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 you and when you did the pre-seed raise most folks are selling you know doing pre-seed raises they're selling you know 15 to 20 percent of their companies is that sort of what you guys did no that uh we have taken another way actually we have uh diluted not more than fifteen percent actually oh wow so you sold fifteen okay so so that's good so you so you raised it like a two a two million pre-money valuation something like that uh uh actually more than that i would say okay well if you sold fifteen percent four hundred into two million would be fifteen percent uh less than fifteen oh less okay got it got it so hot so higher than a 2 million valuation yes okay let's go back to the tool because that's where we started and i was confused but now we know more about the business so going back to the tool again you have 10 customers paying you today on average what a customer like what did you make per customer last month so it actually depends if you talk about uh the customer there are customers who are paying us 50 lakhs for a campaign there are customers who are paying less than that like uh the ticket size that starts from 50k to 50 lakhs and here like if you talk about what we are able to make in 50k ticket size we are able to make 5k out of it and then if you talk about the bigger ticket size there uh sometimes we are not charging 10 percent straight away we are charging some uh fixed amount of commission okay dumbbell this is very confusing um how much total campaign volume in dollars us dollars did you process last month so in u.s dollar if i'll just i'll just have to convert it from rupees or relax or what ah yes from rupees to uh dollar so that will give me fair idea well what is it in rupees i can do the conversion so that will be somewhere close to uh 37 uh k dollar that's what we did last month okay so ten brands spent thirty seven thousand dollars through your platform last month in the last six months actually okay darn paul so 10 brands spent 37 000 united states dollars through your platform over the past six months is that accurate yes that is okay so i mean how do you go faster right i mean that's not a lot of ad spend especially when you're taking a very small percent that is actually fine at this point of time because we wanted to uh gain a lot of uh in like not a lot of experience in this market and after that we can actually charge more and now when uh started right so we thought of delivering a lot of value to the customer and after that we can eventually uh start taking more margin for each and every campaign which we are executing how many understood understood how many influencers made at least a dollar over the past six months so if you talk about how many influencers who have worked with us uh for a paid campaign so they are like close to 55k influencers who have made at least uh i think i would say uh at least 100 with us okay so there's 55 000 influencers that have made at least a hundred dollars from you over the past six months no more than six months actually this number close to okay eight nine months okay these people john paul my math something's wrong here if i take 55 000 influencers and they all have made a hundred dollars on your platform that's 5.5 million but you just told me your total volume over the past six months was 37 000. i i uh there i said like 55 000 i think there is some confusion i think not 100 less than that actually how many influencers last month made at least a dollar from your platform at least a dollar you're talking right last month at least a dollar i'll i'll just tell you like the number which i have now that uh 55k influences have worked with us under paid campaign i just have to check uh into that number that what number they have made all of them well for context if you've if you have 37 000 in total paid campaigns over the past six months right that's accurate right yes in last year divided by 55 000 influencers right that's each influencer making 70 cents on average actually when i said like the number was not like last six months if specifically i'm when i'm talking about the influencer side that was the whole number when we said how many influencers the past six months that i need to check actually okay but darpa my question is still the same might do you understand my question you have 55 000 investors that have made at least a dollar and you have 37 000 of total revenue through the platform gmv ad spent 37 000 of total ad spend across 55 000 influencers each influencer is only making like 50 cents that's nothing okay i'll i'll i tell you so what happens like when i'm telling you so there are 55k influencers who have worked with us for any sort of campaign that could be like barter also sometimes we are not making uh they are not making money they are getting some people but that was my question darm paul i said how many influencers made it some money on the platform and you said 55 000. so that's why i'm kidding no i just i just have to check into that number look into that number i'm not very sure about it but yeah that i can i give you that 55 influences have worked with us for any sort of campaign okay got it that wasn't my question that's why you confused me okay so that's why we were on different pages my the reason i asked this question is i know a lot of inputs are marketing companies where it's a marketplace like this that you can sign up influencers all day long but if you don't help them make money they're gonna leave that's why i asked this question actually initially that happened to us also currently like uh as as of now we are having 60 uh more than like 68k influencers and we are also having another uh data set of 40k so total like somewhere close to one lakh plus influencer database i don't care about the database i care about influencers that are making a living on your platform so actually we are a small team and this is what we have done so far will be definitely uh scaling that up yeah but why do you care why do you care about how many influencers total have signed up if none of them are making any money on the platform it doesn't matter how many signed up they're not activated that's very much true that uh if they're not making money number of signups or number of influencers are not gonna be helping us that's totally true but so why don't you know that number i mean i asked you the question you said you don't know it isn't that the number one most important metric for you is how many influencers have made money on the platform but you don't know the answer to that uh actually you said like so far right so uh from last two months i am not having the track of it i can probably send you that number okay that's my question isn't that like isn't that the number one thing shouldn't you know don't you check that every month yeah i think i should be knowing that okay this would be nice fair enough okay make sense cool okay so you're doing 37 000 last six months um you've raised some capital scale you're 15 full time look we're rooting for you you're in a very tough space though so we'll see what happens in the meantime though let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite business book favorite business book so that was reached there and poor dad i liked it number 10 that got a lot of motivation number two is there a ceo you're following or studying so currently uh there are many ceos whom i am following at this point of time but elon musk is the is everyone's favorite so number three what's your favorite online tool for building upgrad favorite online tool so there are multiple tools which i uh i've been using for building upgrade what's your favorite online tool pick one google docs i would say okay google number four how many hours i sleep to get every night i think uh six hearts six okay very good and what's your situation darpa married married single kids no i'm not married i'm a single person so not married no kids in how old are you uh currently like 24 and a half 24 and a half very good last question what's something you wish you knew four years ago when you were 20 uh can you come again what something you wish you knew when you were 20 years old there are a lot of things actually i i should have started earlier that's how i feel guys start your company earlier upgrade.ai launched about a year and a half ago they've got 55 000 influencers signed up they've helped 10 brands process 37 000 in ad volume through their platform they're hoping to make money based off a commission on ad spend they process and also help influencers make a living on their platform we'll see what happens three co-founders split equity evenly up to start 15 full time on the team four hundred thousand dollars pre-seed raised at around north of a 2.5 million valuation we'll see what darm paul does next darn paul thanks for taking us to the top thank you thank you so much one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas 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 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell 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