SPRobot Team Size (2026)

[00:00] Out of school, he launched an a consulting company called BSolve. He's grown that to $800,000 in revenue last year and said, you know what? We wanna build software to help our consulting clients do work better in the Microsoft ecosystem. Him and his partner have invested a $150,000 from their agency into this new SaaS tool, which you can find at sprobot. Sprobot is the name of it. Hoping to launch here in the next, call it, three weeks, [00:22] three months. We'll see what happens. Hey, folks. My guest today is Martin Hattingh. He's a Microsoft three sixty five architect who's helped deliver SharePoint design, development, and adoption services to clients in the financial services industry for the past twenty years. He's currently building SP or sprobot, a SharePoint and Teams governance SaaS, which helps organizations prevent and manage content sprawl. Martin, you ready to take us to top? Yep. What is content sprawl? [00:48] >> So content sprawl is something that we encountered in our day jobs as Microsoft three sixty five consultants. So we've been working, helping orgs move into the Microsoft Cloud and then also build out their apps and run their services in the Cloud. The one thing which is quite easy these days with Microsoft applications, with Teams specifically, Teams have got more than 10,000,000 users, is to create a workspace. You can spin up a workspace really quickly and really [01:16] >> easily, and people tend to do that just it just goes wild. And it's a 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 overload all over the place. [01:39] That's content. [01:40] >> How solve do [01:42] >> You solve that by putting governance in place, by putting a bit of friction in place for well, a couple of steps. Putting a bit of friction in place for the user so they can't just spin up the workspace willy nilly. There needs to be a definite purpose to it. And it needs to be properly thought out. It needs to be based on a specific direction. It needs to have a specific set of rules which govern its [02:06] >> lifecycle. And that's kind of the governance framework which you can use to limit that. So our goal is to build a tool which enables you to enforce that framework on your workspace creation. [02:20] Very cool. And so what do customers pay on average to use this technology you've built? [02:25] >> So we are still pre revenue. We're looking at pricing at the moment on average. So what we do is we price it per tenant. So tenant is a Microsoft property. So an organization usually has a single tenant. And we are looking to be very cost effective with our pricing, pretty aggressive with our pricing. So we have a couple of pricing tiers based on how many pipelines, how many workspace, concurrent workspaces you can create, etcetera, etcetera. But [02:52] >> we're looking at an average of between one hundred and fifty and two hundred US dollars a month per tenant per org. So it's it's very much the the the SME space we aiming at, not [03:02] Why are you only charging per org in in terms of instead of per tenant or per seat? [03:08] >> So so the the we've got a we've got one or two competitors already, that do sort of what we do and a bit more. [03:15] Who are they? [03:16] >> What we wanna do is so Sharegate is one of them. [03:19] Can you spell that? [03:20] >> Quite a bit fair. [03:21] Sharegate, literally the two words. [03:23] >> Got it. Quite a big term. [03:25] Can you [03:26] just say the letters? [03:28] >> So s h a r e g a t e, share gate. [03:33] Share share gate. Okay. Got it. Got it. [03:36] >> Yep. Yep. Okay. So they're big player in space. Orchestry is another one. And SysKit are one of the three big players in the space. So the pricing varies wildly between our competitors. We have the advantage of being South African based. Our entire team is South African based. I'm in Cape Town. And we have a very low cost of living. I think Indian companies find they have a very similar advantage in the space. We deal with that [04:08] >> quite a lot as well. [04:09] And Hey, Martin, can you quantify that? [04:11] Mean, what is your cost? What does it cost to rent in Cape Town? [04:15] >> So so typically, can get a you can get a fairly nice two bedroom apartment for about $1,000 a month. Less actually. Oh, [04:30] 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 this. 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 [04:53] 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 three 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 [05:17] 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 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 [05:39] built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder 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 by 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 [06:05] 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 what you can get now inside of Founderpath. 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 [06:27] 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 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. Alright. Let's jump back into the [06:53] interview. Can I ask how low you've kept your all in sort of monthly living expenses? [07:00] >> So I have a my 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 have I have assets in a house with a pool and all of that. But I've kept I've kept my living expenses to and let me quantify it in dollars quickly, under $5,000 a month. [07:21] 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 in Cape Town. Are your engineers there as well? Your whole team? [07:29] >> The whole team's here. And [07:31] how big is the team? [07:33] >> We are 16 people that does the day to day Microsoft three sixty five work, but the sprobot team is currently six people out of that 16. [07:45] Well, sorry. Wait. Is this one company and there's a consulting arm with 10 people and then the SaaS product, which is six people? [07:53] >> Correct. Correct. That's how we split it. We've got a some of the Out of the six people that work on the SaaS product, three are full time and three do a bit of consulting work 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, we're finding this problem over and over again. Let's build a solution for it. And [08:19] >> let's make that solution available to the whole world while we can. It's identifying that, scratching that itch that that we had, the typical scenario in in SaaS, I think. [08:29] So when did you launch the agency? What year? [08:33] >> In 2001. [08:35] Oh, wow. Okay. Got it. Yeah. And how if you're comfortable sharing, how like, what was your best year in terms of revenue? [08:43] >> So we got again, in relation to the low cost of living, we got just over $800,000 annual revenue. [08:53] That was in 2022? [08:54] >> Yeah. Yeah. [08:55] Okay. Wow. So I guess how do you make the decision to siphon off some resources to invest and experiment with a SaaS product versus just to keep building a consulting business? [09:05] >> I think it's a combination of the one is realizing that the consulting business is just constant churn and constant grind. It's that part of it, wanting to free up a bit of time and