How TypeStack CEO Silus Reddy grew TypeStack to $53.6K revenue and 14 customers in 2023.

hey folks my guest today is Silas ready he's a Founder entrepreneur and engineer and he loves to make new things using mostly zeros and ones he loves creating software that impacts some parts of life and is now working on what's called typestack.ai a WordPress blog alternative for startups Silas ready to take us to the top all right so what gave you this idea were you a WordPress customer and got frustrated or what yes I I think you're Spartan right um I mean uh before type stack we were actually building a different product called window and as part of that we were focused heavily on content marketing specifically blogs and we were using Wordpress and super frustrated with the tool the bulky the bulkiness of it and the issues that comes with the legacyness of its tool right and then we felt hey why can't blogging be super simple um because things are super simple right now every tool has become like easy two minute setup most things taken care but uh we were struggling to find a great alternative which does this and then that's when we thought hey let's build this and that's how type stack has borne and how much are customers paying per month today for type stack uh we we have only single plan uh as a as opposed to more SAS companies we have a single plan it's it's at 19 per year if the 19 per month if they pay for a yearly subscription or 29 per month okay and how what percent of users pay annually versus monthly um it's mostly monthly at this point of time and we are hardly a few months old uh Nathan I mean we we are still in beta I mean if you see our website it stays beta so we're still in beta but we do have paying users and we do have some users uh but yes uh it's mostly monthly at this point of Time how many paying users today um we we are in double digits low double digits we have about 14 odds that's awesome yes okay very good so 29 bucks a month times 14 customers is about 400 a month in revenue is that right yes yes that's amazing okay tell me when did you write the first line of code for the company um I think this is July July of 2022 so about four three four months back and then how did you build a wait list so you could start you know getting your first customers uh so we it was mostly feedback based I mean uh I've been in startups for a while now I'm I have 12 years of experience mostly with startups either mine or working for someone else's and uh I've ran this idea with uh with quite a few of fellow entrepreneurs that I know and they said hey uh looks like an exciting tool and we started building even before we have a wait list so it was mostly a parallel process of building product and building a weekly so July we started coding the product and I think somewhere in August September time frame we started building wait list and you know we are where we have silence however how people people can't just they don't just find your website on accident how did you get your first five people on the waitlist um so it's mostly through network uh so we've we've believed that we want to build uh this product entirely through feedback so we've sent this link to all our friends uh and within our Network we bombarded them on LinkedIn whatsapps and emails we've sent I think close to maybe say 500 emails by the way uh and then we got about 20 25 odd responses back uh from within our first degree second degree connections and then that's how it started 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 evaluations 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 round 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 LinkedIn messages or did you do it manually uh no it was all manual uh We've we've got the emails it was mostly emails but we're not LinkedIn messages because uh off late I feel LinkedIn is so spammy I don't know if people even respond there anymore so we've collected emails from LinkedIn and then started dropping them email one by one it was not even what's the subject what's a subject line uh it was like hey uh do you want to grow your content I mean something like that I mean we've we've tweaked it for different guys but hey do you like to see your bro content do you like to see your content grow do you like to uh see your organic traffic grow something like that because that's what type stack does it's mostly for organic marketing and content marketing that makes a lot of sense okay so you're doing about 400 bucks a month in Revenue today or about five thousand dollars per year in terms of run rate did you launch this yourself are you still founder no we are three founders actually at this point of time like I said before type stack we were building a different product called it was called window uh and currently three of us are working on this and we have a fairly decent time as well in fact we are funded uh we've raised a small round of funding from venture capital and foreign we're talking about too many things here so window is that what you raised money for uh no we've raised money for uh type stack okay so for today and okay so you raised a million bucks in your pre-seed round for type stack most companies are selling 15 to 20 of their business in their pre-seed rounds is that about what you sold yes that's about true yes okay so you got something like a four or five million post money valuation or a four or five million cap if it's on a note yes how did you convince investors to give you a five million dollar cap on a pre-revenue company um I think it was mostly the team uh um I like I said we've we all three of us are uh second time entrepreneurs by the way uh this is my second startup even my co-founder has done a startup before both of them uh and this third second startup and uh I think we are well-rounded team you know I'm a non-techie I take care of marketing and other needs I have a techie founder who takes care of all the tech uh related tech-in product right so it's a well-rounded team uh and we feel it's a fairly large Market that we're going behind I think these are a few reasons why uh VCS were gracious enough to give us a check did you guys put the equity evenly uh yes almost I think very slight differences but yes almost thirty percent thirty percent thirty percent something like that yeah about two three percent here and there yes and so why why what is this Windows thing and is it shut down now or what happened to it no window is mostly on autopilot at this point of time so uh window was a software alternate to Nathan we were trying to build a software alternative for small businesses uh it's a mobile app through which anyone can create their own online store uh and it's currently on autopilot it makes about two thousand dollars per month at this point of time with with very little effort from our end uh and we are currently focused fully on type stack and if you see broadly uh like I said window is a...