How Umwelt.AI CEO Vishal Chopra grew Umwelt.AI to $224.7K revenue and 16 customers in 2024.

guys he was a technology executive in HR used those salaries to build up a nice personal NASDAQ to make sure you could pay off his mortgages pay off all his car loans pay off everything so he could take the risk and launch the company which he did in 2019 called umwelt dot AI it helps HR managers make sure their employees are happy so they retain them he's got 16 customers today those are companies that pay for 16 000 seats on his platform that yields ten thousand dollars per month in revenue or 120 Grand of ARR he's kept the company lean eight people or sorry six people full-time out of India paid himself very little about to close a 200 000 precede around at a three million post money valuation we'll see what happens next hey folks my guest today is Vishal Chopper he's a seasoned professional with two decades in nature a leadership coaching and mentoring a former HR head turned teacher preneur he pioneered umwelt dot AI to empower CEOs and chros in shaping a future ready people first culture using AI his expertise Drive Employee Engagement and retention through Tech driven insights transforming workplaces for lasting success so shall you ready to take us to the top yeah all right so give me a customer story today who's using umwelt for employee engagement and people Analytics uh so these are large Enterprises uh basically from different Industries uh normally service Industries uh which are highly I would say employee intellectual dependent right uh so basically these are the companies which would have uh large intellectual property uh in terms of employees uh knowledge base and uh they are largely dependent on the employee actually to serve their customers well let's let's let's use a specific example just so my audience can really understand what you do you have Puma listed on your website as a customer how does Puma use you yeah so so uh the users uh for having the interaction with the employees throughout the journey and understanding the behaviors behaviors needs experiences within the company and we also so we use behind Behavioral Science behind it to understand the psychology of the employees and their experiences within the company uh proactively generate the alerts uh to the CEOs and HR leaders to understand that uh what is missing in the organization what employees are looking for and how I they can actually retain and engage their employees proactive okay let's you didn't use the word puma in any of those sentences so let's talk specifically again about Puma so so for example does Puma's uh this Puma's onboarding and recruitment team use you as an applicant tracking system oh uh so this is this is experience analytics right that means that uh similar to employee experience feedback uh the customer experience feedback right what uh we do is that right through onboarding till post exit we set up the Journey of an employee within the company right and we decide that when at what intervals and what uh uh the points that matters to the employees Journeys uh we want to have an interaction with them we also can you use can you I'm trying to get away from using buzzwords and give you the opportunity to actually tell us how a real customer use you so for example yeah Uma does Puma does quarterly employee reports the Puma HR managers use let me just um let me just give you an example so you understand what I'm trying to get at right is unwell used to do for example the performance review every quarter at Puma so that we can make sure that the HR leaders are empowering the the you know the team members to hit their bonuses for example okay uh so I will talk about varamoda specifically right here again the similar client retail uh so we help them to actually uh write at the point of the onboarding of the employee itself they go through the induction process right now post-induction uh we uh so our boss name is Nikki uh so Nikki goes and interacts with them uh and understand their experience how their experience has been throughout the induction process so that would involve uh from the company's perspective they want to deliver uh specific experiences to their employees so we check back that if they actually have those experiences and what were the lags behind those experiences of an employee would they contribute to them looking for uh leaving the company as well I say and we will generate these insights to the CEOs hras all the HR Partners uh to take those actions and rectify those problem areas speak to the employees and you keep them engaged and working with the company understood what is the average customer pay you per month to use this kind of Technology uh so it is it is 0.5 to uh one dollar per employee per month okay so what is the average size of a customer that's using you then in terms of number of employees uh employees to 10 000 employees okay so so let's pick a midpoint there let's say 7 000 is the average team size at Point at 50 cents a c the average customer is paying you 3 500 per month is that a fair average okay interesting okay give us the back story here when did you launch the business uh so we started working I started working on a world order in 2018 and we launched on uh in 2019 July okay how did you get your first customer do you remember uh yeah it was best seller which is better mode only Jack and Jones selected these are all the brands belonging to the same group right so uh it was it was it is a huge group with all these retail apparel branch 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 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 evaluation 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 how did you land that customer though that's a big group to get as your first customer usually big Enterprises don't don't work with startups I come from the Asia fertility so so I know a good number of chros my ex colleagues right so I went to this idea to them and uh started exploring that what exactly they will look forward to have because I think communicating with the employees the largest problem any organization has today um if you if you see right from Google's or Facebooks everybody is facing that challenge that uh how to interact with the employees and how to actually preempt that what exactly is their experience uh listening to the voice of employees very important to them understand do you remember what the contract size was on that first customer uh so it was uh around 20K annual okay interesting and and have you sensed increased or decreased prices generally how did you make the decision that 20K was the right price to go out to the market with back in 2019. so I looked at my cost very specifically so I didn't want to actually started it so so it was very specifically looking at my cost uh as well as the market competition I wanted to actually make it uh so the uh keep it very very lucrative right so so one of one of the things was only not when when we use the word AI uh typically what happens to the mind uh is that the price is going to be 10x but I wanted to keep it same as those annual feedback surveys were charging for one single communication with an employee on annual basis we charge the same amount on automating the complete journey of these interactions...