How SmartCue Relaunched on Product Hunt with 852 Upvotes and 4 Paying Customers in 2022 (Interview with CEO Robin Singhvi)

Intro and SmartCue Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Getsmartcue.com. They launched back in 2021, got paying customers. Product kept crashing. They shut it down. They relaunched September of this year on product hunt. 852 upvotes to his community of a thousand people. He now has eight paying customers that pay on average $304,105 $100 a month. So about $2,000 in MRR. They raised a $150,000 pre seed round at about a $2,000,000 valuation a year ago, hoping to raise another million dollar round next year in 2023 at

00:27around a $10,000,000 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 Singhvi. He's the founder and CEO of SmartCue, the fastest sales effectiveness platform with the shortest learning curve for enterprise sales teams. Robin, you ready to take us to the top?

Target Customer and Use Case

Robin Singhvi

00:45>> Yes, sir. How are you doing,

Nathan Latka

00:48I'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 SmartCue. Otherwise, it's not not useful.

Robin Singhvi

00:58>> Yeah. So, we actually think of it from a sales team size perspective. So if you have a sales team of at least 10 salespeople in your sales organization, then SmartCue will add value to your team.

Nathan Latka

01:13Okay. Even if those 10 people are doing sort of a 100 demos a month, a lower ARPU, higher touch approach?

Robin Singhvi

01:21>> Yes. Yes. As long as you're selling an enterprise software, which is complex, SmartCue can add value to your sales team.

Nathan Latka

01:30Well, quant quantify that. What do you mean when and you say enterprise sales teams? Usually, people quantify these by cohorts based off ACV cohorts.

Robin Singhvi

01:39>> 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 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

Health Tech as Beachhead Market

Robin Singhvi

02:10>> or pharmacies or large employers, they're gonna have to sell differently. They're gonna showcase their solution differently. And so that's where you wanna 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.

Nathan Latka

02:30I see. So, I mean, is that is that your key use case? Is it is it sort of industrials and health care?

Robin Singhvi

02:38>> Health care is a key one because I've spent time in health care. 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, 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 SmartCue is that much easier. Mhmm.

Previous Fundraise and Pre-Seed Round

Nathan Latka

03:03Now give us the backstory here. We chatted back on October thirteenth last year. You told me you were targeting a $2,000,000 fundraise at a 10,000,000 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?

Robin Singhvi

03:19>> No. Well, after our call, 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. So we ended up raising a We raised a really small 150,000 pre seed. A lot of it, you know, from friends and family, angels,

03:43>> and some of it from an accelerator. Part of the equity I can buy back. So so that that works out okay.

Nathan Latka

03:52How much do you have to pay to buy the equity back?

Robin Singhvi

03:55>> I have to pay three x.

Nathan Latka

03:57Okay. Is this Calm?

Robin Singhvi

04:00>> Is this what?

Nathan Latka

04:01Is this Calm Capital, Tyler's group?

UP Funds Deal Structure and Equity Buyback

Robin Singhvi

04:04>> No. No. No. It's called UP Funds, UP Funds.

Nathan Latka

04:08UP Fund. Interesting. Okay. So just to be clear, they bought how much did they buy for a 150 k? 10% equity or something?

Robin Singhvi

04:16>> No. They they did invest a 150. They invested a 100 k.

Nathan Latka

04:20Okay.

Robin Singhvi

04:21>> The rest was angels, friends and family.

Nathan Latka

04:24But how I guess what I'm asking is how much do they buy for a 100 k? Is this like 10%, 5%, twenty percent?

Robin Singhvi

04:30>> Five.

Nathan Latka

04:31Five. And so if you pay them 300 k, you can buy back the full 5%?

Robin Singhvi

04:38>> I can buy back 4%. So they still keep 1%.

Nathan Latka

04:41I see. Okay. And how quickly would you have to pay them 300 k, or does that offer expire at some point in the future?

Robin Singhvi

04:48>> No. No. It's founder friendly whenever I'm ready, And I can pay them back quarterly, monthly, annually, whenever I'm ready.

Nathan Latka

04:57Do they require that at year three or four you pay them back?

Robin Singhvi

05:00>> No.

Nathan Latka

05:01Okay. So you can just leave it all in if you want?

