Jugl Revenue, Valuation & Funding (2024)

[00:00] Guys, there you have it. Twenty years ago, he launched his agency, Cap Digisoft. He says he always wanna launch a product that would impact millions. He's now building jugl. They're doing a $100,000 a month in revenue up from almost nothing just a year ago. He put in 250 k in a pre you know, up upfront to get it going and then raised another 2 raising 3,000,000 right now at 2.3 already wired on a 15,000,000 valuation, burning [00:19] a $100 a month per month right now, but doesn't concern him. He got plenty of runway. Team of 24, 15 engineers. Again, a platform that helps you motivate, track, and measure employee engagement. Hey, folks. My guest today is Arun Kumar. He's building a tool called jugl. That's jugl.com. It's employee and client success management platform. Arun, you ready to take us to the top? [00:42] >> Oh, yes, sir. [00:44] Alright. Whenever I see a startup founder where they've got two jobs listed as present on their LinkedIn, I'm always curious. So you're doing jugl, but you also have capped Digisoft Solutions for the past twenty years. How do these things fuel each other? [00:57] >> Yes. CapDigisoft is my first business. I own. It's a tech company. I have around 400 employees working globally operating from four countries. But I'm always passionate about product. You know, through product, we can be able to impact 100x or 1000x more than what you do through service industry. We formed a bigger opportunity, and I formed a dedicated team for jugl. And jugl is a separate entity, and we raised the funding, and it's going great. And by [01:29] >> the way, thanks for having me on your show. [01:31] Of course, you've been doing Cap to do so for almost twenty years. Juggle has been only three years. I love a story where a SaaS founder found a need via their agency. Is that the pattern you fall into here? Is Captidusoft an agency and that's how you discovered the idea for Juggle? [01:49] >> I would say yes and no. I found this myself personally, not my team or anybody, because I know I want to form the product. Again, to keep the story interesting, through CapDigiSoft, always I invest under $2,250,000 every year to find the product which can impact millions of businesses. Mhmm. That makes sense. Juggle is my fifth try on those processes. Every time I invest, I learn something, and I decide, okay, I'm not going to impact millions of [02:24] >> businesses from this product. So I scale down or I close. So jugl is my fifth venture like that. So I always explore. I always explore, invest. [02:35] Alright. Let's talk about jugl. Give me a customer story. How's the customer using you today? [02:41] >> You know, jugl is mainly designed for non tech business owners, right? And countries like Asia, Middle East, Central America, those people are non tech business owners. They don't have a proper tool to manage employee efficiency, employee communication, task force. They are not. And they are not tech savvy business owners either. So they are generally using the available tools like WhatsApp and then Telegram. They're using those tools, but those tools are not efficiently designed to manage employee [03:18] >> communication and employee productivity. [03:21] >> The problem, what we are trying to solve, again, when you introduce a new product like Slack and Microsoft Teams, it is a painful process for them. Mainly, they're getting user adaptation because the users are non tech people, the interface is different, the habit is different, approach is different, so they miserably fail when they introduce these kinds of tools. [03:41] So Arun, can you give a real example? Can you name a company in Central America that's using you? [03:47] >> Yeah. So that is a company called Bamboo. They have 200 employees. Their business is managing the building. They construct the apartments. They construct the shopping complex and manage it. And we have our office, Central America office in that building, so they are the first customer in Central America who worked up to us. So That's we have these 200 clients, and they're using WhatsApp for communicating between employees. [04:15] Interesting. Now, is Bamboo, are they representative of your average or median customer today, about 200 employees? [04:21] >> Yes. 200 employees is my average. That is my average customer size, employee size per organization. [04:29] 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 took 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 [04:52] your 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 [05:16] 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 [05:38] 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 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 [06:04] 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 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 [06:26] 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 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 [06:52] the interview. Okay. And then give me a sense of how you price. What's a company like Bamboo gonna pay you on average per month or per year to use your technology? [07:00] >> So before before the pricing, I want to talk about what is the impact jugl is giving so that you [07:05] can Oh, Arun, sorry. My audience is extremely data driven, and they're technical, so I understand you wanna talk about impact and all that. Let's talk about that towards the end, though. So on average, what are these customers paying you per month or per year? [07:16] >> It is anywhere between 3 to $5 per user per month. [07:20] Okay. And now that we have that, so let's talk about the impact. How are you measuring, you know, the, know, the impact bamboo is having by using juglone their 200 employees? [07:29] >> Right. You know, let us say they are paying $2,000 per month salary per employee. That ballpark is price. And juglone will impact and improve 10% of their productivity increase. Right? We claim up to 40%, but I'm talking about minimum. That means they are gaining $200 more productivity from the employee. So when you do the comparison, when you get $200 more productivity, paying $5 is a no brainer for people. [07:57] Yeah. But people have to believe the number you gave about productivity gains and increases. Right? So, like, people that don't know you well would say, well, how do you measure a 40% increase? Right? How do [08:06] >> you measure We have free trial, thirty days, and we give a complete use case. We take one department. We implement jugl, and then we also tell them how to measure that 10% to 20% productivity increase. [08:19] How do know what their baseline productivity was to know that you improved it 200%? [08:23] >> Because we give them a blueprint of how you can measure the the productivity before juggle and after juggle. [08:31] But what what is the productivity metric? Like, you know, gallons of water, for example, or number of API calls, or what what is the actual thing you're measuring? [08:40] >> See, again, you know, how many tasks they do and how efficient they do. These are the two datas we are looking for. Correct. And when you assign a task and there is no follow-up and there is no reminder for a task, employees always go slow on the task base, right? Not every employee is disciplined to check what is a task they could complete. No. So business owners doesn't have time to remind them, give the list in [09:07] >> front of them. They don't have mechanism right now. But in juggle, they will get a reminder, hey, you have x number of tasks remaining. Correct? And if you do this, there is an encouragement waiting for you. It's a psychological motivation. It's not only a cost management. It's psychological motivation for people to complete it. [09:24] I see. And then okay. So a company like that has 200 full time employees paying 3 to 5 per use dollars per user per month, that means the average customer is maybe paying you 600 to $1,000 per month, something like that. [09:36] >> Correct. Correct. [09:37] Okay. Interesting. Now that we understand sort of the economics there, give me the backstory. When did you launch the company? What year? [09:43] >> We launched three years ago, and interesting is we pivoted twice since we launched. We launched as a personal productivity and also business productivity app. We went to the market, and the market says, If you go to the personal, they say, Business is there. It's not for me. And when we go and present to the business, they say, Personal is there. It's not for me. Correct? So then we came back to the drawing board. We completely reengineered [10:13] >> everything, exactly focused towards business. Correct. And then we go back [10:18] Well, give me an example of that. Give me an example of something you you a feature you killed because it was too personal. [10:25] >> Well, we okay. We introduced a new feature, Dan Cullen. The new feature is creating a workspace for the business, so nobody can get into the workspace. No disturbance whatsoever. See. Correct? In personal, you will see the message from business. Also, in personal, in the same screen, the distraction comes in. [10:41] I see. [10:42] >> In this space, we introduced the one workspace where business exactly fit into it, and then they don't have any distraction. [10:50] I see. Okay. So you get going in 2020. When did you write the first line of code for the platform? Was that earlier? [10:56] >> 2020. I think twenty twenty middle. [10:59] Okay. Okay. And then how long how long were you writing code before you closed your first customer? [11:06] >> I would say eight months. [11:08] Okay. So my question to you as a business owner, how much of your money did you plow into this thing before you had your first customer? [11:16] >> If I can say, close to $800,000 [11:19] Does that make you nervous? [11:22] >> To some extent, but since because of my background, technology background, and other product