Uptime Labs Revenue, Valuation & Funding (2024)

[00:00] Guys, uptimelabs was launched last year. It's a SaaS platform today with three customers paying $6,000 a month or $18,000 a month in revenue. They did a million dollar pre seed round last year at a $4,000,000 cap. Today, seven folks on the team. Two cofounders are still around. They're looking to scale again. They help you get better at incident response. For example, if two servers go down or something like that, they help you get your teams up [00:20] to date so they can respond quicker in a real life situation. We'll see what they do next in terms of growth. Hey, folks. My guest today is Hamed Silatani. He's a father and husband, and he uses his remaining time to build uptimelabs, which helps train teams to fix outages quicker at uptimelabs.io. Hamed, are you ready to take us to the top? [00:37] >> Yes. Of course. [00:40] Alright. So give me give me a give me a customer story here. Tell tell me about a customer that's using you and how they use you today. [00:45] >> Yep. Sure. So the big challenge with when it comes to IT outages and recovering from outages is the chaos that it breaks out as soon as system goes down, okay? And it takes a lot more than technical skill set to be able to recover from an outage. So a customer we signed up, our first customer last October, they were preparing for their peak period during Christmas time, and where they thought it would be very busy, and [01:16] >> they had to they wanted to skill up enough engineers so they can cover that busy period. But there was no other product or no other solution to let them to prepare and skill up the engineers in the short span of time. So we happened to see kind of the customer in a meetup, and then we explained what uptimelabs does, and how we deliver this skill training, and let engineers to go through experience of troubleshooting, ten years [01:45] >> of experience within three to four months, then they, they, they really got interested, and they engaged us, and we ran those incident drills for them in the in the [01:57] So, Hamed, just to just to paint a real story here, a team can sign up. An engineering team can sign up for uptimelabs, and and what you'll do is you'll you'll act like they have been hacked, and all their user passwords are now out on searchable on Google or something. And you will let the team practice how to respond to these incidents so that when a real one does happen, they're more prepared. Is that accurate? [02:17] >> It it it is correct, but we are not working in a cybersec environment. Okay? We are we are training people to recover from genuine IT incident, the ones that happen not because of malicious. [02:29] Well, give real examples. It'll be helpful. [02:31] >> Okay. The network goes down, okay, between two servers without without any particular reason. Okay? So there's no malicious intent there. And people start noticing that oh, on the front end various different applications start failing and user reporting problems. How do you find what is the problem and recover from those network outages, that's the sort of experience that we get people through. [03:01] That's great. [03:02] >> Break that scenario for that. [03:03] And help me understand your guys'revenue model. Right? What's the customer pay you guys on average per month to use the technology? [03:09] >> We we are still very early stage, less than just about a year old. We have three tiers which is we call it two nines, three nines and four nines, and the nines come from availability jargon, 99% available, 99.9% available. And then they pay us per tier, and each tier gets a number of incident drills and trials per month available to them, and they also get a number of seats available to them. So they pay us based [03:44] >> on number of drills that they run. [03:46] And so again, what does the average customer actually pay you per month? A $100 a month? $500 a month? 1,000 a month? [03:51] >> Oh, £5,000 a month. [03:54] 5,000. Okay. So 6,000 USD per month, something like that. Yep. Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders, but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 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 Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can [04:19] 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 eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending [04:43] on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation, Private equity firm is different. If you're gonna 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 [05:05] 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 founder share with us on the show. So traction 1,200,000 seed round 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna see companies that have sold the whole business. Well, here are a bunch [05:30] that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple. Maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll 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 dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. All right, we're gonna [05:54] go back to the YouTube video here in a second, but if you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link, this link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. 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. [06:20] I hope to see you there. Alright. Let's jump back into the interview. That's very cool. And and someone paying you $6,000 a month, how many seats are they probably paying for? [06:29] >> They they pay for five seats. Okay. And they that five seats can help them train up to 20 engineers in the course of year. So they train set of engineers for a quarter, and then bring another set of engineers to use those five seats. [06:48] And you'd walked us through the story of your first customer last year, which was great. How about how many customers are you serving now today? Are we talking three, four, five, something like that? [06:57] >> We currently serving three customers the moment. [07:00] Customers. Okay. So three customers paying $6,000 a month is about $18,000 a month in revenue right now. [07:06] Is that accurate? [07:07] >> Yep. Almost. [07:08] And what's what's the growth plan this year? How do you get up to 50,000 a month? [07:14] >> So our our our focus this year is to to to [07:22] >> we're not optimizing to for increased revenue this year, we're optimising to learn from customers what exactly they need. So we're very careful what customers