How Karmabot CEO Stas Kulesh grew Karmabot to $750.6K revenue and 350 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is adi berenson he's the co-founder and ceo of claire labs prior he was three years as human interaction designer and prototyping at apple and before that eight years as vp of business development and marketing for prime sense the leader in 3d sensing technology behind microsoft connect and apple's face id cameras prime sense was acquired by apple audi are you ready to take us to the top yeah thanks a lot great to be here you bet so claire labs at c-l-a-i-r you're building contact-free remote patient monitoring systems what got you into that space so um actually it's all started from our work in apple uh which i cannot get too much into it so my my background is coming from consumer electronics but in my days in apple i got to work a bit with them on digital health projects that was back in 2017 and i realized what a monumental um challenge it is for modern societies and uh once i started getting into this and and learning about our old-fashioned workflows uh are there we realize that technology can make a huge difference i mean we we very very quickly even before we started the company we narrowed in on a horizontal workflow which is patient monitoring and i can get into it more but i'll follow you around yeah so patient monitoring there's sensors that are installed so there's is there an iot play here do you pay for the sensor installation so it is an iot play you got it right the unique part about it is that it is not touching the patient so clinicians are calling it passive monitoring because the patient doesn't need to do anything so contact free is not wireless it's actually collecting the signals environmentally without touching your skin um it's not about it what is it though is it like a lamp you sort of sit next to your bed like how do you think about it yeah it's a beautiful comparison it is like a lamp yeah so it does need to have some kind of line of sight to your skin okay and then by looking at your skin in two waves of near infrared it can see movements of superficial arteries so arteries that are very close to the surface by looking at those arteries we see volumetric changes and we see tone changes and then we are actually uh recreating or regenerating the plus signal pulse rate oxygen sat respiration rate and so on interesting what does the physical device cost okay so i'm not gonna i mean forgive me for that i'm not gonna expose our costs because we're not selling it to the consumer the way it works the business model is that our customers are providers or health care providers and they're offering it under i will call an umbrella of rpm remote patient monitoring services which is reimbursed by medicare and all major health care payers so it is a prescription service the device is fda cleared and the way it works is the payer is paying for it as long as you are recognized as a chronic patient or a patient at some kind of you know are you manufacturing it directly did you have to go source in china the manufacturing plant or is this someone else's technology like heart no no it's how hardware so we are it's our own hardware we are sourcing it exactly as you mentioned we're fabulous of course so we're sourcing it in china and we're building the device itself yes when did you ship your first device so we we are currently actually in clinical trials so the devices that we are shipping into facilities in the us for clinical trials are actually not built in china they're built in israel in a low volume prototyping facility uh the trials are going on for two months already um and so it's not in production how many have you produced for all the trials combined fifty five zero okay yeah five zero that's it it's very low volume yeah okay 50 for testing um got it and the healthcare providers are obviously the customers um tell me about how you make money from them what do they pay you on average per month so i'm not going to get into numbers but i'm going to get into the business model so basically the components that the payer is paying the health care provider is made out of installation is made out of the what the clinician is getting to review the material and is made out of the actual monthly payment for uh for collecting digitally collecting the signals from the patient i'm getting most of this now i'm i'm going to explain a little bit so i'm not going to get into my revenues but the way it works is that if you have a chronic i mean just be fair you're like i mean you're basically pre-revenue you're doing clinical trials right absolutely we're pre-revenue but we do have a plan so i can give you yeah i mean so when you say you don't want to get into your revenues and you just tell me your pre-revenue right that's a much better way to say it makes it very easy no no but i thought you were referring to what are our plans regarding revenue so today is zero yeah fair enough yeah but if you want to know how how how big is the market and what is our plan for future revenues and i can a little bit i can give you one data a chronic patient recognized as such under an rpm program can generate revenues for the care provider in the order of magnitude on of 150 dollars per month it makes out of several components so this is 1800 dollars per year we believe that we're going to get a big chunk of it that's the business model so we're not charging the provider for the the device itself we're actually uh getting recurrent revenues out of the reimbursements so let's just focus on israel for a second how many patients do you believe should have this lamp next to their bed right that should be sort of paid for with you know the government money right medicare medicaid whatever you guys have an integral for that so i will actually answer you in the in in newest numbers because that's the that's the uh that's the market that we analyzed and that's the market we're targeting so the way it works is that i can picture for you right now a dream of all the chronic patients but that's going to be a little bit superficial so there is for example one condition that we're doing active clinical trials on and we are showing act actual clinical outcomes which is copd for example so it's a respiratory condition i mean it's a chronic obstructive pulmonary this is there are 16 million patients um recognizing one six one one six zero okay no no one six one six million recognized as such there's a lot of um talk in the industry about the un uh yeah the undiagnosed but diagnosed there are 16. so you have 60 million people on you can get on an rpm program should you guys them should be all of them should be yeah sure sure so 150 bucks a month that's 2.4 million a month or about 30 million run rate for you getting 100 penetration of this market that's actually not that big right for what you guys are building that's very small actually i will i don't know how you got to it but if you have 16 16 million sorry sorry sorry you're right i missed a bunch of zeros there 