How Qela App CEO Tamara Tachynska grew to $330K revenue and 1 customers in 2025.

guys tomorrow launch an app called Keela app which is helping a very large Democratic volunteer group in Ukraine raised hundreds of thousands of dollars per month to support the cause in Ukraine she says wow if this is working so well in Ukraine I want to take this prototype and create a version to sell to a western non-profits or non-profits in Europe and so she's looking to take this to Market at 350 per month with her three co-founders we will see what happens next so far fueled by a 50 000 loan from a friend and a fifty thousand dollar investment uh and a ten thousand dollar Grant as well hey folks my guest today is Tamara tajinska she's building an app called Kila which is uh and she's doing this because she's a communication strategist and manager from Kiev uh Ukraine in the past decade she's been working on various projects from Healthcare and politics to education and culture both in the private and public sector keyless is supporting motivation management app so take your volunteers take your supporters how do you engage them that's what she's working on tomorrow are you ready to take us to the top okay okay great maybe tell us a story right now of a company that's using uh you to manage their volunteers their supporters um actually uh the story of Keller app uh began before full Russian invasion in Ukraine and before that it was just Standalone solution for one Ukrainian liberal movement and it was like a prototype and just before the invasion we decided to turn this uh Standalone solution into SAS solution for every Democratic community in the world uh unfortunately or the worst posed about our work but we just you know pull authors together and continue to work and I'm happy to announce that we are going to launch the US and European market very soon and what it is about it is about the Revolutionary way to communicate uh the leaders and supporters should communicate differently and the main point is to share the power with supporters to see them not only like um you know like your employees but that as your core decision makers as you are shareholders and so on so this is amazing so just to be clear is this for companies that want to empower employees or this is for organizations that want to empower volunteers and supporters it could be both but mostly and first of all it's for an organization that want to empower their supporters and volunteers donors and so on okay so can you rename two or three organizations that pay you today uh actually it's Ukrainian organization and we uh it's not a big of of them so it's it's it I cannot say uh some some moment like uh Democratic acts in Ukraine and some students organization but it's not like we are launching the market fully so uh we as so are you tomorrow are you pre-revenue it's okay if you are you pre-revenue today yeah yeah pre-revenue yeah we have some I mean we have some tractions but it's not like a full Market presence so what is traction how do you define traction today uh actually uh we got uh we got some uh actually the Prototype was used for three years so it has some uh results we saw how much uh the number of volunteers and supporters increased for instance for that organization it was six time increase in from two thousand to twelve thousand users of the app and the donation increase their donation increased and uh just like uh from 18 000 uh dollars to forty thousand dollars per month so we saw how it worked and after that we got uh some grants for developing and after that how much uh it was ten thousand uh euros and after that we raised some uh like friends and family investment it was about 100 uh 100 000 000 uh dollars so it allowed us to develop the solution and now we are like trying to because in due to the martial law in Ukraine the political activities in Ukraine stop so we cannot just sell it fully in Ukrainian Market because uh it's forbidden to um the rally are forbidden and so on so we have to focus on the market outside of Ukraine and understand how when you raise the hundred thousand dollars how what percent of the company did you sell uh it uh it was it was not like uh some of them it's like my my um like my friend we we have we have some specific like um agreements on it it was not like for sharing some some uh What's tomorrow what's the incentive how did you get this cat your friend doesn't give you money for free do they uh it's no he wants it's it is a little it is alone ah okay yeah it will be uh like uh it's it's alone we will so you still own you still own 100 of the company then um no another part of this 100 was for uh for five percent uh 50 50 000 was uh sold for five percent okay and 50k was alone yeah I see okay so then you own 95 the other investor owns five percent and that's the cap table today uh uh no I have a confounder I have a couple of co-founders uh the major co-founder he is a tech guy he provides all the infrastructure for the development on the all the team and so how many co-founders do you have uh I have uh three co-founders actually uh one of them The Tech Guy or another one is uh one of the author of the idea of Kayla app and the other one is it one of the investor 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 did you guys just split Equity evenly at the start or did you guys have to debate that a little bit no we didn't split uh uh evenly because it was like uh we understood what uh what's um what's impact of each of us so you kept more right I kept more that's the way to do it okay very cool so so I guess my question is everyone listening right now is rooting for you they want this to succeed but in order for you to build a sustainable application once the grant money and the fifty thousand dollars sort of runs out you've got to figure out a way to make money on this thing it sounds like you've added a lot of value to this group that's you know increased donations they have thousands of supporters on your platform why haven't you asked them to pay yet um you know in Ukraine um you know volunteering in Ukraine now is uh saving our country actually so it's our like social Mission so we are ready to provide our service for free for some organization if it's like meets our values and and it's very very crucial for for instance for surviving our country because volunteering in Ukraine now now this organization that used our prototype they are raising like more almost 200 000 uh dollars per month and they spend this this money for supplying Ukrainian Army any anything that needs