How Fitbots CEO Vidya Santhanam grew Fitbots to $532K revenue and 50 customers in 2023.

what is going on youtube you know we are just two weeks away from founder 500 in austin texas on september 1st and 2nd there's over 500 b2b sas founders all coming together you don't want to miss it ticket prices increase every three days i have it on automatic accelerator every three days and we're almost sold out you can see there's about nine left when you go to the event bright link about nine left and it's updating real time so check it out today it's founderpath.com and then in the upper left you can hover over our product drop down and click the event stream i'll also put in the description here of the youtube video i'd love to see you there hey folks my guest today is vidya santam she's the co-founder of fitbots and leads growth she started the company after a 16-year career her last company being mind minetree where she led strategic talent and leadership building video you ready to take us to the top absolutely noon all right you told me before you listened to the show so this should be really easy interview right i've memorized all your questions by the so you should just do the whole show i'm just going to leave here all right tell tell us about so what is fitbots what are people paying you for yeah absolutely uh so fitbots we are nokia's company we have both the sas product for okrs along with the network of okr coaches the problem that we really solve is the big problem of misalignment especially when teams are hybrid and ceos are really struggling to get everybody focused on outcomes so that's where we come in interesting so when you say your sas that helps teams manage their okrs what does that mean usually yeah so so we have a product uh we have an okrs product and along with that we have a network of okr certified coaches so let's see a team wants to get spun up on okrs they take a subscription from our software along with a coach from our network yeah so guys this is one of those things like it's one of the things we look at at founder path the one where deciding which bootstrap founders to give capital to if they have like a healthy business cadence which means there's like a monthly review of okrs every quarter they're looking at last month's okrs and protecting the next ones we like this kind of business discipline video is building this nicely at fitbots okr stands for objectives and key results now video there's a lot of sort of frameworks around this people have heard of you know i would say some of the older guys would be like vern harnish and rockefeller habits this sort of a version traction is sort of a newer version just to be clear you're not selling like a new way to do okrs you're selling software to empower systems that already exist to do okrs right that's correct nathan um so uh objectives and key results as you rightly call them it's very similar to the revolution around agile which happened a few years ago uh when tools like asana and all came up ajit was already a known concept so it's very similar to okay we're not really here to educate the market on the framework we are trying to help companies to adopt tokyo's using our software i love that okay so what are companies paying you on average per month to use the technology um so we get um the annual contract value is about ecb so it's about 500 dollars okay and are you charging based off team size or product features what do you charge based off of um we charge per person per user per month or user pro any product based up selling or no matter what you plan you're on you get all the product functionality yeah so we have three plans and uh the plans which are of course you know the the more expensive ones have got uh stronger integrations i see okay so the average company is paying 500 bucks per year though um uh the average company is paying around six thousand dollars for you oh six thousand us dollars per year that's true that's right oh amazing okay got it got it um okay very interesting and then put this all on a timeline for me when did you write the first line of code for the company yeah um so we we launched in we we started the company in 2018 me and my tech co-founder kashi uh we launched the okrs product in 2019 um and from there we in the same year we actually realized that many teams being new to okrs used to come over to us and say that hey tell us more about okrs and how to use it correctly we're familiar with it but we want to know how to use it correctly um so we got certified as opr coaches coached about 650 plus teams ran about thousand plus check-in meetings and built the product as we were close to users um uh so from there wait what did you get certified through like certified from from who um we got certified from the okrs training us they're one of the global best in okrs also bringing the certifications into asia pacific um so the learning that we had nathan was that not every problem in the world can be solved only with software so you need some amount of um handholding for teams as well so that they do it correctly so that was our learning 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 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 interesting okay so you you think about in 2018 you really launch it 2019 then right right and how did you get your first customers did this coaching company give you a bunch of early customers after you graduated as coaches yeah so we we got our first customer through our own network so um and and from the first customer we we took that uh experience and we got the second customer the first were really through networks okay very cool i love that i love that flow and now fast forward today how many customers are you working with oh we have 50 customers 5-0 that's correct that's that's wonderful okay so um how are you we talked about your first customer what came from your own network how are you adding new customers today because you rank very high on g2 you're getting a lot of word of mouth i imagine yeah that's right uh our top two sources for leads are through inbound so we write a lot of content to nokias um because we're also we have a lot of expertise around okrs with the software so that's converted into high quality content and and we get leads to inbound um and the second source is through reference refers could be either through our own customers or through word of mouth um or through reviews like on g2 so these are okay okay and 50 customers times 500 bucks a month means you're doing about 25 000 a month in revenue yeah you're absolutely correct amazing and what were you exactly one year ago um we were about close to about 14 uh kmrr okay so last year at this time you're doing 14 000 a month yeah a little lesser than that we closed the year last year we closed the year at 14k so we're probably doing a little lesser than but more about 100 than year over year growth have you done this all bootstrapped yeah we...