How Teamforce AI CEO Vivek Kumar grew Teamforce AI to $738K revenue and 100 customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is vivek is vivek kumar we'll talk to uh john here in a second but vivek is the founder and ceo of a company called click it they help enterprises and mid-size businesses reduce turnover by giving frontline employees a voice before clickety worked at blackstone in new york as a management consultant and then graduated from the wharton school at the university of pennsylvania or maybe those were obviously reversed but vic are you ready to take us to the top let's do it all right introduce john here how do you guys work together john's one of our co-founders very good so just there's two of you guys or there's more there's one more he's in india who's the smartest who's the best looking this one right here no john who's the smartest smartest man i think the guys who code okay so vic are you kind of leading the dev team and john you're the business guy depender is our dev team uh i kind of uh investors in the business than john customers and product ah very good okay good and did you get i mean the equity conversation always tough did you guys just say 33 33 33 how'd you do it uh it's not exactly that dependent and i had been working on something for a few years in india and then we brought john on board uh last year who pursued who john you went after them or they came after you uh i would say it was a it was a mutual it was kind of so diplomatic i love this that's the right answer john all right let's get on to the rest of the interview what's click it do vivek and how do you make money uh so we make it easy for organizations to collect feedback from non-desk bound workers which is about when you think about the us workforce 80 million workers are hourly and most of them don't have a easy voice to provide sentiment about how they're feeling in the workforce we make it easy through a kiosk and we charge organizations dollars per employee per month to be able to provide this information okay that's your only pricing plan no expansion revenue opportunities uh there are expansion revenue opportunities for enterprises uh but the basic pricing is about three dollars per employee so would you say that's a fair average you look across all your seats the average seat's about three bucks a month correct okay and what's the founding story when did you launch what year we've been around for a few years but we launched this offering about three months ago and it's already been getting good traction in the market because there's not really any great uh um substitutes that are available to kind of capture voices in a scalable way for non-desk bound workers who quantify that so you know how many seats on the platform today what's good traction uh in total across different solution sets we have we probably get about 10 000 responses a day um primarily a mix of enterprises and mid-sizes and warehouse logistics and then we also do some small and medium businesses on the side john vivek danced around the question how many seats on the platform okay we have we have over 100 customers uh the new product offering we have uh several hundred employees using it um across uh you know half a dozen or so different large organizations okay so i am curious are you so 100 logos using you guys give me a general sense of average team size are we talking kind of startups are we talking thousand person teams the the so the when we talk about all the customers those are mostly like smaller businesses um the new offering that quebec mentioned those are enterprise mid to mid to large size organizations so companies that have you know over a thousand employees in some cases okay and what do you so i want to kind of get you know phrase get more of the story you guys are in a beautiful spot right and that most people have on the show they're doing some big amount of you know you know revenue the problem with those shows are they're not actionable because people listening are where you guys are or they're in corporate thinking about leaving to be right where you guys are so this is gonna be very very valuable uh where are you guys at today so you're three months in so what's revenue today per month so total revenue per month is between ten and twenty thousand dollars about half of that's recurring so about ten thousand a month and recurring the new offering that john uh is talking about more detail it's about uh a thousand a month and recurring so within three months we've hit a thousand an mrr with a new offering that's great so a hundred logos paying you about a hundred bucks per month right they get about 10 grand per month in sales right there you just launched a new offering why why um why go to two offerings so quick it's like you haven't given the first one chance yet to scale we did actually try to scale it what we found is we run into some roadblocks going into the the mid-size and higher end of the market it was more targeted customers uh in the hotel space who were logging into wi-fi um and and while we were growing incrementally month on month what we wanted to do was actually grow a much larger business and that's part of the reason john came on board was to help us think about where we could take the business beyond what we were doing kind of with a lifestyle type business and make it more into a high growth opportunity so john what month did you join i joined a little over a year ago okay that was in may of 2017. yeah and then he was exploring what we could do that whole time okay and when vivek when did you and your other cofounder really start working on this we had something completely different in india back in 2012 jan of 2012 we wanted to get more people online for free in india we really had a good background in the wi-fi space and we we knew we understood that but we didn't know what to kind of do with that in terms of monetization uh ended up coming back to the us serving a lot of small hotels with getting guest feedback over wifi managing their networks and then realized wait you know you could set up kiosks that obviously rely on wi-fi host everything in the cloud and collect employee feedback in a scalable way for non-desk bound workers and that's sort of how we arrived on this story okay so between 2012 and 2017 i mean how did you and your other co-founder how did you support yourself did you have money did you did you raise capital we've raised about 750 000 over that course that whole time in fact just closed some more capital recently but because we were living in india our costs were very low we did have some trickles of revenue so we managed to not die we were good cockroaches and now that we've sort of found something that's better product market fit we are investing more and looking to raise more money uh to kind of really grow what looks like a good opportunity so 750 in uh you know back since 2012 you said you just raised an additional amount how much total in what company so far uh 750's total raise we're looking to click another 250 and just close a little bit more on friday another 25 on friday so what what what vehicle are you doing this on it's a rolling note or something right convertible notes with caps that have gone up over the years interesting like natural accelerators or something in some ways i mean we did do an accelerator here in pittsburgh called no no no no sorry sorry i meant natural accelerators on the cap like it increases five percent each year uh yeah roughly i don't think we've been i mean our first cap note was 2 million way back in 2012 or most recent is at 5 million did you keep those early investors on the cap table you didn't reset right we did not there was debate about whether to do that they'd kill you they would and it's not the right thing to do it's not no they would kill you you did the right thing um okay very good so so capital's in raising additional 250 route sounds like the note will allow you to go up to a million which is what you're trying to close out now the additional 250. um where is i mean where is the growth coming from today right so where where are you signing up new customers from yeah yeah john um we've actually so far we've been getting um a lot of referrals a lot of work working on networks we're based in pittsburgh and the bay area but kind of this part of the country is where a lot of our customers are for the new offering so warehouse distribution centers we can expand that for right now we're trying to stay laser focused on that offering we have you know having said that we have started to pick up a couple unaffiliated customers just through outbound going to trade shows things like that yeah yeah yeah the top tools are warehouse logistics fast food retail manufacturing and we're even getting some interest in health care as well any any metrics yet on churn so far zero but we don't have enough of a large sample size in terms of our turn of customers or production employee turnover no no no sorry turn off customers none i mean in our hotel business it was 99 retention uh about 125 paying customers in this space the uh three customers to date zero so far in the three months interesting and and any metrics said on like cac and lifetime value or no it's just too early in the hotel space we know that in this it's too early um but some of our mid sizes are about you know a thousand a month one of them is much larger than the other two so yeah uh you know you could assume it's tough to say because there isn't any...