FolkTalk revenue, CEO Armaan Puri, team size, customer count, churn, and more in 2023.

folktalk.in helps you translate your videos into multiple language instantly using AI they align video with the audio including pauses they've got 11 on their beta list so far that got this through cold emails there's four co-founders Armand's got the most equity and they also set up an ESOP pool right to start to motivate folks like the one engineer that's doing some work for them right now hoping to go to Mark and launch their first price plan later this year their bootstrapped so far you can check them out at folktalk.in hey folks my guest today is Armand Peery he's an AI researcher and entrepreneur with experience at top research labs in India and Singapore he's created an Innovative vernacular of AI products resulting in multiple patents and research papers with demonstrated Market success today he's working on automated dubbing for creators at folktalk.in our model are you ready to take us to the top definitely all right talk to me about how a Creator a customer who's paying you that's a Creator and how they use you uh right so currently the way a customer would use us is simply by providing their product link or their video link I should say and the target language that they want us to convert the video in so and also we ask the the Creator to specify the kind of features that they want us to include uh in the converted video so our offering includes things like nip synchronization which is also our USB that we offer high quality lip synchronization without uh sacrificing on video quality which has been a serious concern for creators and also voice matching where we try to match the Cadence the speech style uh the pauses that are particular Creator would take in their original language and convert it into the target language so these are some of the inputs that we require so just to be clear if corporate McDonald's records a new message they want to send out to all of their worldwide employees they could take that one 30 second video and in um in a you know English right the American language in English put it in your system and you're going to create the take the exact same video but the mouth is going to be Ai and it's going to speak in sort of Indian or Chinese or Russian whatever the languages that you need to convert it to yes precisely that so let's say if the target language is Hindi then they would uh the lips would move in a manner that this actual speaker or the original speaker is speaking the language and we will also ensure that the voice Timber and the the pauses that are required those are at the right moment so the audio also matches with the video so yes that's exactly right it would we would try to make it look seamless that's great what do customers pay you on average per month for this so uh right now we are in our beta stage we have unpaid customers who are uh using our product and testing it and uh getting ready to kind of uh use it commercially but on average a content creator would pay us about 150 dollars a month and uh it's different for Enterprises as you mentioned in McDonald's so if McDonald's were to use it for their internal or even for their ad campaigns then our pricing would be somewhere around a thousand dollars for uh Enterprises for Ed tech and and so forth but just to be clear you're guessing you don't have paying customers yet when can you launch pricing uh right so what's taking so long I would say is uh the fit between the expectation that we have from our uh from the content creators so we have been able to match the expectations on the video end so as you mentioned the lip synchronization and the visual aspect of the video is something uh that we specialize in we are trying to expand our range on languages so we have uh for example Hindi creators who are ready to use our product for English and for Spanish uh so they're ready to use it in those languages uh but for Indian Regional languages which are in AI terms there would be low resource languages they don't have as much data available those are the challenging languages models but we do have Solutions and we are acquiring customers or unpaid customers right now who are expressing interest in converting to 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 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 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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 evaluation 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 so how many are on the beta list right now how many have signed up but are not paying uh right so right now we have 11 uh customers that are on our uh built our list are not paying so out of that one is a pretty big Ed tech company so inside the edtech company they have a multiple Educators and instructors uh so if we're not taking into account them are we not accounting for them as separate from the edtech platform so that's just one customer that's great counting them as and the others are all content creators ranging from uh about a million subscribers to a few hundred Arman how did you find the first these first 11 beta users right so uh that's interesting because uh our journey has been has relied a lot on network so uh I am connected directly to a lot of people in the content creator space one of my co-founders also is directly in touch with uh Educators and content creators and so about 50 of them we have acquired through uh simply emails gold emails and pitching our products what is the subject line of the cold email say uh the subject line of our code email reads um so we have experimented with different things but what seems to uh work best is uh acquire new audiences and increase Audience by 40 something you know Empire freezing of course I don't have it uh by heart but something along those lines where we instead of uh talking about ourselves we try to talk about the uh customer or the understanding and are any of these beta users have they said you know have they signed and said let us use it for free and then we'll start paying a thousand dollars a month or have they no one's committed to any future Revenue