How FleetDrive 360 CEO Omprakash Karamchandani grew to $2.5M revenue and 1.4K customers in 2024.

guys this is the great story of a Founder who built a tool for himself he ran his own trucking company in Atlanta had 20 trucks he made 15 000 top line per truck 5 000 net ended up selling that business for a 3X ebitda multiple because he got excited about the software the compliance software for trucking companies he now has over uh 700 trucking businesses signed up which equals 1400 drivers that pay on average 300 per year but that's just the recurring fee there's another 300 bucks per year they make per driver on one time fee so called around a million dollar run rate today he's hoping to break 3 million this year up from 750 000 done in 2022 hey folks my guest today is amkaram chandani he is the founder and CEO of a company called fleetdrive360.com he's a tech leader with a track record of over 25 years in the space now working on this comprehensive cloud-based solution to manage FMCSA and DOT compliance so explain that in a second I'll be ready to take us to the top sure yeah let's do it okay what is FMCSA and DOT compliance so every trucking company they have to follow certain guidelines FMCSA is a Federal Motor Carrier Administration and Dot is the Department of Transportation so if you have a trucking company or you are driving a commercial vehicle on the road you need to follow certain guidelines um you know put by FMCSA and what we have done is we have put together a Consolidated One-Stop shop platform for all the trucking companies to basically um fulfill the requirement laid out by the FMCSA and and do you charge based off number of trucks they're managing or something else a number of drivers oh interesting and so how many how many drivers are on the platform today so right now we have about 1400 and we actually launched this product last year in August and since then we have been consistently getting about 200 to 300 customers every every month okay new customers per month and is that new drivers or can one customer have 10 drivers One customer have multiple drivers so we have few customers have 10 20 15 drivers as well what does your largest customer have in terms of number of drivers so right now we have uh 17 drivers in one customer but we are actually talking to three customers One customer has 500 drivers uh One customer has two two thousand and another customer has about you know 1500 so uh those are kind of Enterprise customers for us and initially we were just focusing on the individual you know call owner operators which is you know one single person driving the truck and those kind of things so we are focusing on that now we are actually getting into Enterprise space which is more larger bigger carriers and how many paying customers today so we have 670 or about 700 paying customers wow okay so 700 paying customers making up 1400 drivers so average of two drivers per one customer so these are small mom mainly small mom and pop like types of driving operations last mile delivery I imagine no this is last mile plus the Long Haul which is the first Mile and um yeah this is over the road so you'll be surprised there are almost four million uh drivers uh on the road um that you know there's an attempt that we are targeting is that in a specific geography or is that worldwide it's just the U.S wow okay so where are you based what state uh so we are in Atlanta but we are actually um catered to the entire U.S United States um drivers okay got it so you're targeting four million you're at 1400 right now you've got 700 paying customers you launched last year in 2022 um take me back to your first customer how did you get that customer signed up and paying so um you know I I actually owned a trucking company myself so I come from the technology background I have done 25 years of truck uh technology implementation large you know um products and stuff like that and I started Trucking Company when I was doing the trucking company I found this that there's no solution to actually manage your compliance and um you know seven out of 10 trucking companies go out of business because of the compliance issues either they are not safe to operate or they have any compliance issues so every um when you say you run a trucking company like can I like how many trucks did you have on your balance sheet for your for your company 20 trucks at the top 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 valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason 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the truck and then you have to make sure they're compliant to actually make money doing deliveries and driving that is correct so you have to have a compliant drivers who actually do the drug and alcohol Consortium you also need to have the vehicle maintenance records you also need to do a lot of additional things on the safety um you know you get a DOT inspection on the road and if there's any non-compliance they will flag you and then your safety scores will you know take a hit so all those kind of things so when I was doing it I found that there's no one single solution available there's a lot of service provider what they were doing was they were doing manual like Excel you know OneDrive kind of stuff and I don't get visibility into my Trucking Company you know how I'm doing you know whether I'm safe I'm compliant I'm not complying and there was nobody could actually give me the services so I created my own small system because every company has to go through the audit first year within first year it's called new when did you write the first line of code for Fleet Drive 360 what year uh 2020 okay 2020. and then when did you bring on the first paying customer uh it was 2022. but you were the first customer right uh no um I was I sold my company but uh I had a few connections you know my friends um uh those started using and they really found it very extremely helpful so they actually brought more customers for me well wait real quick I imagine