How Brandrex Launched Its First Paying Customer on Day One of Private Beta (Interview with CEO Roland Umukoro)

Introduction and What Brandrex Does

Nathan Latka

00:00Guys, we're rooting for Roland. He spent 8,000 US dollars to build his MVP called brandrex.io. It helps you track brand assets, build your funnels, have everything in one spot. He built a wait list of a 115 people and just got his first paying customer today who's paying $6 a month. Hey, folks. My guest today is Roland Yumikuro. He's a business innovator and designer who works with multiple brands. He's developed and created multiple platforms with insights

00:24and co owned Flinioid, TeXio, and Lulu Tech and the founder today of brandrex, which is helping brand building at SaaS companies to generate brand assets. Roland, you ready to take us to the top?

Roland Umukoro

00:37>> Yeah. Yeah.

How Customers Use the Platform

Nathan Latka

00:38Okay. So explain to me how a customer uses brandrex.

Roland Umukoro

00:42>> Okay.

00:44>> So we just got into private beta today, and how our customer use the platform is, know, the system in which people create a brand after, first of all, they look for a name, the next they are proceeding creating a logo that 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 after that, they go on trying to create contents

01:17>> for their brand and then they're trying creating and then trying to visualize and put a vision of what their brand is therefore. So we have a kind of streamline where this can be done on the platform by just creating an account, going to the brand wizard, and you have the option to create all these things in just in in a step.

Nathan Latka

01:41Understand, Roland. And how many walk me through sort of when you wrote the first line of code for this.

Roland Umukoro

01:48>> That has been over a year.

Nathan Latka

01:52So you started coding this and so so how have you how have you funded the building the the MVP? Did you bootstrap or raise?

Bootstrapped and Fundraising Plans

Roland Umukoro

01:59>> Yeah. I still am bootstrapped. Yeah. But we're trying to raise funds on that.

Nathan Latka

02:03How much are you looking to raise?

Raising $500K at $1.3M Pre-Money Valuation

Roland Umukoro

02:06>> Yeah. We're looking to raise $500,000 US dollars.

Nathan Latka

02:09At what valuation? Yeah.

Roland Umukoro

02:12>> At at 1,300,000 US dollars in fifteen months.

Nathan Latka

02:19Pre money or post money?

Roland Umukoro

02:22>> You said?

Nathan Latka

02:23Pre money or post money evaluation?

Roland Umukoro

02:26>> Yeah. Pre money, actually.

Nathan Latka

02:28Okay. So 1,300,000 pre money, which should be 1,800,000 post money. Why is brandrex worth $1,800,000?

Roland Umukoro

02:38>> Yeah. Apart from the from what we're going to raise and apart from our bootstrap,

02:51>> We have the time spent on the platform by the teams also. So putting these datas together, yeah, it's it's worth that for fifteen months. Yeah.

First Paying Customer on Launch Day

Nathan Latka

03:04Roland, to be clear, you you have no revenue today. Right?

Roland Umukoro

03:10>> Yeah. Actually, we just had a revenue today. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

03:15You literally turned on your paywall today?

Roland Umukoro

03:18>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

03:19Amazing. Has anyone started paying?

Roland Umukoro

03:22>> Yeah. That's why I said we had one. Just one. So at least that's

Nathan Latka

03:26Okay. This is amazing. So you have one customer paying. How much are they paying per month?

Roland Umukoro

03:30>> Yeah. It's not a kind of monthly subscription platform. It's a pay for what you need subscription platform.

Nathan Latka

03:39Well, how much is he paying for what he needs?

Roland Umukoro

03:43>> No. Pay for what you need. Like, he's paying $6. Okay.

Nathan Latka

03:46What you need. So what is what does he get for $6 a month?

Roland Umukoro

03:50>> Yeah. Okay. What I guess for is that, like, he's using our our AI tools to generate a vision statement and about us for brand and also an email accounts. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

04:05Oh, 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 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 Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second. But you log in, you connect

04:29your 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

04:53get 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

05:15not 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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06:03if 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

Building the Waitlist Through the Agency

Nathan Latka

06:29the 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?

Roland Umukoro

06:38>> We're looking at 115.

Nathan Latka

06:40A 100 one hundred and one five zero?

Roland Umukoro

06:44>> No. One one five.

Nathan Latka

06:45How did you get one one five on your wait list?

Roland Umukoro

06:49>> Yeah. We before starting and working on the platform, we're already a kind of branding agency before. So yeah. So we work for some brands, but we created them professionally, that is having to do them manually. Mhmm. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

07:04So How much did the branding agency do in revenue in 2021?

Roland Umukoro

07:09>> Yeah. That was about $3,000 plus. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

07:17300,000 or 30,000?

Agency Revenue and Market Validation

Roland Umukoro

07:19>> 300. So that's 3,000. That is 1,300. 3,000. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

07:27Roland, how much revenue did the agency do last year? 300,000?

Roland Umukoro

07:31>> No. 3,000.

Nathan Latka

07:333,000.

07:37>> Yeah.

07:37Okay. How do you know that you've 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.

