How Qtr CEO Swami Venkataramani grew to $1.7M revenue with a 49 person team in 2023.

books on discipline he's building quarter dot AI it's a to-do list application that doesn't suck uh we'll see what he does with it he launched it a couple months ago he's planning on charging 70 to 25 bucks a month for it 150 installs so far via his wait list team of four Founders split Equity evenly 25 each we'll see what they do next hey folks my guest today is Swami venkatramany he's an engineer designer and photographer at swamifoto.com and now the CEO of quarter dot AI That's qtr dot AI Swami are you ready to take us to the top sure all right what is quarter.ai water is a visual planner that makes it really easy to plan your months your weeks and your days we make it efficient because we bring all of your planning Tools in one place your Journal your calendar your planner and your task manager but efficiency is only one part of the equation the other part is can you be effective and that's to do with your systems and your methods and routines so we've created a framework that we call go far essentially how it works is you start your quarter by breaking down some of your goals into smaller steps putting a plan around it a big picture plan and then methodically narrowing down your focus for each month for each week and day and even down down to time slots the problem with the current tools right now is that um they do a good job at organizing your stuff but there isn't enough Clarity on how my my daily tasks are connected to the big picture so it's not very easy to know what to focus on that's going to have the biggest impact and that's really the problem that you're trying to solve well this is tough first off the website's beautiful so so well done it tells like a really compelling story The the flip side of this though is like this is such a freaking hard space I mean there are so many free Tools in this space it's hard that you're competing with engineering teams that are 200 people and the tools for friend free they don't even charge for it the second thing is like you know one of my one of the quotes I was talking about all the time with my internal team at founder path is we tend to overestimate what we can do in a day right we're about accurate we can do in a week but we definitely underestimate what we can do in a year and so people can't you can't even necessarily trust people to set their own benchmarks in that way and then when you have to move something from you know you know you we have a to-do list and then the same thing sits on the to-do list for weeks and weeks and weeks and we go damn should we just delete this thing from the to-do list and then there's no process for elimination there's only process for addition if there's no process for elimination you just confused long term how do you solve these like very deep human problems that you know that reminds me because I used to use todoist and I I remember getting a task once and the alert was it's been snoozed for 167 days and so that's what happens in these task managers right the list just keeps growing um the way we are trying to solve it is by time framing is we want to give you a handle of your time so I want to be able to jump to any time frame and know what my priorities are if I can help you visualize what your commitments are um at any given time frame so what are my commitments this week what are my commitments for this month and that that helps me Pace myself and make sure what I'm focusing on today is actually having an impact on the overall timeline and so that that's the goal here um we'll see how it works out interesting now what's your model for your paid right now um we are still yet to release our paid plans but it is going to be a subscription subscription model okay I want to talk more about that how you're thinking about your initial pricing plans but let's just start with the free premium today um let's get the backstory when did you write the first line of code for the platform February just about two months ago oh wow amazing okay so two months old this is great um how have you gotten your first couple users then through my Professional Network um just most of them have been most of them are just busy professionals leaders in in in in in in in big companies but they have you know a lot of things going on outside of life so they they're interested in a tool that can help them keep track of all their activities but tell me specifically what that means do you post a link and say hey friends in a WhatsApp group I've got a new app check it out quarter.ai or is it a Facebook app I mean how do you tell me specifically right now I'm just calling my friends I'm calling people and telling them hey do you want to check this out um going over sometimes just explaining to them what this is and how this might help them yeah we also have a company interested in in the team version of this so we are in that process as well for an Enterprise version 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 evaluation 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 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 how do you deal with you know most people like for me my journal is the same way I imagine a Taylor Swift fan who's 13 using you know their Journal at night before bed you put your deepest most sensitive like thoughts and challenges in a to-do list and this is why I like I use Apple notes right is because I'm like you know pretty darn secure very small like with someone some CEO is reading this going whoa I didn't know Nathan was doing this or you know that's his goal or whatever how do you how do you get around that how do you get around the Privacy aspect of it privacy and trust your friends even some of your friends they might go man I've got all these goals but like there's these two things I really don't want me to know about I'm not going to use this to-do app he's going to see it well everything is encrypted if that's what your you are getting I'm sure you are secure I'm talking about the perception yeah well it's a personal tool it's and we use other to do apps already uh we we use Journal Labs I use and I've been using day one I have all my personal thoughts and yeah you're right every time I write something really personal that thought crosses my mind what if somebody sees that um I would say that's not the problem we're trying