How Enquire AI CEO Cenk Sidar grew Enquire AI to $1.7M revenue and 80 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is jenk siddar he began his professional career 14 years ago today's the co-founder and ceo of inquire formerly global wonks inquire provides the world's leading enterprises with an ai powered platform to leverage global subject matter expertise in real time follow along at dot a i didn't ready to take us to the top thank you thank you thanks for having me who's paying for this so basically our clients are mostly uh 1400 companies and also some investment groups private equities hedge funds uh that require on-the-ground insights for uh pre-deal due diligence or any uh you know insights require research uh we basically work with mostly the head of uh you know portfolio managers and also like head of research for different organizations and they engage our platform when they need outside expertise and insights what does that mean i mean people know traditional firms like glg right where you can say i need to know more about the waste management space and glg will go find the top experts in waste management and connect you on a phone call with them are you effectively doing that but using code so uh yeah we automated most of the process but or also uh the way we deliver insights is very different than other traditional expert networks basically we have about 40 000 experts and every single expert is searchable and transferring our website so basically when a clients sign on our platform they can search an expertise and they can engage those experts on a real time basis and we're not really focused that much on the expert calls we provide expert quality arrange expert calls for clients but our core product is network pulse and network pulse is a product that you go to our platform and ask any business policy or a security related question and within minutes you get real expert insights on that question uh to your dashboard automatically so most of the cases you don't even need to have one or expensive expert call you can get the uh you can get the insights you need within minutes through your platform what incentivizes the experts to respond or request for inquire so quickly do you have 40 000 people on your payroll i know basically we have a gamification for expert compensation every expert that provides approved response to a question get paid somewhere between twenty to fifty dollars and uh so uh and also basically answering a question and you know on top of getting paid for the answer they provide they also become eligible for like a higher value consulting engagement it could be an expert call or it could be a report and technically we also create and provide visibility to experts from all over the world well like if i want to go find the world's top expert on b-52 bombers they're not going to be hanging on inquire to gamify earning you know 20 bucks to answer a question right how do you go recruit do you have to recruit like the smartest people in the world and if so don't you pay them way more than 20 bucks an answer so nathan you will be actually surprised uh you know about the caliber of people that we have in our platform again i just gave an example about network pulse but we have high ticket engagement as well so yeah we ultimately basically continuously recruit experts to our platform we have about uh are close to 40 000 experts in any subject matter expertise you would imagine from what is that what does that mean does that mean you've paid at least a dollar to 40 000 people over the past 12 months no basically those experts come to our platform and they built their profile very similar to how they built their linkedin profile and they choose the engagements they would like to do some experts may say i don't want to answer you know questions for fifty dollars i just want to be eligible or available for expert calls and then they get paid understood by price 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 going to 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 going to 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 many though i'm curious though how many how many did you pay at least a dollar over the past 30 days uh so i would say we have about like half of the experts somehow get engaged through a platform through network pulse or call i will say like about 15 to 20 000 people but that's engaged you know what makes this work is the money right the unification how many made at least a dollar in the past 30 days no actually the amount that i gave you was like the number of people who oh eight oh 20 000. so here here's the deal so if you answer a question and your answer got approved by your ai who's assessing the quality of the response and your expertise and your rel like basically your relevance to the question it needs to automatically got paid uh so we don't make people work for you know uh you know no compensation and i should also explain that we only match questions with the people who have already expertise on that for example if the question about sas revenue models you don't need to even you don't even need to do any work on that you provide one paragraph answer within eight minutes the average time that you spend answering a question is eight minutes and if you make fifty dollars in eight minutes is more than any other expert networks paying experts in an hourly basis understood so is this you tell me if this math is right then if you paid you said the average expert gets paid 20 to 50 bucks per question let's just assume 20 the low end of what you gave if you paid 20 000 of these folks at least a dollar in the past 30 days we can take 20 times twenty per question right so you spent in the past thirty days four hundred thousand dollars paying experts to answer questions on the low side of last year yeah probably that's that matters that's the last year not the last 30 days no i think you asked about the last year so yeah exactly so but don't forget we're charging our clients hold on i know jank i know i understand that but i just want to make sure i get this right it's 40 000 of built profiles 20 000 have been paid at least a dollar in the past 360 days the past year yep i see okay not the last 30 days yeah i see okay so in 2021 you had about 400 to 600 thousand dollars of expenses which went towards paying more yeah probably more uh yeah because yeah so so