FolkTalk Team Size (2026)

[00:00] Folktalk. In hopes you translate your videos in a 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. Armaan'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 market and launch their [00:20] first price plan later this year. They're bootstrapped so far. You can check them out at folktalk.in. Hey, folks. My guest today is Armaan Puri. 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 that demonstrated market success. Today, he's working on automated dubbing for creators at folktalk. In. Armaan, are you ready to take us to the [00:46] top? [00:47] >> Definitely. [00:48] Alright. [00:48] >> Good to be here. [00:49] Talk to me about how a creator, a customer who's paying you that's a creator and how they use you. [00:55] >> 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 creator to specify the kind of features that they want us to include in the converted video. So our offering includes things like lip synchronization, which is also our USB that we offer high quality lip synchronisation [01:29] >> without 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, the pauses that a 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. [01:49] So just to be clear, if corporate McDonald's records a new message they wanna send out to all of their worldwide employees, they could take that one thirty second video and in in, you know, English, right, the American language in English, put it in your system, and you're gonna create the take the exact same video, but the mouth is gonna be AI, and it's gonna speak in sort of Indian or Chinese or Russian or whatever the language [02:11] is that you need to convert it to. [02:13] >> Yes. Precisely that. So let's say if the target language is Hindi, then they would the lips would move in a manner that this actual speaker or the original speaker is speaking the language. And we would also ensure that the voice timbre 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. [02:39] That's great. What do customers pay you on average per month for this? [02:43] >> So right now, we are in our beta stage. We have unpaid customers who are using our product and testing it and getting ready to kind of use it commercially. But on average, a content creator would pay us about $150 a month. And it's different for enterprises, as you mentioned, 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 enterprises, [03:13] >> for ed tech, and and so forth. [03:14] But just to be clear, you're guessing. You don't have paying customers yet? [03:19] >> No. We don't have paying [03:20] customers so long? What what when can you launch pricing? [03:24] >> Right. So what's taking so long, I would say, is the fit between the expectation that we have from our 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 that we specialize in. We are trying to expand our range of languages. So we have, for example, Hindi creators who are ready to use our product [03:54] >> for English and for Spanish. So they are ready to use it in those languages. But for Indian regional languages, which are in AI terms, they would be low resource languages. They don't have as much data available. Those are the challenging languages for us. But we do have solutions and we are acquiring customers or unpaid customers right now who are expressing interest in converting to. [04:22] Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this, you love watching these interviews with SaaS founders, but imagine if we all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 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 Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you connect your [04:45] Stripe account, you see your valuation real time. You can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna get [05:10] a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation, Private equity firm is different. If you're gonna 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. [05:23] >> Right? So [05:23] 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 founder share with us on the show. So traction 1,200,000 seed round 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter [05:47] by the event. Maybe you only wanna 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. We'll 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 dataset of SaaS valuations than [06:13] what you can get now inside of Founderpath. 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 wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link, this link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. Or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products, click on get your valuation here, and [06:37] 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. Alright. 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? [06:51] >> Right. So right now we have 11 customers that are on our beta list or not paying. So out of that, one is a pretty big ed tech company. So inside the ed tech company, they have multiple educators and instructors. So, if we're not taking into account them, we're not accounting for them as separate from the EdTech platform. So, that's just one customer that we're counting them as. And the others are all content creators ranging from about [07:23] >> a million subscribers to a few 100. [07:25] Armaan, how did you find the fur these first 11 beta users? [07:29] >> Right. So that's interesting because our journey has been has relied a lot on network. So, 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 educators and content creators. So about 50% of them, we have acquired through simply emails, cold emails and pitching our product and [07:58] What does the subject line of the cold email say? [08:02] >> The subject line of our cold email reads so we have experimented with different things, but what seems to work best is [08:12] >> acquire new audiences and increase audience by 40%. Something wrong. I'm paraphrasing, of course. I don't have it by heart, but something along those lines where we instead of talking about ourselves, we try to talk about the customer or the Understood. [08:30] 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? [08:42] >> Right. So that's what we're working on right now. So to answer it directly, no one has committed at this moment, but we have