to solve right now um but I guess it's it's a more relevant thing when we use this in the context of teams and we're still working through that with our Enterprise partner but um yeah I mean everything is encrypted no one's going to see your data even we don't know what what you're writing so that's the assurance that I can go yeah talk to me more about how you're onboarding right I think a lot of people get this wrong when they first go to market they get their first 10 customers what you've done is nice you've got a very professional looking website for all I know you could be doing 50 million in revenues it's a very nice website I click invite or I want to try it and you take me into very simple like you don't you didn't spend three years coding some fancy onboarding thing you take me to a very simple Google form and you ask the basic questions and then you say where do you work what tools do you currently use why are you interested in quarter and how did you find out about us tell us why those questions specifically and what you do with the answers yeah so in this first phase we are trying to nail who is this going to be most useful for and so those questions help the answers to those questions help us understand uh understand that and we've already found some patterns from you know from from the submissions and it was kind of surprising actually because we thought this would be used a lot by let's say um you know solopreneurs or entrepreneurs but we've actually seen a lot of interest from senior managers and CFOs and ctOS from companies and they want to use this for their personal life so the form has helped us um you know figure out what uh what who is really interested in in using Quantum so what do you do if I fill this out do you accept everyone or do you are you rejecting people no so we built a system where um right now most if you fill it out you're most likely to get in um but we have a system where we have to go and approve you and then you'll get an email and in that email we have a a walk through video and um and then just the vision of quarter we're explaining why we're building it and then you can start using it interesting okay and what is using it is it a web app a mobile app what do I get it's a web app right now okay interesting okay so that's go to market how many folks have you let in so far right now we're at about 150. 150 okay interesting and have you started let's talk about you know your first price your first paywall right what's the price point what do you put behind the paywall what do you keep for free how are you thinking about this we're thinking of somewhere around 17 to 25 um on a monthly basis um and maybe like a week a week free trial and can I ask you a question before you build this in like whatever price Model you really want to use I would just see for me like when I hear 17 20 for to-do app I go it's not interesting but if it like caught my attention and you use pricing for marketing it was something like why on Earth are top CEOs paying a thousand dollars a month for this simple to-do app then I'm like whoa what is that I want to try it would you ever consider trying something where you go under that messaging like make the most expensive CEO only to do app out there yeah and I know some companies they pay a thousand dollars for Asana for example um and um it makes it feel more premium I guess and I know that what we are building here is premium is the stuff that we are doing here is not just another to-do app um but so why price it like another to-do app then I guess I'll say that it's introductory pricing um because like you said the market is really crowded and our first goal is to get people in and um and you know I mean I'm not going to say the pricing is going to stay the same yeah yeah yeah we'll we'll see what happens okay so that's the pricing when are you putting up with pricing wall up in a few weeks okay okay and what how do you think about well will everyone have to pay who you send the invite link to um we are still thinking through some of those things I think we're gonna offers an introductory um a discount or something like that for our first users um but eventually everyone will have to get on the paid plan yes yeah and are you bootstrapping us or you've raised yeah bootstrap I love that that's awesome and who is it you keep saying we do you have a co-founder or just you we are actually four of us four you just put it 25 each yeah oh wow you just did it even does that mean you guys couldn't have the tough conversations about who's worth more I think we're all worth the same I don't think this would have existed without any of those uh people's contributions all right fair enough let's wrap up here Swami with the famous five number one your favorite book um culture code from Daniel Coyle number two is there a CEO you're following or studying right now I'm following my cousin karthikane he's a CEO of data Genie and he's a little bit ahead of me so um glad to get his notes number three is he using your task app not yet but yeah I gotta you know all right number three what's your favorite online tool for building quarter besides your own oh come on I was gonna say quarter but yeah um we use slack a lot yeah number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night seven to eight okay in situation married single kids married any kiddos nope no kiddos and how old are you I'm in my early 40s early 40s we'll say 41 last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. um I wish I uh focused more on discipline and uh planning my life a little bit more all right guys there you have folks on discipline he's building quarter dot AI it's a to-do list application uh that doesn't suck uh we'll see what he does with it he launched it a couple months ago he's planning on charging 70 to 25 bucks a month for it 150 installs so far via his wait list team of four Founders split Equity evenly 25 each we'll see what they do next Swami thanks for taking us to the top thanks so much 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 YouTube every day at 2PM 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 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 fundraise 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 nathanlocka.com forward slash 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's support all right I'll be in the comments see ya