How SlidesUp CEO Kunal Bhatia grew SlidesUp to $31.9K revenue and 10 customers in 2024.

just got done editing this interview you guys are gonna love it before i do that though i want you to know that i'm going to be in the comments for the next 30 minutes or so answering your questions if there's additional questions you want me to ask the ceo next time i interview them leave them below or if you're just loving the data points i get ceos to share click the thumbs up button below that's your way of telling me you're loving this stuff and i'll get you more of it additionally again i'll be in the comments answering any questions you have all right for 30 minutes enjoy the interview hello everyone my guest today is canal bhatia he's putting a complex event planning software called slides slides up he's a product designer from boston now living in san francisco and he's the co-founder and design lead at the company slides up he's an outdoor fitness enthusiast because of november project and coaches at uncommon movement maybe we'll meet him at a free workout canal you ready to take us to the top sure so are you like super strong you'd kick my butt at the gym oh actually i haven't been working out regularly for the last month since i moved out to san francisco but you know talk to me in three months so you're in san francisco from boston which rent is more expensive uh rent in boston was zero dollars because i was living with my parents so i've got an infinite rent increase in the most expensive market in the world so out of curiosity what are you paying now in san francisco for rent uh it's a temporary managed place from this place called zeus living they're phenomenal and my rent is 3 800 with them i get full airbnb style business ready rental from them furnished they're like my personal move team zeus what zeus what zeus living interesting i have to look that up okay good let's talk about slides up so what do you mean by complex event management software sure so anything that has many sessions or many speakers you know think a sales kickoff meeting at a company or you know team off site something like trainings workshops even a leadership summit any of these complex internal or external events that companies are hosting you know that's the kind of stuff that slides up will help you um organize interesting okay so that's the company i mean are you targeting enterprise smb what's the average company paying per year to use the technology sure so we started off with actually a different market with conference organizers and you know i got the feedback then from hitting sha you know don't be in that uncanny valley of like you know there's the smb market then the uncanny valley and then enterprise you know mid-market um so we were right in that that dead zone before uh we've since changed uh our average contract value is now up above 10k okay 10k per year yep okay that's great so uh i mean did you have to change anything about the product to change that rpo it was literally just positioning on the landing page it was literally positioning and we've done that positioning change in the last two months we've run two enterprise pilots recently um with fabulous you know fortune 500 customers of ours so we're right now in that middle positioning change and it's going well so far so the average new price is ten thousand dollars per year on these two pilots but when you look at historically all of your customer base right now what's the rp assume it's lower much lower it was within that one to five k range which is you know not very uh supportive of either sales model whether it's product led sales or you know having um bdrs and yeah so that's like that's like 100 or 200 bucks a month kind of positioning exactly yeah interesting all right put this on the timeline for me when you launch we launched about three years ago um and then went through y combinator startup school in 2017 that sort of helped us accelerate our growth initially we actually shut down in the middle officially uh earlier this year but um you know a couple months ago we got uh uh some some people knocking on our doors to run enterprise uh contracts uh enterprise pilots that we ran okay so 2016 you launched and now how many customers are you serving today uh so we've got a handful in the new uh space uh with enterprise uh companies as well as uh mid-market companies but but add up all of them the new ones you were talking to right now and your old historic ones are we talking like 10 customers or like 100 or 10 000 or what yeah between 10 and 100 okay between 10 and 100 got it so at a minimum 10 right at 200 bucks a month you're doing north of 2000 bucks a month right now in revenue yeah much much higher now because of the uh the new mix of customers with the enterprise pilots have you closed any of those pilots yet though or they're just yes we closed them we uh got the bookings um we still have uh you know 10k of bookings to to you know um collect on annual or monthly bookings uh these were one-time pilot deals that we're trying to convert into annual now got it okay so if you if you when your own internal planning you have to plan your own expenses team members your rent food blah blah blah i mean what do you put your monthly or your true monthly recurring revenue at right now sure um it's uh it's still early because we're you know shifting that market so i would have to say it's somewhere on the five to 10k scale yep yep yep fair enough uh with potentially a lot of change happening over the next 12 months as you move aggressively towards enterprise exactly yeah okay very good um where are you getting these two new enterprise pilots how about how they find you yeah actually one was word of mouth uh from our very first customer droidcon boston uh fabulous conference uh that they host over there for android developers and uh one of the people who was on the volunteering team who was using our product uh for uh data through our api into their native app that they built for for the conference he basically wanted to do the same thing for his company they were running uh an internal i.t conference and he basically used it for the exact same use case very cool okay so he it was the same person it wasn't a referral was the same person at a different conference uh yeah so the buyer was different at the conference than the company the the person that the company just happened to you have used it a little bit yeah while it's working with the conference organizer you mentioned you went through yc so you've raised some how much total have you raised we actually went through startup school which is not the full yc program so we haven't raised any uh fully bootstrapped since day one and how many folks are on the team we have three right now and we're just about to hire we hired our first uh marketing associate from uh this platform called gen m uh so they'll be doing some uh outbounding with spell that it's gen gen m yeah kind of like gen z except you know i guess gen marketer basically