How Knowd CEO Justin Shum grew Knowd to $330K revenue with a 3 person team in 2025.

guys node.ai got going call it six months ago research and they just closed a 500 000 convertible note with a 10 million cap so call it that sold five percent of the business pretty healthy though the question now is can they get uh MBA students as their initial ICP Target can get these students using the Tool uh and then after that can they start turning on a revenue stream here we will see what happens Justin's got experience though what two time exited first time exited founder second time exited founder bootstrapped BC note is this third project we'll see where it goes hey folks my guest today is Justin shum he's building node.ai which extends human reasoning and decision making abilities he's building on his own experience it's a three-time Founder one bootstrap one exit and one Venture back to Justin you ready to take us to the top absolutely let's do it all right what was the name of the bootstrapped one yeah ready chat founded back in 2013 exited in 2015. ready chat okay and what was the uh you bootstrapped that right yep you got it so like No No Angels you just put in your own money basically yes that and a lot of Blood Sweat and Tears yeah and how many years was that again you said uh we operated for three years and then we had an acquisition okay and did you I mean did you guys break a million bucks of ARR at that point or what were you when you exited we were pretty close in terms of Canadian dollars uh if you converted that to USD yeah it was uh it broke a million and because it was a hybrid between you know software and services we didn't get a huge multiplier on it it was about 3x Revenue uh for the opposition okay uh this would have been back bootstrapped entrepreneur that was a lot of money for us at the time yeah I mean what that's a three million dollar deal back in 2017 right you guys own how many co-founders uh there was three I mean so if you each can pre-tax take home something like 300K that's a good gig back then yeah you know what and in Canada you get uh your tax free up to 750 000. so it was basically all of it in our pockets which was nice that's okay so I changed my math you each get 350 000 uh pre-tax and get to chemo so that's something like that yeah that's great looking back do you go man I wish I kept building that thing there was a lot of potential there did you sell too early or no yeah I think every founder has uh seller's remorse for sure um but you know that was a it was somewhat of a platform that launched us into other businesses and you know all of us are um you know successful in in different areas now so um I don't think I have too much ruts yeah I I rarely meet Founders that regret their first sale because it creates so much optionality for you not to mention the cash in your pocket um so all right you get that done in 2017 and then what was the next company I guess this was the BC backed one this was actually not we um the second company was ask Avenue again in the prop Tech space What uh ask Avenue okay and uh you know we had some of the largest Enterprise customers at the time Remax um you know a royal page another massive brokerage with 20 000 agents um and we got a lot of press want to pitch competition to kick it off uh but that one was angel-backed actually and it was a completely different experience from you know bootstrapping where you own I own 51 of ready chat uh ask Avenues slightly less but it's super important to note this that taking on Angels they have to be the right Angels uh the angels we took on were not um experiencing investing in Tech and so they had different agendas different strategies they were trying to enforce and so it got pretty messy pretty ugly and I actually exited that one willingly um and didn't make too much money off of it I just wanted to to move on to new things why do you say ugly yeah just different objectives um you know they were opposed to the markets we were entering the go-to market strategy um and there was just a lot of uh debates um you know a lot of bats which led to backstabbing eventually so it became somewhat of a toxic environment backstabbing yeah yeah yeah so for example you know I was the CEO at the time and I really wanted to continue to go after Enterprise uh within real estate um continue to go up market and just double down on that segment uh but they wanted to expand uh into other verticals um and So eventually you know it came down to you know voting and and I was outvoted and and I was actually removed from the company uh but I was willing to leave interesting what was the board how many folks there was I believe six people at the time wow that's a lot of people on a board for a company at Angel stage yeah yeah so you can imagine how complicated that was well yeah and you and also you rarely I mean you don't want to have an even number on your board because then you have to deal with ties um exactly all right what was the third company yep third company is um node which I'm currently working on uh this one's venture-backed so I've gone through you know very structures and I can say that this one is a lot easier when you're Venture packed you have just access to Stronger advisors more resources and you really can I wouldn't say take your time but you can really methodically plan out you know your next steps you're not trying to put out a bunch of fires trying to you know make payroll or anything like that you have um more time and focus I would say oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built the into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out I'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your founder path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different valuation private Equity Firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when I hover over here here right so the teal is what a VC would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on YouTube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of SAS valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your evaluation 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 so what do how much did you raise in what year yeah so we just closed it actually um last month um so it's precede uh 500 000 USD from Drive Capital amazing Partners um we're contemplating taking on a little bit more for our our precede with um I don't want to name them yet because it's not not done but um their resources in Ai and we're building an AI space uh would be invaluable to us so we're considering open up a little bit more and then maybe we'll raise a either a small a or a larger seed in about six to eight months time what cap did you negotiate um so it's convertible note um sorry what was your question what cap did you negotiate or was it a or was it an uncapped convertible note it's capped yes um I I don't want to get into too many details but I will share that we did raise like we're probably in the top 10 in terms of valuations and terms um we came out of a a program called entrepreneur first not sure if you're familiar with them that's where I actually met my co-founders this time around um and their terms were like ten percent for like 200 000 uh not the not the greatest and so we actually um we actually...