How Foyer Work CEO Pratyush Rai grew Foyer Work to $24.8K revenue and 1 customers in 2024.

foyer.org they're helping maximize performance of engineering teams One Design partner today paying a hundred dollars per month they spent about fifteen thousand dollars on the MVP three co-founders each own 33 they raised 900 000 bucks in funding out of seven million valuation so they've got plenty of Runway to grow here as they look to onboard four to five new design paying design Partners in the next three months with a team of six hey folks my guest today is brought to you uh Rye he's the CEO at a company called foyer foyer is a team of former IIT graduates building a virtual project manager for software engineering teams you can find them at foyer.work you sure are you ready to take us to the top yep all right so foyer helps maximize performance of engineering team is what does that mean can you tell me the story of a customer that's currently using you yep so uh the the kind of problems our customers bring to us is basically they they are a small team of Engineers who are you know trying to get a bit more process driven uh let's say you know a a team of about 12 or 15 odd Engineers which was not following any sort of agile or you know mythology and who are you know uh now trying to uh trying to onboard in the right set of processes over jeera or and use GitHub in the right way so what we help them do is to get them the right Statistics over jeera and uh over GitHub so that you know they can start measuring them and also what are those what are the statistics is the number of pushes per engineer number of lines of code written what are those metrics uh so we we do not uh go at an individual level Matrix for uh things like number of lines of code are not the right target points for us what we focus more on is at a team level what are some of the aggregate metrics pertaining to you know commits uh per Engineers reviews for engineers and you know some of the process driven process related metrics like a are there any last deployments are there any hybrid tickets which are delayed and all of these are at Team levels not at an individual level so we promote a more Team level uh measurement as compared to an individual level measurement and what are some engineering teams paying for foia today what on average per month yep so we we charge somewhere between five to ten dollars per developer per month I think most of the existing tools are like way too expensive and and we have heard a lot of our customers complain about that uh that you know these are not affordable for startups their uh their prior plans are already designed keeping Enterprise customers in mind and that's why like we are charging uh what is more than we need to startups and what does the average team have when they sign up five seats 10 seats 100 seats uh so so we are targeting anywhere between 10 to 40 seats and uh and uh well the most most set of companies we work with are somewhere about 20 25 30 odd uh uh developers okay so 20 developers at 10 bucks a pop they're paying you on average 200 a month something like that yeah yeah and put this on a timeline for us when did you launch the business what year uh so we launched our business this year uh uh uh so we will host our product in multiple stages we followed a very lean approach uh we our first version was launched somewhere about in August our uh you know latest version was launched somewhere uh last week so so we are like very very new right now that's awesome do you have customers yet or your pre-revenue yeah we we are uh we are having uh two design Partners at this point uh and one of them is a pain design partner uh another is doing a trial it's going to convert into a paying design partnership what the one the design partner what does that mean how much do they pay for that yeah yeah so we we charge them a lower tier uh from our price point and what does that mean is that you know we are going to co-build our product with them we we get to understand how they are using it uh we have designed our product in a more flexible manner in order to you know cater to their specific needs it's not a self-served product which is there to launch uh you know for uh globally for our customers uh we have a pipeline of three more companies whom we are approaching uh as design Partners so you can you can think of them as a customer but a customer for whom we are going to you know sort of cater to uh in a much more closer way as compared to it what do they pay for that so for you to do engineering where are they paying a thousand dollars five thousand dollars what are they paying to be a design partner yeah yeah we we charge them the Lower Road here somewhere somewhere about five dollars per day 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 evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your founder path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different valuation private Equity Firm is different if you're going to 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 here right so 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 Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to 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 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 valuation 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 okay but if you're designing something that doesn't exist right why are they paying for a month for something that doesn't exist no no it exists so uh when we when we go to the design Partners we have a product which is ready what we do what we do is that we iterate with them in case if there is a specific requirement uh you know some sort of customization or personalization they would require we follow that approach so our design partners for us which helps us build a better product and we are we are you know sort of customizing our video so you have one paying customer today with 20 seats at 10 bucks to seats you're doing about 200 a month in Revenue yes that's great okay and how much did you spend personally building the MVP uh sorry I think I should just clarify it should it is five dollars so it's a hundred dollars per month Revenue yeah and how much we spend building our MVP um I think if we if we just uh uh um if I'm getting to the more correctly we spent somewhere about you know of 15 to 20 000 dollars in in the last uh three to four organs on our product part uh on our company expenses there have been some fixed expenses like laptops and all but like otherwise we spend a very very small amount of money building our MVP almost You Know Who provided that 15 000 was that your own money or did you raise money oh vvd some money uh from one uh one PC Fund in India and some Angel Investors and how much did you raise uh we we ended up raised uh to the north of 900 000 uh somewhere to the north of that yep and and why was it I mean why couldn't you fund this with your own money so that you could preserve equity