Flyte Revenue, Valuation & Funding (2024)

[00:00] Hey, folks. My guest today is Shilpa Sharma. She's the co founder and CEO of Flyte. She's passionate about entrepreneurship and innovative ideas, now building this tool, which is an automated note taking application called flyteai.com. Shilpa, you ready to take us to the top? [00:16] >> Yeah, for sure. Hi, everyone. My name is Shilpa. I'm the CEO and co founder of Flyte AI. Flyte AI is an 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, you can focus on the conversation without worrying about meeting minutes. [00:36] And Shilpa, what do people pay you on average per month to use the tool? [00:40] >> So we are in the beta program as of now. We are yet to launch the platform. In a couple of weeks, we will launch it. It's a standard three tier light plus and pro. Light is like if you have five hours of usage, you can pay $10 for a month. If you are a professional, have a usage of around sixteen hours, it's $29. And if you're a power users like salesperson, customer success, or podcasters maybe, you [01:05] >> will be paying $89 for fifty hours in a month. [01:09] Okay. So you're pre revenue today then, correct? [01:12] >> You're pre revenue. [01:13] When did you first write the first line of code for the platform? [01:18] >> 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 technology stack. We started working with customers as well and we are here today. [01:42] How much have you spent so far on the MVP? [01:48] >> 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 to 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, three fifty users who have signed up through our website. No marketing dollars spent yet. [02:11] And how did they get on your waitlist? How did they find you? [02:15] >> So we go to podcast, webinar, conferences, and pitch events. So we participated in Seattle Angel Conference. We participated in Female Founder Alliance. That's again Seattle based company. And we have done two accelerators programs started with Founder Institute Seattle and recently graduated from Techstars as well. So all these communities have helped us to have the word-of-mouth spread the word and bringing these people on our platform. [02:44] And Shilpa, you have to remind me, with those accelerators, how much capital did they put into the business? [02:50] >> Founder Institute is initial stage accelerators, so they don't put any capital, but Techstars does, so they have around 120 k of investment in our business. [03:02] And I forget, it's a pretty standard percentage wise. How much equity do they get? [03:08] >> Founder Institute gets, like, they have a warrant, so around 4% and then Techstars at 6%. [03:14] Does that feel fair to you having just gone through both programs? [03:18] >> So my background has been in tech operations working for Fortune 100 companies, but never had done a startup, which is like tech startups. So I'm a first time founder and wanted to learn a lot from experienced people. So for me, at this stage, we believe that this was the right choice, given we have limited experience doing these things. With Techstars and FI Network, we found a lot of founders who have exited the companies and have great [03:46] >> background in launching tech products. So that has been a great help. So totally justified. [03:52] So Techstars has 6% and then FI Network has 4%, and then you and your husband own the rest of the business. [04:00] >> That's right. [04:01] That's great. Okay. So you're building a waitlist. When is the magic moment? When are you turning on the paywall? [04:07] >> 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 beta access, but they are 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 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 [04:32] >> people on on our paid tiers. [04:34] Now, Shilpa, you and your husband have been working on this site. Sounds like for the past ten months or so. 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? [04:48] >> That's a great question. Actually, I was working full time until like April this year. So it's been a couple of months when we have started doing everything full time, but my husband has been working full time on this for a long time. 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 [05:15] >> liking the product, liking the notes created by Flyte and I would love to spread the word and see if we can get more traction on our website, on our platform, and would love to get 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. [05:38] If you look at your current savings and your current personal expenses, you can sort of calculate a life runway, right? How many months can you keep playing with Flyte AI before it has to be making substantial revenue to support you guys? [05:51] >> For next seven, eight months, it's pretty okay for us to continue to run the business and have our run rate to a point where we feel like this would be comfortably We can spend on our rents and stuff. But yeah, it's pretty good runway. [06:07] And Yeah. You're in Seattle. You're in Seattle, right? Seattle's not rent's not cheap there. [06:12] >> Oh, I'm not based in Seattle. I'm currently in Toronto. I'm based in Canada. We incorporated our company in The US and started with Founder Institute in Seattle, so kept our headquarters there. [06:23] Very cool. Okay. So just the two of you right now, getting ready to launch. What is your initial price point going to be? What's the cheapest price? [06:30] >> It's the light tier. That's $10 for a month, five hours of usage. [06:35] Is that too cheap? [06:37] >> I think so. Given the quality of notes that we create, it's a value for money. [06:43] So why not launch at $1,000 a month? [06:48] >> So these price points are coming from customer validation calls. So if we are talking to salespeople or podcasters, investors, marketing managers, it's all coming based on