How Produx AI CEO Tony Tom grew Produx AI to $75.9K revenue and 5 customers in 2024.

guys product. a competes with sort of product board and pendo in that same space they're doing 5,000 a month today in Revenue across five customers that pay on average $1,000 per month they raised about 500,000 bucks worth of capital it called around a 3 million valuation two co-founders hustling Total Team of five about the two co-founders split Equity evenly at the start now going through Tech Stars learning a lot about the network and growing fast we'll see if they can go from 5 to 50 customers here quickly again at product. AI hey folks my guest today is Tony Tommy he's been a startup guy since the age of 19 landed at a startup eventually worked in a few startups in Enterprise to see the problem and started products AI to solve it it enables B2B product teams with intelligence Tony you ready to take us to the top yeah that's cool what does that mean that's very broad enable B2B product teams with intelligence so yeah when when the companies usually scale from a Founder L sales or Pro small process close group to a very process-led multiple team sales GTM motion what happens is the the product teams get detached more and more from the customers at the end of the day they are like very far from the customer and there'll be teams like customer success support everybody interfacing with customers and the context is always um coming from those teams mostly so during that process um the product teams is not getting the enough context to make all the decisions what we do is we pick up all the customer data feedback coming in from different locations different tools and generate insights on top of it so that product team can use those insights to make more Intelligent Decisions more smarter decisions should we think of you like segment or pendo or who would you compare yourself to um pendo is a good example product board is another good one um there are a few new companies that are out there as well uh doing the exact same thing so we are we sit in between if if to be exact we sit in between the customers and the product board so that we bridge the gap between the customers and the product team I that's the right positioning I see and and what are you what are customers paying on average per month to use this technology you've built so somewhere in between $12,000 to 24,000 is is the average monthly price um and it depends on how much data that you're bringing in as well so uh if you want to like bring in a ton of data from your past history historic data from what the customers were talking about like two years back three years back then then it would like scale up as well so $122,000 a month or about $150,000 per year is your average contract value um no no no $12,000 per year about thousand a month yeah thousand a month okay very cool put this on a timeline for me when did you launch the business it's been super early for us like seven months back we launched it so super launched and C late late 2022 late no 2023 early so somewhere in March 2023 is the exact timeline when did you write the first line of code for the platform that is probably March first week or second week once week this year yeah this year okay interesting and did you quit your full-time day job before that or were you thinking about this idea for a while we've been thinking about this idea for a while but could the day job on Jan 31st took a month off after that and then kind of like jumped into it so me and my cunder has been discussing this and a few other ideas and we landed finally on this how did you find your first customer so we um we went outbound fully on um right out of the bat and we didn't want to wait for sales or anything so it was fully outbound cold call was the first customer you cold called how did you get their number uh we use uh platforms uh that are providing us data to to like Target ICP so like Apollo Zoom info those kind of tools to actually find out the number what filters were you using Apollo and zoom in info so we um for my ICP it's basically companies ranging from 10 to100 million in and hiring product managers having at least 100 to 400 employees and um a few more filters like location in the North American region a few of them interesting okay so you call you sell them that was your first customer how many customers are are you serving today so we serve approximately five right now so um some are some are coming on board um going through security and all that so we are super small right now okay so it's about 5,000 a month in Revenue yeah that's great now have you self funded this I see have a techar shirt on did you go through Tech Stars yeah I mean in fact we are going through Tech Stars right now amazing so what is it I forget what the it's like 15K for 7% or something right 120 for yeah somewhere in that range so the 100K not is like a separate one on your current valuation yeah I I see but have you raised any other Capital besides 120,000 from techstars yeah we uh we've raised 400k in additional uh from different angels and and groups that we work with so 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 287 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 lost in you connect your stripee 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 valuation 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 founder paath 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 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 realtime valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raise they sold 22% 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 the 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 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 founder path.com products SLV valuations or if you go to founder path.com and hover over products click on get your valuation 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 there all right let's jump back into the interview okay so about 520,000 RIS today and call your preed round plus the accelerator yeah that that would be good most folks are selling you know 15 to 20% especially in today's compressed Market 15 to 20% in their preed round were you in that same