How Richpanel CEO Amit RG grew Richpanel to $4M revenue and 200 customers in 2024.

guys launched in 2018 is now working with 200 e-commerce Brands processing and helping them get support questions answered faster he ended last year without a two million dollar run rate that's an average ACV of 10 grand a year hoping to double this year to 4 million you raise a 2 million pre-seed around back in 2020 at a 20 million post from Sequoia now raising a 5 million seat it caught a 30 or 35 million pre both from customers and to additional potential traditional VCS again building Rich panel to get rid of these horrible support experiences you and I know and we're checking out with most e-commerce brands hey folks my guest today as I meet RG he's a CEO and co-founder at richpanel.com under his leadership the company is going to over 2 000 brands in three years he leads everything product engineering at the company and is obsessed with their motto the best service is no service I mean you ready to take us to the top I am what does that mean the best service is no service um my my Funda is simple when I started the company uh you know if you look at any business you look at their customer service customers usually contacting about the same you know same seven to eight types of issues but customers but businesses are still using agents to handle these issues and if you contrast it with which is stupid and if you contrast that with what happens in Amazon where I've bought like 50 items this year maybe more and I've never contacted them once the difference is that Amazon is productizing each of these contact reasons you know if I want to like return an order cancel an order edit anything in my order I can do that within Amazon I can manage my subscriptions they now have situations where if somebody forgets a coupon code they have a flow for it right so that's the kind of interfaces that we build for other companies and then you know you basically eliminate all the contacts and customers able to like self-resolve business are able to scale it's a win-win that's awesome now when you came on the show back in July of 2020 you told me you had 70 customers and you're doing about 90 000 a month in Revenue so you just passed a million dollar run rate I think give us an update on the business where are you at today we we crossed two million dollars in December of 2020 and we are on path to take this year to like 4.5 million so sorry last year what did you finish at you finished it at 2 million right a little about two million yes oh that's great and how many customers 210 customers with the ACV of around 10 000. wow okay so 200k that makes tons of sense walk me through what a customer is paying you for and if you can you use a real customer as of today a customer would pay us for cell service resolutions approximately like one dollar per resolve and they pay us for Ticket because we have both the modules we have the agent help desk for which you pay by tickets and we have uh the sell service where you pay by sell service results where an agent wasn't needed so if it's a ticket you pay approximately 20 cents per decade if it's a you know self-resolve you pay like one dollar so what we both have vested interest to do more sell service results and I think when we last spoke you said you were looking at raising a two million round but you weren't sure if you were going to close it or not you had been bootstrapped previously what'd you end up deciding to do I did raise uh two million dollars from Sequoia to 20 million dollar valuation I did that in 2020. uh we also got selected y combinator but we decided to not go ahead with it because because this thing happened like one week before YC YC was all remote I'm a big YC fan but it didn't make sense you know to dilute so much uh when we were already getting they wanted what seven seven percent for 125k yeah so they put you they give you a standard valuation of like 2.1 post and the the disadvantage that ether mainly is it was remote so you don't build a network right when you go into a thing like YC the major takeaway or the major benefit is the network and the kind of people you meet uh that that doesn't happen or Zoom calls and like the Zoom sessions where 100 people are coming together yeah now obviously Sequoia put money in just at the same time at a 20 million valuation YC wants a two million valuation I mean ultimately did you want to do YC but Sequoia blocked it because it's a massive haircut on evaluation not really I think Sequoia was very open about it lots of other people in the same uh you know cohort like being funded at the same time they did decide my friends did decide to do with YC it's acquired no problem I think they're like very cool as investors very open-minded if you have a reason to do it they never block I just uh spoke with a few of my existing customers where you know they wanted in at the previous valuation because I'm doing like my next round but they wanted in at the previous valuation and the reason is because these people are like extremely influential they're people like you that can like promote this out of Rich panel so they were like you know we you know we are your customers in the last two years give a sin and we want to like you know work very closely with you because each time we do a catch-up for one hour catch up over like a review call we're like 45 minutes is discussing personal life right we're just helping each other grow and like whatever both the founders both have like similar problems and like similar that we go through so 45 minutes is that and they're like you know we want to invest in each other's success and they did this and I went to Sequoia and they're like yeah absolutely cool you know it makes complete sense to have these people as well 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 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 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 you there all right let's jump back into the interview how much are you raising right now so I'm doing a 3.5 million dollar round uh actually five million dollar round with uh like us with an extension seed extension and I'm doing like a 500K round for uh with the angels but I started off like with like three 3.5 but just after my two calls that I did with VCS they were like you know you need to take at least five your businesses at a decent scale so we want to take you five and then you can do your a series they understood why I'm raising like a small round they respect it and they're like if you want speed you get it but we want minimum that much ownership in the company so we were like okay yeah and what is the minimum ownership they want so you know they're looking at like you know whatever if we do like if you close a dividend at 30 35 at current stage then they're like we want like substantial percent uh it's not about the ownership there are few forms that are not willing to write check sizes below that if that makes...