their usage and all other B2B SaaS 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 our platform, based on all those things like customer validation value that we are providing. It's not thousand, but $10 [07:17] >> for light usage, five hours. If they are a premium user using for more than fifty hours, then it's going to be $90. So that's what we believe. We'll always continue to discover more things as we become post revenue. Right now we are pre revenue, so it's all based on our interviews with potential customers. So we'll explore that more, Nathan. [07:36] What does five hours mean? Do I turn this on on every Zoom call and it auto takes messages? So if a Zoom call is twenty minutes, that's twenty minutes used out of the five hours? [07:44] >> Exactly. [07:45] I see. Are you guys in the Zoom marketplace? [07:48] >> 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. Mhmm. We are working on adding ourselves on Zoom marketplace and having some integrations [08:11] >> on Salesforce and HubSpot so that salespeople can use it comfortably and easily. [08:16] Is your plan to stay bootstrapped or you guys think you'll raise? [08:20] >> We plan to raise. So right now, in beta program and getting initial customer traction, that was okay with us to just use our own money and tech stars money, but we'll open our pre seed round by end of October around where we'll raise some money to continue our growth and have more people on the team and have some marketing amount that we can spend on to get more people on our platform. [08:47] How much will you target to raise in October? [08:51] >> We are targeting around $750k. Okay. Yeah. [08:56] And and obviously, it's October now, so you think you'll probably you're trying to close that before the end of the year? [09:02] >> 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 q one twenty twenty two, we should be able to complete the round. But we are starting to get investor CRM, all the pipeline and stuff, engaging with people to just get the traction there. [09:21] Targeting $750k, what cap do you think you'll raise it or what valuation would you target? [09:27] >> Our pre money valuation target is around between like 7 and 8,000,000, but 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. That's why we want to first see how the traction goes, how many people are willing to pay for something that we are offering and all that. It depends on a lot of variables and I believe that would decide our exact valuation. Right [09:54] >> now it's just a ballpark figure, which we believe will be confirmed in a couple of months. [09:58] Pariko, I love this story. Now, you mentioned competitors a couple of times. Who do you think right now is sort of your closest competitor? [10:07] >> Our closest competitors are Otter dot ai and fireflies.ai. So those kind of automatic transcription tools that are creating transcriptions, they are actually a little bit different because we create well organized meeting minutes and action items. We do see these competitors are creating transcriptions. So that's why we wanted to get a little bit ahead and see if we can create something that's more useful to business professionals and that they don't just look for highlight notes or something [10:36] >> in a transcription that is like verbose transcript for a sixty minute meeting or so. [10:42] Mhmm. Interesting. Well, we will see what happens. Notetaking app space is obviously hot. Evernote is sort of an old player in the space, but we will see what happens. Let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, Shilpa, favorite business book? [10:56] >> Crossing the Chasm. [10:57] Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? [11:02] >> Virgin CEO. [11:05] Richard Branson? [11:05] >> Richard yeah. [11:07] Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building Flyte? [11:11] >> Online tool, meaning infrastructure or cloud system? [11:15] Whatever you want to define it as. [11:18] >> AWS. [11:20] Number three or four, how many hours of sleep do get every night? [11:23] >> Six to seven hours. [11:25] Okay. And situation? Well, we know you're married because you mentioned your husband, but any kiddos? [11:29] >> Not yet. [11:30] No kids. Okay. And do you mind me asking how old you are? [11:34] >> Between over 35. [11:37] Okay, fair enough. Last question, what's something you wish you knew when you were 20? [11:42] >> I wish I would have started doing my own business early on because this is something that's super exciting, and I'm loving every minute working on the startup. I've had multiple jobs in the past, but I feel like this is something I would have done earlier. [11:58] Guys, flyteai.com, automated note taking taking app. They've powered the business. They've been building it over the last nine months. They raised $120,000 to do that, mainly from tech stars. It took 6%, so call it 2,000,000 valuation. Founder Institute also got 4% warrants. The rest of the equity, Shilpa and her husband, the co founders, they still own. They're looking to launch here the next couple of weeks. They've got 70 beta users on the platform launching with a [12:18] price point at $10 a month. We will see what happens. Shilpa, thanks for taking us to the top. [12:23] >> Thank you so much, Nathan. Appreciate it. [12:27] One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM Central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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, ARPU, CAC, LTV, you name it, they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live. It is fun to watch every Thursday 1PM [12:52] Central. 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In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty 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. [13:55] We got to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. Alright, I'll be in the comments. See you.