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...