yet either right so uh that's what we're working on right now so to answer it uh directly no one has commented at this moment but we have verbal confirmation from uh about three content creators and the big entity platform so that's one of our uh big wins at the moment that we have the edtech platform on board we are creating the and you keep saying we do you have one other co-founder I actually have two other co-founders so three uh yes there's four there's four of you total four of us did you guys just play nice and split Equity 25 each uh so it's a almost it's almost like that so I originally uh started working on the product so just to avoid a situation where we are split two and two and we are stuck on a decision uh there is about two percent extra uh with me at the moment so that we can proceed and not uh create a debt so you own 27 and the three of them own like 23 24 percent in fact I see very cool and have you guys bootstrap today or have you raised capital no we are we're completely bootstrapped and uh our plan is to acquire uh at least 10 customers and then think of uh raising Capital when did you launch the company when did you start working on this so uh I started working on the AI algorithm part uh while I was at my previous uh job so even there I was working for a conversational AI or vernacular company or where I sort of uh talked about what year was this right this was last year this was uh 2020 to July so that's when I started uh working on the product development I have went through a few rounds of iteration of development I got feedback from friends and family and uh I had a decent working product by October and then in November I uh gathered my other co-founders and I uh because of course I what I realized was I was uh decently good at writing code and uh creating uh like the base for the product uh and also strategizing how we can take this forward but for marketing for sales and for those things uh I thought it would be best to expand the team and uh get it started as quickly as possible so in remember we formed the team and in January we started uh speaking with customers interesting and what are you doing right now to try and get a sense of what they're willing to pay if if you're doing customer calls how are you structuring those calls what questions are you asking what are you watching and measuring in the product UI right so what we are specifically asking customers is uh three things essentially so we want to identify whether the pain point for a customer is the uh translation which would be uh let's say the original video is in English and we are converting to Spanish then I'll be using some uh very typical Spanish words which normally a person would not use in their daily usage which is which often happens with AI translation systems uh so we try to identify pain points in text or in audio if the audio sounds unnatural or it sounds robotic or it doesn't match with the original speakers uh speaking style or is the problem with the video so we have sort of broken down deep uh potential pain points into these three elements of text video and audio and that's what we try to figure out very good and it's just four of you today or is there other folks on the team uh so there's four of us and there is uh another uh Tech person who's helping us with the uh the whole dashboard that we want how are you getting into work for you to give them Equity are you paying them uh right so the fifth person would uh get Equity from the ESOP pool and of course the co-founders are working uh is there an ASAP pool set up today yes we already have the split uh so that's what we're basing the fifth how big did you set up that ASAP well at the start so they to start with we've set up about 10 to 15 is what the soft pool size is at the moment and from that we are uh planning to okay so you don't own 27 so you own something more like 20 and then your three co-founders own like 18 19 and then the ESOP is 15 that's how I get to 100. right right right exactly so from the 1990 we uh split that way so as to avoid the deadlock problem that makes a lot of sense but we're certainly rooting for you you're off to a good start in the meantime though let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite book my favorite book would be denial of death by Honest would recommend it to anyone I can number two is there a CEO you're following or studying uh not one in particular but uh I am following uh I mean I try to gather things from a lot of CEOs but not one in particular I can't pinpoint number three what's your favorite online tool for building folktalk online Tool uh that would be hugging face that's uh quite a boon for anybody who's an AI and who's trying to build an AI program what's it called hugging face yes hugging face got it number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night uh six to seven I would say on average and what you said what's your situation married single kids uh if there's a fourth option I take that not not single but not married yeah fair enough uh so no kids right now no and how and how old are you Armon and 25 25 last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. uh something I wish I knew well there are a lot of things I wish when I was waiting uh one that I can think of right now is uh consistent 80 is better than an inconsistent hundred percent that's probably one thing I would like to do that's a good one guys folktalk.in helps you translate your videos into multiple language instantly using AI they align video with the audio including pauses they've got 11 on their beta list so far they got this through cold emails there's four co-founders Armand's got the most equity and they also set up an ESOP pool right to start to motivate folks like the one engineer that's doing some work for them right now hoping to go to Mark and launch their first price plan later this year their bootstrapped so far you can check them out at folktalk.in our mom thanks for taking us to the top 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 our poo CAC 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 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