basically you know the you know there there are days that we get a lot of questions about you know these days we get all questions about ukraine and russia right and then all of our experts who have expertise in russia ukraine eurasia political risk gets pinged not many on north korea but maybe like something happening in that part of the world or maybe about the fed interest rate conversation these days or bitcoin regulation or questions that we receive really depends on the agenda of the global markets and the understanding yeah i think the product is crystal clear i'm not questioning that all these use cases make complete sense so i don't think we need to spend more time there i think my audience gets it i get it completely um i am curious though so like in in 2021 how many questions went answered total uh again i am not sitting in front of my dashboard right but we in average a week and of course the number of questions increase every week as we get as we onboard more clients but i will say last year in total we have about like 35 uh so again i don't want to give a wrong number and we have about the 4 000 questions answered last year i believe 500 to 4 thousand questions answered last year yes okay you just told me last year 20 000 experts were paid at least a dollar but they only answered 4 000 questions don't you need at least a one-to-one ratio no here's the deal uh again when you ask a question or a platform you get minimum fives maximum eight responses so that's how that's the beauty about the product so when you ask a question about you know regulation of like bitcoin in russia you're not getting one expert answering the question there so you're paying 20 bucks to five experts if they all give a good answer to one question exactly i see okay and then the flip side of the marketplace which i'm trying to build out here that's why i'm asking all these questions how many businesses spent at least a dollar to get a question answered on the platform last year uh uh we have about 120 on board institutions you know some of the clients only use expert calls some of them use only network pulses some of them use both i will say about 80 institutional clients uh and i will say about 100 110 users engage the platform and ask real-time questions expert so is that a way of saying you have 110 free users but 80 of them are really paying your big paying customers 80 institutions and 110 users so some institutions that use us let's say i'm just giving an example like uh starbucks may have five users so you're averaging about 1.2 seats per enterprise or 1.3 seats per enterprise yeah but this year we made a major difference in our pricing model so we launched unlimited questions and that's revolutionary in the consulting and the knowledge market now in a position to sell unlimited question packages per user uh for or you know clients so technically once you have the license you can go and ask unlimited questions in our previous model we used to charge three hundred dollars uh per question uh you know uh and now we're basically providing this unlimited uh model that will be very user friendly because they will be able to ask unlimited questions of forty thousand experts and we've got it why is the network so is it fair to say if you you just made this pricing change right yes so if you had four thousand questions asked last year at 300 bucks a pop you did about 1.2 million in total revenue last year uh this is all only network pulses we have a lot of expert calls and we do a lot of consulting engagements we have enterprise level uh we have enterprise level uh software but just for pulse is the 1.2 million correct yeah we don't we don't announce the revenue numbers but you know i think your mat is pretty close for the network pulses yes and you have a bunch of different revenue streams are just smart you're diversified but about what percent of your total revenue would you say is just pulse revenue uh we at this point we're not really like you know providing this information on the public spaces but i think i shared the information with you earlier uh in or um you know like for your survey but basically as of last year i will say uh you know a large portion of our revenues came from the network pulses and the marketplace but this year it will change significantly because we started providing api access to large third-party data platforms and the the balance is going to shift towards api and the lumina product uh for 2022 numbers okay but just to be i want to put up we can round so you don't have to be specific but last year you did somewhere between 1 and 2 million revenue mainly pulse in 2022 you think it'll be more diversified and a higher revenue number 100 percent exactly got it perfect that's great have you bootstrapped this or raised uh we just closed our cities a round we raised about 5.5 million dollars a month ago we closed the run before that we did our seed and two years ago with our uh angel run so this is our third institution second institutional run third funding round and we will be uh you know we will be going towards uh or series b around and by the end of the year uh as or as or growth you know significantly increases with the new products i just highlighted the seed that you did last year how much was that uh it was three million three million two point two million two point two and then angela was like and what year was the 800 oh good question uh i think it was 2019 18 19 period and when did you launch the story you asked about the seat the seat was 2020 march when kobe just hit at that point yeah when was the 800 grand it was angel run it was 2018 and 19 it was like not one round but it was a continuous race yeah that makes a lot of sense and so you just raised a series a at 5.5 million those folks are selling between sort of 10 and 20 percent of their business in a series a were you sort of in that same range we are uh but as i mentioned uh we are making significant transition to become technology provider you know rather than to be like a professional services provider so let me briefly like explain what i mean with that or marketplace that we just you know we just talked about the number of questions the number of clients that have access to is a platform that you know clients can you know engage the experts directly but now you basically implemented our technology to large enterprises so we are in the process