16 million so so how do you the the test you're running right now on the 50 devices you're targeting the us market exclusively yes right now exclusively yeah okay okay got it um yeah sorry that map is obviously much bigger right so 16 million patients at 150 bucks a month is like 2.4 billion a month right exactly per month well the reason i bring this up right is that's almost 30 billion dollars per year right which effectively is going to come out of my pocket right it's me paying it's the u.s citizens paying into medicare medicaid or the us government printing more money to cover these expenses actually saving a lot of money and i will explain so an average copd patient which is diagnosed as such is having an average uh incident office hospitalization at least once a year and this hospitalization is costing 20 12 000 the reason why we are enrolling them on rpm programs is because we are showing data that we can raise the flag an alarm to the clinician taking care of them seven to eight days before such hospitalization event and with simple intervention of antibiotics or steroids you can prevent the whole hospitalization incident so it's it's a it's economically uh money-saving so how many hospitalizations are there right now in the u.s from copd patients exclusively every year 16 million because it's almost it's once a year yeah so every single sea person in the us with copd goes to the hospital at least once per year on average so some more some less that's the average rate yeah i i see i see interesting um what you're arguing what you're arguing though is that with your early indicators right via the veins and the skin and the early things seven days early you're basically saying no none of your you're not gonna replace all 16 million hospitals no no we're no no we're we're not and it's very it's going to be very irresponsible of me right now to say exactly how many we are but we are what we are showing and we're going to be very accurate with you nathan what we are showing is that we are raising the an accurate alarm flag seven to eight days before very i mean in very high rates like 95 percent okay 95 percent of the ex uh the the hospitalization cases of the clinical trials of the sample we we sampled we are showing a very obvious deviation of a score combined out of oxygen sat heart rate and respiration rate out of norm and and then and we know that there is an effective intervention uh so we believe there is going to be we believe and that's what we are pitching that there is going to be a substantial economical benefit to this rpm why why does it happen why does it have to be your iot device i mean listen i use woop and i look at resting heart rate i look at respiration look at the exact same things you're talking about and i could tell when i was getting covered because my resting heart rate was jumping through the roof it was very obvious they put a little warning in the app that said you probably have coveted and sure enough i did why can't somebody else do this for much cheaper okay so it's a it's a it's actually a very good question so you are asking me to compare yourself to wearables because wearables are everywhere so number one problem with copd patients and with other chronic patients especially elderly is compliance everything that requires them to take action which is charging putting it back on tolerating it even pairing it with the phone is is going to lead to low compliance so there is going to be there there are a lot of attempts to use wearables with them it just doesn't work isn't it harder to convince all of them to install this thing on the desk next to their bed and make sure their skin is exposed for at least five minutes every day so your thing can do the reading no no what you're describing is not passive if i would have pitched that that would have been bad what i'm claiming is is that they don't need to do anything it just happens i mean there is you have to install the thing how you they have to install the thing in their house no no you need to install the finger but okay so that is right just like you have to buy a wearable and put it on your wrist fair enough no no but once and that's and for years you don't need to do anything that's once you don't need to expose i mean what you describe you need to expose your skin absolutely not i reject it completely you need to manage yourself naturally there was in the clinical trials we've done there was no single night we didn't collect quality data over the night in enough samples to feel how close do they have to sleep to your device five feet two feet ten feet five to six feet not ten feet up two to six feet it's enough so you as long as their body as long as their body is sleeping within six feet of your device your device can get the readings they need right on i see interesting okay give me the back story here when did you launch the business so we launched the business in 2018 2018 and have you guys bootstrapped or raised uh we bootstrapped for a year and then we raised a seed round of nine million in two trenches in 2019 and 2020 okay okay nine million and then yeah that's why it takes yeah we're going to raise more for contact in early 2022 okay but nine million total to date nine million total today yes how much have you already burned through uh yeah i mean we're not sharing that yeah i'm sorry for that we're not sharing that i can tell you that we are certain people okay we're not just a big company all of them a part of me are researchers and engineers how many are full-time on the team all of them how many oh thirteen thirteen okay so there's thirteen on the team how many are engineers uh so half of them are researchers half of them engineers and i'm the only one who's doing all the rest i see ng are you the only founder do you 100 no no no we are we're two co-founders so my co-founder was working with me in apple and is the is the brains behind the technology is a phd in computer vision is one of the brightest minds in israel in computer vision yeah okay you guys just split it 50 50 or he gets more smarter no well you should but but all right you guys put it 50 50. obviously you do a seed you take some dilution most folks are raising seeds now and they're selling call it 10 to 20 percent of the business were you sort of in that average we are we were diluted by the two rounds that we entered disease of course naturally yeah but we're very proud of those partners yeah my point is though most people are when you raise that money you're giving up and selling 10 to 20 percent of the business correct yeah yeah yeah well 10 is in the low side yeah yeah yeah but you didn't give up more than 20 for nine million did you yeah i'm not sharing that sorry for that yeah okay i mean that would be a yes uh why why i mean that's my internal business it shouldn't be too interesting yeah well it's what i mean it's extremely interesting the more you're deluded the less control you have it's the number one thing that matters when you're trying to build a business is control so you can