we're signing up. What we we've been looking for customers we call visionary customers, okay? So the vision of the leader at the helm and the technical team is much more important than the revenue they give us this year because that will help us to build an awesome product that then we can sell [07:48] >> a lot faster next year. With that context, we'll be looking to sign up another five customers this year by end of the year. [07:57] The only kinds of founders saying right now they don't care about increasing revenue are ones that have raised a crap ton of VC to get through a recession. Everyone else wants to make a lot of money right now, and they wanna be very profitable. So I'm assuming you've raised capital. [08:10] >> Yeah. We have raised our proceed round. Okay? I'm not saying I don't care about money. I do care about money. I need it, but what I care most about is building this awesome product that people need because then money and success will follow. [08:23] That makes a lot of sense. How much was the pre seed round for? [08:27] >> About just under $1,000,000. [08:30] Just under 1,000,000. And did you close that last year? Yes. Interesting. So looking back now, you know, most SaaS companies doing rounds last year, their pre seed were selling, you know, between 1520% of the company in that round. Were you in the same range? [08:44] >> Yeah. [08:45] Yeah. Okay. So something like a $4,000,000 cap, $5,000,000 cap, something like that? [08:51] >> 4,000,000. 4,000,000. 4. [08:53] That's great. Now looking back now [08:55] >> think need to convert this in pounds and dollars. [08:57] Yeah. No problem. No problem. Looking back now, was that the right decision? [09:03] >> Yeah, absolutely. I think without without that money we wouldn't be able to to build the base product to start going to market. [09:14] >> And, I think it was the right decision, and then the amount worked out well as well. It's given us enough runway, especially through this economic situation at the moment. [09:24] Yep. And what's the team size today? How many folks are full time? [09:28] >> We have seven of us full time, five in product engineering, and then two cofounders. [09:36] That's great. And I I get you're one of the founders. Right? Yes. Okay. Now were you what'd you guys do at the beginning? You just split equity fifty fifty or what? [09:45] >> That's a that's a very interesting question. So initially, it was it was it was more than 12 of us. So it was four of us were getting together, but then it [10:00] >> started fifty fifty, but but it didn't end up fifty fifty. [10:04] And so that's a tough conversation, but it happens a lot. So to the extent that you can, walk us through how you had the conversation about, hey, I'm working harder, I deserve more, I'm working less, I don't need as much equity. [10:15] >> I mean, the good thing was all of us, we knew each other for a very long time, so there was absolute trust in the conversation and fairness. And how we ended up to kind of changing the percentages was really how much risk each of us are happy to take, okay? So I left my permanent job six months before anyone else, so that gave me a reason to get more equity, and then my co founder came in, [10:50] >> and couple of two other colleagues that we started uptimelabs together, still involved as advisory, but they they they didn't take that risk. [11:04] Hamed, I think that's a good reason to get more equity, more risk, more upside. That's how it works. Come back in in a year. Give us an update. It sounds like you're off to a fast start here. But in the meantime, let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite book? [11:15] >> My favorite book, Bad Strategy, Good Strategy. [11:18] Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? [11:25] >> See well, there's an ex CEO, the CEO of app Founder and CEO of AppDynamics, Jyoti Bansal. And after he AppDynamics, he started setting up other companies. So yeah. [11:39] Number two. What's your what's your favorite online tool for building uptimelabs? [11:44] >> My favorite online tool? Mirror. Miro board. Number [11:49] four. How many hours of sleep do you get every night? [11:52] >> It's a tough one. Depends between between five to seven hours. [12:00] Okay. And what's your situation? Married, single, kids? [12:04] >> Married and a boy. [12:07] Oh, very cool. And how old are you? [12:10] >> 44 years old. [12:11] 44. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20. [12:17] >> Something I wish I knew in my twenties. Oh, [12:23] >> absolutely [12:26] >> help as many people as possible without any reason. Because when you start a new journey, like entrepreneurship, all of the that comes back and help you get to receive those help. So yeah. [12:39] Guys, uptimelabs was launched last year. It's a SaaS platform today with three customers paying $6,000 a month or $18,000 a month in revenue. They did a million dollar pre seed round last year at a $4,000,000 cap. Today, seven folks on the team. Two cofounders are still around. They're looking to scale again. They help you get better at incident response. For example, if two servers go down or something like that, they help you get your teams up [13:00] to date so they can respond quicker in a real life situation. We'll see what they do next in terms of growth. Hamed, thank you for taking us to the top. [13:07] >> Great. Thanks, Nathan. Thanks for having me. [13:10] One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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 alive. It is fun to watch every Thursday one [13:34] p. M. Central. Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at two 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 notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live. I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SaaS world, whether it's [13:56] an acquisition, a big fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or something else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if you want to take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS founders. You want to get in there. We've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing. You can go in there and quickly search and see what [14:17] people are saying. Sign up for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, but I do it so that we can all learn. We have [14:37] to counter those people. We got to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. All right. I'll be in the comments. See you.