exit. We negotiated exit. We had a conversation with a few potential investors, but then at last minute, they walked. Mhmm. So that's what that's what happened. [02:36] So bay you didn't make any money on it. You just sort of shut it down? [02:39] >> Basically, we shut it down. Yeah. Yeah. [02:41] Okay. Well, thanks for the trans thanks for the transparent people need to realize it's part of being an entrepreneur. You know? You gotta swing the bat. Sometimes it doesn't work out. [02:47] >> Yeah. It's not just like we shut down. We we we shut down, and then I worked for almost a year on liquidation. And [02:54] On what? Oh, liquidation. [02:55] >> Liquidation. Yeah. And and I paid all the salaries, all the taxes, but then I I need to negotiate to all the suppliers and real estate. So it was it was quite a cumbersome process. Yep. Not just like the base value you walk to another business. [03:11] So did you was there something that you were exposed to at Fridge No More that enabled you to come up with this idea for Benue Data? Are they connected in any way? [03:20] >> They are only connected through one of my investors. So one of my angel investors introduced me to Dmitry Empower, my cofounders, and Ben Data. And that's how we met. And I I realized that I still I have a scar from the human human intensive business with, like, all a lot of employees. So I wanted to build something which doesn't have a lot of employees, just software and b to b. [03:51] There's two of you, two cofounders? [03:54] >> Then they had three cofounders. [03:56] Three of you guys. Did you just split equity evenly at the start? Yep. Okay. Good. So you were very diplomatic? [04:03] >> Yeah. [04:04] Alright. What's the company do? [04:07] >> So we are building automation for disaster recovery process in the cloud. So the thing is the the backup is a huge business. Right? How you back up your servers, your cloud resources, and it's it's automated. But with the recovery, how you actually bring this backup back back to life, back online is very manual still. And we found this opportunity that in the cloud, all the cloud platforms provided all the necessary blocks, the cloud API, native backup. [04:46] >> Basically, now we are able to automate that. We collect data from through API. We create those plans, and we can bring this, like, end to end automation for for recovery. So what it means when a disaster happens, I think ops or whoever is responsible needs to push this one button and the whole infrastructure, like applications will be recovered in a different environment. [05:12] Oh, 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 took 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 Founder Path. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you [05:35] connect your Stripe 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 Founder Path dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, [05:59] you're gonna get a 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 [06:21] 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, 1,200,000 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. [06:46] Maybe you're going out 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 Founder Path. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. Alright. We're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a [07:08] second, but if you 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 [07:35] back into the interview. You told me before the show your your pre revenue today, which which is great. When do you think you'll have your first paying customer? What's your plan? [07:42] >> So our plan to launch to release our first product by the year end. And in q one, we will start acquiring customers, hope to acquire three to five in in q one. [07:57] How will you price it? I mean, is this the enterprise motion? Is it low ARPU, freemium, PLG model? [08:03] >> I think we're gonna we we actually have both. So we we will be selling [08:10] >> kind of inexpensive product to late stage startups through AWS Marketplace. So without extra, you know, integration, sales, whatever, you know, process. [08:22] How much would that be? [08:24] >> It would be 500 to 1,000 per month. [08:27] Okay. [08:28] >> And that's that's to create disaster recovery plans and update them regularly. So have that ready in case something happens some disaster happens. For midsize enterprise, we define it as our second segment. That's more of 3,000 a month, 3,000 to 5,000 depending on the size of infrastructure, and that's that's going to be more of a. [08:54] >> Manager's provider channel or direct direct channel. [08:58] Understood. So so you're an accelerator now. Which accelerator did you choose to go into? [09:04] >> Yeah. So we picked Berkeley Skydeck at UC UC Berkeley. Yep. It's very focused on b two b and has a [09:14] What's their model? Do they how much capital they give you? What equity do they take? [09:19] >> They invest 200,000, and they want to get