execute your vision it's the most important thing any founder can be thinking about when you're launching your business so i totally disagree that it's not important and and i so let's agree to disagree i've done it in the past with what company company no with prime sense we had a beautiful company we entered this is um you're vp of business development correct yeah yeah yeah okay you're not the founder so it's completely but i know how it worked no but i know i would work so i if there is one thing that i will push very hard on is that there is no one formula to build the startups okay they're all different uh so the story which is which is exactly why i'm asking right that's exactly why i'm asking so why are you okay taking 20 30 dilution so early tell me more about the quality of the money where is it coming from why did you need these partners okay the quality of the money i will tell you so it's coming from a very reputable israel if you see called 10d okay then you can look them up i mean it's it was founded by one of the most reputable uh venture capitalists in israel a veteran and the other fund is called super moon capital uh which is out of silicon valley um both of i mean there are other private investors but i will i will just focus on those two because they are the most active investors and i'm working with them only on almost on a daily basis very cool all right did you learn anything about the equity you know how equity was managed at prime sense you know mistakes that you want to make sure you don't you don't do here in your current business i mean your point that my job was very different than everything is than a founder i'm learning every day how different this was so i had some exposure but not complete exposure i was not uh going through what the founders went through i was mostly on the operational side so that's a fair point yup yup i mean no i mean look that company raised 36 million well almost 40 million dollars right and so that that 20 million series b if you know if they were raising at a minimum 10x it was probably higher than that that's almost a 300 million evaluation and but you are talking about crime scenes right prime sense correct yeah they got at 2008 right then you go out and sell for to apple for 360 million uh you know that's basically the valuation that it was four years prior to the to the exit right so you just lose optionality but i get it you're building a company that requires a lot of capital investment up front there's an iot play there's tech so i get it yeah um okay very cool yeah 13 on the team so when do you guys think you'll have your first paying customer uh early 2023 2023 yes wow yeah i mean i know no no it's because you need in order to realistically and not realistically in order to make business um reimbursement-based business not out-of-pocket business reimbursement-based business in healthcare in the us you need to have fda in order to have fda you need to complete clinical trials you need to do submission and you need to wait for clearance so yeah i mean i'm a very realistic person i can say 2022 but i can guarantee 2023. what uh are you looking to raise more right now yeah we we have a decent runway ahead of us but we are keeping our options open i mean if there is going to be a very very smart money in good terms why not what would you consider really smart money money that comes from the domain that open doors name an investor that you'd consider no name name an investor would be a great partner for you or you would kill to have them involved why is that a why is that a hard question no because uh because what would the other investors say i mean i have yeah i'm not naming names yeah because what if i don't get them did i get my second best so that's why i have my own lists and that's uh yeah and that's the private information yeah who would be very strategic for claire i would describe them and not name them okay reputable visits that are operating in digital health and medical or and or venture arms of the leading medical devices companies yeah who is a leading medical device company ignore who you like i just don't know right who is these these answers aren't helpful to my audience who doesn't know your space right so who is a top medical device company okay so that's easier for me okay because that's clear if you look at companies like medtronic massimo resmed phillips those are beautiful names to have involved in my company now see was audi was that so hard was that really that difficult was that no no it's fine yeah but this is what i'm not gonna do sorry for that nathan no so it's so it was so simple right that's so helpful thank you for answering all right let's wrap up with the famous five number one favorite book wow favorite book wow i i didn't prepare for that so it's actually the corrections by jonathan's friend yeah number two is there a ceo you're following are studying um actually it's phillips i know him for many years i worked under him directly uh stanford houghton yeah when when i lived in the netherlands yeah number three what's your favorite online tool for building clary or claire sorry ah my mentos no no your favorite online tool ah online tool i don't know we're working with monday if that's right but i'm not i'm not too in love with it yeah i mean it's just cool yeah you can't say that roy is another you know israeli engineer you've got to say you love it no no no i'm working with them but i'm not in love with amy online yeah fair fair enough number four how many hours of sleep you get every night oh my god that's a bad one much too little so i i would say to give you a direct answer i don't know four or five four five and what's your situation married single kids married with two kids okay and how old are you 50. that's the toughest one five five zero five zero yeah all right last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. something i wish i knew when i was 20. um wow i was asked in my 50th birthday if i have any grits or if i would have done things differently and i answered no which is probably a lie but i'm happy to believe in this life so i will never this is not a regret question adi it's it's for other people who are 20 who are listening yeah that would love to learn from you right so something you wish you knew when you were 20. um i mean ex yeah uh do relocations explore other cultures as early on uh i did not enough of it and i'm yeah yeah and i should have done it claire labs guys they've invented a way to basically install think of it like a you know a light or a lamp next to your bed for copd patients to understand again early warning signals to try and prevent hospital visits save taxpayers a lot of money uh they're targeting the u.s market 50 devices shipped today in clinical trials they raised 9 million bucks to get this thing to market hoping to get their first paying customers by 2023 13 folks on the team we will see what happens adi thank you for taking us to the top thank you that was super fun i appreciate it one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm 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 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 1 pm 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 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 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 nathanwacka.