you can get an apprentice a marketing apprentice uh to help you uh for fifty dollars a month and uh the exchange there is that you get to mentor them um for a couple hours is there good quality people are they real hustlers they're willing to work hard they're willing to work hard and so far i've interacted with two and you know it's going well so far in week two they're based in the us all over the world all over the world so our first one was from chicago and our second one is in mexico city very cool okay so the team's three today who's in what's the split between engineers or business person yep so uh basically we have our cto uh very seasoned vet in in the software industry uh has had one exit before um and then uh it's myself as design lead and we have a salesperson as well as a on the co-founding team so so those three people i mean those are not cheap you're brought on this gen m for person you're doing you know two three well four or five thousand dollars a month right now in revenue are you guys just living off savings or there's not enough revenue yet to pay yourselves really correct so i'm actually the only full-time person on this team uh the other two co-founders are part-time and you know once we are able to get that revenue higher they'll be able to join full time as well okay so i mean how do you you're working on two pilots right now what do you think you need to get the revenue to so that it's an easy conversation for you to recruit them in full time because obviously you want them full time that will help you grow faster yep well the conversation's pretty easy because i've worked with them in the past and they know where we're heading um so basically you know we want to get north of six-figure revenue um you know at least uh to start having that conversation of you know when so you're halfway there halfway there all right now um talk to me about growth right so if you're doing five grand a month today what were you doing a year ago almost zero because uh we you know had to shut down but we had why did you have to shut down uh it just didn't make sense for me personally um you know i wasn't growing anymore personally wasn't learning as much we were just you know hitting a you know pushing a boulder up the hill which wasn't worth pushing um in the conference organizer space and i can go into more details there about why that sales cycle is really tough um but you know we were all kind of exhausted there and so um you know until the enterprise pilots didn't come in and and re-energize the team um it was a a pretty rough year last year why do these enterprise accounts come to you i mean there's a lot of well-established players in this place but visibo c-van social tables why do they come to you yeah i think in general the event market event tech market is a very unloved space i think everyone knows seavent everyone knows bizabo but that's sort of a necessary evil you know i personally came from the healthcare market and it's kind of like epic everyone knows epic but they hate to use it why does everyone hate using cvent in visibo same reason epic same reason for you know salesforce these are like form written products like you have to fill out multiple you know pages of long forms and it doesn't really help you do your job any better it's just you know everyone's on there so you have to be on there as well and you know they've got decent amount of market share so if you're not using them and you're not bringing them from job to job it's like you know no one's going to get fired by using vent or bizabo or you know salesforce interesting all right very good um any plans to raise capital or are you gonna stay bootstrapped yeah um right now we're staying bootstrapped and that's the intention to go for as long as possible uh if we see some reason that we should be raising uh we may pursue it but that's not in the cards right now very good let's wrap up here canal what the famous five number one what's your favorite business book oh that's gotta be ben horowitz is the hard thing about hard things and my next book from him is waiting at my doorstep at my parents house in boston number two is there a ceo you're following or studying yes uh i mean the the one that i'm following now is uh ted blaser from work ramp i did a short stint with uh with work ramp and and learned a lot from them uh going to be really excited to see where work ramp's heading in the next year number you think the ipo or something oh i mean yeah that's that's easy for them yeah they're what are they they're at uh they're doing more than a hundred million bucks in revenue uh i'm not sure exactly uh revenue numbers right now but uh you know they have very large enterprise customers uh they're all xbox early hires so they've been there done that they've failed on their own startups before that so they're like very seasoned uh they know what they're doing and for this stage where they're at like 30 employees now um they're well north of where most startups would be and they're raised from boat capital so they're in good company initialized capital all of them as well number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company besides slides up and uh making us uh plan events in zen mode uh we we actually side note there we dog food our own product to host events and you know normally events are a dead end you know funnel but we turn that into a content growth loop um that being said uh we love stripe uh we built uh stripe the whole company off of stripe and stripe atlas they were the first you know partner we had in in getting that first payment for the first pilot number four how many hours you sleep to get every night right now it's about six which is unfortunate but i'm trying to get back up to eight where i was uh before the move all right six and what's your situation married single kids single okay and how are you i am now 30. 30 years old very good uh last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew uh just focus right uh i think being intentional about the way that you build things uh do things in life um and and make sure that you're taking care of yourself so that you can take care of others and and serve others guys slides of event planning software three uh ten customers right now call it about 400 500 bucks a month doing about four to five grand a month right now in revenue with some big enterprise pilots happening uh that they hope they convert to 10 20 000 per year kind of contracts they've got three folks on the team right now one engineer one sales rep and then canal leading all the design too early to talk about other unit economics but they are doing this all bootstrap so operating at breakeven as you look to scale hoping to 100 000 bucks in terms of ar before some other team members join back up full-time canal thank you for taking us to the top thank you very much nathan these ceos rarely give these kinds of interviews i hit them hard i get the data and i want 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