How Nife labs CEO Nida Sahar grew Nife labs to $272.3K revenue and 25 customers in 2024.

guys the hybrid Cloud platform knife dot IO they're doing 25 000 a month today in revenue from a thousand a month just a year ago their preced around they closed a year ago for half a million bucks at a five over a five million valuation looking to raise 500k now targeting a 10 million valuation we'll see if they can get it done 25 customers paying on average a thousand dollars per month a team size of 20 folks with eight engineers hey folks my guest today is Nina sahir she's been blessed with many empowering opportunities in the past 15 years of her career her corporate experience made her extremely passionate about technology and paved a way for the world of startups she's now working on nife knife dot IO not just for teaching her how to create technological impact but opening possibilities become an example for others uh specifically others other women in Tech it's an application life cycle management platform Nita you ready to take us to the top yes yes yes yes yes um thank you so much yeah you you bet so when did you launch the company and tell us a story about a customer that's using you today oh we started off a peak of pandemic 2020 2020 May and uh yeah I was stuck in Singapore in a room and then I didn't know what else to do because it was not my um country of origin and then my coach advised me that I should start a company and that's what happened uh the students are that simple but yeah so um you wanted a story of one of a customer who's using it so we have an interesting music app that's using our platform and they're doing this to live stream um uh their Studio the the production work so different musicians from different locations are actually jamming together and they have deployed their application through knife so that's really interesting that's very cool and so what is the average customer pay you per month today average customer pays anywhere between thousand dollars um to about thousand five hundred dollars per month yes and what do they get for a thousand a month uh they get a lot of automations done in uh in a single go so they can deploy their applications not just that um also they get performance metrics related to the applications who's using it how they're using it and how they can go ahead and um scale their applications to different regions and locations as well so your website says the fastest way to build manage deploy and scale any application securely globally with auto deploy from get zero devops servers or infrastructure management so should we look at this like robotic process automation software you can look at it as an application life cycle management software well make it not so buzzwordy okay make it real for my audience what does it actually mean it actually means your applications need a place to stay so we help them Reach their the exact location where they want to live uh so my example that I always give is Airbnb for servers right so we have a whole bunch of servers across the world and we know what the the kind of ecosystem and infrastructure each of the servers have so we help your applications go and live in the location that makes more sense for them not just for vacationing but yeah to um survive and to breathe okay and you got going in 2020 how many customers do you have today we have about 25 odd customers we are still very old say yes and so 25 customers paying a thousand a month means you're doing about 25 000 a month in Revenue yes we are that's great and where were you exactly one year ago so we can calculate growth rate we were at a thousand dollars that's about it tell me that story how did you get your first customer uh so a first customer came from one reference uh primarily uh yes that was the easy part I think getting the first customer was not that difficult I think the difficult part was getting the second third fourth fifth Customer because then we had to establish patterns we had to see uh what are exact icps who is our Persona which markets do we Target because we were all over the place really so uh I think we've a year ago we were still doing pre and spray I would say but then identifying the first uh getting my second or third customer became super super critical so I think um it was a lot of um what do I say marketing effort lot of sales effort LinkedIn reach outs don't ask it's it's been like a great learning process yes and how many folks today are full-time at the company we're about 20 at this time point of Time 20. how many of those are engineers eight eight okay and do you code I do code yes I'm a tech founder turned whatever business person yes that's awesome are you a sole founder do you have a co-founder I'm a solo founder yes oh I love that congrats it's so rare um did you have people saying oh Nita you've got to get somebody else and you said no I'm gonna do it myself like what was the thinking there investors said you need to find someone you're gonna go crazy I had my coaches who said that you know I'll go crazy I did try finding people it's not that I didn't but then it just didn't work out so so at one point of time I said you know just just forget about finding a co-founder if I have to build this and and the drama around finding a co-founder is also crazy right and you know um whatever so I said either I'm gonna build a company or I'm going to find a co-founder so I said Chuck finding a co-founder let me build this so there were a few investors who didn't worry about the fact that I was a solo founder even what drama the drama was person coming in asking for steak not wanting to work and then you know the whole thing about hey I am I am the CEO of whatever Telecom organization I'm coming down to your company so I need to get this much pay and I don't know what not so um I think the co-founder conflict part I think probably I could write a book on it so yes that's that story oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders 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how about about how much you sold uh we sold about 10 of a company okay ten so you were at about five million valuation yes we're about a 5.5 million valuation guess how'd you convinced folks to give you a five million evaluation you know in the middle of 2022 markets are going a bit crazy you know you're early on how'd you get that valuation done couple of things one is the the topic of what I'm...