How Soft Solutions CEO Ankit Nagpal grew Soft Solutions to $2.1M revenue with a 42 person team in 2024.

guys soft Solutions limited.com and they're building a tool to help any local business text message Market to get their customers back faster he learned this problem firsthand through via his wife's dental practice he spent forty thousand bucks so far on the MVP he wants to go and sell this all in India using 100 commission model on sales reps you'll spring on 50 new sales reps per month again 100 commission model he's launching early next year we'll see what happens hey folks my guest today is on kit nagpaw he's a software engineer who's developing a new SAS software for shop owners called Soft Solutions limited.com onky radio take us to the top yeah all right so tell me why you want to get into this space SAS software for shop owners okay yeah so um so um let me tell you a bit about myself so I own a business in which we have around 5 000 customers and uh I felt a need that we need a software in which uh I should be able to communicate with my customers regularly may it can be holiday events it can be uh remind us it can be some promotional messages um for for the customers and uh through WhatsApp or Facebook and other messaging platforms what is the what is the name just hold on one second what's the name of that other company with 5000 customers no that's my business I have a dental clinic so I have 5000 patients that are that are customers so uh what what have what was happening was we were not we were not we were not able to be in touch with all the customers said uh so um they were not uh how can I say that I we wanted to be in touch with the customers so that I'm very confused you have a dental shop you do fix people's teeth and you have 5 000 customers and you're frustrated you can't talk to them yes that that was that was from where we started with this com with this product that's okay what I'm asking is you are you a dentist with a dentist my wife is a dentist and she has those patients and patients were coming to us regularly and this they were telling us oh we forgot your appointment or we did not get your message or for the regular teeth cleaning and other services with annual checkups and everything understood so you're you're now building software to help your wife and others like your wife connect to their patients more frequently yes yes exactly so but we so but we felt that uh whenever a patient came to us and we said oh you missed your annual checkup and things like that they always said we forgot so that was that was uh very frustrating for me because I thought why we are not why they are not remembering us why they are not remembering our appointments so the problem I found that most of them do not use emails they are like regular people they are they use messenger Facebook WhatsApp or um telegram or whatever messaging platforms but so and I try to find some software something where I can schedule a message or something like your appointment is due on this this date and they get through whatever platform they are using so we I was I have particularly I spent at least five ten days searching for anything that I can there are scheduling software available like calendly and many other but they are mostly email and nobody reads email so I mean people do not read email in my country usually they are like older people they they usually check SMS and WhatsApp so okay sorry just uh we have a very short amount of time so short answer surpass I'm going to try and get through a bunch of stuff here okay so I think I understand why you're building this when did you write the first line of code for your platform okay so I made a demo so first of all I made a demo in March 2022 this year so you just started earlier this year and and is it just you building it or how many Engineers are you working with okay so I started with I I just made a simple demo demo software myself I took around two months to make a demo and then I showed the demo to many business owners like this is the software that can help you increase your business so and uh what should be the price and like that so I started myself now I now we are eight Engineers eight Engineers handling different department like server and one person is handling app and like that so now we are it and I have built the team slowly over the period of time I could not build the team on the day one because I understand I understand again short answers here if we can because otherwise we're going to end up not getting anything done you have a team of eight my question is you told me before the show your pre-revenue so how are you paying these eight engineers myself um from my pocket 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 valuations 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 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 okay does that make you nervous how much of how much of your own money have you invested so far okay so I I have 250 000 not interested I have the fun fun of 250 000 that includes the salaries salaries and development cost and opening of a few first three four offices in my country okay so you've invested personally 250 000 bucks to pay the engineers yeah I will be investing this is my fun pool that I have till now I have invested around forty thousand dollars till now okay so you've invested forty thousand to pay eight Engineers for about five months which enables you to build an MVP not not following it from from March to this month but gradually like I started with one then I added keep on adding like every two months I am adding one person okay okay the point the point is over the past seven months you've personally invested 40K across eight Engineers to build the MVP to where it is today yes yes okay is your wife paying for it yet thank you yes yes on a monthly basis yeah some expenses yes no no is she paying to use your software to connect with her dental clients yes we have made a small software demo just just uh just uh how can I say not the final not just uh yeah yes and we are sending messages and she's not paying but we are testing it on several businesses okay when are you going to start charging your wife why so long it's already working why wait until June next year to start charging I mean I and my wife we have seen say a family so it's not about charging nobody cares this is business This Is War you gotta charge okay she's giving me feedback so that's the compensation okay fair enough what about other people though why don't you have other people paying yet yeah because uh I have installed on 20 different businesses they are all friends and family just for the feedback like how is it going how much business just I'm collecting data so what do they're telling you they're willing to pay per month to use it yeah so uh if I I'm in India so I can tend in Indian rupees because we are launching India so everybody is comfortable with...