PriceOps revenue, CEO Nikhil Kotcharlakota, team size, customer count, churn, and more in 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...