How Brainboard CEO Chafik Belhaoues grew Brainboard to $1.5M revenue and 10 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is shafiq baus he's the founder of brainboard and former cto of scaleway the french cloud provider he's an engineer with 15 years of experience in building infrastructures at large scales and solving problems now building brainboard.com visually build and manage your cloud infrastructure shopific you're ready to take it to the top yes okay tell me who's paying for this who's paying for your tool today so the customers that we have are mainly cloud architects i mean when they say cloud architects are engineers building infrastructures inside companies so because you know just to give an overview of these people as i'm an engineer with like the brain board comes from our own frustration so we got a lot of tools to deal with infrastructures and we got a lot of cloud services and engineers struggled between both of them and glue the different tools and processes to make things work inside companies so brain board make it easier you got a one unique platform where engineers can build their infrastructures interesting okay and and what do they pound average to use a tool per month yes it's per month uh the the pricing plan is per user per month so we want it to be predictable you know one of the pain points now using the cloud is the cost and the prices are unpredictable you know when you use cloud infrastructures you do not know how much we're gonna pay but we want to do it the other way around it's predictable it's paid by user per month and simple and easy so topic when you look at all your customers today what's the average company paying you uh per month would you say yeah the average company is between 12 and 15k amounts okay okay so you're an enterprise sales motion then yeah we can say it's it's still sas we're not in that enterprise module it's still sas but it's between 12 and 15k well yeah you can be sass in selling to enterprises i'm just saying your price point is high where it's an enterprise sales motion that's true yeah interesting okay put this on a timeline for me when did you launch the business we launched it uh in 2019 so actually we started working on 2019 and we launched in january 2020 okay and how did you fund yourself in between those 12 months when you had no revenue yeah this is interesting questions it it is our own funding so i finally found the brain board with my co-founder jeremy so we yeah we were self-funded and we stayed like that for uh almost two years then when we realized that we got a lot of traction we got paying customers and we said okay now it's time to move on and we we raised fan fans last year okay so in 2021 you raised how much did you raise in 2021 we raised we raised more than 1.2 million usd okay and would that's sort of your seed round or precede yeah we call it precede uh appreciate it around so this is like to build the first team and yeah get the first team build the product for enterprises so that's why you call it three seed we're not seed yet awesome and how did you manage dilution what what cap did you raise at or what valuation did you raise at yeah this is yeah one of the biggest questions you know when you start fundraising is economics and control and we yeah the valuation it's uh is more than four million so post post money or pre uh pre money free money so 5.2 post yeah something like that i mean asaps and so on but this is something small yeah so you sold about 20 percent of the business something like that yeah not that much but close to that yeah very cool now you mentioned you guys funded it yourself at the beginning how much of your own capital did you put in actually we put it we we had like more than 150k wow and what oh so 300 000 total yeah 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 gonna 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 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 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 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 guys get that money were you guys like rich or you cut your parents are wealthy or what you had an early exit or medical or what none of that you know we got a we were based in france and we got a system in france you know when you work for more than six years you can you can take like two years off and you got all 60 something like that of your salary so we took advantage of that we used it um to fend ourselves which means we had like 60 of the former salary to fend ourselves for two years i see i see okay that makes sense um talk to me about customers today how many customers are paying you yeah we do not have a lot of customers now we are just starting so we have like more than 10 customers and we are like which one do i see a month ago i mean two months ago and and we like we are not seeing a lot of a lot of uh an increase in the users that we have and the increase of the paying customers so the first we got a few customers now we are we have more than 10 and we are seeing like growth coming and we go to a few interesting customers that we are talking to prospects that we are talking to that we hope to close in the near future in the next coming days that's awesome i mean can i take 10 customers times that are who you told me earlier of 12 000 a month you guys are doing about 120 000 bucks a month right now in revenue yeah not exactly that but something similar because you know we have kind of discount for the first customers because they they accept to test the product give us feedback so it depends but this is like the the pricing pilot we can say but what are you actually doing right now in terms of mr is it more like a hundred thousand bucks and yeah no no not that bad no not that much lower yeah okay so so how so i asked you earlier what your average price was you said 12 000 bucks but if you have 10 customers today then you have 120 grand so you're lower because you're on boarding people you're just getting started i get that but what is monthly revenue today is like more like 40 50 000 yes something like that yeah i see i see okay so so how do you think about discounting these early folks you're giving big 50 60 discounts it depends it really depends on the customer and the number of seats they take you know as we price perceived so like for customer taking 50 seat it's not the same thing for a customer taking five seat so what we usually do we apply between 15 and 25 and uh yeah but in return we take either engagement for a year or they accept to give us a regular feedback like we do with them regular uh points like meetings either uh once a month or once each two two weeks so yeah it depends on how we work with them and some of them um like they pro they propose for us to be partners with so we started this partnership we didn't thought about it at the beginning but now as we're seeing people and companies asking for it...