Roland Umukoro

07:49>> Yeah. Yeah. That is how it is for when you're you're looking at it from The US currency type or the country where which is Nigeria. Yeah.

08:03>> Actually, a dollar is worth up to 700. Yeah. So the value of it is kind of high here where I am. So we have to offer

Nathan Latka

08:12How many how many Nigerian naira how many Nigerian naira did you do in revenue last year at the agency?

Roland Umukoro

08:21>> Okay. How many no. We did we did 2,700,000 plus. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

08:29Yeah. So that's about 6,000 US dollars.

Roland Umukoro

08:33>> Okay.

Nathan Latka

08:37Yeah. It's about 6,000 US dollars. Right? So same question. I mean, I I have companies and founders that I interview that do a million dollars in agency revenue before they launch a SaaS tool. Why have you launched your SaaS platform so early? You haven't proven you can sell the product yet via the agency.

Roland Umukoro

08:55>> Yeah. The thing is that we took a we took a lot of surveys. We took a lot of survey. We took a survey of we took a survey of more than having

09:05>> 2,000 plus people on our survey, and we got a kind of response that

Nathan Latka

09:11How did you get how did you get 2,000 people to fill out a survey?

Survey of 2,000 Plus Respondents

Roland Umukoro

09:15>> Yeah. I'm kind of connected to some some of my clients, though I'm not working just I never worked I I don't just do just the branding agency. So I have some clients which I've been working with on different professional levels, and they helped me take on this this survey out.

Nathan Latka

09:32How many people so so 2,000 people answered the survey, or you sent it to 2,000 people?

Roland Umukoro

09:38>> 2,000 people. 2,000 plus people answered the survey. Yeah. But I was actually filled out directly. You said?

Nathan Latka

09:45How many actually filled out the survey?

Roland Umukoro

09:48>> Yeah. That's what I'm telling you. 2,000 plus people, 3,000 survey.

Nathan Latka

09:52And what did the survey ask them?

Roland Umukoro

09:54>> Yeah. The survey question is I I sorry. It's been a while, but I'll just give you some of the questions there. The survey question, one of them is, you know, if we have a platform that can do this for you, how much are you willing to pay for that?

Nathan Latka

10:13And what did they say?

Roland Umukoro

10:15>> Yeah. Now most of the responses came in sorry. I'm gonna give you the value nearest. Don't make the mistake in dollars. So most of most of the answer is some people are willing to pay 700 just for logo, which is less

Nathan Latka

10:30than thousand 700,000 naira or 7?

Roland Umukoro

10:33>> Yes. 700 naira. That's a dollar 16. 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

Nathan Latka

10:47Hey. But Roland. Roland. Roland. Sorry. Roland.

Roland Umukoro

10:49>> Hold on. Hold on. First of all, one

Nathan Latka

10:50Roland, paying getting a survey response of someone saying they're willing to pay $2 to have you build something is not a profitable business. That's nothing. That's no money.

Roland Umukoro

11:02>> Yeah. Yeah. When you are saying it that way. Yeah. But I'm coming I'm giving I'm still getting to my point. Yeah. So now most of them ask when we we ask them how much are they willing to pay for professional email, some of the response came in that willing to pay 3,000 naira a month, some 2,000 naira a month for professional email. Now, we have other lots of questions and we did a calculation and evaluation. We

11:31>> discovered we can't just service Nigeria alone because the money that we'll be generating from Nigeria will not be that much. So we did a little research and we're involving The US market to it. So with our calculation and everything we did, we see that on average, it is actually spending $16.8 a month.

11:57>> Hello?

Nathan Latka

11:58Yeah. I guess what gets you excited about people telling you they're willing to pay you $18 to build something?

Roland Umukoro

12:03>> Can you hear me?

Nathan Latka

12:05Yes. I can hear you.

Roland Umukoro

12:06>> Sorry. Can you hear me?

Nathan Latka

12:08My question is, what why are you excited about people telling you they're willing to pay you $18 to build something? That's it's not enough to build a business around.

Roland Umukoro

12:19>> Yeah. Actually, having people to pay 16, not 18, $16.8

12:26>> is actually a good number because if we can hit our targets, which I'm very sure we can because we're hoping to get about sorry, I have this on the documents and I can't recall, but about 55,000 or 60,000 people in fifteen months, we're able to get raise our one point

12:44>> yeah. We're able to raise about a million dollar plus within fifteen months. So we're So

Nathan Latka

12:49Roland Roland, sorry. Just to take a step back. Just to take a step back. You did a survey. People said they were willing to pay $2 for one product, $5 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.

Private Beta Strategy and Major Launch Timeline

Roland Umukoro

13:09>> Yeah. It's possible. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

13:12So why why have you only I know it's only been a day you just launched, but usually on launch day, should see a spike in sales. Why have you only converted one person off your 115 person wait list?

Roland Umukoro

13:22>> Yeah. We're not it's not our launch day. We're not in fact, you can't even register without an invitation code for now. That's why I told you we just launched into private beta, not major launching. We're still in beta. So be launching we're having our major launch by February next year. Mhmm.

Nathan Latka

13:42What what what's what takes so long? What has to still be built?