my listeners are curious about the trucking company so you sold your trucking company that had 20 trucks huh yeah what what what what would you make an average month on one truck uh it's about you know you you can make about uh 5 000. that's cash flow net or gross isn't it and what what about gross uh gross will be about uh twelve to fifteen thousand interesting and then and then the 10k of expenses those are things like licenses paying the driver all that kind of stuff that is correct yeah it depends you know if you have a um you know there's two kind of things one is a spot Market where you actually go on the load mode and get the loads other one is the you know contractor rates um you can make it the gross revenue anywhere from twelve thousand to twenty five thousand and when covet hit it was like even going up to 30 000 a month so these 20 trucks that you owned were all based in Atlanta uh yeah my office was in Atlanta but they were going all across the US so did you did you employ 20 drivers full-time on your payroll or did you let them rent your trucks and then they could do what they wanted they were my employees interesting okay so and then how where would you get orders from like how would you know you needed to take a delivery to Illinois so uh there are brokers and they're called the freight brokers so they they're the top three um um um JB Hunt um then tql then RC uh uh CH Robinson I'm gonna interview I'm gonna go get all of them on my interview album okay so you get your your deal flow your sales from these freight brokers um and then that and then you deploy your drivers your 20 drivers right interesting interesting now can you finance the trucks like will someone give you a loan for you to buy the truck and then yeah so um I was leasing most of my trucks and only on fuel trucks because leasing I have to you know not worry about the maintenance and truck uh you know repairs and everything uh leasing company takes characters so I was leasing rather than buying but a lot of people that's included that lease cost is included in the 10 000 monthly expense per truck right that is correct okay okay then you said you sold this again I only know B2B SAS how does a trucking company get like what you had get valued um so it's normally the ebita three to five times of a beta um so depending if you're making a 5 000 net per truck multiplied times three x you sold your company for something like fifteen thousand dollars per active truck that is correct yeah okay so 15 000 times 20 trucks you sold it for around 300 Grand something like that that's good why sell it yeah because I wanted to focus on the technology because I found there's a gap there and um this can scale because I cannot scale my trucking company to thousand trucks right there's always lot of overheads running a trucking company you know all all drivers you know insurances accidents and stuff like that uh but the solution uh because I saw that people liked it so I'll tell you one thing when I did my first audit uh with FMCSA and the auditor came and he liked my solution so much he said you know I wish everybody had this and that's when I started thinking you know I should build it that's amazing okay so what do customers pay you on average today at Fleet Drive 360. so we have multiple products we have subscription also to our platform but then we also have uh annual uh recurring products then we have one time also like you can do in-app purchases so just looking at the recurring Revenue how much is that like would you say per customer uh about 300 uh per year or a month about a year oh wow okay so I mean can I take 300 times 700 customers you're doing 210 000 bucks a year that's the recurring um monthly right uh but it's they pay by the driver so we have 1400 so 1403 uh that's what you would do oh so you're doing like 400 000 500 000 a month in recurring Revenue a year in recurring Revenue yeah it's based on the drivers the number of drivers so every driver there's a recurring fee interesting so if you're doing about five you know you're doing about uh uh 35 40 000 a month right now in recurring revenue and but it's annualized so 500k 400k a year how much on top of that do you make off like one-time fees and things like that um so average uh sales to a customer today is about 500 to 600 and out of its 300 is recurring uh which will go towards the Reckoning and then rest is one time so it's so it's like a 50 50 split yeah I would say yeah yeah so did you well you do you'll do more than a million dollars in Revenue than over the next 12 months that is good yeah so uh [Music] yeah 20 23 we are targeting actually 3 million with all these big customers like Enterprise customers so right now our platform can cater three categories one is uh the small carriers which is Mom and Pop shops then second one is the service providers like you know I was using a service provider who was doing compliance for me they have their own customers they can use our platform to support their customers and the third one is Enterprise big companies like you know uh JB Hunt or um any any big you know um uh trucking company has thousand two thousand five thousand trucks they can use our platform as well and if you're targeting three million this year what did you finish with in 2022 uh 2022 will be finished with uh about 700 to 800 okay but we started only half of the year right you know we only did from there yeah we'll say 750 there and so what have you bootstrapped all this or have you raised capital um it's kind of bootstrapped uh but we did uh do the debt financing and um you know we raised 250k that um and then also 250k uh initially you know at uh 6.5 million valuation so is your pre-seed round yeah kind of interesting and and when you raise the uh the debt what is the interest rate that you pay on that um I don't remember sorry I I think it's probably in the game at eight or ten something how much time do you have to pay it back um I think we have about three years three to five years so years and was this