tactical medicine and so on and so on uh so I believe that some organization all over the world are more like can offered us more than Ukrainian organization these days so which country are you going to get your first paying customer from uh I'm looking to I'm looking for U.S customers I'm actually we are looking for some probably non-profitable organizations who are organized organized some some human rights or climate crisis response or some students self-government organization because I believe that our app allows to again just build very strong Community very loyal community and a big community and uh like teach people to be involved and to keep interest in and retain this interest for very very long time because we believe we see the problem that a lot of volunteers just quit this volunteering job and they lose interest but tomorrow how do you convince a us-based non-profit to use your application right like like are you gonna fly over here in store doc I mean how are you going to get that first customer uh first of all I'm going to um we are already a part of allianzo democracy's foundation fellowship at the fighters for democracy so we have some public PR and we have some visibility for like for fight for democracy this is the first one the second one I know that a lot of non-profits use CRM system tasks managers but they they don't work as we do they just don't communicate with supporters on um our way so I believe we are we will improve and we will just trying to attract clients from I mean tomorrow but I guess just to be really specific everybody wants to shine a spotlight obviously on what's happening in Ukraine right now it's a great time for you to use Western media to promote Killa app for free right I imagine a headline in the Wall Street Journal the secret app Ukrainian volunteer organizations are using to raise 2.4 million dollars annually and then it's a backlinked tequila app right why aren't we seeing that kind of press coming out um the difference between the Prototype that this organization are using and the our actual product there's a difference we add something so I want to be like fair I like to be honest that they are it's like much more we are providing a much more uh solution my much more features in our solution so it then comes to my mind to use to use this as a as a you know as a pitch well I found you I mean look I'm gonna do everything we can to promote the heck out of you but I want to see you uh you know even do more and I just feel like this is such a great story and I understand why you don't want to charge Ukrainian organizations for your software but I also know you'll be out of business at some point if you can't figure out a way to generate Revenue that isn't grant money or loans right so I want to see you succeed and sell around the world thank you thank you thank you for your support of course of course I think this is a like very unusual situation uh I never wanted to be like non-profit uh business yeah we are for profit we want to make money and we but we want to like to create a win-win situation so we want to leave the solution will be affordable for every community so what's your pricing going to be what are you going to launch at it's so it will be like uh it will depend on the number of users up to 100 users it will be free just to to to touch the ground and just yeah how it works up to from 100 up to 1 000 users it will cost like uh 350 dollars so it's not like that much uh and uh after one thousand up to 2050 it will be like 750 and after that I believe it will become some customer and how many how many folks are using like how many unique organizations are using the tool today even if they're free um to be honest now this two to nobody because it's like we are testing it the new version the Prototype tomorrow how many Pros are using the Prototype I'm trying to give you some credit here right you have a massive organization in Ukraine use you need to raise hundreds of Millions now it's just one organization okay got it so you've got the one organization that you're powering with the Prototype you're getting the new version together to launch in in the west and maybe in Europe uh to your first paying customers at hopefully 350 bucks a month yeah all right on that note let's wrap up here with the famous five tomorrow number one what's your favorite book oh how to say um I I can I can say what I what I'm reading now right um I am reading now I'm the masters of scale uh this is a book about like startups yeah number two is there a CEO you're following or studying second please is there a CEO you're following or studying um actually I'm I'm um you can pass yeah okay number three what's your favorite online tool for building Kila app actually we are using now uh Microsoft Azure tool this is our platform that we are using for building I understood uh number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night how many hours I sleep yes it depends it depends how um depends on uh Sirens alerts in Kiev actually are you in cave right now yes yes can we can we see out your window do you have a do you have a view can you improve the camera oh interesting so are you like west north south east of cave uh it's uh thousands of KF and you can see you can see the stripe on my window which prevents it from crashing from the heat wave if it occurs that's interesting so I prefer to sleep eight hours per night got it yeah all right and what's your situation married single kids uh single no kids but I have a very nice dog oh that's great okay and can I ask how old you are I'm almost 40. okay so 39 years young something last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. uh secondly something you wish you knew when you were 20 years old um that I will be so brave um yeah yeah I never expected for me guys tomorrow launch an app called Kila app which is helping a very large Democratic volunteer group in Ukraine raised hundreds of thousands of dollars per month to support the cause in Ukraine she says wow if this is working so well in Ukraine I want to take this prototype and create a version to sell to a western non-profits or non-profits in Europe and so she's looking to take this to Market at 350 per month with her three co-founders we will see what happens next so far fueled by a fifty thousand dollar loan from a friend and a 50 000 investment uh and a ten thousand dollar Grant as well tomorrow thank you for taking us to the top having me 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 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