Roland Umukoro

13:46>> Yeah. We don't have no. We launched into private beta. We have done all testing or have done some user testing, but we still want people's feedback.

Nathan Latka

13:57People 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. 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?

Roland Umukoro

14:18>> Yeah. What when we're trying to take things a step at a time. So we are not rushing all of them into the platform. We are just 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 are looking for, then we have to we will do another major update on the platform, then before proceeding to our major launch.

Team Size and How It Is Funded

Nathan Latka

14:46Roland, my point is you've already built six products before getting feedback from 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.

Roland Umukoro

15:03>> Yeah. These platforms are yeah. They are categorized as different product there, but all of them actually come together to be that's why the whole point of your platform is helping your brand come up at once. So if we are just giving you just one product and you're having to use other platforms to generate every other thing, then that is no longer our market. Now our market is just you come to the platform and you get your

15:30>> 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 start up businesses, the small businesses, and that is what we are that is what we are looking at. So those six products are very important that they are up and they are running. So we don't have issues maybe. I don't know if you get what I'm saying.

Nathan Latka

15:47No. I do. What what's your team size today? How many people?

Roland Umukoro

15:51>> Yeah. Actually, our team size today is just six. We have four before, but now we're six.

Nathan Latka

15:56How are you paying six people with no revenue? Who's paying for it?

Roland Umukoro

16:02>> Actually, that is where my investment comes in. I've been the one working on the payments. I've been on making the payments from what I've been doing. But

Nathan Latka

16:13So Roland, how much of your own money how much of your own money have you put in?

Founder Personal Investment of $8,000

Roland Umukoro

16:17>> I've doing that from my paper.

Nathan Latka

16:19Okay. You said?

16:20How much of your own money have you invested so far?

Roland Umukoro

16:23>> Yeah. How much of my money invested? Not with payments and every other thing so far. For a year. I've invested 8,000 plus.

Nathan Latka

16:328,000?

Roland Umukoro

16:33>> Thousand. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

16:35Does that make you nervous?

Roland Umukoro

16:37>> Yeah. I trust in what I've done. Yeah. So I'm not scared if the platform is gonna work or not. I I've seen some reviews, and I'm very positive. I'm a very positive thinker, and I'm

Nathan Latka

16:51I love that.

Sole Founder with Advisers

Nathan Latka

16:52Are you a sole co founder? Do you have a or do you have co founders?

Roland Umukoro

16:56>> Yeah. I'm actually a sole founder, and I actually need a cofounder, but I have advisers. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

17:07Yep. Are you doing all the engineering work?

Roland Umukoro

17:11>> Yeah. No. No. I'm not doing all the engineering work. I had to call in some help from some other developers.

Nathan Latka

17:18So you paid them the $8,000 to build the technology?

Roland Umukoro

17:22>> No. I not paid them 8,000. Like, you said how much have I invested? I said I've spent 8,000 plus, but I did

Nathan Latka

17:27On engineers?

Roland Umukoro

17:30>> Yeah. On engineers. I spent almost half of the money on engineers.

Nathan Latka

17:34Okay. 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?

Famous Five Rapid Fire Questions

Roland Umukoro

17:45>> My favorite book.

17:48>> Can you hear me? My favorite book?

Nathan Latka

17:50Yes.

Roland Umukoro

17:51>> Okay. It's from Jeff Walker. The it's called Product

Nathan Latka

17:56product launch formula.

Roland Umukoro

17:57>> Exactly. Product launch formula. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

18:00Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Roland Umukoro

18:04>> Yeah. There was, which was Bill Gates.

18:07>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

18:08Number three, what's your what's your favorite online tool?

Roland Umukoro

18:13>> Sorry. Didn't catch that.

Nathan Latka

18:15What's your favorite online tool?

Roland Umukoro

18:18>> Okay. My favorite online tool. Yeah.

18:22>> Basically, generally, it's just AWS. I'm not gonna waste any time.

Nathan Latka

18:27Four. How many hours of sleep do you get every night?

18:33Roland, how much do you sleep each night? How many hours?

Roland Umukoro

18:37>> Yeah. Sometimes I get four hours of sleep. Sometimes I get eight hours of sleep, and sometimes I get thirteen hours of sleep.

Nathan Latka

18:46What's your situation, Roland? Are you married, single, do you have kids?

Roland Umukoro

18:51>> No. I'm single.

Nathan Latka

18:52Okay. And how old are you?

Roland Umukoro

18:54>> Yeah. I'm 25.

Nathan Latka

18:57Last question. What's something you wish you knew when you were 20 years old?

Roland Umukoro

19:03>> Yeah. I wish when I was 20 years old,

19:09>> I'm so glad I no. I don't have that on I don't have that on my thoughts.

Nathan Latka

19:15Guys, we're rooting for Roland. He spent 8,000 US dollars to build his MVP called brandrex.io. It helps you track brand assets, build your funnels, have everything in one spot. He built a wait list of a 115 people and just got his first paying customer today who's paying $6 a month. We're rooting for him. He's a sole cofounder. Roland, thank you for taking us to the top. One more thing before you go. Have a brand new show

19:39every 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 Central. Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them

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20:28don'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 up for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with

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