How SARAL CEO Yash Chavan grew 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 heard Jason Cohen say this like um I said something like I'm happy to pay you for your time um if you're if you're open to just chatting and but nobody took my money they gave me money so yeah okay no that's very cool um all right so and then now let's pivot over to cold emails for a second so first off what tool did you use to send them was it a reply dot IO send grid something else it was instantly okay instantly yeah they're crushing it I hear okay so instantly is what you use were you happy with them yeah pretty good it's a good tool okay how did you get the cold email us to put into instantly I think it was Apollo or I think seriously one of those sources of all those sales now I had subscriptions for um for these tools so yeah what does sales Navigator cost you true I think it's like 50 bucks or something yeah yeah something like that yeah cool and then okay got it so what did you search and we already know sales Navigator how I used it what did you search an Apollo to build a cold email list um same thing so I actually talked to a different person as I went after founders of econ brand saying hey it's influencer marketing even something you're looking at doing why haven't you done it yet because everyone was if I just gave you 100 influencers you would like it's like hey e-commerce brand here's 100 influencers who are ready to promote you everyone's gonna say yes to that so what's the friction like why aren't you doing it so I figured that out speaking with Founders and then obviously speaking to influencer marketing managers or just marketing people in Ecom in general asking them what their pains were while they were doing influencer marketing so they shared this main feedback was around two bits there were people who were using some Enterprise Source spaces very like I think it's typical of the SAS space when it's kind of like a mature industry where there's some companies that were started in 2013 2015 built for that market and they're priced at like twenty thousand dollars thirty thousand dollars a year paid up front annually and newer modern Brands don't want to do that like I don't want to pay 30k without even a free trial so I wanted to build something that was the startup SMB friendly equivalent so we offered a free trial we are transparent with our pricing we don't force people to hop on three sales calls and all that so all these were pain points that I discovered so the pain points are not just in terms of the product but also in terms of excuse me that's you um the pain points are not just in terms of the product but also in terms of the business model for example so like hey I don't want to hop on three sales calls well here's a free trial and so on so like I discovered all of these things yeah this makes tons of sense okay when you launch the business uh you're you're so founder you have a co-founder so the founder that's awesome so you still have 100 today correct that's awesome any plans to raise or you want a bootstrap I actually applied to Tiny Seed twice before they rejected me so we were at like three 800 mrr they rejected 3000 Mr they rejected now at 32k I applied like a couple weeks back and now they're like yeah we're excited so I'm speaking to Rob Walling tomorrow so I don't know how that's gonna go but I think they're it's going to be undervalued so if you're like you're not going to go with them but yeah let's see I'm I very likely win a race for some like hiring and growth purposes but I don't want to go to a VC route and we'll see like if I just hit 60 70k mrr in a couple months then I can just build the brunt and not raise what do you think Tiny Seed will value the business at what like what's their typical offer they give so they invest 120k to 250k for a 10 to 12 percent um and I assume given our Revenue they'll give us um 250k for a 10 um which will be 2.5 yeah so that's basically what I want to if that's a 5x multiple on your current ARR something like that yeah is it worth so I mean is that worth the dilution to you or how do you think about that no I I don't want to give up 10 for 250k because I I just I know my numbers will be at 50K by end of year so at 50k then I don't need the I don't upfront need 250k anyway right it's not like 250 kids even if I get the 250 I'm probably gonna spend it 10K at a time so if I'm at 50k I don't need the 250 so yeah unless someone's like a strategic investor or some of our brands are bigger Brands like eight nine sugar companies who are using several some of those Founders are interested in me and the tool in general so they're like five hey if you're ever raising to sell write an angel check so if I ever need money I can just raise from my customers have you have you identified any other Capital sources besides Tiny Seed and besides traditional VC you know I haven't really looked at the VC model or raising money yet just focused on the product but right now we're having some friction in the model uh which is like I think I need more people to do some support onboarding that sort of stuff for which I need more money um so yeah right now I'm just like getting into that world but yeah how much money would you need over the next three months to make this these one or two hires that you mentioned probably like I don't know not much maybe for three months probably like 30k 50k around that so somewhere I guess if someone looked at your current 103 paid customers right that pay you 2.99 a month and they you know and they expect those customers keep paying 2.99 per month based off your historical return values and they offered to basically pull that cash forward for you and give you 30k today is that a kind of structure you look at um yeah I'd consider it I see what you're doing Nathan you're good at this just curious just curious real recognize real yeah yeah just just curious we uh I mean I I consider it no I genuinely consider it yeah I spent I spent years you know thinking about what is the right product structure for Founders like with like with your mindset right yeah you want to keep equity and that's why we launched the founder path so okay very cool well congrats on the growth um talk to me more about your full team size today how many full-time um six people six people okay and profitable are you burning profitable can I ask how much um make sure lovely about 10K it depends because I reinvest a little bit in like I every bit dollar I make I really invest in marketing so we have profitable at 20K for example but then every every like 5K increment we have I'm reinvesting in um people I'm reinvesting in marketing so they're intentionally low profitable but like we are making 5K 8K profit sometimes 10K depending on the month so I love that this is a great story let's wrap up here Yash with the famous five number one favorite Business book third Business book 100 million dollar offers yeah her Moses that's a good one number two is there a CEO you're following or studying I'm gonna name three the three b's of bootstrapping Becker Brunson and Barry who's the last one actually uh Nathan Betty oh Barry Nathan Barry yeah yeah um number three what's your favorite online tool for building the company um CRM yep number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night situation married single kids single no kids running around yet all right how old are you I'm 24 24. last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. um I guess I was very impatient I I guess I'm I still have it like I want things to be done now now but then I guess like if I I were to give myself some I was like just be patient keep showing up and things will happen so yeah 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 influence our marketing managers at e-commerce Brands and ultimately 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 Yosh thanks for taking us to the top this is great thanks Nathan one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm Central it's 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