How Boltcode Was Building an HCM Platform for Small Teams with 15 Free Users and Word-of-Mouth Growth (Interview with CEO Manodnya K H)

Introduction and Company Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00University student building Boltcode 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 from her parents who are gonna 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. Boltcode.io. Hey, folks. My guest today is Manodnya KH. She's

00:24a 20 year old computer science student and cofounder of Boltcode, 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 her software engineering skills has enabled her to bootstrap Boltcode and drive development of innovative products. Her passion for entrepreneurship and her technical expertise make her a viable asset to this space. Manodnya, are ready to take

00:49us to the top?

Manodnya K H

00:51>> Are

Nathan Latka

00:52you ready to start? You ready to take us to the top?

Manodnya K H

00:54>> Yes. I'm ready to start. Alright.

What Is Boltcode and Who Is It For

Nathan Latka

00:56So what is Boltcode? Tell us about a customer that's paying you or using you and how they use you.

Manodnya K H

01:02>> So the thing is, are a lot of core HR firms. Right? We have Oracle, we have Workday, we have BambooHR, we have Workforce Now. But then, you know, we believe that employee engagement is just more than core 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

Current Product Status and Closed Beta

Manodnya K H

01:28>> we recognize that there's too many tools and all of these tools are overstuffed 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 lean and clean tool 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 one fifty

01:56>> candidates, and we wish to launch full fledged in the next two quarters.

How the MVP Was Built

Nathan Latka

02:01And so how have you built it? Have you spent any of your own money building the MVP, or have you built it all yourself?

Manodnya K H

02:08>> The MVP was bootstrapped by us and yeah. Basically, I have a full time job that helps pay for my interns.

Nathan Latka

02:16So have you put have you invested any of your own money in the startup or no? Just your time?

Founder Personal Investment

Manodnya K H

02:23>> A lot of my own money has gone in, let's say, to the tune of around $7,800 in the last six months itself.

Nathan Latka

02:31Okay. Does that make you nervous?

Manodnya K H

02:34>> It does kind of make me nervous because there's around 30 k of my own money in the line right now. And yes.

Nathan Latka

02:41You said there's $30,000 of your own money in the business right now?

Manodnya K H

02:45>> That is what we have been planning to commit, but then funding external funding would be sweet.

Nathan Latka

02:51Okay. Got it. But you've saved up 30,000 of your own money, and you're willing to spend that to get this new business to market?

Manodnya K H

02:57>> Yes.

Nathan Latka

02:58Manodnya, that's a lot of money for a 20 year old. Where did how did you save up $30,000? You must be a great saver.

Manodnya K H

03:05>> Let's just say that I have generous parents.

Nathan Latka

03:09Mhmm.

Manodnya K H

03:10>> And my full time job helped me pay for it. So

Nathan Latka

03:13Okay. So so how much of the 30,000 came from your parents?

Manodnya K H

03:19>> Let me put it as around 80 to 85% of it.

Nathan Latka

03:22Okay. And do you give them equity? Did they ask for equity?

Manodnya K H

03:26>> Yeah. There is equity in the pipeline.

Nathan Latka

03:29But did they ask for mean, you know, someone listening right now is gonna go, oh, she just got money from her parents. Know, most people, if they get money from someone, they've gotta get that give that person equity. Did you give your parents equity?

Manodnya K H

03:39>> Yes. I am looking at giving them around 60% of equity.

Nathan Latka

03:43Oh, six zero.

Manodnya K H

03:45>> Six zero because, you know, I haven't really put in my money. It's just my time which has been going in. So

Nathan Latka

03:54That's a lot, though. That's sixty percent's a lot of a lot of equity. What if you build us into a $10,000,000 company? They're gonna own 6,000,000 of it.

Manodnya K H

04:03>> Let's look.

Nathan Latka

04:07You you cut out. What'd you say?

Manodnya K H

04:11>> But then equity is not finalized yet, so we're still looking at it.