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 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 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Introduction hey folks my guest today is stosh coolish he is building a very cool tool called karmabot.chat if you want to follow along it's people culture as a service he grew up in siberia studied computer science and nuclear physics played in a band got excited got excited by the indie games making and then left you need to become a digital designer since then he's been working remotely traveling and blogging now settled in new zealand and growing karma stosh you're ready to take the top yes yes let's uh nice to see you again all right i'm glad i'm glad you're here let's jump in so last we spoke you're really focused on slack it sounds like your position has changed a little bit uh or maybe not what are you working on today right so today we're working on fixing bugs and they recently released departments kind of big piece in microsoft teams that means that now big organizations on microsoft can create uh karma board sub installations so if i'm talking about let's say mcdonald's i don't have to purchase one karma both for the whole organization one tiny shop can purchase karma but now and that helps because before it wasn't possible technically so the whole department's thing it's huge and uh it's been um it's out there now and we tested it and we you know so just take a step back for people that are not familiar with what you do what why are customers paying you right so remote work is here like you know that and it's getting bigger and bigger and it will stay most likely um it's really hard to maintain a healthy people culture in a remote company so karma is one of those tools that helps companies to uh appreciate each other more to record this a phrase to uh you know convert that praise into rewards and so on we we automate one-on-ones we do all sorts of things to keep this remote people culture healthy Currently serving 350 customers got it and how many customers are you serving today uh we've got a three million solutions so all together i think it's more than 3 000 but 350 of them are paying so that's teams 350 teams got it so 350 teams and about how much do they pay you each month approximately 100 a month a hundred dollars per month okay so your ace uh i believe so have you generally increased are you moving up uh up market or staying sort of where you're at flat uh the departments was a huge block on the way and uh we're trying to solve it so we get into big organizations so far it's pretty much yeah around 100 people paying around 100 a month so this is the regular size of the team and the regular bill and can i take 350 customers times 100 a month you're doing about 35 000 a month Monthly recurring revenue in revenue yeah exactly um and one thing that helps in terms of revenue actually we integrated automated uh gift cards purchasing so some of the teams um they they re convert karma into rewards and we get a cut of that so the cash flow is being maintained by automated uh rewards and that really helps as well now you were doing about a year ago seventeen Bootstrapped month so you've more than doubled in size and i believe you've done this bootstrap is that right yeah got it so completely bootstrap you and you still are bootstrapped today no outside capital no a second any plans to raise could be maybe it depends on how this remote thing is is going to go because when when when the college started we had a huge surge and i think this was around the time that we when we spoke the last time the first time with you um and we were really hopeful that this is gonna stay but then a year ago we saw a huge plunge because people they want to change things it's in their heads maybe remote work wasn't working for many of them but then maybe they panicked by it uh they would they were doing panic buying initially and now they're kind of trying to sort this out properly so it's still unclear um how fast this can go and tell me more about how you're growing so quickly at 240 customers a year ago you now have 350 your primary sources of customers earlier were a product hunt launch and then the slack app exchange i believe where are most your new customers coming from today uh it's it's well fortunately it's it's word of mouth because product market feed is 84 and nps score is standing around 80 ish so we kind of have a happy product for happy people so they talk about it and this portion increased since the last time we spoke and otherwise it's still slack and microsoft marketplaces so how many new users or trials sign up over the past 30 days from slack five 30 days would be about 500 and how many for microsoft well i guess they're they're sort of the same right yeah it's similar yeah yeah yeah microsoft is up and down because they're still figuring out their featuring mechanism you know it's like an app store they always change things so 500 new trials and then what do you do with those trials take me down your funnel when they hit your website they give you their email then what uh well they actually installed it from slack in slack you can have the application installed just through this plus button right there in the slack and then we have an in slack onboarding experience if that's not enough they are taken outside in the web and there we try to explain what we have what we do over the first uh we've got a free 30 day trial and then over that period of time we sort of reach out based on your activity if you're a champion if you're really digging it we're gonna be you know inspiring you to do more how do you know that what are you measuring to quantify really digging it right well you send in karma i'm sending karma to nathan um every other day and karma can see that we don't really track people's activity on slack we don't really track their activity on microsoft teams we're not that kind of company uh we just we see what they do with us how much they enjoy using karma and then based on that we encourage them to use it more for the first 30 days it's mainly an inch out experience well as usual we also have the marketing chain going on in the email but that's um i don't know it's helpful i don't think many people convert it just because of that and talk to me about team today you were four people a year ago how many today uh well it's five or six contractors coming and going uh we we're trying to stay lean and mean and keep this to the minimum because we're bootstrapping obviously um and as i said it's still not clear where this would go because i mean that's why the investment probably is not happening and we're not really taking it and and what Profits was your what were your profits last