How SmartCue CEO Robin Singhvi grew SmartCue to $51.4K revenue and 4 customers in 2024.

getsmartq.com they launched back in 2021 got paying customers product kept crashing they shut it down they relaunched September of this year on product on 852 upvotes to his community of a thousand people he knows eight paying customers that pay on average 300 400 500 bucks a month so about 2 000 bucks in mrr they raised 100 000 pre-seed round at a battle two million dollar evaluation a year ago hoping to raise another Million Dollar Round next year in 2023 at around a 10 million valuation now that he has a bit more product Market fit with his team of five as Robin looks to scale hey folks my guest today is Robin Singley he's the founder and CEO of smart cue the fastest sales Effectiveness platform of the shortest learning curve for Enterprise sales teams Robin you ready to take it to the top yes sir how are you doing I'm good when you say for Enterprise sales teams what do you mean in terms of like minimum ACV in other words they have to have a 50 000 ACV to get value out of smart queue otherwise it's not not useful yeah so we actually think of it from a sales team size perspective so if you have a sales team of at least 10 sales people in your sales organization uh then uh smart queue will add value to your team okay even if those 10 people are doing sort of a hundred demos a month a lower RP higher touch approach yes yes as long as you're selling an Enterprise software which is complex uh smart cue can add value to your sales team well quantify what do you mean when you say Enterprise sales teams usually people quantify these by cohorts based off ACV cohorts um well you can you can think of it in ACV but it has to you have to be selling a complex product to multiple different buyer personas a good example uh is the health tech industry right complex product in itself from a software perspective but also complex from a compliance perspective from a clinical perspective and then the complexity is also in the buyer Persona that they're selling to so if they're selling to payers or insurance companies or hospitals or pharmacies or large employers they're gonna have to sell different they're going to Showcase their solution differently and so that's where you want to ensure that you're able to bring in consistency in your product demos across teams and you're able to personalize those demos based on the buyer Persona that you're pitching to I see so I mean is that is that your key use case is it is it sort of Industrials and Healthcare uh Healthcare is a key one because I've spent time in healthcare so I know that industry a little bit more than others and I know that that industry specifically a has the dollars and to your point uh has deals that have high ACV so for them to be able to implement and deploy a solution and gain value out of a solution like smart queue is uh that much easier now give us the back story here we chatted back on October 13th last year you told me you were targeting a two million dollar fundraise at a 10 million post money valuation with about six customers and and about a thousand bucks in a month in Revenue at the time did you end up closing that round no well after our call uh you convinced me to raise a smaller round and raise only as much as I need to so that I'm not not diluting as much so thank you for that Nathan and so we ended up raising it yeah we raised a really small 150 000 precede uh a lot of it uh you know from from friends and family Angels um and and some of it from an accelerator uh part of the equity I can buy back so so that that works out okay and how much do you have to pay to buy the equity back uh I have to pay 3x okay is this calm is this what is this calm Capital Tyler's group no no no uh it's called Uh upfund up fund up fund interesting okay so just to be clear they bought how much did they buy for 150k 10 Equity or something no they they did invest 150 they invested 100K okay the rest was uh angels for instance but how I guess what I'm asking is how much did they buy for 100k is this like 10 5 20 percent five five and so if you pay them 300K you can buy back the full five percent uh I can buy like four percent so they still keep one percent I see okay and how quickly would you have to pay them 300K or does that offer expire at some point in the future no no it's founder friendly uh whenever I'm ready and I can pay them back quarterly monthly annually whenever I'm ready um or do they require that at year three or four you pay them back no okay so you can just leave it all in if you want yes yes interesting 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 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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 well so you got that deal done um and then I guess fast forward today how many customers are you working with so you know interesting since the last time we spoke I had six customers I had an MVP uh we started implementing and rolling out the MVP to our customers uh realized that uh the product was failing and the nature of our product was such that you know it was working alongside sales reps when they were doing live sales demos it could not crash right if it crashed it instantly lost the confidence of the rep and so we went back to the drawing board re-architected the entire product relaunched it this past September so just two months ago and we're back at you know six eight customers now a few paying others in Pilot and uh yeah so so but what we're seeing is that the usage is better uh better customer response they're seeing value out of it and we're actually seeing customers use us for not just the use case we intended it for but also other functions inside of the company so that's that's good validation for what we're building we love that how many of the eight are paying four four and what do they pay per month on average uh you know it varies um you know it's it's early days for us so what does the biggest one pay per month uh they're paying about again just very very small amounts of like a thousand bucks or something like that thousand bucks and what's the smallest one paid per month uh about 300 and how do you price why what does someone get that's paying you a thousand bucks that you wouldn't get if they paid you 300 bucks uh right now it's just a matter of getting smart cue in the hands of as many people as possible um there isn't necessarily you know we're giving One customer more the other less it's just a matter of number of seats and uh sort of commitment they're willing to put into something the only difference between someone paying 300 today and a thousand is the thousand dollar customers paid for more seats more seeds a longer contract how long uh some go for a quarter the others are here someone signed on for 18 months how are you signing an 18-month contract with like...