Nathan Latka

04:17Oh, 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 Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you connect

04:40your 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 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

05:04get 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 this is

05:26not built 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

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06:14if 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 back into

06:40the interview. So where is the status today? You mentioned you got a pilot for 80 seats. Is the pilot committed to paying at the end if it works?

Pilot Commitments and Revenue Potential

Manodnya K H

06:54>> 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 vetting 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 that is supposed to conduct technical assessments without really having a human interviewer. So that

07:23>> would be saving like lots of man hours and lots of dollars and 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 around a $100,000 to $200,000 a year.

Nathan Latka

07:40But what about all these testimonials you have on your website? Samarana Jawakar at co create. You've got PES University. You've got Genpact and Raju. You've got Jeff at PES University. These are all folks who are using it. Are they not paying?

Free Course Users and Growth Channel

Manodnya K H

07:54>> Right now, they aren't really paying. They just signed up for some of our free courses right now. And

Nathan Latka

08:02How many people have signed up for your free courses?

Manodnya K H

08:06>> Around 15 to 20 people right now. Like I said, we are looking for a full fledged launch in the next one or two quarters. So

Nathan Latka

08:13And so how did but, know, you gotta, you know, got your first sign up. How did you get your first 10 sign ups 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?

Course Content and Word-of-Mouth Growth

Manodnya K H

08:29>> Actually, most of those courses were built by me and my co founder. And they were found by people through mostly word-of-mouth right now, and we have our LinkedIn page. So that's how people found it.

B2B2C Business Model Explained

Nathan Latka

08:42And is your idea that if someone's looking to hire an engineer, they'll pay Boltcode to to give these courses give access to these courses to the recruits, and they the recruits have to go through the course?

Manodnya K H

08:54>> Yes. So the plan is we would want to go for a b two c two 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 B2C2B and sell these courses, probably looking at metered courses. Right now, we are having around 20 to 25 trainers in the pipeline and we will be onboarding them very soon

09:21>> in the next two to three months.

Nathan Latka

09:24Mhmm. Okay. So but then what what do you how do you think you're gonna make money from this? Are you gonna sell the courses to consumers? Are you gonna sell access to the people that did really well in the courses to businesses?

Manodnya K H

09:36>> We would want to sell access to consumers as a subscription model and then have course bundles to businesses so that, you know, they can handle their employee upskilling and reskilling to focus on their business needs.

Nathan Latka

09:49Why 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 gonna have a job at the end of it? In other words, you have a marketplace problem. Right? You've gotta get businesses ready to hire your students, and then you've gotta go convince students to pay for the course.

Manodnya K H

10:06>> 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.

Nathan Latka

10:16Okay. 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?

Manodnya K H

10:25>> Yes. We would want to have pre vetted 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.

Nathan Latka

10:40Yeah. But my my question is, how do you convince candidates to join your platform and get trained if those candidates don't know if there's gonna be a job waiting for them when they're done?

Manodnya K H

10:52>> Well, that's a risk we all would want to take. And when the quality of courses are really good, then I would think candidates would join. Also, b two c is not what we are actually looking for. We would prefer b two c to b where we are selling these to corporations so that they can reskill their talent instead of having to hire new talent.

Nathan Latka

11:12Okay. So you're you're you keep saying b to c to b. What you're talking though 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?

Manodnya K H

11:26>> Yes. I think I just got confused.

Nathan Latka

11:29Oh, okay. No worries. So so b to b to c. That that makes more sense. And so so I guess what what's your plan for signing up a 100 companies on this? And and and how do we, you you know, how do you make sure that this becomes a success? You're juggling a full time job in the start up. You don't really need to start up to succeed because you have a full time job to lean

11:48back on as a safety net.

Founder Motivation and Daily Commitment

Manodnya K H

11:52>> The start up 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 Boltcode, 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

12:15>> want it to become a success because right now I'm spending around eight to ten hours a day on Boltcode. 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

Co-Founder Relationship and Equity Discussion

Nathan Latka

12:31Makes sense. Talk to me about your cofounder. You mentioned you have someone else. How did you find him or her?