month on 35 000 top line 25 approximately so what do you do with that capital i mean this is great bootstrap founder you're traveling the world you're living the life you love do you leave that money in the company do you buy real estate in new zealand what do you do with it um all of the above and also just to simplify the answer yeah and we we're hoping to get big uh somewhere in the future someday um we're trying to like play in the long game uh these money this this capital will be needed in the future we're not i mean we're trying different things in marketing maybe you know reaching out here and and they're spending money in this campaign or another but still none of that actually proved that it can work 100 percent you know well when you spend 10 000 and get 12 back that that didn't happen yet that's why we still cautious and maybe one day we'll spend it on marketing and you know convert some thousands of people and make it happen for them so you didn't spend you're not spending anything right now on paid ads no none it's really it's it's so difficult because the main decision makers they are at the top of the chain we don't sell we don't like trello engineers don't come to their superiors saying like let's buy trello gold it's so cool we've been using it for a while with karma it's usually the culture the culture is coming from the head and then we need to convince those people it's really difficult to target them and convert through ads yep no that makes sense now you were thinking about selling the company if you got the right price a couple years ago maybe a year and a half ago where are you thinking about today if somebody offered you you know 10x arr would you sell well 10x maybe uh 10x we've been offered and 15x we've been offered hello sorry 10x a.r.r now um we have never been offered that but uh we we may consider it yes uh i don't i don't say that it's impossible what happened what have you been offered uh good question that was a 2x error so approximately half a million and that doesn't cause it it's like we're getting six when was that uh last month literally i mean but you're doing you're doing 35 000 bucks a month in revenue you're doing almost 500 000 a year in revenue so they offered you effectively 1x arr not 2x right two ish yeah yeah okay got it so it's between 500 can a million is what they offered yeah yeah yeah and the million was well kind of uh impossible so we didn't get what do you mean by that so they said that their range is 500 to 1 million and that wasn't yeah in our heads that that doesn't do it unfortunately because at so much we can get like you said we can get almost that bootstrapping being profitable in three years if when if and if we put it on autopilot meaning that we stopped doing this like stop supporting people and stop maintaining it it's just there on the store full self-service i think it will still grow uh it's growing seven percent a month at the moment it will be growing one two percent and it'd still be making money yep no this makes good sense you're doing it the right way how much of equity do you own 50 who owns the other 50 well they are the founder who's you're their founder uh david kravitz from australia how do you guys decide to split the the revenues is it did you just pay out dividends or what uh yeah dividends and it's 1550. it's kind of super simple system how does that tell me more about how that works uh well we've got money coming in and then we split them when we need it otherwise we don't touch that if he says like i wanna i wanna take a uh i don't know i wanna do something at my house and i need to take out six thousand i'm taking six thousand as well becomes super simple i see so so do you do this every month or quarterly or annually at need like when when we need that so you could do it it's all needed basis yeah yeah yeah it's inside business it's it's a side business we've got other things going on and this is something helping us in in you know moving along the line oh this is a side project for you oh yes what else are you doing i still do some consultancy work i still do um i've got this uh design and development studio and this is a regular you know business for producing products for others what's the url for that uh it's called slide a sli day dot com yeah so that's been going on for 11 years and i think it's not the unusual story when the design and development studio builds their own product mail team did it right yeah this is interesting obviously you use slidea to build karma correct yeah that's why i'm saying that the team is flexible and fluent they come and go because i take people from other commercial products i put them on karma and then uh they they get back it's one of the struggle to yeah no i was just gonna say slide it looks interesting i'm always looking for dev shops and design shops to recommend for to help people like get their mvp off the ground so like what does somebody like slobot if this isn't your own tool but what does somebody like slobot pay to get the mvp built well you know it's it's such a big question we can it could it could vary from 10 to 1 1000 uh because of the complexity and the actual functionality that's required you said one a thousand dollars 10k to 100 of them oh ten thousand to a hundred thousand dollars to build the mvp yeah i see and and how much time does that usually take well uh 100 hours to 1000 hours it's kind of you know let's be specific let's be specific your time tracking bot for slack right there you have lifted on slide how much time did that take you and what was the full cost uh the time tracking stack bought maybe 300 hours that took so roughly that would be around 30k okay got it so and you're so you're always charging on an hourly basis not per project roughly roughly anyway like even if it's a fixed price we still have uh i still have the amount of hours in my hand so it it makes that and what was that hourly rate again uh it's a 70. 60 to 70 dollars interesting very cool um two and then it's 200 300 hours to build an mvp that's how you get the 10k 100k yeah yeah really really smart model here okay cool so i understand dividends out of curiosity how much did you guys pull out in dividends over the past 12 months i don't remember how much last month it's taking it's taken when it's needed it's not it's just there it's like in a big pile of so you don't you don't remember how much dividends were taken out of the company last month yes i don't remember that interesting maybe not because i have other sources this is just one of them yep okay got it um okay cool this makes good sense um let's move forward here with the uh with the sort of churn stuff obviously turns critical in this sort of business what does it look like uh let me open it up uh it's getting up and down obviously recently we noticed notice that people after using karma for two years or three years they just switched to another product because they sort of they want the novelty not because the product is oh well not doing it for them it's just the team