experience, me personally, I felt that is a reasonable investment from my perspective because we have a chat engine. We have a chat system we built, and that is a custom chat system like Slack, like owning a custom chat system with a task for 800 k, I think that is a that is a brainer, no brainer for me personally. [11:47] Okay. So then you got your first customer after that. Where did you find that first customer? Do you remember? [11:53] >> You know, I am a good networker. I talk to people. I have my own social media channel. I publish and I talk my progress. I have around 100,000 followers. So as soon as I published, I have 500 companies who signed up. They want to try. But we spoke to people, and we selectively identified which company is suitable for us. And then we onboarded one by one. So now we have 400 organizations using our app very successfully. [12:18] So today, you have 400 paying customers? [12:21] >> Yes. [12:22] Okay. And can I take the 400 paying customers times the average monthly ARPU you just told me? You're doing about $280,000 a month in revenue? [12:30] >> I would say $100,000 would be reasonable because not every company has 200 employees. Many companies have 25 employees, 40 employees. It's all over the place. [12:41] But you told me, quote, My medium number of employees is 200 earlier in the interview. [12:46] >> That is our target market, but our launch strategy is not go to the bigger one, to the smaller one, get the product stability, and then go to the larger one. Now Okay, Arun, just to [12:55] be clear, your median customer today then is not 200 employees, correct? [13:01] >> See, again, as I said, we claim the ladder. The first ladder we claimed is 25 average employees. Okay? But I don't want to go into the 200 employees in the first step. I want to stabilize the product by introducing two two hundred, but now our target market is 200 employees. That is the same way. [13:19] But a target market of 200 is different than what your median customer is today. So I understand what you're saying, but I just wanna clear that up for the audience. [13:26] >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Sure. You can say that 25 employees is, but eventually, when you ask me next year, it will be a different number. [13:33] I see. Okay. So if you're at about $100,000 a month today in revenue, where were you exactly one year ago so we can calculate growth? [13:40] >> You're asking after one year? [13:42] No. If you're at $100,000 a month today in revenue, where were you one year ago so we can calculate growth? [13:48] >> I would say zero because we didn't have any revenue at all last year because last year, people were using it. We gave a free trial, so we don't have any revenue at all. We didn't have any revenue. [14:00] Arun, you told me that you wrote the first line of code in 2020, and your first paying customer, you got eight months later. That would have been early twenty twenty one. But you just told me in 2022, which was last [14:08] >> year, didn't know customer pays, it doesn't so when we get thousand dollar, $500 I don't really consider that as a revenue, but I can excitement is okay, we got one customer paying. But when you talk about revenue means we have five customers paying every month, that took a long time. We signed up the first customer, they're ready to pay, And we started focusing only on that one customer, what you want more, what you want more. So [14:32] >> we didn't onboard the second customer for a long time, and we gave three months free trial for every other customer. Mhmm. [14:40] So was 2022 total revenue under, call it, a million bucks or under 500 k? [14:46] >> No. I would say less than under a thousand dollars. [14:48] Okay. So under a 100,000. You've you've you've been scaled over the past twelve months from nothing to a 100 you did you collapsed collected a $100,000 last month in revenue. Correct? [14:59] >> No. In 2021. [15:01] Okay. But you just you just told me that your total monthly recurring revenue today is a $100,000 a month. Is that accurate? [15:07] >> Twenty twenty twenty two, yes. [15:09] You just told me that your total monthly recurring revenue today, so as of last month, was $100,000 That's July or 2023. Is that accurate? [15:17] >> Yes. [15:19] Okay. So if you're doing a $100,000 a month today and you were doing zero a year ago, that means you've added a $100,000 in new monthly recurring revenue in the past twelve months. Does that make [15:29] >> That's right. That's right. Okay. [15:31] How did you do that? [15:32] >> Again, aggressive marketing, and I use B2B means I always go and talk in a conference. It's an educated approach, right? You know, you educate business what problem they have because most of the business owners, they don't know that they have a problem, and they don't know that there is a solution. So educating [15:48] the last conference you spoke at where you got juggle customers from it? [15:52] >> I spoke in India, and we