Manodnya K H

12:38>> 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 Boltcode to come out right now.

Nathan Latka

12:56Oh, 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?

Manodnya K H

13:07>> Yes.

Nathan Latka

13:08I see. Do guys split equity fifty fifty?

Manodnya K H

13:12>> We really haven't discussed equity yet because, like I said, I'm getting most of the funding to the table, and most of the tech is mine. The other co founder just handles operations, so we haven't really discussed it yet.

Nathan Latka

13:25Like like, what kind of operations?

Manodnya K H

13:28>> Basically, all of the spot where we are handling trainer onboarding and vendor onboarding, The other cofounder's handling that for me while I focus on the tech.

Nathan Latka

13:37Mhmm. So if this other cofounder 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.

Manodnya K H

14:00>> 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 taking trainers and relationships when there's the tech, which is pretty solid.

Nathan Latka

14:16So What does it matter if you have solid tech if no one's using it?

Manodnya K H

14:22>> Well, that we will cross that bridge when we get to it.

Nathan Latka

14:25That 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?

Incorporating in India and Legal Challenges

Manodnya K H

14:37>> 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 contract framed hasn't really happened for the last two months because our portals are down here in India.

Nathan Latka

14:53I see. Why are portals down?

Manodnya K H

14:55>> I don't know. 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.

Nathan Latka

15:04I see. What do you hope happens? Do you hope to just put it fifty fifty?

15:10I am not sure. Again, I

Manodnya K H

15:12>> haven't really thought about that bridge. It's more about going to market right now and then crossing that bridge.

Nathan Latka

15:18Yeah. 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.

Manodnya K H

15:34>> That's the point. We need each other, and it's

Nathan Latka

15:36a symbiotic relationship for both of us.

Manodnya K H

15:37>> So we wouldn't really want to lose each other at this point.

Nathan Latka

15:42Yeah. So so would you would you do fifty fifty then?

Manodnya K H

15:46>> Probably, if it does come down to negotiating, I'm open to negotiate.

Nathan Latka

15:51Yeah. Are you a good negotiator?

Manodnya K H

15:54>> I am an amazing negotiator.

Famous Five Rapid Fire Questions

Nathan Latka

15:57And and, well, you got your parents give you $30. So I would say you know something about negotiation. Alright. Very cool, Manodnya. Let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite business book?

Manodnya K H

16:10>> I don't really read business books.

Nathan Latka

16:13What do you who who inspires you in terms of people in business?

Manodnya K H

16:18>> I think it's my father who inspires me the most.

Nathan Latka

16:21Okay. And what company does he running or what did he create?

Manodnya K H

16:26>> 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 Boltcode off his feet off its feet and like helping me formulate the business plan, see the bigger picture.

Nathan Latka

16:44It really Number inspires three, what's your favorite online tool for building Boltcode?

Manodnya K H

16:51>> I would say I really like WordPress.

Nathan Latka

16:57That is what

Manodnya K H

16:57>> get my first website up.

Nathan Latka

17:01Very cool. Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?

Manodnya K H

17:06>> Let's just say I'm lucky if I manage five or 5.5.

Nathan Latka

17:10Okay. And numbers what's your situation? Married, single, kiddos?

Manodnya K H

17:16>> I'm single. Married to my work, I guess.

Nathan Latka

17:18That makes sense. And you mentioned you were 20 already. Last question. What's something you wish you knew five years ago?

Manodnya K H

17:26>> Well, five years ago, I wish I knew

17:31>> I'm not sure. Five years ago, I

Nathan Latka

17:33was not very sure what I wanted with life. I wish

Manodnya K H

17:35>> I had this clarity five years ago.

Closing Thoughts and Wrap-Up

Nathan Latka

17:38Guys, there you have a university student building Boltcode 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 from her parents who are gonna 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. Boltcode.io. Manodnya, thanks for taking

18:01us to the top.

Manodnya K H

18:03>> Thank you.

Nathan Latka

18:04One 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, 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 Central.

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