Robin Singhvi

05:04>> Yes. Yes. I can.

Nathan Latka

05:05Interesting. Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders, but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 interviews I've done manually. Saves you a lot of time. Well, we've done

05:23this. We've built it into the beautiful interface inside of Founderpath. 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 eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see

05:47three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation, private equity firm is different. If you're gonna 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. Right? So

06:09the 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 1,200,000 seed round 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter

06:33by the event. Maybe you only wanna 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. We'll 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 dataset of SaaS valuations than

06:59what you can get now inside of Founderpath. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. Alright. We're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second, but if you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link. This link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. Or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products, click on get your valuation here, and go

07:24ahead and sign up to give it a whirl. Again, all that valuation data live right inside the platform. I hope to see you there. Alright. Let's jump back into the interview. So you got that deal done. And then I guess fast forward today, how many customers are you working with?

Product Crash, Rebuild, and Relaunch

Robin Singhvi

07:38>> So, you know, interesting since the last time we spoke, I had six customers. I had an MVP. We started implementing and rolling out the MVP to our customers, realized that the product was failing. And the nature of our product was such that, you know, it 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

08:08>> back to the drawing board, rearchitected the entire product, relaunched it this past September, so just two months ago. And we're back at, you know, six, eight customers now. Mhmm. A few paying others in pilot. And yeah. So so but what we're seeing is that the usage is better, 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

08:42>> inside of the company. So that's that's good validation for what we're building.

Current Customers and Pricing

Nathan Latka

08:45We love that. How many of the eight are paying?

Robin Singhvi

08:48>> Four.

Nathan Latka

08:49Four. And what do they pay per month on average?

Robin Singhvi

08:52>> You know, it it varies. You know, it's it's early days for us. So

Nathan Latka

08:57What does the biggest one pay per month?

Robin Singhvi

09:00>> They're paying about, again, just very, very small amounts of, like, a thousand bucks or something like that.

Nathan Latka

09:06Thousand bucks. And what's the smallest one pay per month?

Robin Singhvi

09:10>> About 300.

Nathan Latka

09:12And 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?

Robin Singhvi

09:19>> Right now, it's just a matter of getting SmartCue in the hands of as many people as possible.

09:26>> 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 sort of commitment they're willing to put into

Nathan Latka

09:37So the only difference between someone paying 300 today and a thousand is the thousand dollar customers paid for more seats?

Robin Singhvi

09:43>> Mhmm. More seats, longer contract.

Nathan Latka

09:47How long?

Robin Singhvi

09:50>> Some go for quarter, the others are year. Someone signed on for eighteen months.

Nathan Latka

09:55Mhmm. How are you signing an eighteen month contract with, like you know, when you're still trying to get your first five customers? If I was a customer, I'd say, Robin, I'm not signing a a year long plus contract with who you just launched.

Robin Singhvi

10:06>> Well, I guess it's a matter of establishing trust that, you know, what we're building and what we're providing to them will actually, you know, hold its value irrespective of whether I'm around or not. And, of course, the fact that, you you know, I'm trying to give them confidence that I will be around.

Nathan Latka

10:25Why are they even questioning if you're around?

Robin Singhvi

10:28>> They're not. You asked the question, but they're not they're not questioning me on the eighteen month contract.

Nathan Latka

10:34Interesting. Is it fully committed, or can they stop paying in in two months?

Robin Singhvi

10:39>> No. No. There there isn't an exit clause, but, you know, we're we're not gonna let that customer sort of drop off or have a have a poor experience. Mhmm.

Nathan Latka

10:50You probably thought that the first time though, but the app was crashing when salespeople opened it. So how can you guarantee that?

Robin Singhvi

10:57>> How can I guarantee what?

Nathan Latka

10:59Uptime.

Robin Singhvi

11:01>> I mean, we've been we've been testing it with a bunch of customers, and only when we sort of realized that, you know, yes, we're at that point where the product works. We we tested it out on a bunch of different use cases with different with our initial beta customers as well. So, yeah, we're pretty confident that it works.

11:23>> And we're seeing it now, actually.

Nathan Latka

11:25How many folks are on the team today?

