How instarel CEO Thomas Helfrich grew instarel to $240K revenue and 20 customers in 2022.

hey folks my guest today is thomas ai nerd self-inflicted there hell frick he's a b2b technology influencer with over 169 000 followers on linkedin he's the ceo and founder of instarail.ai and the host of the ai nerd youtube channel all right thomas your attention to the top sure let's do this thanks for having me by the way it's a pleasure to be on here 18 million downloads i want to be 18 million and one yeah i know that's awesome i i hope you get there um so instarrell i hope am i pronouncing that correct correctly okay so what came first like an ai tool to drive engagement or an ai tool to create content yeah well we came first was falling in love with the problem uh and the problem was it just takes student long to create the content engage with it and figure out a strategy that works so that was that was the first piece and then uh you back into the other parts of the technology and the things you need to go build to solve that okay and so uh help me understand what the product does today what are customers paying for yeah so they what we do is we save you time and this is how we do it so we use a bit of ai writing to a technology to help accelerate the content creation process um and that would be from the writing from the spell checking to the you know the tonality plagiarism all the things that go into creating any type of content uh we leverage a bit of automation technology and other just accelerators i'll say it that way and and uh and then you draw all humans in the loop to drive engagement and uh tonality and reality into what you're building and what you're doing so they get the content they get all the engagement um i myself you know i have 24 hours a day seven days a week coverage and all my social media accounts and you know i was like 30 hours a week in social media and i'm only there about an hour now and so that's what they get they get the ability to grow network uh you know get inbound interest in what they're doing without having to sit there endlessly and you know write content engage with it over and over so your funnel when you say like you and they right who who is the customer is it a blogger like what is your customer profile the the best for us are our startup technology companies that are uh have some type of funding and they need to get to market they need to get marketing so you know if a founder goes oh i need a higher marketing person that's when i want you to go no no no call me there's a less expensive better way to do it so for example you know we're full marketing for a number of startups but we're also fractionally there so you get you know let's say the power eight 10 person team plus all this technology but you may only use an hour a day you only may need to post a week it just depends on what you do so instead of hiring full-time people to go do this and and then loading your books up with a lot of salary costs that could have gone to product or uh sales we do all the content creation and all the engagement for you so you can actually scale at uh at real speed and we can back that up with data we've had some of your fast growing clients on sendzilla's been on the show they're on a tear and so you're automating content creation for a lot of these folks um help me understand pricing what are they paying per month on average yeah so individuals i mean you can start as low as 99 a month right for get a kick ass you know carousel post created for you or a handful other posts up there's a few thousand dollars a month um when we're doing you know full on you know nine by you know six coverage all your social media accounts you know 40 posts a month articles blogs video edit there so it can be a range for us to take on any customer we just require two things which is a goal you have to have some type of goal that you're chasing for why you need to create content and go get to market and the second's just a budget we want you to think in in terms of 12 months though over month to month because that way your mindset's right to grow you're in the mindset of i'm gonna have this fixed cost approach to marketing and you're going to get some assets built along the way and as you get more successful you can either scale up if you find some attrition in your business will help you when you scale down so you get it month to month but we need those two things you need a budget and you need you need a you need a goal if you don't have them we don't take easy thomas what's your sweet spot though i understand a range of prices but the average customer today pays how much per month yeah corporate like full-on customers pay anywhere between two and three thousand a month and then individuals are probably 500 or less 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 it 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 valuation 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 frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're gonna get 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 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 raised they sold 22 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 valuations than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to 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 founderprath.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 okay interesting so i mean i imagine most your revenue comes from the corporates paying two grand a month yeah it's a it's a bit of a actual split because we started doing this 99 carousel post deal where a lot of people started signing up for those because there's such there's such good content that can be leveraged on multiple social media channels we're getting a lot more of individuals just coming in saying hey make me a post or a couple of those a month and so it's decent it's uh do risking our revenue a little bit by adding more users and as we build the platform in the background and we get the technology working together um it's nice to do that value add so how many of those 99 sort of this is really your top of the funnel right how many of those 99 packages did you sell last month um we just started it but you know we've had over 100 customers on the on the platform in that range already so or in our in our company so we're only about a year into revenue to be fair um and we've grown about 20 kmrr already so great yeah so we're moving fast we're a technology company actually with a lot more revenue ahead of us than technology so we're building what we need to build to best serve the customer and allow them to get more acceleration so thomas when did you when did you write when did you launch the company what year september 2020 and by the time you through cap table lawyers and websites up it's you know march okay so 2020 and if you're doing about 20k a month today in revenue what were you doing about a year ago do you remember uh 700 okay got it so most your growth has come so how did you support the business the first 12 months when you were pre-revenue well it's uh it's just bootstrapped i mean just without the pieces we're in there just building it funding ourselves we did a friends and family around that that...