How OpsLyft grew OpsLyft to $1.5M revenue and 10 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is ayush kumar he's a software engineer by heart with a deep passion for building products for developers all around the world he's now building opslift.com which simplifies operational complexities for cloud management are you sure you're ready to take us to the top yep absolutely hey thanks nathan for uh you know uh inviting me to report uh like podcast uh like wonderful to be here yeah what does cloud management mean is that like keeping my aws spend low or setting up you know my servers in the most operationally efficient way or what's it mean yeah i think uh cloud management in general to me uh really means around that given that more and more organizations in current days are like really uh you know running every piece of their workload upon the cloud right uh so as and when basically the organization kind of like really hits a certain size and scale right uh the cloud footprint like really grows up like on a massive levels per se there are like hundreds of machines being running and in fact thousands in some cases uh there are like huge amounts of data that is kind of being stored etc etc so the overall uh i would say a requirement of managing this entire infrastructure and keeping it stable and uh also at the same point in time ensuring that all of your applications are running at the lowest amount of cost being possible also right so all that requires like a huge amount of time and effort for engineers on a day-to-day basis right and that's where i would say the complexity part of the management of the cloud operations like really comes about uh wherein engineers in today's state like really find it uh you know time consuming and hard to like really solve the problems around uh uh you know managing this entire cloud infrastructure understood you know so that's what's hoping that we do and so help me understand how you price this what are customers paying on average per month to use your technology yeah i think uh these typically sell uh into the category of the customers which are who are spending above i would say in the bracket of i would say two to ten million dollars annually on the cloud right uh so our price point usually like ranges uh somewhere between uh twenty thousand dollars two hundred thousand dollars uh annual yeah sorry twenty to a hundred thousand yeah and what would you say a sweet spot is like is forty or 50 000 bucks a year appropriate or is that too low i think uh our sweet spot typically should range around i would say 30 to 40 k per month sorry and is it a flat fee or do you only get paid if they save money on their cloud spend uh no i think uh it's a mix of both i think ours is a usage based pricing wherein you know the more and more basically customers uh uh you know uh use our platform to like really uh analyze more and more resource so our pricing is majorly focused around the resource uh based pricing right uh measured by what so you say utility what kind of utility how do you measure it yeah so our utility measurement criteria typically revolves around the two factors first is basically how much of the i would say savings potential are we able to like really generate for the customers right so i think let's say if you say that we're able to generate like 100 000 per month right so that's one criteria that we generate and then secondly i would say on the basis of the utility that uh how much uh of the number of resources that we are basically able to like analyze and produce opportunities against people so i think that's the truth so what what's what would like one resource be like one server what do you mean number of resources yeah so the number of resources here as you like rightly mentioned it would be either a one server or as a regular storage device that you kind of really subscribe in the cloud an ip address etc etc so all i would say the constructs uh that like infrastructure as service by default like really offers you right that would be a resource i see okay put this all on a timeline for me when you launch the business i think uh we launched our business full-time in december 2020 uh i think it's been roughly around you can say uh you know uh uh 15 to 18 months for us running this business right so yeah that's that's it when we launched do you remember when you uh landed your first paid customer or are you guys still pre-revenue uh i think uh we landed our first customer somewhere i think around in february uh 20-20 if i could remember correctly right within the two months so uh we were bootstrapped i think in the first year of our business right uh so our only source of money was basically from our customers so yeah i think that's when we landed up our first customer oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're 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 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 attraction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 to 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 these recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of sas valuations than what you can get now inside of founderpath and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to 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 now are you still bootstrapped or have you raised uh we have raised i think a capital in this year itself uh i think uh we released i think about half a million dollars so far yeah okay so you raised half a million bucks this year and caught a pre-seed round was that like family and friends or an investor i think uh it was uh it was a mix of i would say family and friends plus uh like some notable indian investors across in india and the us right so that's what's basically the pc ground to the system i see i see and most people are selling you know 10 to 20 of their business in their seed round were you sort of in that same range uh sorry i didn't follow you on this question most people like so you raised 500 grand you sold equity most people are selling 10 to 15 10 to 20 percent of their equity in their pre-seed round did you sell about the same amount i think ours was like quite less in that sense uh because i think uh we were already generating a significant revenue uh you know uh uh like before we raised out basically our seat uh like receipt round right so i think i think uh uh i can't definitely can't disclose out the number of uh equity that we kind of like really sold but i think uh it was much lower than two what basically uh uh you know uh like to typically what we see companies selling out in the previously dropped yeah okay so i won't push you harder but fair to say you sold less than ten percent of the business in that round i don't yeah okay fair enough fair enough okay so first customers back in 2020 do you remember who it was how did you land that first customer i think uh ours was typically uh the first customer was one of the largest i would say uh you know uh news leading apps across india it's by the name of in shorts uh that's basically one of the news editing apps here in india right so uh we landed our first customer i think uh uh through references only we connected i did a lot of networking across different different founders right and we've got an intro to the cto et cetera he liked...