How Brandrex CEO Roland Umukoro grew to $263.2K revenue and 1 customers in 2024.

guys we're rooting for Roland he spent 8 000 US dollars to build his MVP called brand Rex dot IO it helps you track brand assets build your funnels have everything in one spot he built the wait list of 115 people and just got his first paying customer today who's paying six bucks a month hey folks my guest day is Roland umokoro he's a business innovator and designer who works with multiple Brands he's developed and created multiple platforms with insights and co-owned clinioid texio and lulutech and the founder today of brand Rex which is helping brand building at SAS companies to generate brand assets rolling your radio tickets to the top yeah yeah okay so explain to me how a customer uses brand Rex okay um so we also going to private beta today and uh our customer user platform is a you know uh the system in which um people create a brand after first of all they look for a name the next the uh proceeding of creating a logo that uh does a little bit of a story or professional logo any of them maybe a word Mark or a letter Mark which of them and um after that they'll go on trying to create a contents for their brand and then um they're trying creating and I'm trying to visualize and put a vision of what their brand is therefore so um we have a kind of streamline we did some can be done on the platform by just um creating an account going to the brand Wizard and you have the option to create all these things in just um in in a step understand and how many walk me through sort of when you wrote the first line of code for this uh that has been um over a year okay yeah you started coding us and so so how have you how have you funded the building them the MVP did you bootstrap a raise yeah he's still on bootstrap yeah but um we're trying to raise funds for next how much are you looking to raise yeah we're looking to raise 500 or 500 000 US dollars at what valuation yeah at um at uh 1.3 million years or less in 15 months free money or post money you see pre-money or post money evaluation yeah free money actually okay so 1.3 million pre-money which would be 1.8 million post money why is brand Rex worth 1.8 million dollars yeah um from the from Volkswagen tour is an apart from a bootstrap uh we have our the time spent on the platform by the teams also so putting on these data together yeah it's it's worth that for 15 months yeah Ron to be clear you have no Revenue today right actually uh we just had the revenue today yeah you literally turned on your paywall today yeah amazing has anyone started paying yeah that's what I said we had one last one so at least that's uh okay this is amazing so you have one customer paying how much are they paying per month yeah he's not um a kind of monthly subscription platform it's a pay for what you need subscription platform well how much is he paying for what he needs no pay for what you need like you're paying six dollars okay so what is what does he get for six dollars a month yeah okay he's using our AI tools to generate the uh a vision statements and about us for the brand and also uh an email account 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 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 okay and how many people are on your wait list how many customers can you take off your wait list and grow to by the end of the year uh we're looking at 115 100 10150 no one one five how did you get one one five on your waitlist yeah we before starting and working on the platform we're already on a kind of branding agency before so yeah so we work for some Brands but we created um professionally that is having to do that manually how much did The Branding agency do in Revenue in 2021 yeah um that was about to uh three thousand uh Dollar Plus yeah three hundred thousand or thirty thousand 300. uh thirteen hundred three thousand yeah Rowan how much revenue did the agency do last year three hundred thousand no three thousand three thousand yeah okay how do you know that you found a real problem if you were only able to convince your agency customers to pay you 3 000 over a full year that doesn't sound like there's a lot of people willing to pay um yeah um yeah that's how it is for when you're looking at it from uh the U.S currency type uh the country where which is Nigeria yeah um actually a dollar is what um up to 700 yeah so the value of it uh is kind of high here where I am so we have to offer um how many how many Nigerian naira how many Nigerian naira did you do in Revenue last year at the agency okay how many now we did a we did a uh 2.7 million plus yeah yeah so that's about 6 000 US dollars um okay yeah it's about six thousand US dollars right so it's the same question I mean I have companies and Founders that I interview that do a million dollars in agency Revenue before they launch a SAS tool why have you launched your SAS platform so early you haven't proven you can sell the product yet via the agency yeah the thing is that we took uh we took a lot of service uh we took a lot of service we took a survey of um going to we took a summary of more than uh having two thousand plus people and um we got a kind of response that how did you get how did you get 2000 people to fill out a survey yeah um I'm kind of um connected to some some of my clients though I'm not working though so I never worked I don't just do just The Branding agency so I have some clients which I've been working with um on different professional levels and um they helped me take on this um this survey uh how many people so so 2 000 people answered the survey or you sent it to 2000 people two thousand people two thousand plus people inside the survey yeah how many actually fell down you said how many actually filled out the survey yeah that's why I'm telling you two thousand plus people three thousands already and what did the survey ask them yeah the survey questions um uh sorry it's been a while but I'll just give you some of um questions there the survey question one of them is uh yeah if we have a platform I can do this for you how much are you willing to pay for that and what do they say yeah no most of the responses came in I'm sorry I'm going to give you the value there so I don't make the mistake in dollars so most of uh most of the answer is um some people are willing to pay 700 not for logo Which is less 700 700 000. yes 700 naira that's a dollar yeah so and then we have around now how much are you willing to pay for a professional email now most people in Nigeria can't um maybe Roll and Roll and Roll and sorry hold on hold on first of all right getting a survey response of someone saying they're willing to pay two dollars to help you build something is not a profitable business that's nothing that's no money yeah yeah when you're a city that way yeah well I'm coming I'm giving I'm still getting to my points yeah so no most of them ask when we ask them how much are they willing to pay for professional email and some of the response came in they're willing to pay 3 000 error a