of engaging and you know implementing our technology large uh professional services firm so that the internal employees of these large organizations will be able to ask questions internally and that will be pure sas play and that we are very excited about it so that puts us more in the technology provider category than the service provider and and so again if you sort of finished last year between one and two million bucks of revenue what do you think you can grow to by the end of 2022 yeah i think we are uh projecting to be somewhere about five to seven million this year interesting okay that'd be what you're doing like 150 000 a month right now on revenue you think you can get that up to like 500 600 grand yes again our lumina product that we uh implement the knowledge uh management tool to large organizations and we are working with the largest organizations of the world they're like a one to three million dollar you know price value that what we're providing right now and also we are building such partnerships for the api basically integrating or creating a product third-party platforms imagine bloomberg terminal we do not like working with them right now but i'm just giving an example we have the you know full access point to the like platform terminal and then we build a little slot that you will be able to ask a question on the front end you see bloomberg or doll jones but on the back end you are seeing you're basically reaching out to our expert network and get real-time content from our experts i just gave the bloomberg an example but there are like 10 plus platforms that size we are working on providing or unique solution that brings human data and technology together got it again i think i the audience totally understands the product it makes a ton of sense to me um help me understand growth though so you if you're right you know 150 grand a month right now on revenue where were you exactly a year ago uh i think a year ago that time we were this time you're talking about uh half of it or even one third of it lost interest interesting we have a very continuous growth pace especially uh with the number of new api partnerships that we are bringing on the table i get that jankto when you when i asked you about your series and slang between 10 and 20 percent you immediately went into like professional services right and how you're pivoting away from that which is obviously if you're trying to maximize valuation that's good because vcs are going to value professional services way less than pure software 85 margin revenue that is that code for telling me you sold maybe a little more than 20 of the business in your series a uh somewhere around there yeah be very very typical numbers exactly why did well more than 20 wouldn't be typical series a for a sas company because because your margin profile it sounds like it's a little bit worse but you're going to improve that over time i guess the reason i'm asking you is why do you need 5.5 million it's very dilutive for you as the founder here's the deal because we invest heavily in technology and you know we this that's in line with our vision moving from marketplace to technology provider we invest a lot in data science how we can automate and you know provide more scalable opportunities for example in the early days we were able to run maybe 10 to 25 questions a day because we had to have like a human eye looking at every response and checking the quality of the response and releasing to the client dashboard right so we were able to automate that with ai so every response that provided by the experts is automatically in real time assessed by our ai so that if the quality is lower than our threshold we don't uh project that response to the client dashboard so by demanding this ai we can increase the number of questions we can run on the platform internally or externally for our clients how many people are full-time today so we have about uh 35 people full-time how many are engineers uh i one-third of them are technology people okay so about call it 12 and when did you launch uh uh it's a tricky question because we launched the company in 2017 but the first two years were really building the supply side of the company right building the platform with like bringing experts to the platform uh you know trying the product with like a smaller number of experts and clients so good last two years since we raised or seed round uh you know we have much more like uh like structured uh uh you know growth and not just we're out of time here so we gotta wrap up rapid fire questions here one word answers if you can number one favorite business book uh i like the uh the the lean the eric uh lean startup number two is our ceo you're following or studying uh good question i uh you know i always uh i was like i was like jeff bezos number three what's your favorite online tool for building inquire uh i love a salesforce number three or four what's your uh how many hours i sleep to get every night uh probably like six and situation married single kids uh i'm actually single divorced uh two kids two kiddos and how old are you jank uh i'm 39 and the kids are nice the kids are seven and nine wow okay last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. uh you know starting a business is extremely beneficial like rewarding but also super stressful because i built other businesses in the past guys there have it launched in 2017 and choir.ai is helping 80 enterprise accounts with 120 seats get big questions answered via their network of 40 000 experts those experts 20 000 of them made at least a dollar last year in the platform they spent between caught 400 and 600 grand last year paying out those experts and generated about one to two million bucks in revenue from these customers asking these big questions they're now moving more to a pure sas play looking to scale up to six or seven million bucks in revenue this year just closed as series a 5.5 million selling about caught 20 percent of the business as jank looks to scale thanks for taking us to the top thank you i really enjoyed it thank you very much one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm 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 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 1 p.m central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of 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