How Sqrl CEO Om Suthar grew to $10.8K revenue and 150 customers in 2019.

just got done editing this interview you guys are gonna love it before i do that though i want you to know that i'm going to be in the comments for the next 30 minutes or so answering your questions if there's additional questions you want me to ask the ceo next time i interview them leave them below or if you're just loving the data points i get ceos to share click the thumbs up button below that's your way of telling me you're loving this stuff and i'll get you more of it additionally again i'll be in the comments answering any questions you have all right for 30 minutes enjoy the interview hello everyone my guest today is omsuthar he is a first generation immigrant and second generation entrepreneur he studied taught and practiced design in three continents in five nations in the span of 10 years he's published over 10 patents and continued to innovate himself beyond the traditional archetype of designer now building a company called squirrel abundance for your body mind and wallet i'm ready to take us to the top i am all right so what does squirrel do and the domain name is sqrl dot me if you guys want to follow along that's right um we help organizations get to know and grow the well-being of their workforce okay so who are you selling into typically kind of heads of hr yes uh and sometimes uh directly to the uh employer the owner of the company if they're small okay and so give me give me a kind of perspective here right are how are companies paying for this are you pure play sass yes this is pure sass uh and uh flat uh heat rate of six dollars per month per active seat just kind of like slack okay and what's like your sweet spot so so i guess when companies sign up are they typically signing up for one seat or a thousand seats or so they're typically our sweet spot seems to be um small to medium-sized businesses around 200 employees we find three total pilots to date and we just launched our waitlist site so we can launch this to the public but because our vision is for this to be a quick stealth service checkout where we automate everything that's important and give you give the employer control of everything that matters okay so pre-revenue today yep okay pre-revenue uh so when did you launch when did you write the first line of code uh we started this journey 10 months ago and it was just an app and then in the beginning of january this year we launched our workplace program with three pilot companies all different sizes all different domains to learn more and they actually paid us to build this that's great what'd they pay 1200 a month per employer okay so you had three paying 1200 a month so 3 600 bucks a month in revenue yep okay that's great um and how many employees are that that span or just was it just per one per company basically it was 50 employees at one 80 at another 20 and another so a batch of 150 total okay plus 20. so what is 150 times 6 come out to 3 600 a month in other words if you add up 160 total seats yeah that's right yeah okay good so so basically you pre-sold the thing now what does activation look like have they been able to get those 150 seats actually using the tool and how do you define active that's right so an active user is defined by a user that signed up and created an account um and uh we've what we what we was lucky for us is that we we launched the application to the consumers first to learn a lot about how do we make sure activation is really high so our activation rate is around 36 okay so like in the past 30 days how many of the 150 seats have logged on um almost 80 percent of our users that create an account stay on as monthly active users okay got it so you've got about call it 120 out of 150 that logged on in the past month that's right okay great so so 156 bucks a month that's like 900 a month in revenue but you're getting about 3 600 because these were your pilots you charge them a little bit more um when do you actually turn on the kind of the paywall for anyone um so we're our wait list just launched so we can qualify the right customers again and uh for for our public launch and we're about three months away from that okay so you'll launch basically january 1st 2020. that's right okay um what did what have you spent to date uh on the mvp in terms of cash right so you've been building it for basically 12 months how much have you sunk in yeah about 120k of my own funds and uh 26 000 from uh friends and family around okay so how much total capital have you raised besides your own money uh 26 000. oh okay good would you do a convertible note yeah good why did you do i mean why not just put in a little extra money yourself why go through all the legal and the work of raising 26 grand uh to be quite honest um we ran out of our bootstrap uh you know range as much as we had um i've built all of this on the side of a full-time job and and scaled this i've designed every pixel so um i've taken it as far as i potentially could and i'm trying to bring in more support to scale and funding are you still working your full-time gig i am come on when are you going to quit you got to go all in no safety net well um my plan is uh to go in if as a public launch i would basically go all in because i think we'll hit a a pretty high uh mrr where i feel uh comfortable leaving and doing this what mr do you have to hit before you feel comfortable leaving 10k okay got it and what's team size today how many people full-time uh we have six developers and three advisors and i do design and product are those six developers though awful time yes oh wow so so i mean isn't that weird them being full-time but they're like our ceo isn't even full-time why should we put all of our energy in well um i put in my full-time hours or close to it about 30 hours a week um just between the job uh i'll typically work my full-time job go home work from 7 to 10 and then wake up connect with the team again on the uh progress they've made overnight um and then again from about six to six to seven thirty i'm working there and then i head to my full-time job so nine people on the team uh total yep and what's burn right now per month it's about six grand per month okay i mean so so these six developers must be like super cheap ukraine kiev argentina india india got okay so what's the connection did you have connections there or how did you find them um well it's kind of ironic one of my advisors connected us and i realized that they work in the building next to the building i used to work in india when i was designing an electric scooter for inner city women about seven years ago so i was like this this works out great that's pretty cool okay do do you have any sense on where you're gonna find like how what's the weightless saying how are you gonna grow it how are you gonna get traffic yeah so i you know one of the the areas that um we're trying to tackle and why we're trying to do this so differently