PriceOps Revenue, Valuation & Funding (2023)

priceops.net they started building a platform I call it a couple months ago they have three co-founders husband and wife team owned 70 together the engineer owns thirty percent also a lifelong friend company is hoping to solve the pricing issue trying to identify why a solution like this doesn't exist today they are launching their own pricing plan here targeting end of June at maybe a thousand bucks per month ultimately trying to price their plan against an outcome based metric which they're still trying to figure out what that will be 10 on the waitlist so far which he's done via cold Outreach on LinkedIn hey folks my guest today is nikhil coach arlakota he's a dad entrepreneur pricing Enthusiast and has been the pricing discipline for the past 10 years he loves the impact price can have on business growth and is now building priceops.net which is an end-to-end pricing solution for SAS companies Nikki are you ready to take us to the top absolutely all right so yes give us a description of a customer that uses you today and how they use you yeah so we are still pre-revenue but the customers that we are targeting would be um anyone who is working on pricing and SAS companies right so that could be a pricing manager product managers uh product marketing managers like that's the profile or that's the type we would be using that part okay and how much have you spent of your own money so far building an MVP oh I mean it's not too much that we spent um I mean I got lucky because I found a amazing co-founder I mean he's been a friend of mine for more than 17 years um so I got him on board we have not really spent anything outside it's more of me uh again just our day-to-day expenses right so nothing major expense um but yeah okay so you have a co-founder and do you spell Equity 50 50. uh not 50 50 exactly um we uh we actually have three co-founders uh so one is my wife as well she's doing the product and customer success uh side of it and and customer interviews so it's 35 35 and 30. okay you and your wife have owned 70 together that's right yeah I see I see okay so you're hustling uh you're being Scrappy I guess help me understand how you discovered this problem right were you working in another company and hated the pricing experience you were running or how did you discover this yeah so I was in like I said I was in pricing for a long time in my life I was actually in the manufacturing side of it for the majority of uh of my experience or in my career but what I realized was price the impact pricing tools can have on just the whole pricing process and how it can improve it and how it can make our lives that much easy so we can make decisions faster so during that time I spoke to a lot of SAS companies um and I was based in Charlotte North Carolina but I was talking to a lot of companies in in California and a lot of what I realized was they were all like trying to understand how to do the price right like how to get the right pricing or what's the process so majority of the companies I spoke with especially early to Mid-State startups they were like looking up uh pricing processes online like just just trying to Google it and trying to figure out their pricing or maybe even uh use the company enterprising as a benchmark so what I realized was it was a big pain point on uh for companies to figure out their pricing and the pride price models used so that kind of game me an idea one okay I I see that companies are struggling with that and a product in that space would really help companies uh take make that decision faster okay so how are you going about discovering if you have a real product here in other words I mean when you plan to launch the pricing page or how big is your wait list today uh so we have a little bit of weightless it's not too large uh but what we are doing is how many people are on the waitlist uh about 10 uh and most of them most of them were through the customer interviews that we got how are you getting them to respond to your emails or your LinkedIn requests how are you getting their attention uh I mean just just reaching out to individuals just cold Outreach right really uh trying to get email or Twitter or LinkedIn uh LinkedIn an email and so what's the LinkedIn if you're if you're messaging somebody called on LinkedIn for this product what what do you say what's the text uh I mean mainly to get there uh pain points and the challenges that they're trying to work through uh someone emails me on LinkedIn and says please reply I want to know your pain points and challenges for my new pricing software I'm going to say I don't have time for you and I'm gonna ignore you what specifically are you putting in the first LinkedIn message to get a response uh I mean that's pretty much it though like I mean I've been getting decent responses but what I'm trying to say is like uh like how challenging pricing can be and what we where we are trying to build the product and feedback from industry experts like them would would really help and uh folks have been really good at responding back to them 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 open up your LinkedIn on your computer and read to me a cold message you send somebody okay is it like one sentence or like 30. um about 15 I'd say 15 sentences yeah oh so it's law I mean this is a you're using emails yeah I'm losing inmail yep okay read one to me uh so the one I got response to right so uh this person was head of pricing at a company so they were and they put it on their LinkedIn page that they're working on pricing and packaging so I said I see that you're working on pricing and packaging changes um and we are building at Price option building an end-to-end pricing solution uh I would like to get your feedback on what challenges you're facing and how we can build the best product to solve those problems and if you have about 30 minutes to spare would like to get some insights from uh industry experts like you what'd they say back uh they said uh happy to uh chat and they gave a certain uh time time frame that they're free on and they set up an interview interesting interesting and what are some of the key questions you're asking when you get that call set up once you have them live so mainly like what does their pricing process look like from uh from the from starting to the ending and to get it live um and what are the pain Point what are the tools they use today mostly Excel uh and how do they actually validate their pricing and how can how can certain the tools that you're building can help them with all with all these uh steps and like what price models they use how do they find the optimum pricing and so on okay talk money I mean when you start charging people uh probably by the end of June is what we are trying to get to and what do you think you're going to start with in terms of a pricing point um so so we are starting to Target like maybe early stage companies to begin with so probably around the Thousand uh to five thousand dollars um per year is what we uh trying to what we're trying to look at um but once we can prove out the concept and actually add more features um in the tool the the uh contract the ACV can be much larger and what are you pricing against number of seats number of skus number of amount of gmv yeah it's going to be a flat rate to start with about outcome based pricing uh models so we are actually figuring out how we can charge based on the outcome that we are delivering as well so that's something that I still we're still figuring out okay interesting all right very cool so okay you're building and then who's who's the engineer who's doing all the tech work uh so it's one it's my co-founder uh sharep uh he's been the front-end developer for our past 12 front and end back-end developer for past 12 years and he's the one doing all the work for publishing the product how did you convince him to work for free in exchange for 30 equity uh I again I've known him for more than 17 years I mean he's one of my closest