How UpCred CEO Dharmpal Chaudhary grew UpCred to $820.8K revenue and 10 customers in 2024.

hey guys recording this here on what is it friday the 19th maybe you're seeing this on monday at the latest but want to let you know we are almost sold out for founder comp sorry founder 500 in austin texas here in about a week uh it's gonna be an amazing event 500 b2b sas founders i'm looking at the attendee list there's almost um there's almost 60 founders with more than six seven million bucks in arr it's an incredible group of group there's over uh there's over a hundred over 150 with more than a million uh more than a million revenue it's an incredible group you don't want to miss it uh grab your hotel grab your flight grab a ticket right now i'll put the link in the bio um in the description here on youtube and i think there's only about three tickets left okay about three tickets left i'd love to see you guys there don't be bashful grab your ticket now hey folks my guest today is john paul chadry he started his career as a software engineer with a company called travel year travel e aari then worked with air asia yellow.ai and plebo he started his first company step out in football analytics domain and currently work is working as the co-founder and ceo at up cred which is building tech to solve the problems related to influenza marketing john paul you ready to take us to the top yes yes okay so how do you help influencers market okay so uh actually uh firstly like there are influencers out there which are not so popular but their content is performing really well so we are uh searching for those sort of influencer and then for the relevant kind of campaigns which are coming out from brand we are connecting them with the brands okay so who's paying you the brand or the influencer how do you make money actually most of the times we are making money from a brand site we are taking straight forward commission from their end okay so there's no sas fee it's only commission uh that's a service charge we call it it's a straightforward service charge which we are taking from a brand site for every collaboration which we which they do with influencer okay so what is the average brand pay you per month in terms of the straight fee uh coming to state fee that is 10 of the total campaign cost whichever will come up after uh summing up all the cost for different different influencers which we will be selecting for a campaign okay so i'm i'm a brand you know let's let's just call it it's i'm pepsi a pepsi brand a coke brand right and i want to find influencers so pepsi is going to come to you and say i want to spend a million dollars this month right and and when do you get 10 of a million uh that again depends like if you are trying to or you are ready to spend million dollar probably rather than asking you 10 percent of the total campaign cost i will probably ask you for a fixed commission on top of the whole campaign okay okay i'm not following you the pricing model here seems a bit confusing so i'm trying to ask questions to simplify it if i want to spend a million dollars through your platform today and you're going to help pepsi go find 100 influencers to spend a million dollars on how do you make money so most of the times like whenever we are doing an influencer marketing campaign we are trying to charge brands which is something which which is uh actually justifying okay so every time we cannot charge for 10 percent uh commission because for every campaign the kind of effort which we are putting as a company will be different so we will be first so like maximum it will be ten percent that's it it can be somewhere between how many darpa how many brands paid you something last month uh last month uh more than 10 brands which paid us because we recently started and we are also uh we are also focusing on the tech side of it there are a lot of problems there in this market and we are trying to solve it i can uh briefly talk about those problems well so are you are you are you pre-revenue today or have you made money already so we are already making money we are making revenue okay when and when did you launch the company what year so the company was launched in uh september 2021. okay 2021 and have you guys bootstrapped today or raised capital okay so uh initially we bootstrapped but uh like this year like initially itself we uh we like raised our receipt round how much did you decide to raise so we raised like 400k plus okay and why did you need that money to build this was just the engineering too expensive or what the engineering is expensive but at the same time we wanted to bring uh something really good good so and that we wanted to launch very quickly so for that we needed that money so who is we how many are on the team today full time so the team is more than like 15 people we are having more than 15 people as a full-timer and then there are a lot of other consultants and part-timers who are working with us for different different things like if you talk about marketing strategy and uh content script strategy we are having people who are working as a part-timer 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 it 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 valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner 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 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 raised they sold 22 to 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 valuations 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 and how many founders do you have john paul can you come again how many founders are you the sole founder okay so we uh we have total uh three founders at this point of time okay and how did you you know splitting equity at the beginning is always really tough how did you guys decide to split equity at the beginning so initially we thought of going with a base equity that hey we'll be giving you this this percentage initially and going ahead whoever is whoever is going up and uh above the mark we can allocate more equity to them that was the discussion initially okay well that didn't answer my question so what what did you end up doing how much did you split it equally or did you do something different okay so uh first of all like 50 50 doesn't work out because what happens if you see right uh down the line after one year most of the times one co-founder will actually be leading a lot probably he will be having a thought process or maybe uh understanding of the the same market two weeks better than the other co-founder so he should be benefited right or he should be rewarded for that so just for inserting that we initially divided the equity in a way that hey let's uh let's have these these uh percentage as a base equity and after that whoever is uh creating more value they can be given more equity got it but are there two of you or three you said split 50 50 but you started by saying there's three co-founders so what is it i i said 50 50 which means 30 30 or 30 30 uh 33 33 yeah got it so everyone got like 20 equally so they're 60 and you said at the end of a year whoever's working the hardest will give more equity too yes i see okay and when...