have something that is scalable and that is repeatable. And the other thing is I have a 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. The whole sign up [09:33] >> process, the onboarding process, the flow of it. And it's been a challenge. I saw it as a of a challenge for me to actually build that. So that's been an interesting journey for me personally to do the whole design of the system. Like all of the UI, I actually do the UI design. That's all on my side, the product management of it. The project management, we've luckily got a really good project manager and a really good [09:55] >> architect and a senior dev who are very hands on with that. But everything you see, the site, the marketing of it, 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. [10:10] When did you launch the SaaS? When did you write the first line of code for the SaaS? [10:14] >> A year ago. So we are currently in beta. We're in beta version at the moment. We are looking to launch our first full version probably in the next three months or so. We're just polishing up a couple of things. [10:29] How do you know what to polish if you don't have paying customers helping you guide the product? [10:34] >> Luckily, the Microsoft three sixty five community is very hands on and it's quite a tight knit community. Lots of forums and I've obviously built up a large network over the years of people that I deal with, whether it is partnerships or just sort of general thought sharing. I've got a lot of input. We've got a lot of input from these partners, from these guys, these experts in the community. And then also we have one or two [11:02] >> of our actual consulting clients who are going to be running very first versions of it now. We didn't roll the beta out to them. We got our peers to test the beta with us. But the clients are going to be running production with the with the the first version once we launch in a couple of months. [11:20] Interesting. Interesting. How are you you know, your pre revenue on the SaaS, you have six people over there, three are part time. How do you pay the three that are full time if you have no SaaS revenue yet? [11:30] >> With consulting profit. We made the conscious decision to invest that money. So I'm taking a bit of a pay cut this year. I have taken for the last year. And I've got a very, really great partner. We've been partners in the business since we started in 2001. And he's committed to driving the revenue on the consulting side while I focus on this. Very grateful to have that. It's not everyone that has that opportunity. [11:57] Mhmm. How much money so far has the agency invested in the SaaS company? [12:05] >> Roughly a $150,000 [12:10] Does that make you nervous? [12:12] >> It does. Very. Why? Because it's the first time we've done this. And I know it costs a lot to do this and I know it takes a lot of time and I know it's going to still take a lot of time once we get to selling because that's the hardest part. Everyone tells you it's easy to build it. It's harder to sell. And I am very I'm still very nervous, even though we do all the validation, [12:39] >> we speak to so many people about whether people are actually going to pay for this or how many people actually going to pay for this. I don't know. Guess we'll find out. But we gotta we gotta start somewhere. [12:48] I love that. Just to be clear, what's the name of the agency? Is it sprobot.io? [12:52] >> So the product is sprobot.io. The agency is BSolve. So solve the problem with a b in front of it. [13:00] Bsolve.co.za? [13:03] >> That's it. That's us. Yes. [13:04] Amazing. Okay. But but both of these websites are 100% owned by one entity with you and your partner? [13:10] >> Correct. Correct. [13:12] And you guys just your friends, you split it fifty fifty or what? [13:15] >> Yeah. Yeah. We've got we've got some minority shareholders as well in the business. But we started straight out of university and we decided we're crazy. Gonna start a business with dealers. And we started actually selling software to and building software for schools, schools administration software at that stage, high schools. That was the early days. And then we discovered Microsoft SharePoint while we were busy doing that in 2002. We were like, this is a really great product. [13:42] >> We can build something with this and let's use it. So we started rolling out intranets and building smaller intranets and building up. And we eventually got to the stage where we built intranets for 55,000 person that's kind of the scale we've done the consulting on. [13:57] Interesting. I love that. Well, heck of a story here, Martin. Let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, your favorite book? [14:05] >> Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand. [14:07] Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? [14:15] >> That's a tough one. So many. A couple of chief marketing officers that I'm following and studying, but not a not a CEO particularly. [14:22] Alright. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building the company? [14:29] >> Proto. Actually. Prada? Proto.io. Prototyping tool. Wireframe and prototyping. [14:37] Number four. How many hours of sleep do get every night? [14:41] >> I stick with my eight hours. I need them. [14:43] That's good. [14:44] >> And situation, married, single, kids? You mentioned, what, 45? [14:48] >> 45, married, no kids, lots of bicycles to take care of. [14:53] Alright. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20. [14:58] >> I wish I knew how how much risk I could take at that stage without consequences. [15:05] Yep. Guys, they're out of school. He launched a consulting company called BSolve. He's grown that to $800,000 in revenue last year and said, 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 a $150,000 from their agency into this new SaaS tool, which you can find at sprobot. Sprobot is the name of it. Hoping to launch here in the next, call it, [15:28] three weeks, three months. We'll see what happens. Martin, thanks for taking us to the [15:32] >> Thank you, Nathan. Appreciate it. [15:34] One 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 [15:59] central. Additionally, remember these recorded Founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM central. To make sure you don't miss any of that, make sure you click the subscribe button below here on YouTube, the big red button, and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live. I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a big [16:22] fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or something else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if you want to take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS founders. You want to get in there. We've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing. You can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying. Sign [16:43] up for 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. 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, I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people. We got [17:03] to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. Alright, I'll be in the comments. See you.