Robin Singhvi

11:27>> So we are now five people.

Nathan Latka

11:29Five.

Robin Singhvi

11:30>> Combination of full time and contract.

Nathan Latka

11:32So how are you I mean, how if if you got four customers that are paying between 300 and $1,000 a month, you're doing something like $2,000 a month right now on revenue. How are you paying all these people, including supporting yourself and your life, your livelihood?

Robin Singhvi

11:45>> Yeah. So I'm not paying myself. And with the others, it's partly this revenue and the the fund that we raised. Mhmm. So that's that's what's sustaining the team right now.

Nathan Latka

12:00Well, yeah, about a $150,000 can't sustain a team of five for twenty four plus months.

Robin Singhvi

12:07>> Not for twenty four, but we run a pretty lean team. A lot of the team is based in India, so costs are lower.

Nathan Latka

12:16Mhmm. How are you managing this yourself personally? Right? I mean, you have to put food on the table somehow, so you're not paying yourself. Where are you doing consulting on the side or something?

Team, Burn Rate, and Personal Finances

Robin Singhvi

12:25>> No. No. No. The family's supporting me. So they've been

12:28>> pretty support a fan.

Nathan Latka

12:29Okay. We love that.

12:30See, now we're getting to the good stuff.

12:32This is how founders and entrepreneurship actually works.

12:34Okay. So what do you do?

12:36You go to the family and say, guys, please help me cover living expenses for a year. I wanna take a risk and start a company.

Robin Singhvi

12:42>> Yes. Exactly. I mean, I think the good thing is they didn't even have to I didn't even have say that. Right? They were like, you do what you need to do. We got you.

Nathan Latka

12:50Are you in their house right now? You're living with family?

Robin Singhvi

12:53>> I am. Yes.

Nathan Latka

12:54That's awesome. Okay. So you keep your rent low and food. Do they make you clean the house or anything?

Robin Singhvi

13:00>> Yeah. You know, I mean, I I gotta do things.

13:03Fair enough.

13:03>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

13:04That feels like a good trade. Alright. So you're growing is. You're growing now. You you re okay. So you you you had a company. It was crashing. You killed it. You relaunched. You tested it. You're now going to market again. Four paying customers. Another four potentially in the pipeline. How much of the $150,000 cash do you still have in the bank?

Robin Singhvi

13:20>> We have a large chunk of it still.

Nathan Latka

13:23Okay. Are you so are you planning to raise this year or next year? I should say next year. It's December now.

Plans to Raise Seed Round in 2023

Robin Singhvi

13:28>> Yes. Actually, Nathan, I I am hoping to to raise a seed because we now have the confidence that what we're building has legs. It works. Clients are liking what they see. They're seeing value in it. So now what what I need to do, what I really wanna do is start building, you know, a really strong team both on the dev side and on the go to market side. And to be able to do that, you know,

13:57>> I think I I will need some capital to do that. So unless there is a significant event on the revenue side from, you know, a few large customers, I feel like, I might go back into the market or raise a seed.

Nathan Latka

14:12And how much are you looking to raise potentially?

Robin Singhvi

14:15>> I'm looking at anywhere between a mil to mil 5.

Nathan Latka

14:19Mhmm. Mhmm. And how much equity do you think you'll have to sell to raise a million bucks?

Robin Singhvi

14:24>> I am thinking anywhere between 10 to 15%.

Nathan Latka

14:28Mhmm. And so why do you feel like you're worth $10,000,000 today or the company's worth $10,000,000 today?

Robin Singhvi

14:34>> Well, one is we we have satisfied customers, referenceable customers. Right? I think that's the biggest thing. The second is that we've actually proven that, you know, we can run a lean team. We can pivot when we need to. We can actually deliver a product, and and actually go to market, not just build a product in silo. Right? So for example, September when we launched, we launched a product hunt. We actually ended up being product of the

Product Hunt Launch Strategy

Robin Singhvi

15:02>> day for, you know, a solo founder running a super lean team, no marketing team behind it. You know, I was pretty I was pretty pumped about that. Right? And then

Nathan Latka

15:13How did you do that? How did you do that? You launched in September. You got 852 upvotes. How did you do that?