month some 2000 era a month for professional email now we have another lot of questions and we need a calculation and evaluation we discover um we can't just service Nigeria alone because the money that will be generating from Nigeria will not be that much so would you do a military research and while involving the U.S markets to it so with our calculation and everything we did we see that on average a user should be spending 16.8 a month hello yeah I guess what gets you excited about people telling you they're willing to pay you 18 to build something yes I can hear you my question is why are you excited about people telling you that we're going to pay you 18 to build something that's it's not enough to build a business around yeah actually having people to pay 16 not 18 16.8 um it's actually a good number because uh if we can hit our targets which I'm very sure we can because uh we're hoping to get um about sorry I have this on your documents and I can't record what about 55 or 60 000 people in 15 months we're able to get raise our 1. um yeah loser is about a Million Dollar Plus within 15 months so wrong sorry just to take a step back just take a step back you did a survey people said they were willing to pay two dollars for one product five dollars for another product and you you believe that you can go get 800 or 900 people paying you 16 per month which would be something like 10 000 a month in total revenue yeah it's possible so why have you only I know it's only been a day you just launched but usually on launch day you should see a spike in sales why have you only converted one person off your 118 person wait list yeah uh well it's not our laundry we are not in fact you can't even register without an invitation good for now that's why I told you we just launched into private data not not major launching we're still in better so we have made so we'll be launching we're having our major launch by February next year what what what's what takes so long what has to still be built yeah um we don't have no we want you to probably make that well done all testing or I've done some music testing but we still want people's feedback even people are more likely to give you their feedback if they're paying you already have a beautiful website you have your persona Creator your payment account your asset Marketplace your funnel Builder you already have a ton of products uh why don't you focus on getting more people from your waitlist to actually use these products on a paid version so they'll give you more feedback yeah when we are trying to take things up a step at a time so we are not um rushing all of them into the platform we are just um emailing specific users based on how we are categorized them on our CRM so we are having them little by little and once we get the results we're looking for then we have to we will do another major update on the platform then before proceeding to our major launch role in my point is you've already built six products before getting feedback from Cut you only have one customer paying why not build one product focus on learning on that one product and then build five other products you've done all this development work before Revenue before sales yeah um these platforms uh yeah yeah categories are different product there but all of them actually come together to be uh that's why the whole point of view platform is happy your brand come up at once so if we are just giving just one product and you having to use other platforms to generate every other thing then um that is no longer our Market now our Market is just you come to the platform and you get your brand ready just from start to finish and all you have to do is focus on marketing so we are trying to look at the startup businesses the small businesses and that is what that's what we're looking at so those six products are very important that they are up and they are running so we don't have issues I don't know if you guess what I'm saying no I do what what's your team size today how many people yeah actually our team size today is just six we have four before but now we're six how are you paying six people with no Revenue who's paying for it uh actually that is where my investment comes in I've been the one working on the payments I've been not making payments from uh what I've been doing but um so Roland how much of your own money how much of your own money have you put out yes you said how much of your own money have you invested so far 8 000 Plus 8 000 yeah does that make you nervous yeah I trust in what I've done yeah so I'm not scared if the platform is going to work or not I I've seen some reviews and I'm very positive uh I'm a very positive thinker I love that are you a sole co-founder or do you have co-founders yeah um I'm actually a soul finder and I actually need a co-founder but I have advisors yeah are you doing all the engineering work yeah no no I'm not even under engineering worker I had to call in some help from some other developers so you paid them the eight thousand dollars to build the technology said how much am I invested I said that you spent a thousand plus but I didn't know how much did you spend on engineers yeah on Engineers um I spend almost half of the money on Engineers okay yeah that makes sense well we're rooting for you I hope it goes well in the meantime though we're out of time let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite book my favorite book can you hear me my favorite book yes okay um it's from Jeff Walker um the it's called the product product launch formula well exactly product launch formula yeah number two is there a CEO you're following or studying yeah there was which was Bill Gates yeah number three what's your what's your favorite online tool sorry I didn't catch that what's your favorite online tool okay my favorite online soon yeah uh basically General is just AWS Amazon website number uh for how many hours of sleep do you get every night [Music] Roland how much do you sleep each night how many hours yeah sometimes I get four hours of sleep sometimes I get AIDS out of sleep and sometimes I get 13 hours sleep and what's your situation Roland are you married single do you have kids no I'm single okay and how old are you yeah I'm 25. last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20 years old yeah I wish well I was 20 years old uh um so that I no I don't have that I don't have that on my thoughts guys we're rooting for Roland he spent 8 000 US dollars to build his MVP called brand Rex dot IO it helps you track brand assets build your funnels have everything in one spot he built the wait list of 115 people and just got his first paying customer today who's paying six bucks a month we're rooting for him he's a sole co-founder Roland thank you for taking us to the top 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 revenue our poo CAC LTV you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every Thursday 1 p.m 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 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