How SARAL CEO Yash Chavan grew SARAL to $1.1M revenue and 103 customers in 2024.

guys getzerole.com is what companies use to quickly find a list of influencers to promote their brand Yash built this they're doing 34 000 per month in Revenue the sole founder owned 100 got his first customer back in December of 2022 using Apollo to build an email list it's LinkedIn sales navigator to focus on uh influencer marketing managers at e-commerce Brands and ultimately we reached out with loom videos figma screenshots Etc to get 15 minutes on their calendar to land his first five pre-sold paying customers again scaling nicely profiting ten thousand dollars per month was with his team of six as he looks to scale hey folks my guest today is Yash Siobhan he's a marketer at heart who dropped out of engineering College to work in sales and eventually fell in love with growing companies SAS companies at his agency today he's working on a company called get sorale.com it's an influencer marketing platform for e-commerce Brands yeah ready to take us to the top yes Nathan two years ago I read your book being on the show so here I am that's awesome we're thrilled to have you well so why'd you why'd you choose influencer marketing for e-commerce brands in terms of you know your first your first SAS company this is a tough space influencers come and go churn is tricky it's sort of a Marketplace problem as well yeah so we're not building a Marketplace we're building a search engine which is fundamentally different from most other like influencer platforms on the market and the reason why I started this was because we were doing influencer marketing for some Brands and we found that the whole process of like if you're an e-commerce brand wants to work with an influencer they've got to like find them they're going to contact them they've got to send them a contract they got to figure out a way to track when they post affiliate links shipping products all of that is very um clunky and expensive if you use a software or a bunch of software to do it or extremely time consuming if you do it manually those are all basically like simplifies this process and brings it brings it Under One Roof so I see so if someone's listening right now and they want to launch a certain product and they're looking for influencers in the fitness space they could go to get sorel.com and look up type the word Fitness and you'll give them a list of influencers correct yes at what point do you make money they make money videos subscription so we make money based on we have a SAS subscription which comes with a certain number of influencers um and if they need more influencers than that limit they got to pay more so we have that expansion Revenue as well so yeah I see I see okay so what is the average company pay you per month two years your use your influencer search engine um 299 a month 299 yes that's great how did you come up with that price point um so we started it so story when I started um again so Dean Maxwell is one of my mentors so I pre-sold the software to five people at 99 bucks before I wrote the first line of code before we wrote the first line of code so I was like okay 99 is the base price um and my offer was you will get two months of the software if you pay me for one month so we just like board 99 to be honest and then slowly we started increasing it so when we launched we made it we launched at 99 in a couple of months we made it 150 a couple of months we made it um 199 then we like increased it to 299 we saw relatively in fact we saw higher quality customers come in the higher our price point went and then so that's why we settled on 299 so yeah that's right Josh when did you land that first paying customer what month um that was in December of last year December 2013. yeah that's great and then fast forward to today how many customers total 103. that's amazing okay so 103 customers paying 299 a month is that right correct congrats okay that's 30 000 bucks of monthly recurring Revenue right actually 34 because there are some bigger brands that use us um who are doing they want like they want to reach out to 2 000 influencers a month so they are on a slightly higher package like I said the expansion so it's 34 but yeah that makes tons of sense walk us through how you know a lot of Founders struggle that you know they spend a year writing code and they realize nobody wants to buy their software where did you find those first five customers you pre-sold yeah it was pretty just like doing things that don't scale reaching out on LinkedIn to people who were doing influencer marketing and saying hey I'm looking to build this software and I just said hey um do you have pain I'm building software that solves this for Persona um would you mind hopping on a 15-minute call to review it or as soon used to send them a loom video of like figma mock-ups saying hey like what do you think would this be useful and people shared feedback with me and then we actually refined the product in the figma MVP stage before we even like hired a programmer or whatever so yeah that's very cool okay how did you what did you search on LinkedIn to find the person to send the cold messages to yeah influencer so that's our core user which is an influencer marketing manager at an e-commerce brand um so we just reached out to those people saying and I send thousands of cold emails as well so it's like um I sent Google emails saying hey we're launching the software I'm not looking to sell you anything um I just need feedback would you be open um and people who are surprisingly um open to it so yeah 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 around 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 well sticking with LinkedIn and then we'll go to your cold email strategy for a second so what button are you pushing on LinkedIn to find only e-commerce companies and then what button are you pushing after you get that company list to find only the influencer marketing manager at the company yeah and sales Navigator there's a filter I think it's the retail filter or something you can use to find e-commerce Brands and you can type in the keyword e-commerce you can look at hashtags on LinkedIn as well so if someone's posting about hashtag influencer marketing very likely they're in the influencer marketing space or hashtag e-commerce marketing see who's posting those are content creators which means they're also engaged because LinkedIn has a lot of leads but they're not on LinkedIn like they don't they log in once a month so it's pretty useless reaching out to those people so reach out to people who are actually actively posting commenting um things like that so yeah did you give any you know I understand reaching out saying I have a new product are you open to help on a 15 minute call here's a loom video as a tease did you give them any incentive for their time no I mean time is valuable did you say take the call and I'll give you a free year or something uh I didn't say free here I did add a line I think I...