and not get diluted so uh so we we started off you know doing uh doing our early work uh as a bootstrap company but then we realized that you know the uh there are certain very good investors in our Market who are very aligned with with this vision and uh uh and what we wanted to do was we wanted to experiment uh uh we wanted to experiment on certain aspects of our product uh in a much more robust way so we thought that some capital in the bank can you know actually help us have that you know a peace of mind of uh of who are putting in those experimentations and that has actually turned out very well our first mbb was a Google sheet integration uh right now our MVP is pretty pretty well designed in terms of our UI us and that expense we could not have made as a boot start company because our uh you know savings together would have not how much Equity did you have to sell for the 9 100k um I don't think uh I think the final activity was somewhere uh between uh 13 or 14 percent a 14 percent Rod I think yeah four four zero one one four not four oh one four one four okay got it so so you sold one four percent that's seven X so 900 times seven well so you raise it like a six million evaluation yeah yeah somewhere somewhere uh in that range nearby actually seven million okay almost how did you get a seven million evaluation pre-revenue I mean that's that's your really good storyteller yep I I think uh I think it uh it uh it depends a lot on on the market and on the uh on the thesis which we have of this particular product and market right uh but what matters a lot uh from from any you know precede standpoint is uh from any PC pitch standpoint is is are you the right team to build for this market and is the market going to be big enough and I think uh these two uh aware aspects which we were able to satisfy pretty well um how many co-founders are there yeah we are three co-founders we know each other for about seven years we have been very very close friends uh that's awesome did you guys just split Equity evenly 33 absolutely yes that's very nice of you guys no one was more important than anyone else huh I think everyone was very important for everyone else that we should look at it all right so three co-founders and how many folks are on the team today uh we we are the V3 are full type and then they are uh three and don'ts who are full-time interns we will mostly go we are mostly going to work with them as full-time employees very soon so they're free interns right now are you paying them yep they are paid rentals I I believe in you know uh I do not uh uh like you know working for free so like uh I I would want to pay my interest as well and so what's your plan to go from one customer to a thousand how do you grow yeah I think my plan is that we'll we'll maybe work with five or six or design Partners in the first uh you know three or four uh four months after launch and that's what we are currently doing uh after we are you know very sure on what is a particular wedge for our product at that point in time will you know start only uh focusing on uh you know establishing that wedge in the market and you know communicating that to our potential customers uh so our plan is five to six for design partners then focus on you know one or two very strong wedges and and you know just uh uh uh just enter the market with those bits how are you gonna go find four more design Partners where are you gonna find them I think I think we already have a certain potential design Partners in mind we we have we have their pipeline ready so I don't think it's going to be a big challenge uh how many are on your waitlist right now uh so we are we are essentially in the process of onboarding three more uh companies so we are already you know in our uh um to achieve our Target there's one uh big uh uh one week leap we wanted to get some us-based design partners for that we are you know using our college network and some you know friends of friends uh who are helping us get the introduction interesting okay very cool we'll love your story we're certainly rooting for you we're out of time now let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite book I think uh um my favorite book is doubt teaching it's a book on taoism uh uh and written by loud Zoo very small book very insightful book number two is there a CEO you're following or studying um I think I I really really admire um uh so so uh I I really admire Paul raham as a investor and uh I do not follow him as a CEO but uh but I I think a lot of what what he talks about is very applicable as a CO2 so I really he he has really you know impacted my work in style as well number three what's your favorite online tool for building foyer ah I think there are too many favorites or too many favorites I think the biggest uh the biggest one would be uh Firebase uh we we are a back-end books uh very heavily on Firebase it has saved us a lot of time yeah number uh five how many hours of sleep do you get every night sorry can you repeat and number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night uh I think uh it ranges anywhere between five to uh nine hours I I do not like compromising on sleep so there are certain days when when I get an opportunity I sleep more but otherwise like like today I have swimming less and what's your uh what's your situation married single kids I'm a single I'm single right no not married no kids and how old are you uh I'm going to turn 25 very soon uh 20 what 25 25 very soon 25. okay last question what's something you wish you knew five years ago when you were 20. I think uh I think a lot of stuff related to entrepreneurship uh I think I I would I would have wanted to understand the YC Playbook of doing things five years ago uh a lot of mistakes we did uh like you know uh not not making a lean MVP uh and you know not focusing uh very deeply on customers we could have avoided that I would have wanted to focus a bit more uh on the uh on the YC uh you know philosophy of doing startups guys there you have it foyer.org they're helping maximize performance of engineering teams One Design partner today paying a hundred dollars per month they spent about fifteen thousand dollars on the MVP three co-founders each own 33 they raised 900 000 bucks in funding out of seven million valuation though so they've got plenty of Runway to grow here as they look to onboard four to five new design paying design Partners in the next three months with a team of six probably are you sure we're rooting for you thanks for taking us to the top thanks uh Nathan I look forward to you know uh uh I look forward to more such videos and uh and thanks a lot for doing the the founders as well you bet take care 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 we release them here on YouTube every day at 2 p.m Central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the Subscribe button below here on YouTube their 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