is um typically wellness programs are sold uh as an add-on to your health insurance or payroll or something like that because they know that its value can't really stand on its own what we're trying to do is build a direct to buyer sales model where we really put uh control of the health data as well as the parameters of um you know which milestones you want to reward and how much you want to pay out in cash and we automate all that so giving that control really allows us to onboard and launch a wellness program in minutes and clicks which takes our competitors days or weeks so really um by building this flywheel and then partnering with like our local chamber of commerce uh small business uh administrations because i'm here in dc i'm able to uh make the right connections to kind of get this out to the right audience and what we've learned is there's a lot of small businesses even labor uh intensive environments like construction workers that would love to have benefits but they've just always been no clear roi and out of budget yeah well i mean the thing i always want about this is like do people care enough right does an hr team care enough about dedicating budget to this kind of problem or is it really just a made-up problem that we know would feel good to solve people won't actually put money behind yeah that's a great question traditionally it's an ambiguous problem and it doesn't seem clearly valuable like what's what's my bottom line right but what we're trying to build is um currently your personal health data is collected by health insurance companies and then they use that to factor and augment the cost of your deductible making care even out of reach what we're doing is we're reversing that and saying hey um what if you are you can show that you're becoming more physically active that you're building financial resilience that you're becoming more mindful of your emotions and you can use some factor of that information and give that the positive information to the health insurance company to reduce your deductible can can can we do that that's not something we've proven out yet but that's what we're really trying to build towards yeah because you've got an example on your website like joy it says at the top like this morning i'm grateful for snuggles with my mom and then it says you've walked 9 000 steps right and then you have you know you have this much in your savings account right so you're trying to like put all this in kind of one snapshot is this really a big data play it it's not really a big data play i think it's a big insight play like data has now just become a commodity everyone's collecting it but nobody knows like really what to do with it right but we've done some backwards calculations like um just if you walk 2 000 steps more if you add 2000 steps to your daily average uh that all other things being considered that's an 8 reduction of risk of chronic cardiovascular diseases right you're not going to see that rebound like bottom line value overnight but over the course of five years 10 years that makes a big difference and especially when you talk about spending 400 which you probably all are on gym memberships and stuff like that with more problems our program gives you data on what's happening that helps hr organizations also understand how to better uh activate meaningful benefits but like for example like you say set aside a dollar for every thousand steps you naturally take each day is that the employer incentivizing the employee to walk more and the employer will give them a dollar or does that unlike to take a dollar from like the paycheck of the employee to put to their savings account so there's two layers to that uh one is you're incurring your own savings habit from your own checking account to your own savings account and then on top of that the employer can uh customize a match program if you will where they say hey every time you hit 10 000 steps i'll pay you an extra two bucks that will pay out at the end of each month i'm putting my phone on a treadmill yeah i'm just kidding you can do that but we'll we'll catch it those were anomalies that are pretty easy to like catch on in aggregate like why would i connect my bank account to this app so you can see my savings when i know my employer is behind it now they have all my personal financial data that's a great question we actually don't look at your overall savings amount all we look at is the amount that you save with squirrel uh we're very explicit and um uh intentional about what data we collect and what data we don't look at but you have to connect to my bank of america or my capital one my chase accounts in order to actually facilitate these payments back and forth so i mean technically you do have hooks into my pr you know the company will now have hooks in my personal banking correct so the company will not have hooks into that what we use is plaid and dwalla and those are apis where we just pass secured uh apis and keys uh we don't actually like we have there are clear safeguards and limits and what we can actually look in at yep yep interesting all right uh let's wrap up with the famous five number one favorite business book um probably traction right now because i'm reading number two is there a ceo you're following or studying joe gebia from airbnb number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company number four how many hours of sleep getting every night seven okay and situation married single kids married and have one kid okay how are you i'm 35. 35. last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew [Music] uh start building specific knowledge what do you mean um i picked this up from neville but um in his pod but um it's it's about you know just going zooming in on one specific thing and really learning it really really well and using that knowledge to build uh you know you with other ancillary specific knowledge you can build something that's really unique to you and build your value not just for yourself but like in society guys there you have it it is an app that companies can buy to help their employees have healthier better mindsets on life have better savings habits currently 150 seats are active at six bucks a month so 900 a month in revenue this comes from three pilots where the com the brands and companies paid 1200 bucks per month on average to do these they are now opening up the uh the paid program on january 1st 2020 waitlist is just now launching spent about 146 thousand dollars building the mvp between 2018 and 2019 now looking to scale about nine people on the team six engineers burning about six thousand dollars per month as they look again to grow um thanks for taking us to the top thanks these ceos rarely give these kinds of interviews i hit them hard i get the data and i want to do it more so if you want to get more of this stuff make sure you subscribe up here and then additionally go check out one of my other ceo interviews right now