launched juggle in front of 1,001 business owners. [15:58] Was that at SaaS Boomi, or what was the conference? [16:01] >> It is not SaaS Boomi. It is, know, SaaS Boomi is a tech tech conference. But I chose a conference. It's called GetCo. They have one specific regional business owners all aligned. It's called Kidco launch, annual meet. And there are around twelve hundred hundred business owners represented in that. [16:21] And what do [16:21] >> you put [16:22] in your slide deck to get people watching you on stage to convert to a jugl user? [16:26] >> No. We I talk about problem. This is a problem business owners are facing. I ask a simple question, do you face this problem? And I ask them to raise their hands. And I [16:36] >> them to raise I raise my hand and say, yes. [16:37] You still don't have my email, though. You still don't have me signed up on jugl. How do you how do you get someone from raising hand to [16:44] >> sign I have a QR code display on the screen. I said, okay. Can this QR code download the app? Our team will call you and onboard you. [16:52] Interesting. So how many people scan that app from 1,200 total in the audience? [16:56] >> I think 240, I would say, but I don't have exact number, but 240 session signed up on that particular conference. [17:03] That's impressive. Okay. Very cool. Tell me more about how you've capitalized the business. Is it bootstrapped, have you raised capital? [17:10] >> First, initially, bootstrapped, a 250,000 invested by me and other co founder. And then we raised 2,300,000 so far, but my seed round is $3,000,000, and we'll be closing $3,000,000 in the next few months. [17:24] When was the last close? What month? [17:28] >> You mean, like, when I received the last investment in the seed Yeah. I received last week. [17:35] Okay. So you closed a 2,300,000 seed round this this month? [17:38] >> Closed as of it is a $3,000,000 seed round. I've not closed yet. I've received 2.3 so far, and I'll be receiving 700,000 in the next few months and close the 3,000,000 seed round in next two months. [17:51] Okay. So sorry. You've done the first close of the 3,000,000 seed round. You've had and received 2,300,000 of wires. You tend to get the rest of the 3,000,000 here shortly and officially close the round in the next couple of [18:02] >> Correct. Exactly right. Okay. [18:03] What's the market like today? I mean, do you go out and sell 10% of the company for $3,000,000, or how do you think about it? [18:10] >> I'm diluting 20% of my company for the $3,000,000 [18:15] Okay. So it's a 15,000,000 post money valuation then. Correct. Does that feel fair to you? [18:21] >> For me, yes. Why [18:22] do you say that? [18:24] >> Because we we did an intense study on valuation, and we also hired a consultant from California who is a very strong M and A expert, and, you know, we got opinion from him as well. And he says, Arun, this is fair value. [18:36] Why would you use an M and A expert to come up with valuation when VC valuations are very different? [18:41] >> I know that, and I have very close associated with VC firm as well and in many also, and I took advice from everybody. Mhmm. [18:50] That's a 15x multiple on your current revenues. How do you make sure you grow into that valuation to prevent a down round in the future? [18:59] >> We compare it with other products, and this valuation is based on the stickiness. Once customers start using this, it's stickiness. [19:06] Can quantify that? What's your gross churn? [19:11] >> You are saying, yes, my customer pays it more than 90%. [19:17] That's annually? [19:18] >> Yes, annually. [19:19] On a gross basis? [19:20] >> Yes, correct. Okay. [19:22] So 10% gross annual churn. And do you have a playbook in place to expand revenue to make up the 10% hole? [19:28] >> Yes. [19:29] So is your expansion revenue last twelve months more than 10%? [19:33] >> Yes. Yes. You saw the you saw the number. Right? The revenue wise. [19:38] >> But we had under thousand under thousand last year, and this year, we will be hitting 1,000,000. So under thousand to 1,000,000 is one side. And then we will be appointing lot of resellers across international, And we are launching in Malaysia this month end, and we are launching in El Salvador this month, this week, matter of fact. And then, you know, so we'll be launching in Singapore. So we are expanding. [20:03] Right, Arun. Yeah. I understand that. New customers do not impact your historical net dollar retention. So I'm asking about customers you signed up a year ago. What you just told me is 10% of them will churn. And what I'm ask [20:16] >> No. What was your question? Did you just repeat what you just said? [20:20] Yeah. We're just we're talking about standard SaaS metrics, gross churn, expansion, and net dollar retention. Those numbers are all lagging that you look back at the last twelve months. You're not we don't care about future growth on those metrics. [20:33] >> Okay. Okay. See, last month, we onboarded many customers. They used it, they started paying only for this year. I will know the retention data by next year. [20:45] Oh, I see. So you don't have a full year of data. [20:47] >> I don't have a full year data. But since I'm closely working with customers, I am able to give you the data that, you know, since they're onboarding new employees every day, that shows that the stickiness is there. [21:01] I see. I see. I see. That makes sense. What's your team size today on jugl? 24 employees. 