something around 7%. [09:25] Okay. [09:26] >> So it's similar to others. [09:29] Okay. Got it. So you're you're in it. You're in the accelerator now. You said you've got a couple pilots working. Tell me to the degree that you can. I mean, what what are these pilots? Is it sort of very high touch with enterprises one on pilot deals? [09:43] >> So, yeah, so we are working actually, with Berkeley, we're working with the network of alarms, of Berkeley's headache alarms. We are budget 17, so there have been 16 budget before us, later stage. And we have currently three pilots with late stage startups. They are easier to negotiate with. Those customers, they start sending to enterprise, and they get requests from enterprise to build the disaster recovery process, which they don't have at the moment or they have a [10:13] >> very simplified one. So, of course, they are saying: Okay, you want to sell to this enterprise, we will help you to build that process and you don't need three engineers and twelve months to actually to sit down and build that like custom solution in house. We'll just build for you the the process and it's easier. We also talk talk to midsize enterprise but that's that's a longer conversation. [10:37] But why aren't these paid pilots? Why couldn't you get people to pay up front for these? [10:44] >> I think people are not familiar with with with with the product. So we still actually, we're in parallel building the product. So we kind of currently in the in the mode of, like, half automation, half consulting. Right? So you build it you build it as we as you, like, as we do the pilot. So by q one, we will have our first product released, and then then we can start selling. [11:13] That's great. That makes lots of sense. How much of the $200,000 have you guys already spent building the MVP? [11:20] >> We we actually raised 400 already, so through through angels, and we spent 150 so far. So we have [11:28] And is [11:29] >> in in the bank. [11:30] Is that mainly on sort of salaries and stuff? [11:33] >> Yeah. Mostly, it's in engineers, engineering team building the product and some tests on, you know, marketing tests. [11:42] Yeah. What marketing tests have you run? How do you think you're gonna get your first 100 customers? [11:47] >> So we run some online marketing tests. We, [11:52] >> you know, used LinkedIn and Google. It's it's not very effective so far. So at the moment, we are relying on direct channels, basically emailing to Berkeley network, Skydeck network, advisers, and alarms, and it's been pretty pretty effective so far. [12:16] Very cool. Well, we're we're rooting for you. We hope the pilot launch goes well, and thanks for teasing us a little bit here with what to expect in January when you guys launch officially. In the meantime, though, let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite business book? [12:30] >> Favorite business book, hard things about hard things. [12:34] Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? [12:38] >> No. [12:39] Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building a business? [12:45] >> I like Softer, the the website builder. [12:49] What is it? [12:50] >> Softer. Softer. [12:51] Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night? [12:56] >> Eight. [12:57] And situation, Pablo? Are you married, single, kids? [13:01] >> I'm married to kids. Clay is my actually, birthday my my oldest daughter birthday, she's 13. [13:09] Oh, that's amazing. How old are you? [13:12] >> I'm 41. [13:14] >> 41. [13:15] Last question. What's something you wish you knew when you were 20 years old? [13:22] >> 20 years old. I think I I wish I knew that tech was going to that big. Mhmm. And I and I, you know, jumped into that earlier than I did. [13:34] Guys, pop Pablo is building Benue data. They have three pilot customers currently in the Berkeley batch, invested which $200,000 for a 7% stake. They raised $400,000 in their seed round. The company helps with automated cloud discovery backup platform. He learned a lot at his first company, Fridge No More, scaled it from 0 to $40,000,000 of revenue, then but ended up having unprofitable sort of lines of business. Ultimately, couldn't keep up and had to sort of shut [13:57] that company down, learned how to liquidate, which was painful, but good lessons to learn. We're obviously rooting for him rooting for him here with Benny Data. Pablo, thanks for taking us to the top. [14:06] >> Nathan, thank you. [14:07] One 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 [14:32] Central. 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 [14:55] fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or something else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if you want to 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 [15:16] up for 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. [15:36] We got to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. All right. I'll be in the comments. See you.