SPRobot Team Size (2023)

out of school he launched in a consulting company called be SOB he's grown that's 800 000 in Revenue last year and said you know what we want to build software to help our Consulting clients do work better and the Microsoft ecosystem him and his partner have invested 150 000 from their agency into this new SAS tool which you can find at SP robot sprobot is the name of it hoping to launch here in the next call it three uh weeks three months we'll see what happens hey folks my guest today is Martin hatting he's a Microsoft 365 architect who's helped deliver SharePoint design development and adoption services to clients in the financial services industry for the past 20 years he's currently building SP or S Probot a SharePoint in teams governance SAS which helps organizations prevent and manage content sprawl Martin you ready to take us to the top yep so um what is content sprawl so contents probably something we encountered in all in our day jobs is Microsoft 365 consultants and so we've been working helping orgs move into the Microsoft cloud and then also uh you know build out their apps and run their their services in the cloud and um the one thing which is is quite easy these days with Microsoft applications with teams specifically and you know teams have got more than 200 million users is to create a workspace you know you can spin up a workspace really quickly and really easily and people tend to do that you know just like it just goes wild and and it's a great good thing from an adoption perspective but also what you end up having is like just thousands of workspaces that are unused you get duplicate information all over the place and then what happens is people can't find stuff and then they create more workspaces because they can't find what they're looking for and you just end up with just uh overload all over the place so that's content how do you solve how do you solve that you solve that by putting governance in place by putting a bit of friction in place for all this there's a couple of steps depending on bit of friction in place for the user so they can't just spin up the workspace you know Willy and Elliot needs to be there needs to be a definite purpose to it and you know it needs to be properly thought out it needs to be based on a you know in a specific Direction needs to have a specific set of rules um which govern it's it's uh its life cycle and and that's that's kind of the governance framework which which you can use to to limit that um so our goal is to to build that a tool which enables you to enforce that framework on your on your workspace creation very cool and so what do customers pay on average to use this technology you've built so we we are still pre-revenue and we're looking at pricing at the moment uh on average so what we do is we Pro we price it per tenant so tenant is the Microsoft property so an organization usually has a single tenant and we are looking to be very cost effective with so pricing pretty aggressive without pricing so we we have a couple of uh sort of pricing tiers based on how many pipelines how many workspace concurrent workspaces you can create etc etc but we're looking at an average of between 150 and 200 US dollars a month per tenant per org so it's very much the the SME space will be aiming at not why are you charging per organ in terms of instead of per tenant or per seat so so the the we've gotta we've got one and two competitors already um that do sort of what we do and a bit more and who are they what we want to do is so shake it is one of them gate literally the two words um so uh s h a or e g a t e share gate share share gate okay yeah yeah okay um so they're a big play in space uh Orchestra is another one um and uh siskit or one of the the three big big players in the space so they've the pricing varies wildly between the different between our competitors um we have the advantage of being South African based um our entire team is South African based I'm in Cape Town um and we have a very low cost of living I think Indian companies find they have a very similar Advantage um in in the space um we deal with that quite a lot as well and hey Mark do you want to find out I mean what is your cost what does it cost to rent in Cape Town so so typically you can get a uh you can get a fairly nice two-bedroom apartment for about the thousand dollars a month later actually 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 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 valuation 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 final 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 can I ask how low you've kept your all-in sort of monthly living expenses um so I have a my son scenario is a bit more unique because I'm a little bit older I'm already middle aged I'm 45 and I'm I have uh Assets in a house with a poo and all of that but I've kept I've kept my living expenses to and uh maybe Quantified in dollars quickly under five thousand dollars a month wow okay amazing so high quality of living for low cost so that's what you mean when you say you think you have Arbitrage and Cape Town are all your engineers there as well your whole team the whole team's here all teams here and how big is the team we are 16 people that does the the day-to-day uh Microsoft 365 work but the the SP robot team is currently six people out of that 16. well sorry what okay so wait is this one company and there's a Consulting arm with 10 people and then the SAS product which is six people correct correct that's how we how we split it um so we we've got to so so some of the out of the six people that work on the SAS product uh three or full-time and three do a bit of Consulting work to to pay the bills as well so this is really a product of doing consulting work finding this problem in our Consulting day-to-day Consulting work and saying which finding this problem over and over again let's build a solution for it and let's make that solution available to the whole world while we can you know it's it's identifying that scratching that itch that that we had the typical scenario in in SAS I think so when did you launch the agency what year in 2001 oh wow okay got it yeah and and how if you're comfortable sharing how like what was your best year in terms of Revenue so we got um again in relation to the low cost of living we've got just over eight hundred thousand dollars annual revenue yeah yeah okay wow so I guess how do you make the decision to siphon off some resources to invest and experiment with a SAS product versus just to keep building a Consulting business I think it's a it's a combination of um the one is