wants something new and you know the new manager is coming and they just changing the tools completely because i'm a new manager i have to change the culture so they turn it was around one percent now it's four three yeah well on average it's it's slightly below three percent two point eight percent got it so annualized you know 24 to 36 percent something like that yeah it's not that do you have real expansion do you have real expansion revenue or no not you have nothing to upsell yet what it means do you have the ability to take a customer that started paying you 70 bucks a month last year and upsell them to 140 bucks a month this year yeah we're doing that and this this works even well for the plants sometimes we just say it's getting getting more expensive and then um we have the automated rewards when they purchase stuff through us we get the cut and that's ten percent but if they've got like 10 100 team 100 people on the team and they purchase 10 items a week that would be roughly extra 100 bucks a week okay so you upsell based off like percentage of gifts that they're buying for their team or karma they're buying for their team what else do you upsell on number of seats what else a number of seats yes and they have extra features and stuff very cool what's the number one most popular feature that people are paying extra for uh recently that was uh you know donuts.com one of those tools to connect people and automate one-on-ones we build karma connect which will be a smarter version of donuts because we know that we um daytona starts they exchanged karma before so they know each other but that happened years ago so maybe we should reconnect the way we do now on the live call um and we can do it with karma as well so there is a video within karma that suggests us to connect very cool stuff let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite book uh 1986 is four 1984. number two is there a ceo you're following or studying starting who i see all that i'm following or studying uh i'm i've been following this uh base camp but now i'm not sure all right number three what's your favorite online tool for building karma um that will be profit well i really love what the guys doing they they really help you to you know understand the math behind that uh number of revenue number four how many hours of sleep to get every night seven today and i try to stay above seven and what's your situation married single kids uh married those kids how many kids one one kid okay and how old are you i'm almost 40. almost 40. very good last question something you wish you when you were 20. um i don't know travel more guys there we have it karma bot launched back in uh call it 26 they broke 17 000 a month in revenue last year they're now doing 35 000 a month in revenue as 350 teams and hr teams use their tool to give rewards out to their employees drive engagement and drive connectivity in this more and more remote digital world on the 35 000 a month last month they made 25 000 to the bottom line as profits the two founders on 50 each they're totally bootstrapped and their full team is five people strong there's already a side project for them they've turned on a million dollar offer already to exit the business they want to keep building it in something big stos thanks for taking us to the top thank you so much nathan talk to you later one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm 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 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 1 pm 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 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 nathan lacka dot 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

hello everyone my guest today is coolish he is building a company called karmabot.chat if you want to check it out he grew up in the far eastern part of siberia studied computer science and nuclear physics played in a band got excited by the indie games making and left uni to become a digital designer check i mean that is the hell of a bio for several years in the early uh 2000s he's been working remotely traveling and blogging extensively before that becoming a popular sort of mainstream thing and then ended up in new zealand today building karmabot sasha ready to take us to the top yeah yeah hi um i'm stars you just made the introduction i'm jealous if people are watching this video they see this big beautiful mountain you're sitting in front of you're in new zealand right now are you going skiing later today oh well i i tricked you it's chilly actually i'm in santiago south america and uh yeah this trip is about to be over we're going to london next week still on the move still on the move so what is your life like i mean you're you basically are building this slack tool which we'll get into in a second but how many like how frequently are you moving locations well this particular year uh we have a child so it's not really that often we change the locations but this year was supposed to be the big adventure and we got into this and then covet happened uh so now it's a bit of an emergency situation trying to get back home but still trying to keep it funky london seems to be good and home is london right hello the home is new zealand uh we live in new zealand okay guys why why why won't new zealand let you back in college they they they they so they want and then they very very very difficult uh with uh in re returning back is really not that simple interesting okay so tell everyone what does karma bot do and what's the revenue model is it sas yeah it is um it's a subscription model based on the use uh what it does it actually provides teams with within chats mainly uh with the ways to phrase and uh share some appreciation and show some recognition between peers so this was done before obviously on the web but not on chats and what we built is growing from chats back to the web probably from from slightly like you you say chats chat's like slack and then it's growing to the web is that what you said slack and microsoft teams and actually telegram but we have several chats we focused on this in chat uh interface when people typing stuff and this is this isn't you this is a new component to this appreciation field but what do you mean when you say you're growing from chat to the web well uh it means that when expedia comes to buy this uh tool they are saying yes we installed this slack and it's really really cool but not all of our employees are using chats and do you have a web panel now that we can use with the login and password and stuff we don't have it yet and we want to get there but that field is crowded so we're basically approaching the problem that already exists but from the different angle from the angle of interface typing chart i see okay that makes sense and how much revenue are you guys doing today well just yesterday hit a 200k annual revenue so that means 17 000 a month congratulations that's exciting how many customers uh that would be 233 paying teams which translates in approximately 