How ExperientialEtc CEO Karan Bhardwaj grew ExperientialEtc to $5.8M revenue and 7 customers in 2024.

guys experiential Etc was launched in 2017 they hit a million dollars of Revenue the past 12 months after raising 150 000 precede around in 2020 at a 2.5 post money valuation they just closed a whole months ago and knew 200 000 of funding at a six million dollar post money evaluation he's opened a girl from a million bucks in Revenue to 3.5 million over the next 12 months historically his Revenue has been split 50 percent SAS 50 to one-time activations launching a new product called x-bot which will help Brands like h m retailers understand heat maps in their store launch real-time promotions and generate Roi he's making a big bet that he can sell three million bucks worth of that over the next 12 months hey folks my guest today is Quran bardwash he is the founder of a company called experiential etc.com and AD Tech experiential agency using technology for brand communication crony radio takes to the top yep all right give me give me an example of a customer that's using you guys today all right so uh we just doing something for KPMG uh the one of the big fours and we've created an innovation Center for them uh this this kind of entails right everything from facial recognition to RFID scanning to virtual reality Games to a huge tabletop which shows all the stories about where all KPMG has touched different lives in different sectors we are creating something in the augmented reality space as well so that's as far as your uh KPMG is concerned but yes uh all in all experiential Etc is known for creating uh such Tech based activations for B2B clients uh it could be permanent installations it could be rental activations but mostly we are used for brand launches as well so just because software you're selling or are you doing custom agency work for every client so it is it is a software as well as the hardware so we are mostly a hybrid agency we recommend the user Journey we understand the communication of the brand what they are wanting to launch uh what they want to achieve and design the entire software and then we can recommend the right kind of Hardware that should go along it could be uh mixed reality headsets it could be virtual reality headset it could just be a mobile phone using augmented reality it could be an interactive projection it could be emergency manufacturing your own Hardware devices or you're working with vendors now we're working with vendors but we manufacture our own software so we are a software first agency moving towards uh from a semi SAS to a completely source-driven business and so right now like the last 12 months we split revenue on a percent basis how much how much was SAS versus not SAS uh well the last 12 months I would say it's kind of 50 50 but in the last quarter it's kind of 70 towards sauce base and 30 towards nonsense okay so what's the average customer paying you per month just for your your SAS offering uh would be anywhere about uh fifteen to twenty thousand dollars per month or per year uh no for per campaign so it could not be a recurring campaign right even if it's a SAS driven thing it could be probably once and then the next month it would not be uh executed and it would be a month after that but per customer about 20 25 15 or 20 000 what's the crown then it's not recurring Revenue right so it's it's one-time campaigns that you launch using software but that doesn't give you any predictability in the future revenue streams correct uh while the revenue streams are projected in such a way that all the uh softwares that we have deployed they kind of have a longevity of about a year's time uh the client is tied with us with respect to annual maintenance contracts with fixing the bugs with ensuring that the software is okay why don't you charge for I guess I don't understand why don't you charge for that I mean if you're there which are the small subscription piece so it's interesting so what's the subscription that's what I asked what's the subscription fee they're paying you monthly so that would be about eight to ten thousand dollars okay and and that's after a twenty thousand dollar setup fee absolutely okay got it so eight thousand dollars a month and that's making up fifty percent of your Revenue uh over the last 12 months and then the other 50 revenue is going from twenty thousand dollar setup fees to custom work and the launch correct correct and this is just the SAS business I just I just said the split between your revenue is 50 SAS and 50 agency and your response was that's Wait no that's just this ass business I'm confused okay glad to beat myself so let's say the overall business right now in the last 12 months has been more than a million dollars and out of the entire million dollars about 400 000 has been completely SAS or semi-sas business right now out of that 400 400 450 000 each and every client is paying me about twenty or thousand uh on a monthly basis and then I'm charging them about eight to ten thousand on a recurring basis well no they're not charging it you're they're not paying you 20 000 a month you just told me they're not paying you 20 000 a month you said they pay it one time and then they'll ask for one campaign that is while I'm setting the entire software up right in the beginning but then on a monthly basis I charged I made to ten thousand 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 evaluation 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 yeah so it's not 20 000 a month I just want to make that clear you keep saying that you're paying 20 hours a month they're not paying 20 a month they're paying you 20 000 to set it up and they're paying you eight to ten thousand per month after absolutely correct absolutely absolutely correct yeah okay so when you say four you have a million in Revenue the past 12 months 450 KSS what's the rest uh while the rest would be activations like projection mapping uh drone shows immersive rooms Innovation centers experience zones brand launches and stuff like that it's a one-time campaign sort of stuff that's one-time campaigns absolutely correct and is that number accurate you did about 1 million Revenue last year uh yeah in the last 12 months more than a million and what will you do this year you think uh 23 24 we have poised to do about 3.5 to 4 million dollars and and what's going to drive that growth from where you are today so uh to fuel our I mean the activation business and the clientele that we have got and the team size that we've got is anyway uh uh egoing but then majority of this is going to come from a product called Xbox so what we are doing is we are launching a a bot which is going to be placed in source and this is where the entire SAS based pivot is going to come through uh this bot basically is good so let's say Zara is already my client h m is already my client uh and I've been servicing them for one-time campaigns for all these years uh whether it's for facial recognition or social media campaigns and so on and so forth now I'm consolidating everything in one uh product which is called the export...