Boltcode Customer Count (2023)

University student building bolt code to help teams recruit Engineers faster she wants to play a big part in the talent management space she's put in 800 of her own money and got 30 000 bucks from her parents who are going to ask for a big chunk of equity we'll see where that goes but they've got 10 or 11 folks on the platform today Great Courses we'll see where it goes next bolt code dot IO hey folks my guest today is minonya KH she's a 20 year old computer science student and co-founder of Bolt code a human Capital Management startup with expertise in NLP research and software engineering she plays a critical role in creating and launching effective HCM Solutions her background in NLP research combined with our software engineering skills has enabled her bootstrap bulk code and drive to development of innovative products or passion for entrepreneurship and our technical expertise maker available assets to this space manonia are you ready to take us to the top hmm are you ready to start you ready to take us to the top yes I'm ready to start all right so what is Bolt code tell us about a customer that's paying you or using you and how they use you uh so the thing is there are a lot of core HR firms right we have Oracle we have work day we have bambooyage we have Workforce now but then you know we believe that Employee Engagement is just more than code HR so there are a lot of peripheral activities like say job distribution for hiring and then the sourcing of employees plagiarism detection and code when we have pre-employment assessments and all of that Employee Engagement is basically broken and we recognize that because too many tools and all of these tools are over stuffed with features and they're not well integrated so what we want to do is we want to get all of this together as a lien and a clean tools so that small organizations of say 50 to 200 members can use our solution right now we don't really have paying customers we are having a pilot beta you know close beta of around 80 to 150 candidates and we wish to launch full-fledged in the next two quarters and so how have you built this day have you spent any of your own money building the MVP or have you built it all yourself um the MVP was bootstrapped by us and um yeah basically I have a full-time job that helps pay for my interns so have you put have you invested any of your own money in the startup or no just your time um a lot of my own money has gone in let's say to the tune of round uh seven eight hundred dollars in the last six months itself okay does that make you nervous it does kind of make me nervous because there's around 30k of my own money in the line right now and yes you said there's thirty thousand dollars of your own money in the business right now um that is what we have been planning to commit but then funding external funding would be sweet okay got it but you've saved up thirty thousand of your own money and you're willing to spend that to get this new business to Market yes that's a lot of money for a 20 year old where did how did you save up thirty thousand dollars you must be a great saver um let's just say that I have generous parents and my full-time job helped me pay for it so okay so so how much of the 30 000 came from your parents um let me put it as around 80 85 percent of it okay and do you give them Equity do they ask for equity yeah that is equity in the pipeline but did they ask for I mean you know someone listening right now I was gonna go oh she just got money from her parents you know most people if they get money from someone they've got to get that give that person Equity did you give your parents equity yes I am looking at giving them around 60 of equity oh six zero six zero because you know I haven't really put in my money it's just my time which has been going in so that's a lot though that's 60 it's a lot of a lot of equity what if you build this into a 10 million dollar company they're gonna own six million of it um let's look you cut out what'd you say but then Equity is not finalized yet so we're still looking at it 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 the 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 evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your founder 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 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 raise they sold 22 percent of 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 valuation 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 so where is the status today you mentioned you got a pilot for 80 seats um is the pilot committed to paying at the end if it works um I'm actually at this point I'm not very sure about how how it might work because our pilot basically focuses right now on like the pre-wetting and pre-screening during hiring so we now have this platform for coding assessments and we have one product which is very close to my heart so we have this interview bot I love to call it Scout and uh that is supposed to conduct technical assessments without really having a human interviewer so that would be saving like lots of manners and lots of dollars in money for like small and medium-sized companies and that also removes the hiring bias so if it does work then we are looking at Revenue which is to the tune of round of 100 200k dollars a year but what about all these testimonials you have on your website um smart on jawakar at co-create you've got PES University you've got Jen pact and Raju you've got Jeff at PES University these are all folks who are using it are they not paying uh right now they aren't really paying they just um signed up for some of our free courses right now and how many people have signed up for your free courses um around 15 to 20 people right now like I said we're looking for a full-fledged launch in the next one or two quarters so and so how did but you know you gotta you know got your first sign up how did you get your first 10 signups for the free courses by the way the website's beautiful I would never guess your pre-revenue but you've got courses on the fundamental of agile scrum software testing and quality engineering who builds these courses and how do you make sure people find them uh actually most of those courses were built by me and my co-founder found them they were found by through mostly live out right now and we have our LinkedIn page so that's how people found it and is your idea that if someone's looking to hire an engineer they'll pay bolt code to to give these courses give access to these courses to the recruits and the recruits have to go through the course oh yes So the plan is we would want to go for a B2 C to B where we would be selling these courses to you know have corporate sales because we believe that learning and upskilling is an important part of the employee engagement Journey so have a B to C to B and sell these courses probably looking at metered courses right now we are having around 20 to 25 trainers in the pipeline and we would be onboarding them very soon in the next two to three months okay so but then what what do you how do you think you're going to make money from this are you going to sell the courses to Consumers are you going to sell access to the people that did really well in the courses to businesses oh we would want to sell access to Consumers as a subscription model and then have correspondence to businesses so that you know they can handle their employee upskilling and reskilling to focus on their business needs why would a why would a customer or consumer of yours that wants to get into engineering why would they pay for one of your courses when they don't know if they're going to have a job at the end of it in other words you have a Marketplace problem right you've got to