24. How many engineers? [21:10] >> I would say more than 15 engineers or tech people. [21:13] And do you spread them out? Are they all remote, or are they based in one central location? [21:17] >> No. They are all across the place. I have people from Poland. I have people from Brazil. I have people from The US. I have people from India. [21:25] How did you find and run a recruiting process for an engineer in Brazil? [21:28] >> You tell me. That is the biggest pain any tech entrepreneur will face. You know? Our philosophy is hire fast, fire fast, promote fast. So we learn from many other successful entrepreneurs, startup entrepreneurs. We follow the same, you know, because since it is a very specific tech engineering requirement, you know, you cannot judge by interview or you cannot judge by reading profile. You know, you have to hire them, take a risk of thirty days, forty days, assign, [22:02] >> see if they are compatible for your vision. That is the only way we can find the talent. [22:07] And Arun, are you burning money today? Are you breakeven or profitable? [22:10] >> I'm I'm burning money today, and I should be able to achieve breakeven probably end of this year or next year. [22:16] How much did you burn last month? [22:19] >> Last month? I would say close to a $100,000. Sorry. A $105,000. [22:25] Does that make you nervous or you're good with that? [22:28] >> No, man. We work with data, so I'm not nervous. [22:30] Alright. Very good, Arun. Let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, your favorite book. [22:35] >> My favorite book? [22:38] >> Man, the FAB book is The Hook, designed by the the great UI UX designer, how to create an app for engaging your users. [22:46] What's the name of it? Sorry. The Hook? The Hook. The Hook. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? [22:52] >> A CEO? Yep. Oh, okay. I love love Tim right now. He's awesome. He's doing great. And also, follow Sundar Pichai. [23:04] Sundar Pichai. Very good. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building jugl? [23:09] >> Online tool for building jugl? Man, I use Juggl for my internal team process and everything. I love Juggl for example. [23:16] Your own. [23:17] >> Yeah. [23:19] Can't be your own tool. [23:20] >> Oh, it cannot be my own tool. I think we used before, what tool we used? Oh, man. [23:29] >> Since we moved twelve months ago to jugl, I couldn't remember the product we used. [23:35] Well, just think about tools that you used this morning. [23:37] >> Right? Tula. Tula. Tula is the one we used before we used jugl. [23:42] Number four. How many hours of sleep do you get every night? [23:45] >> How many hours of sleep? Six six hours. [23:47] And what's your situation? Are you married, single, kids? [23:50] >> Married. I have two kids. [23:52] Two kiddos. Okay. And how old are you? [23:54] >> I am 40 Last [23:57] question. What's something you wish you knew when you were 20 years old? [24:03] >> Yeah. Don't don't wait for others to believe in you. [24:08] Guys, there you have it. Twenty years ago, he launched his agency, Cap Digisoft. He says he always wanted to launch a product that would impact millions. He's now building jugl. They're doing $100,000 a month in revenue, up from almost nothing just a year ago. He put in 250 k in a pre you know, up upfront to get it going and then raised another 2 raising 3,000,000 right now at 2.3 already wired on a 15,000,000 valuation, burning [24:28] a $100 a month per month right now, but doesn't concern him. He got plenty of runway. Team of 24, 15 engineers. Again, a platform that helps you motivate, track, and measure employee engagement. Arun, thanks for taking us to top. [24:41] >> Thank you, and I appreciate it. And I I wish you all the good luck for all the followers. And there is plenty of opportunity, team, I can tell you. But the thing is, like, pick one problem and stay focused and prepare for the changes. Market will demand something different than what you ask or what you plan for. [24:59] 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, 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 Central. [25:24] 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 fundraise, [25:47] 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 up [26:08] for that @nathanlatka.comslashslack. 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. We got [26:28] to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. All right. I'll be in the comments. See you.