20 000 active users so 20 and how do you define an active user well they send karma then they send these appreciation points to each other that means that they are using the system and what is that so again for people not familiar with your system describe what karma is explain how it works right okay let's say uh you did something great for me at work and i instead of just saying thanks or uh putting a reaction to this line of text that you shared with the team um i'm actually producing this kind of animated card that is being published on the public channel now everybody knows that i'm showing my appreciation of your work publicly and they may be also not aware of the stuff that we're working on now they have bigger visibility within the team all sorts of perks all sorts of girls yep okay so good so this makes sense 233 people the perks are growing uh you just passed two hundred thousand dollars in ar which is seventeen thousand dollars per month where were you a year ago in terms of revenue uh 64 65k a year so three times less so we're growing three times a year since we started that's great have you bootstrapped or raised bootstrap uh we've got some minor minor angel investment but any plans to raise capital uh we feel that we may look into the direction it takes time and it's it's time taken from the product building that's my main concern because we are very small and trying to stay lean it's actually difficult to raise so maybe later this year in order to get faster to the web version we'll we'll do the fundraising again yeah what's the what's the least amount of capital that if you had it right now it would make your life way easier in terms of expanding faster i think um 400 to 500k would be fine uh and that would go mainly into the like explaining what we do now that's like the marketing bit which is part partly sales and also expanding to the web we need more resources to handle it but how much equity do you think you'd have to sell to raise 500 000 um that would be up to 10 percent 10 yeah got it got it so you would you essentially would say okay i think i'm worth about 4.5 million pre-money raised 500 grand 5 million post on a 200 000 ar company yeah yeah the angel investment was based on their five million cap so we want to stay reasonable within this range i believe i said well i'm a founder i really trust that this project is gonna go well so i believe it went up but we've covered around 5 mil yeah i just wonder i hate seeing founders giving up equity the most dilutive round for most founders there's two times it's when you agree with your co-founder how much you're gonna split and the second is your like your first round of funding like this one i just wonder if there's a way for you to get some capital without getting so much delusion well that would be great obviously and to this day we've been very uh careful about this that's why all the equity is still with us apart from the angel uh tiny portion i would scale with you if you go to founderpath.com sas founders are taking money from that site super fast i mean i would i would do something depending on your metrics like 50 grand now and then if you want another 50 grand in three months and another 50 grand three months after that i would do a deal like that with you yeah we could try that uh i've checked out the website by the way i have an account there and it looks great yeah i just say be honest you don't have to you don't have to say nice things just because you're on my podcast you looked at the rates i mean what do you think uh the site looks great uh it's mainly about our data the data that we provided it's kind of messy because you have everything from our stripe account and the early days they were messy we use this account for other transactions it's not 100 and it would be great to have a way of editing this data i know that you don't really want your founders to edit this kind of uh information but to make it cleaner to clean it up somehow so it's actually more representative of the true picture yeah our platform is yeah because of how you did sort of annual plans are things not accurate but yeah the way the system works is you connect your stripe we then give you a credit score and then try and get you money fast but i can because i built the tool i can override it so um so uh we we should we should you know keep me in mind there that's something i would definitely do with you because i think this is an interesting tool but i will tell you this i tried to install it the other day and have our community manager start using in our slack group it's so difficult to figure out like how to get it started because there's the tech piece of installing you as an application inside slack but then there's the emotional piece there's a psychological piece of what are the rewards and how do you tell your community about it we totally understand that and we work uh i mean just late earlier today i did two demos yesterday four demos we speak to customers and it they need to do so much work in order to make it happen for their team but then it becomes their thing we don't we're not trying this is how we're different we're not trying to sell the pre-existing system that we claim is successful we're allowing people to use this tool to build their system and that takes time and it's difficult and then i mean we're happy to help and this is partially what we want to do with the fundraising money this would be actually you can totally see how we can spend that and uh explaining people how to the best practices how other companies did that this takes time to just convey the message you know i do no i agree with you what's how many folks are on the team today uh just six people and uh i think i mentioned before it's it's they come and go permanently we have just four including two founders so how many engineers again are you all engineers uh no not all my co-founder he's more of a business administrator finances kind of person and then uh we have designers on the team and two developers one full-time and myself i'm like in the middle of it i can code i can do that design and how do you i mean when you look at your last 12 months of history i mean how do you think about churn what was your what's your annual revenue turn monthly or or annually um annually i think it's four percent uh but that's that's just again about the comment i guess i call it covet churn which is a made-up turn but this is kind of relevant these days we see um high turn up to three to five percent but actually annually or monthly monthly uh the five percent we got last uh month that was monthly but just because of companies dying out literally they're not there anymore and so the good thing about it the ones who survived and who subscribed now i think they are the survivalists and they will be staying there for longer yeah i mean sauce i'm not revealing any private information here because you came on our deal our new shark tank for sass show on youtube and shared this but i was shocked before covid uh even during copenhagen