from a bank or a government or an individual is this a private a private private owner oh so it's like a friend of yours that's rich or something yeah yeah yeah oh I see why did he or she want to give you debt instead of equity um because they didn't know much about um you know so I think it was 50 50. so I I told you like 250 words for the equity and uh 50 you know 250 they gave on their interest they just wanted to balance it out okay well that's good that helps you save a little bit of equity um right how has the debt work for you is it been good will you do more debt in the future you think I would do the debt in future for sure more than equity why is that yeah because I I think you know when we start um we know that you know where we can take this company too right you know right now it's blowing and it's growing very fast so even if I have to give up you know certain percentage Equity um I know it's much more valuable three years from now which you know I can earn cash anytime yeah yeah well I've founder Pat's got 150 million dollar fund and all we do is non-dilutive capital to SAS Founders so we could give you up to 50 of your ARR at a rate a discount rate something between 7 and 12 so we'll chat afterwards I'd love to help you out sure that's awesome all right all right tell me more about your teams today how many folks are full time so we um so I you know we have a offshore Development Center in Bangalore um my other company like matromax um we do a lot of it and BPO um so we have about seven people developers uh we have uh seven or eight sales people onshore in us and then we have about uh six or seven operations folks okay so like 20 22 people something like that six of them offshore Dev shop okay this makes ton this makes tons of sense now um let me think what else am I missing here um I mean how do you go from how do you go you mentioned you're adding 200 300 customers per month right now that's incredible growth how are you adding customers uh is primarily cold calling uh so we get the data of all the new companies that get registered and uh how do you get that data is that public the government you're required from a Government Directory the the third party um companies who actually you know provide access to the data and they collect all the data from you know our different sources what's the name of a truck data company that you can get a lot of this data from I would say one name that I know is Carrier 411 carry or what four one one oh carrier four one one and they'll tell you like how many new truck companies are registered in California in the past 30 days that's correct and then you get their phone number and just call them and say let's make sure you're compliant it's a 300 bucks a year per driver yeah and it's mandatory right because they they also know that once they get into the trucking industry they need to do the compliance it's it's part of it within six months they're going to get audited and if they don't have the information they will be in a kind of uh um shutdown uh operation or they will have you know sort of yeah so if this is required imagine there's a lot of companies doing this who's your biggest competitor so I would say data color and four lay Services those are my competitors but they don't know I think the first one again what was their name uh JJ Keller JJ Keller interesting okay and fully Services f o l e y Services huh okay so no are they software as well or no uh they have a little bit of platform but it's more manual you know they just manage the processes but not the platform yeah well listen this is a heck of a story we hope you hit your three million Target this year and hit that big growth rate and stake and you'll keep using non-dilutive Capital to keep your Equity uh on we're out of time here though let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite Business book uh zero to one number two is there a CEO you're following or studying my all-time favorite is Steve Jobs um but I right now I'm following you know Warren Buffett number three what's your favorite online tool for building Fleet Drive um so we use the Microsoft team a lot yeah number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night about five or six and situation married single kids married with two kids one in college one in high school two teenagers that's amazing oh man how old are you uh I'll be turning 50 this uh this August very cool so 49 years on young last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. I should have started when I was in 20. I started very late guys this is a great story of a Founder who built a tool for himself he ran his own trucking company in Atlanta had 20 trucks he made 15 000 top line per truck 5 000 net ended up selling that business for a 3X ebitda multiple because he got excited about the software the compliance software for trucking companies he now has over 700 trucking businesses signed up which equals 1400 drivers that pay on average 300 per year but that's just the recurring fee there's another 300 bucks per year they make per driver on one time fees so called around a million dollar run rate today he's hoping to break 3 million this year up from 750 000 done in 2022 it's fleetdrive360.com one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm 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 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 2PM Central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the Subscribe button below here on YouTube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SAS World whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else I don'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 SAS 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 nathanlacka.com forward slash slack in the meantime I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube I'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows but I do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys's support all right I'll be in the comments see ya