verbal confirmation from about three d content creators and the big edtech platform. So that's one of our big wins at the moment that we have the ed tech platform on board. We are kind of creating the [09:02] And you keep saying we. Do you have one other cofounder? [09:06] >> I actually have three other cofounders. So Three? Yes. [09:10] There's four there's four of you total. [09:12] >> Four of us. [09:13] Did you guys just play nice and split equity 25 each? [09:18] >> So it's an almost. It's almost like that. So I originally 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, there is about 2% extra with me at the moment so that we can proceed and not create a deadlock. [09:37] So you own 27% [09:39] and the three of them own, like, 23, 24%? Correct. Correct. I see. Very cool. And have you guys bootstrapped to date or have you raised capital? [09:47] >> No. We are we're completely bootstrapped and our plan is to acquire at least 10 customers and then think of raising capital. [09:57] When did you launch the company? When did you start working on this? [10:01] >> So I started working on the AI algorithm part while I was at my previous job. So even there, I was working for a conversational AI vernacular company where I sort of [10:14] What year was this? [10:17] >> Right. This was last year. This was twenty twenty two July. So that's when I started working on the product development. I went through a few rounds of iteration of development. I got feedback from friends and family, and I had a decent working product by October. And then in November, I gathered my other co founders and I because, of course, I what I realized was I was decently good at writing code and creating like the base for [10:50] >> the product and also strategizing how we can take this forward. But for marketing, for sales and for those things, I thought it would be best to expand the team and get it started as quickly as possible. So in November, we formed the team and in January, started speaking with customers. [11:10] Interesting. And what are you doing right now [11:15] 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? [11:23] >> Right. So what we are specifically asking customers is three things, essentially. So we want to identify whether the pain point for a customer is the translation, which would be, let's say the original video is in English and we're converting to Spanish. Then are we using some very typical Spanish words which normally a person would not use in their daily usage, which often happens with AI translation systems. So, we try to identify pain points in text or [11:55] >> in audio if the audio sounds unnatural or it sounds robotic or it doesn't match with the original speaker's speaking style or is the problem with the video. So we have sort of broken down the potential pain points into these three elements of text, video, and audio. That's what we try to figure out. [12:17] Very good. And it's it's just four of you today, is there other folks on the team? [12:21] >> So there's four of us, and there is another tech person who's helping us with the the whole dashboard that we want. [12:30] How are getting into work for you to give them equity? Are you paying them? [12:34] >> Right. So the fifth person would get equity from the ESOP pool, And, of course, the cofounders are working [12:43] Is there an ESOP pool set up today? [12:46] >> Yes. We already have the split. [12:48] So that's what we're basing the fifth How [12:51] big did you set up that ESOP pool at the start? [12:54] >> So the to start with, we've set up about 10 to fifth 15% is what the ESOP pool size is at the moment. And from that, we are planning to [13:04] Okay. So you don't own 27%. So you own something more like 20% and then your three co founders own like eighteen, nineteen, and then the ESOP is 15%. That's how we get to a 100. [13:13] >> Right. Right. Right. Right. Exactly. So from the 90%, we split that way so as to avoid the deadlock problem. [13:21] That makes a lot of sense. Well, 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? [13:29] >> My favorite book would be Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. Would recommend it to anyone I can. [13:35] Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? [13:39] >> Not one in particular, but I am following I mean, I try to gather things from a lot of CEOs, but not one in particular. I can't pinpoint. [13:49] Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building folktalk? [13:54] >> Online tool. That would be Hugging Face. That's quite a boon for anybody who's in AI and who's trying to build an AI program. What's it called? Hugging Face. H u g g Yes. Hugging Face. [14:09] Got it. Number four. How many hours of sleep do you get every night? [14:13] >> Six to seven, I would say on average. [14:15] And what's your what's your situation? Married, single, kids? [14:21] >> If there's a fourth option, I'd take that. Not not single, but not married. [14:25] Got it. Fair enough. So no kids right now? [14:28] >> No. No. [14:29] And how and how old are you, Armaan? [14:31] >> I'm 25. [14:32] 25. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20. [14:37] >> Something I wish I knew well, there are a lot of things I wish I knew when I was 20. [14:44] >> One that I can think of right now is consistent 80% is better than an inconsistent 100%. That's probably one thing I would like to know. [14:54] That's a good one, guys. Folktalk. In hopes you translate your videos in a 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. Armaan'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 [15:15] to market and launch their first price plan later this year. They're bootstrapped so far. You can check them out at folktalk.in. Armaan, thanks for taking us to top. [15:23] >> Thank you, Nathan. Thanks for having me. [15:26] 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 [15:51] 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 SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a big [16:13] 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 SaaS 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 [16:35] up for that at nathanlatka.com slack. 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 [16:54] people. We got to push them away. 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