get businesses ready to hire your students and then you've got to go convince students to pay for the course uh like I said we are also looking at certain programming boot camps we are still in talks with them and we are looking to close certain deals by the end of this quarter okay so you think the way you're going to solve your Marketplace problem is you're going to sell boot camps directly to corporations right is that right yes we would want to have privated candidates that are ready to enter their workflow Without Really you know simplify onboarding for them without having them to train candidates so we have trained candidates we have a workflow we have our job board so we would want to connect both of them yeah but my question is how do you convince candidates to join your platform and get trained if those candidates don't know if there's going to be a job waiting for them when they're done um well that's a risk we all would want to take and uh when the quality of courses are really good then I would think candidates would join also b2c is not what we are actually looking for we would prefer B to C to B where we are selling these two corporations so that they can reskill their talent instead of have having to hire new Talent okay so you're you're you keep saying B to C to B what you're talking now is B to B to C you're selling to a business and the business is then selling and asking consumers to take the courses to get a job at that company am I understanding you correctly yes I think I just got confused oh okay no worry so so B to B to C that that makes more sense okay and so so I guess what's your plan for signing up a hundred companies on this and and how do we you know how do you make sure that this becomes a success you're juggling a full-time job on the startup you don't really need the startup to succeed because you have a full-time job to lean back on as a safety net um the startup has been actually a big part of me growing up right so when I saw this opportunity I knew I wanted to do it human Capital Management is kind of broken and I face issues in my full-time job when it comes to hiring people and when I did hire for gold code I did face issues and this is something I'm very passionate about and my job is something that helps fund this so I would want it to become a success because right now I'm spending around eight to ten hours a day on Bold code and yeah I've invested enough of my time and money in this for it to fail and I wouldn't really be happy in a full-time job later so makes sense talk to me about your co-founder you mentioned you have someone else how did you find him or her um let's just say that living together helps you get good co-founders but I can't really speak too much about my co-founder right now because it's still in my dormitory and it doesn't really said co-founder has a full-time job and does not really want gold code to come out right now oh I see so you partnered up with someone that you live with at your University and and he or she is full-time at another job so they they don't want their name to be out there yet but you guys are working together on this yes I see do you guys split Equity 50 50 . oh we really haven't discussed Equity yet because like I said I'm getting most of funding to the end most of the tech is mine the other co-founders just handles operations so we haven't really discussed it yet like like what kind of operations uh basically all of this part where we are handling trainer onboarding and vendor onboarding the other co-founders handling that for me while I focus on the tech so this other co-founder is dealing with the marketplace problem which is getting businesses and getting trainers signed up to the platform let's say in three weeks you guys finally have the equity conversation and they want 60 and you say no way 30 is the max can't they just say fine I'm taking all the trainers and companies they're my relationships I'm taking them with me um well legal doesn't really work that way so our legal is pretty waterproof we have a legal consultant on board and we can handle it and as there's no point picking trainers and relationships when there's the tech which is pretty solid so what does it matter if you have solid Tech if no one's using it well we will cross that bridge when we get to it that well that's why I'm asking why didn't you choose to cross that bridge first shouldn't you decide who owns what percent of the company before you keep going across additional Bridges shouldn't that be the one of the first priorities um actually the problem is the Indian government portals are pretty down so we haven't been able to figure out legal so incorporating the company and getting it to work and getting our legal contracts framed hasn't really happened for the last two months because our portals are down here in India so I say why are portals down they were trying to upgrade portals or something and then yeah basically they screwed it up and no company registrations are going through in the country I see what do you hope happens do you hope to split it 50 50 foreign I am not sure again I haven't really thought about that bridge it's more about going to market right now and then Crossing that bridge yeah but why why would you wait to go to market to then have the equity conversation what if you can't agree on Equity after you're already then in market and he or she takes all the relationships with him or her and you say oh I've got a great tech product it doesn't like you need both of you guys together what's the point we need each other and it's a symbiotic relationship for both of us so we wouldn't really want to lose each other at this point yeah so would you would you do 50 50 then probably if it does come down to negotiating I'm open to negotiate yeah are you good negotiator I am an amazing negotiator Andrew well you got your parents give you 30 grand so I would say you know something about negotiation all right very cool uh manonia let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite Business book I don't really read business books what do you who inspires you in terms of people in business I think it's my father who inspires me the most and what company is he running or what did he create um he didn't really create stuff but then he has this amazing sense of business where he comes up with some of the best ideas in Tech and let's just say that he was instrumental in helping get both put off his feet off his feet and like helping me formulate the business plan see the bigger picture so number three what's your favorite online tool for building bolt code um I would such say that is what get my first website up very cool number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night let's just say I'm lucky if I manage five or five and a half okay and uh numbers uh what's your situation married single kiddos I'm single married to my work I guess that makes sense and you mentioned you were 20 already last question what's something you wish you knew five years ago well five years ago I wish I knew I'm not sure five years ago I was not very sure what I wanted with life I wish I had this Clarity five years ago guys there you have a university student building bolt code to help teams recruit Engineers faster she wants to play a big part in the talent management space she's put in 800 of her own money and got 30 000 bucks from her parents who are going to ask for a big chunk of equity we'll see where that goes but they've got 10 or 11 folks on the platform today Great Courses we'll see where it goes next bolt code dot IO manonia thanks for taking us to the top thank you one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm 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 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