How SPRobot Is Building a SharePoint and Teams Governance SaaS Funded by $150,000 from Its Consulting Agency (Interview with Co-founder Martin Hattingh)

Introduction and SPRobot Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Out 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,

00:22three 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?

What Is Content Sprawl

Martin Hattingh

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.

Nathan Latka

01:39That's content.

Martin Hattingh

01:40>> How solve do

How Governance Solves Content Sprawl

Martin Hattingh

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.

Nathan Latka

02:20Very cool. And so what do customers pay on average to use this technology you've built?

Pricing Model and Pre-Revenue Status

Martin Hattingh

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

Nathan Latka

03:02Why are you only charging per org in in terms of instead of per tenant or per seat?

Martin Hattingh

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.

Nathan Latka

03:15Who are they?

Martin Hattingh

03:16>> What we wanna do is so Sharegate is one of them.

Nathan Latka

03:19Can you spell that?

Martin Hattingh

03:20>> Quite a bit fair.

Nathan Latka

03:21Sharegate, literally the two words.

Martin Hattingh

03:23>> Got it. Quite a big term.

Nathan Latka

03:25Can you

03:26just say the letters?

Competitors and Cape Town Cost Advantage

Martin Hattingh

03:28>> So s h a r e g a t e, share gate.

Nathan Latka

03:33Share share gate. Okay. Got it. Got it.

Martin Hattingh

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.

Nathan Latka

04:09And Hey, Martin, can you quantify that?

04:11Mean, what is your cost? What does it cost to rent in Cape Town?

Martin Hattingh

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,

Nathan Latka

04:30what'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

04:53Stripe 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

05:17a 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

05:39built 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

06:05out 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

06:27you 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

06:53interview. Can I ask how low you've kept your all in sort of monthly living expenses?

Martin's Personal Living Expenses

Martin Hattingh

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.

Nathan Latka

07:21Wow. 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?

Martin Hattingh

07:29>> The whole team's here. And

Nathan Latka

07:31how big is the team?

Team Structure: Consulting vs SaaS

Martin Hattingh

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.

Nathan Latka

07:45Well, sorry. Wait. Is this one company and there's a consulting arm with 10 people and then the SaaS product, which is six people?

Martin Hattingh

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.

Nathan Latka

08:29So when did you launch the agency? What year?

Martin Hattingh

08:33>> In 2001.

Nathan Latka

08:35Oh, wow. Okay. Got it. Yeah. And how if you're comfortable sharing, how like, what was your best year in terms of revenue?

Martin Hattingh

08:43>> So we got again, in relation to the low cost of living, we got just over $800,000 annual revenue.

Nathan Latka

08:53That was in 2022?

Martin Hattingh

08:54>> Yeah. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

08:55Okay. 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?

Why Build a SaaS from a Consulting Business

Martin Hattingh

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.

Beta Launch and Product Development Timeline

Nathan Latka

10:10When did you launch the SaaS? When did you write the first line of code for the SaaS?

Martin Hattingh

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.

Nathan Latka

10:29How do you know what to polish if you don't have paying customers helping you guide the product?

Martin Hattingh

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.

Nathan Latka

11:20Interesting. 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?

Funding the SaaS Team with Consulting Profit

Martin Hattingh

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.

Nathan Latka

11:57Mhmm. How much money so far has the agency invested in the SaaS company?

$150,000 Agency Investment and Nerves

Martin Hattingh

12:05>> Roughly a $150,000

Nathan Latka

12:10Does that make you nervous?

Martin Hattingh

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.

BSolve Agency History and Origins

Nathan Latka

12:48I love that. Just to be clear, what's the name of the agency? Is it sprobot.io?

Martin Hattingh

12:52>> So the product is sprobot.io. The agency is BSolve. So solve the problem with a b in front of it.

Nathan Latka

13:00Bsolve.co.za?

Martin Hattingh

13:03>> That's it. That's us. Yes.

Nathan Latka

13:04Amazing. Okay. But but both of these websites are 100% owned by one entity with you and your partner?

Martin Hattingh

13:10>> Correct. Correct.

Nathan Latka

13:12And you guys just your friends, you split it fifty fifty or what?

Martin Hattingh

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.

Famous Five Rapid Fire Questions

Nathan Latka

13:57Interesting. I love that. Well, heck of a story here, Martin. Let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, your favorite book?

Martin Hattingh

14:05>> Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand.

Nathan Latka

14:07Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Martin Hattingh

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.

Nathan Latka

14:22Alright. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building the company?

Martin Hattingh

14:29>> Proto. Actually. Prada? Proto.io. Prototyping tool. Wireframe and prototyping.

Nathan Latka

14:37Number four. How many hours of sleep do get every night?

Martin Hattingh

14:41>> I stick with my eight hours. I need them.

Nathan Latka

14:43That's good.

Martin Hattingh

14:44>> And situation, married, single, kids? You mentioned, what, 45?

14:48>> 45, married, no kids, lots of bicycles to take care of.

Nathan Latka

14:53Alright. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Martin Hattingh

14:58>> I wish I knew how how much risk I could take at that stage without consequences.

Nathan Latka

15:05Yep. 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,

15:28three weeks, three months. We'll see what happens. Martin, thanks for taking us to the

Martin Hattingh

15:32>> Thank you, Nathan. Appreciate it.

Nathan Latka

15:34One 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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