Robin Singhvi

15:19>> Man, you should just go and check out the blog post I wrote. I I spoke about it as well. But but, really, I think one is just putting a framework and a process in place that this is what I need to do and then working backwards from there. Right? Who do I need to tap? Who needs to hear from me when?

Nathan Latka

15:36Yeah. But but, no, tell don't don't don't give me a generic. Tell me actually who you targeted. Like, what what were what were all those things for you?

Robin Singhvi

15:44>> Friends and family, the community. So even before, like, a a few months before we launched, we knew we were gonna launch. So we we started to put the word out that, hey. We're gonna do this. We're gonna need your support. This is what we're doing. Started, you know, attending meetups and events and things like that. In my newsletter, I I made sure to mention it every time I I sent a note to to folks in my

Newsletter and Community Building

Robin Singhvi

16:09>> newsletter that this we're doing the day off. You know, we had some automations going on that twenty four hours, on the on the at the stroke of midnight Pacific when we launch. Note goes out to x number of people every six hours. And notes oh, man. How many? At least a couple thousand people?

Nathan Latka

16:29And where did you get those thousand people? Was this a cold email list, or they uploaded other products?

Robin Singhvi

16:33>> So no. So so so, Nathan, actually, I think, you know, for me, these these thousand odd people, couple thousand people is is actually my community that I've been building over the past year and a half since I started SmartCue. Right? So so just making sure folks are aware of what I'm doing, keeping them posted, taking them taking them along on my journey. So so these are all, like, not not nobody's, someone who who doesn't know

17:04>> me or just got someone's email.

Nathan Latka

17:07Awesome. We love that. Well, we're certainly rooting for you as you build the product and get your first 10 customers. In the meantime though, Robin, let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, favorite book.

Robin Singhvi

17:17>> Hard thing about hard things. That's the one I'm all I just finished. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

17:22Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Robin Singhvi

17:27>> No one in particular, but I don't think anyone can avoid following Elon today. Right?

Nathan Latka

17:31Mhmm.

17:32Number four three. What's your favorite online tool for building SmartCue besides your own?

Famous Five: Books, Tools, and Life

Robin Singhvi

17:38>> I love intercom. Like, I think that's that's been a lifesaver for us.

Nathan Latka

17:42Number four. How many hours of sleep do you get every night?

Robin Singhvi

17:45>> Ugh. I know why you need to ask that to every founder just to make them feel bad. I mean, it's it's past midnight here already, so, you know, I'll I'll take six if I can get it.

Nathan Latka

17:58Six. I ask it because I don't want people to copy a founder that has an unhealthy lifestyle who only sleeps three hours. I don't wanna celebrate that lifestyle.

Robin Singhvi

18:06>> So Fair enough.

Nathan Latka

18:07Number and then what's your situation? Married, single, kids? I think what? You're 30, 37 now?

Closing Remarks

Robin Singhvi

18:12>> I'm 37. Yes. Married, ten years.

Nathan Latka

18:15Any kids? No?

Robin Singhvi

18:16>> No. No kids.

Nathan Latka

18:17None yet. Okay. And last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Robin Singhvi

18:23>> That

18:27>> that patience is a virtue that that, you know, you have to really live by. You have to be patient for for good things to happen to you.

Nathan Latka

18:36Guys, getsmartcue.com. They launched back in 2021. Got paying customers. Product kept crashing. They shut it down. They relaunched September of this year on product hunt. Eight hundred fifty two upvotes to his community of a thousand people. He now has eight paying customers that pay on average $304,105 $100 a month. So about $2,000 in MRR. They raised a $150,000 pre seed round at about a $2,000,000 valuation a year ago, hoping to raise another million dollar round next

19:02year in 2023 at around a $10,000,000 valuation now that he has a bit more product market fit with his team of five as Robin looks to scale. Robin, thanks for taking us to the top.

Robin Singhvi

19:11>> Thank you, Nathan. Thanks for having me.

Nathan Latka

19:15One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. We call it deal or bust. One founder comes on, three hungry buyers, they try and do a deal live, and the founder shares back end dashboards, their expenses, their revenue, ARPU CAC, LTV, you name it, they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live. It is fun to watch every Thursday 1PM

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20:24for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, but I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people. We

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