friends and uh what I did of course was uh like pitch to pitch the idea to him and uh with the the size of the market as well right like I think it's a big problem to solve at least that I still strongly believe that so that kind of convinced him to uh get on board who is doing the best job solving us right now that if you do well you're gonna kill them or replace them um probably I mean so this is pretty new in most of the for most of the companies um some of the ones probably already there are like maybe profitable um I think paddle recently acquired them sometime last year um they are doing some some parts of this um uh but someone who recently started like Ibaka uh is one of the tools that are selling this okay so they're again pretty new and they're again trying to solve that problem and I think we know is one other company that's trying to solve this problem as well can you spell that one Noah Manoa it's m-i-n-o-a m-i-n-o-a interesting okay why aren't there more and larger competitors I mean paddle I mean profile was only doing five million in annual revenue I mean I say only but they have a massive team they're only doing five million in annual revenue on their churn product a retention product Pat obviously acquired them a Becca looks new Manoa looks new I mean don't you want to go compete in a space where you know that the prize is you know a 10 50 100 million dollar AR SAS company uh yeah you're right I mean but but I think I this this problem is definitely something that needs to be solved right like I think today it's it's very much consultative and consultant based model um but I think a tool you won't replace the consultant but it's going to give the uh self-serve uh option for companies that are ready to do it um I think like I I'm not sure why there have not been companies that are uh that's all this problem don't you really know that answer I mean isn't that the best use of your time is to understand why this doesn't exist already because you might discover something you don't want to hear which is there is no market for it uh so so that was one of the things that I started off with right like talking to most of the companies I mean I was at uh Saturday practice earlier this year too and talked to a lot of companies there as well uh they all think that this tool will help them right like they all said that this tool will help them and I've been reaching out to them once we once what are they paying for right now if they say a tool like this will help them and then they say and you know right now we're paying X to solve it uh so so today so it's it's almost like them like either the co-founders or like if it's an early stage startups he's the founders co-founders trying to solve the problem themselves like using Excel right so there is no tool that they're paying for today um I mean if if you say Excel or Google Sheets that that's what they're paying for uh but what they are not sure is is their pricing right right like is the right is do they have the right pricing do they have the right pricing model and to get that they either have to hire a consultant outside or have the pricing expertise which could cost anywhere between 50 to 100K like depending on the consultant that you buy yeah I was obviously nervous when I hear a Founder going to attack a space where there is no player right I mean a Becca has 17 employees Noah has three employees paddle you know capped out and there's a reason they sold the profit well sorry cap that at five million Revenue there um I mean maybe this isn't the problem that people are willing to pay for maybe Excel is the solution um I mean again I I believe like we can solve this problem right okay again that's that's something that uh all the trust uh all the customers we talk to all most of the founders we talked to they said they wanted um and they're willing but they're not paying for it but they're not paying for it right now there there is I'm sure other people have tried this right no one else there is no other company that you just gave me the list of that's doing 50 or 100 million dollars of Revenue helping people figure out pricing for their SAS products yeah not not yet not yet yeah but what that's what I'm saying is don't you have to understand why it doesn't exist in other words Elon Musk knows the reason nobody else is living on Mars is because the oxygen content level is too low and the amounts you know to take one pound from Earth to Mars costs x amount of money he knows the problems to solve I haven't heard you list the real reasons that a company like this doesn't exist today and how you're uniquely qualified to break through those items yeah yeah good point again like I said I don't I still don't understand why there is no one trying to solve this again there are new players in there uh if I have to identify or if what I think uh the answer to that would be is uh they're probably no one's probably figured out a way to productize this the solution right like it's it's like I said it's a consultant based model like each each company uh could be a different um like there are different inputs for each company the the price Model could be very different for each one so maybe no one's been able to productize that yet uh and that's probably why no one uh exists all right well we'll see what happens um have you bootstrapped the company trainer of your race capital no it's bootstrapped yet as of now uh we are looking to raise Capital uh very very early stages yet again once we get the product and some somewhere we'll go uh pretty uh how much are you looking to raise uh probably around half a million uh to a million to start with and what cap I assume you're gonna need to note what what cap do you think you'll try and get um so again like maybe about five to ten million five to ten million so five million would be pretty standard this Market though you never know we'll see what happens on that note though nikhil let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite Business book uh I mean there's there's a couple but right now it's the hard thing about hot things number two is their CEO you're following or studying uh again that's I'm trying to learn from a lot of them but I think Yami rangan from HubSpot yeah number four how many are number three what's your favorite online tool for building price Ops right now it's the atlassian sort of products like Confluence and jira number four how many hours of sleep are you getting every night uh that's a little less right now I guess but maybe around five to six hours okay and situation married single kids we know you're married but any kids meh yep married uh yes one kid already he's about three years old and the second one's on the way actually okay congrats that's exciting how old are you thank you I'm 36 36 last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. oh well um so I think uh what I would say to my 20 year old self is like to get started on a problem that I think is a problem and get into this entrepreneurial Journey earlier so again learning the waters early in my career guys there have a priceops.net they started building a platform uh oh a couple months ago uh they have three co-founders husband and wife team owned 70 together the engineer owns 30 also a lifelong friend company is hoping to solve the pricing issue trying to identify why a solution like this doesn't exist today they are launching their own pricing plan here targeting end of June at maybe a thousand bucks per month ultimately trying to price their plan against an outcome based metric which they're still trying to figure out what that will be 10 on the waitlist so far which is done via cold Outreach on LinkedIn nikhil thank you for taking us to the top all right thank you Nathan one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm 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 our poo 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 p.m Central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on 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