realizing that the Consulting business is just constant churn and constant grind um it's that that part of it wanting to to free up a bit of time and have something that is scalable and it is repeatable and the other thing is I have a bible really appreciation for really great user experiences and I've always wanted to build something that is just like amazing from a user experience perspective um you know the whole sign up process the onboarding process the flow of it and it's been a challenge of you know I saw it as a bit of a challenge for me to actually build that so that's that's been a an interesting Journey for me personally to to do the whole design of the system like all of the UI actually do the the UI design um that's all on my side the product management of it um the project management we've likely got a really good project manager and a really good architect and his senior Dev who's who are very hands on with that but the entire everything you see the site the marketing of it the the content generation that's all something that I had to sit down and really work on myself and and really figure out how to do so when did you launch this when did you write the first line of code for the SAS a year ago so we all currently in Brands and beta we're in better Vision at the moment we are looking to launch our first full version probably in the next uh three months or so we're just polishing up a couple of things um how do you know what to polish if you don't have paying customers sort of helping you guide the product so luckily the the Microsoft 365 Community is very Hands-On and it's quite a Target community and um lots of forums and and you know I've obviously built up a lot of a large network over the years of people that are that I deal with um you know whether it is Partnerships or or just sort of General thought sharing and um I've got a lot of input we've got a lot of input from um from these Partners from these guys you know these experts in the community and then also we have um one or two of our actual Consulting clients who are are going to be running very first versions of it now we didn't roll the beta out to them we got the our peers to test the the beta with us um but the the clients are going to be running production with the with the first version once we launched in a couple of months interesting interesting um how are you you know your pre-revenue on the SAS you have six people over there three are part-time how do you pay the three that are full-time if you have no SAS Revenue yet with Consulting profit um so we made the the conscious decision to invest that that money so I'm taking a bit of a pay cut this year um I have taken for the last year and I've got a very a really great partner we've been Partners in the business since we started in in you know in 2001 and he's he's committed to to driving you know the revenue on the Consulting side while I focus on this uh very grateful to have that it's not everyone that has that opportunity how much money so far has the agency invested in the SAS company um roughly a hundred and fifty thousand dollars does that make you nervous it does very why um because it's the first time we've done this and I I know it costs a lot to do this and I know it takes a lot of time and I know it's gonna still take a lot of time once we get to selling because that's the hardest part everyone sells you it's easy to build it it's harder to sell and I am very I'm I'm still very nervous even though we do all the validation we speak to so many people about whether people are actually going to pay for this but how many people actually going to pay for this I don't know I guess we'll find out but we've gotta we've got to start somewhere I love that just be clear what's the name of the agency is it sprobot.io so the product is the agency is B solved so solve a problem with a B in front of it uh bsov.co.za that's it that says yes amazing okay but but both of these websites are 100 owned by one entity with you and your partner great and you guys just your friends you split a 50 50 or what yeah yeah we've got we've got some minority shareholders as well in the business um but we started um straight out of University we decided to be crazy we installed a business let's do this and we started actually selling uh software to and building software for schools Schools administration software at that stage high schools um that was the early days and then we discovered Microsoft chip when while we were busy doing that uh in 2002 we were like this is a really great product we can build something with this and we can we you know let's use it if we so we started rolling out internets and building small little internets and building up and we eventually got to the stage where we built internets for 55 000 personals you know that's that's kind of the scale we we've done in Consulting on interesting I love that well heck of a story here Martin let's wrap up with the famous five number one your favorite book uh that's a shrug on rent number two is there a CEO you're following or studying um that's a tough one so many a couple of Chief marketing offices that I'm following and studying but not a not a CEO particularly all right number three what's your favorite online tool for building the company um with uh proto.io actually Prada Proto dot IO prototyping tool wireframe and prototyping number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night I stick with why it does I need them that's good and situation married single kids you mentioned uh what 45 married no kids lots of bicycles to take care of all right last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. um I wish I knew how how much risk I could take at that stage without consequences yeah yeah guys they're out of school he launched an a consulting company called be SOB he's grown that's 800 000 Revenue last year and said you know what we want to build software to help our Consulting clients do work better in the Microsoft ecosystem him and his partner have invested 150 000 from their agency into this new SAS tool which you can find at SP robot SP robot is the name of it open to launch here and then next it's called three uh weeks three months we'll see what happens Martin thanks for taking us to the top thank you Nathan appreciate it one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm Central it's called Shark Tank for SAS 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 our poo CAC LTV you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every Thursday 1 p.m Central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM Central 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