but shocked how low your turn was i mean you were under one percent revenue churn per month and then you saw a little spike to like three point eight percent during covet but that'll come back and i panicked it's a good thing to panic about but also be realistic on you know yeah yeah yeah so it's not too bad it's not too bad and this is just to support my claim that this is a habitual thing when it's established it's there it's really hard difficult to pull out of the studio company culture how are you how are you signing up new customers and and what do you think your cac is right now well uh we don't spend anything on marketing just because we don't have anything um xp or anything extra so they come to us through the stores slack has its own app store marketplace microsoft teams has own uh marketplace and they just come organically and we're trying to handle this flow with my co-founder doing demos and the rest is just a self-service how many new demos are you doing per month oh i do seven to ten a week so that's forty one hundred hundred yeah you're doing four you're doing 40 of 40 a month basically yeah about that and how many of those convert to a trial i think the demos um that i do personally and we do one-on-one they convert like 10 um but there are still people who just register they just looking around this is two percent so how many trials do you add per month across the whole company uh you recall it it was um 1200 now it's back to normal 6 700. so 700 new trials per month and then how many of those typically convert to yeah got it got it so 10 would be seven so two percent would be they would get like between like or sorry 7d so you're getting like 20 to 30 new customers per month yeah that's a box ride yeah saying and what do you know that you have to get a customer to do like in the first week that they use you to drastically increase the likelihood that they pay or stick they need to first they need to send karma uh that's like the first metric we want uh worked on and that's why we have this uh onboarding and stuff you went through that so sending karma is the item one and setting your company values for the rewards like taking it one step further the system provides you with the ways of like uh company values show you how you uh use karma and three words give you something back for this karma so it's like uh the next derivative out of this and you have i mean when i look at your seo what kind of world you have sort of an okay domain rate of 50 but you're not getting a lot of organic traffic right now from search why have you not invested more in search um in a way we are we have invested that the rate is low uh based on i mean it depends what you're looking at uh there is a term karma bought and we completely occupied that if you ask i mean obviously those dots that's your company name like there is it had it existed before we started this company it existed already it existed on generally on the internet people are still looking for this and when they look for this kind of product which means basically points given for appreciation by itself so that's us and um in terms of seo i'm happy with that uh we can obviously improve it always so i guess my point is though karma bottom looking at your ahrefs account right now karmabot and karma spacebot you rank number one for both those keyword combinations together they drive you about 50 clicks per month so it's it's just it's a drop in the bucket it's not a ton there are others like microsoft rewards bot which there's way more traffic potential there but you rank number 16 for those things like why not double down under like slack rewards bought and microsoft rewards bought and get those to the number one rank that's that's a great question we will we may be uh that's just one of those things you cannot double down with everything uh yeah yeah it's a valid point that's a fair and i mean that's a fair answer um and then help me understand so in the slack community uh i'm looking at the karoap page right now i mean you you've got it installed here they they don't have i don't think they don't have like a review sort of process do they you mean reviews by the customers or review in order to get the customer okay we get the customer reviews we gather at uh g2 website so g2.com if we search for karma what if there will be a page with a brilliantly shiny review um set and um yeah they they don't have it once like have you done anything with slack to try and get like their staff to add karmabot to like the staff picks list i imagine that would drive you a lot of leads if they did that they would uh but they have another product which they are big friends with and that was one of those things like we going head to head who is it it's like it's a disco disco boat uh grove previously so they were they are in essentials they are on the front page we cannot like ask we i asked actually it's like to to to put karma next to them but it was counterintuitive they invested money in this they are part of the slack fund oh yeah so we are still featured in the new and noteworthy um we are not on the last position in the particular area that's why we still getting people from the store but to be honest it gets crowded that's why we need to get out of chats in general and uh get a bigger chunk of the markets through the web are you profitable today yeah yeah we've been profitable since january as i said we're keeping this very lean very good all right let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite business book favorite business i really like big blitz scaling um you're part of that of course no i would say i think i have it on my on my bookshelf somewhere uh i just read it it was a good book uh number two is there a ceo you're following or studying is there a ceo you're following or studying uh not really no uh we're trying to stay indie and uh be this indie development kind of studio nothing to do so that you sound like a a young jason freed yeah probably yeah yeah all right number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company favorite the lion soul um we like stripe okay number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night seven eight hours okay and you said married with one kid right yeah yeah how old are you seven years how old are you toss i'm 38 38 last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew um consistency is more important than just i know fun karmabot.chat guys enabling teams to reward teammates when they do nice things right now starting in slack and microsoft teams they just passed 200 000 bucks in ar they've got 233 customers paying on average 70 80 bucks a month that's how they've grown uh company launched uh stats when did you launch the company two years ago two and a half years ago 2018 was a company launched it again scaling nicely today bootstrap basically and profitable might raise 500 grand at a 5 million valuation later this year early next to expand to a web-based version thanks for taking us to the top thanks a lot thank you for the opportunity