How Flyte CEO Shilpa Sharma grew Flyte to $3.6M revenue with a 2 person team in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is shopa sharma she's the co-founder and ceo of flight she's passionate about entrepreneurship and innovative ideas now but on this tool which is an automated note-taking application called flight ai.com showpoi you're ready to take us to the top yeah for sure hi everyone my name is shilpa i'm the ceo and co-founder of flight flight is a ai platform that creates well-organized meeting minutes and action items for all business professionals who don't like taking meeting minutes manually this is an ai powered platform so you can focus on the conversation without worrying about meeting minutes and shopa what do people pay you on average per month to use the tool so we are in the beta program as of now we are yet to launch the platform in couple of weeks we will launch it uh it's a standard three-tier light plus and pro light is like if you have five hours of usage you can pay 10 bucks for a month if you're a professional have a usage of around 16 hours it's 29 bucks and if you're a power users like sales person customer success or podcasters maybe uh you will be paying 89 bucks for 50 hours uh in a month okay so your pre revenue today then correct your pre-revenue when did you start when did you first write the first line of code for the platform uh we started writing code early this year so really founded this company in january 2021 but this idea came last year through our conversation with one of our friends it was a very casual chat and he just mentioned how painful it is to take notes manually so yeah it started and we started exploring technologies tech we started working with customers as well and we are here today how much have you spent so far on the mvp um it's uh we are a team of two co-founders my husband is developing the product and i'm the business development person so we haven't spent a lot it's really like less than 500 bucks to uh pay for infrastructure and we are able to capture a lot of leads just by word of mouth we have a pipeline of over 300 350 users who have signed up through our website no marketing dollars spent yet and how did they get on your wait list how they find you so we go to podcast webinar conferences and pitch events so we participated in a seattle angel conference we participated in female founder alliance that's against seattle-based company and we have uh done two accelerators programs started with founder institute seattle and recently graduated from tech stars as well so all these communities have helped us to like have the word of mouth spread the word and bringing these people on our platform and chopa you have to remind me with those accelerators how much capital did they put into the business uh founder institute is initial stage uh accelerators so they did they don't put any like capital uh but tech starts does so they have around 120 k of investment in our business and and i forget it's a pretty standard percentage-wise how much equity do they get uh found institute gets like they have a warrant so around four percent and then tax starts at six percent did all that does that feel all fair to you having just gone through both programs so my background has been in tech operations working for 1400 companies but never had done a startup which is like tech startup so i'm a first-time founder and wanted to learn a lot from experienced people so for me uh at this stage we believe that this was the right choice given we have like limited experience doing these things so with techstars and fi network we found a lot of founders who have exited the companies and have great background in like launching tech products so that has been a great help so totally justified so uh tech stars has six percent and then fi and fi network has four percent and then you and your husband own the rest of the business that's right that's great okay so you're building the waitlist when is the magic moment when are you turning on the paywall um in couple of weeks so we have built the platform we have over 70 users who are already using our platform they started with us like beta access but they're continuing to use it we are getting great feedback we have been able to develop a lot of features based on customer feedback so yeah that's that's exciting it's been seven weeks now into the beta program and in a couple of weeks we'll add our payment system and start onboarding people on on our page eight years now shopa you and your husband have been working on this site sounds like for the past 10 months or so uh i imagine you guys left your full-time jobs to do this you haven't been able to pay yourself from the company yet so how are you paying for like rent and food and personal expenses that's a great question uh actually i was working full-time until like april this year so it's been couple months that when we have started doing everything full-time but my husband has been working full-time on this for a long time uh yeah we are using our savings to pay our rents and food but we are expecting like post revenue company in couple of weeks because we are at the stage now where we do see people liking the product like the notes created by flight and i would love to spread the word and see like if we can we can get more traction on our website on our platform and would love to get like people just using our platform to create notes so hopefully by end of this year we'll be post revenue and that way we want to turn the wheel and that would be an inflection point for us if you look at your current savings and your current personal expenses you can sort of calculate a life runway right how many how many months can you keep playing with flight before it has to be making substantial revenue to support you guys for next seven eight months that's pretty okay for us to continue to run the business and um have our like run rate to a point where we feel like this would be comfortably we can spend like on our rents and stuff but yeah it's it's pretty good runway and you're in seattle here in seattle right seattle's not rent's not cheap there oh i'm not based in seattle i'm currently in toronto i'm based in canada uh we incorporate our company in the us and started with founder institute seattle who kept our headquarters there very cool okay so just the two of you right now getting ready to launch um what is your initial price point going to be what's the cheapest price it's the light year that's 10 bucks for a month uh five hours of usage is that too cheap i think so given the given the quality of notes that we create it's a value for money so why not launch at a thousand bucks a month so these price points are coming from customer validation calls so if like we are talking to sales people or podcaster investors marketing managers it's all coming based on their like usage and all other b2b sas platforms they have been using so it's kind of like benchmarking against our competitors as well as the offering that we are providing as part of platform uh based on all those things like customer validation value that we are providing it's not 1000 but 10 bucks for light usage five hours if they are a premium user using for like more than 50 hours then it's going to be 90 bucks so that's what we believe will always continue to discover more things as we become post revenue right now we are free revenue so it's all based on our interviews with potential customers so we'll explore that more nathan what does five hours mean do i turn this on on every zoom call and auto takes messages and so if a zoom cost 20 minutes that's 20 minutes use it of the five hours exactly i see are you guys in the zoom marketplace uh we are working on that so right now it's a web application you can just use the link similar to monday.com or asana where you can just sign in and start using it we have recording and uploading features so as long as you have an audio or if you're using recording feature to create an audio it'll create notes for you action items and everything uh we are working on adding ourselves on zoom marketplace and having some integrations on salesforce and hubspot so that sales people can use it comfortably and easily is your plan to stay bootstrapped or you guys think you'll raise uh we plan to raise so right now like in beta program and getting like initial customer traction that was okay with us to just use our own money and tech stars money but we'll we'll open our like a pre-seed round by end of october around where we'll raise uh some money to continue our growth and have more people on the team and have some marketing amount that we can spend on uh to get more people on our platform how much will you target to raise in october um we are targeting around 750k okay yeah and and obviously it's october now so you think you'll probably you're trying to close up before the end of the year uh by early next year because i believe by like december or so we won't get a lot of like meetings from people so i think by q1 2022 we should be able to complete the round but yes starting to get like investor crm all the pipeline and stuff engaging with people to just get the traction there so targeting 750k uh what cap do you think you'll raise that or what valuation would you target um our pre-money valuation target is around between like seven and eight million but we'll see like we'll see how it goes we'll just have a conversation with a lot of investors to see how the market values our company and that's why we want to first see how the traction goes how...