range yeah we we are um in the same range so we are in fact less than 15% yeah so if you sell 15% for 400k that mean that puts your valuation at something like 2.4 million post money um in um so our valuation is is higher than that basically so we sell sold less than 15 um and we didn't we didn't actually take um the Texas's money at this point we we took outside money at a higher valuation so we didn't want to take the Texar money at lower Val Texar lets you not I thought Texar forced you to take their money so you're in the program but you didn't take the money they have no equity it's optional so you don't you don't have to take that money if you don't need it so is not on your cap table uh they are on the cap table but that will be for a lower uh uh lower round so it's basically the program works in such a way that you have a fees which is by default given and um the 100K that they're putting in that comes at evaluation uh predefined by techar so we is that a million that is that is 3 million okay and um there there is like some technicalities in there where where if you have pre commits at a higher valuation then you get to like match that commit and um we had commits but the problem was we didn't have enough proof of the commit it was all friends and family and we didn't like send any emails back and forth it was all Word of Mouth that came at that valuation so you raised 400k at a 3 million valuation and chose not to take the 100k from Tech Stars yeah I see I guess what's the upside for techar why why why would techar let you in the program if they have no upside no I mean um there is a there's a common stock allotment for Texas um oh how much is that four five% that that is the 6% basically so that comes with optional 100K as well well if you're going to get if you're going to get if they're going to take 6% anyway why wouldn't you take the 100K no 100K is additional than 6% you said it's optional but they take six% no matter what so if they're gonna matter what true or false techar right now own 6% of your cap table correct yeah true or false you've taken zero dollars from techar uh we took 20,000 that is uh that is basically by default comes with the 6% if they were going to but why would you not take the other 80k if it's basically free money take the 100k from Tech Stars it's not free money it comes as a as a convertible not so it's not free money oh I see okay got it that makes sense okay so you're going to the program now what's I mean what's been you know some people love accelerator some people hate them what's been the biggest surprise um it's the biggest surprise is the the network that we can tap into right off the bat so basically it's like huge Network that unless you so I come from India I don't I had only a few Network that I could connect to with easily so Texar opens up to a large Network within uh their cohort and their mentors and mentees basically so that that helps us move faster than usual very cool and who who is who is we you have a co-founder yeah we I have a co-founder he's um his name is jiren you guys split Equity 50/50 yes ah come on no one was no one was worth more um I mean we we thought about it um hard like for a long time so yeah to who's doing the all the engineering he's doing all the engineering basically so you're the sales guy yes all right how do you go from five customers to 50 uh it's right now we are just focusing only on outbound so basically 5 to 50 would be uh still outbound 90% outbound 10 percentage brand positioning and marketing so we're not expecting um inbound or any plg motion at this point so fully outbound that's the way we are going and just the two of you hustling right now or is the team bigger team is five uh three more additional people so two engineers and one designer at this point two engineer okay and interesting you're the only sales guy though right yeah very cool all right on that note let's wrap here with the famous 5 number one what's your favorite book um sapiens yep number two is there a CEO you're following or studying yes um we work closely with CEO of docket AI so he was the chief data officer previously at Zoom INF for Arjun p number three what's your favorite online tool for Building Products um right now it is Google so it's wi number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night somewhere in between five and seven okay situation married single kids married no kids okay and how old are you Tony 29 29 last question something you wish you knew when you were 30 or sorry when you were 20 when I was 20 yeah uh keep pushing I stopped a bunch of I wrapped up a bunch of startups and shouldn't have done that guys product. a competes with sort of product board and pendo in that same space they're doing 5,000 a month today in Revenue across five customers that pay on average a, per month they raised about 500,000 bucks worth of capital it called around a 3 million valuation two co-founders hustling Total Team of five by the two co- split Equity evenly at this start now going through Tech Stars learning a lot about the network and growing fast we'll see if they can go from 5 to 50 customers here quickly again at product. AI Tony thanks for taking us to the top thanks man thanks for having the time one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1 pm 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 backend dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu 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 YouTube every day at 2 p.m. central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the Subscribe button below here on YouTube the big red button and and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SAS World whether it's an acquisition a big fund raise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else I don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack Community for B2B SAS Founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at Nathan la.com slack in the meantime I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube I'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows but I do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys' support all right I'll be in the comments see you