How Uptime Labs CEO Hamed Silatani grew to $634.7K revenue and 3 customers in 2024.

guys uptime Labs was launched last year it's a SAS platform today with three customers paying six grand a month or eighteen thousand dollars a month in Revenue they did a Million Dollar pre-seed Round last year at a four million dollar cap today seven folks on the team two co-founders 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 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 remaining time to build uptime Labs which helps train teams to fix outages quicker at uptimelabs.io Ahmed are you ready to take us to the top yes of course give me a customer story here uh tell me about a customer that's using you and how they use you today uh yeah sure so uh the so the big challenge with when it comes to iot 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 uh from an outage so a customer we signed up our first customer last October they were preparing for the peak period during Christmas time and where they thought would be very busy and they had to they wanted to ski lock enough Engineers so they can cover that busy period but there was no other product or no other solution to let them to prepare their skill up the engineers in the short span of time so we happened to see a a kind of the customer in the Meetup and when we explain what uptime lab does and how we deliver this skill training and let Engineers to go through experience of troubleshooting like 10 years of experience within three to four months then they they they really got interested and they engaged us and we run those incident rules for them just just to paint a real story here a team can sign up an engineering team can sign up for uptime labs 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 it accurate it it is correct but if you're not working in a cyber-sec environment okay if you are we are training people to recover from genuine it incident the ones that happen not because of malicious well give real examples it'll be helpful okay uh the network goes down okay between two servers without without any particular reason okay so there's no relationship uh impact intent there uh and people start noticing that oh on the front and 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 so that's great that's scenario and help me understand your guys's Revenue model right what's the customer pay you guys on average per month to use the technology uh we are still very uh early stage less than just about a year old uh we have uh three tiers uh which is we call it two nines three nines and four nines and the nines coming from a availability Target 99 available 99.9 available and then they they pay us per tier and each tier gets a number of incident drills and trials per month available to them and they also uh get a number of seats available to them so they pay us based on number of drills that they run and so again what does the average customer actually pay you per month the hundred bucks a month 500 bucks a month a thousand a month oh uh five thousand pounds a month five thousand okay so six thousand USD per month something like that 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 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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 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 that's very cool and someone paying you six grand a month how many seats are they probably paying for uh they they pay for five seats okay uh and they that pharmacies can help them train up to 20 engineers in the course of years so they train set up Engineers for a quarter and then bring another set of Engineers to use those five seats and you'd walk 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 uh we currently serving three customers at the Marine customers okay so three customers paying six thousand dollars a month is about eighteen thousand dollars a month in Revenue right now is it accurate yep almost and what's what's the growth plan this year how do you get up to 50 000 a month uh so our our Focus this year is to to to we're not optimizing to for increased Revenue this year we're optimizing to learn from customers one what exactly they need so if you're very careful what customers are signing up what we will be looking for customers we call Visionary customers okay so the the vision of the leader the help and the technical team is much more important than the revenue they give us this year because they will that will help us to build an awesome product that then we can sell a lot faster next year uh with that context we'll be looking to sign up another five customers this year by end of the year 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 want to be very profitable so I'm assuming you've raised capital uh yeah we have raised our precede 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 that makes a lot of sense how much was the pre-seed round for uh about just under a million dollar just under a million and did you close that last year yes interesting so looking back now you know most SAS companies doing rounds last year their pre-seed were selling you know between 15 and 20 of the company in that round were you in the same range uh yeah yeah okay so something like a four million dollar cap five million dollar cap something like that A A far four million four minutes that's great now looking back now we have to convert this in pounds on dollars yeah no problem no problem looking back now is that the right decision uh yeah absolutely uh I think without without that money we wouldn't be able to to build the base product to start going to Market uh and yeah I think it was 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 and what's the team size today how many folks are full time uh we have severe seven of us full time five in uh product engineering uh and then uh to co-founders that's great and uh you're one of the founders right yes okay now were you what'd you guys do at the beginning you just split Equity 50 50 or what is a very interesting question so initially was it was it was more than two of us so it was uh four of us were getting together but then I it started 50 50 but but it didn't end up 50 50. and so that's a tough conversation but it happens a lot so to speak something 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 uh I mean the good thing was uh all of us we knew each other for a very long time so it was absolute trust uh in in in in the conversation unfairness and how we ended up to kind of changing the percentages was uh really how much risk each of us are happy to take okay uh so I I left my my perimening job six months before anyone else so that gave me a reason uh to to to to get more equity and then my co-founder came in uh and a couple of uh to two other uh colleagues that we started up on Labs together still involved uh as advisory but uh they they they didn't take that risk so how many I think that's a good reason to get more Equity more risk more upside that's how it works uh 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 a famous five number one what's your favorite book my favorite book bad a strategy good is strategy number two is there a CEO you're following or studying uh see well there's a XC uh the CEO of act founder and CEO of autonomics and he after aftermath he started a setting about other companies uh yeah number two what's your what's your favorite online tool for building uptime labs my favorite online to mirror mirror boy number uh four how many hours of sleep do you get every night ah tough one depends between five to seven hours okay and what's your situation married single kids married and boy oh very cool and how old are you uh 44 years old 44. last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. something I wish I knew in my twenties oh absolutely help as many people as possible without any reason because when it's starting a journey like entrepreneurship all of the that comes back and help you get receive those help so yeah guys uptime Labs was launched last year to Sap's platform today with three customers paying six grand a month or eighteen thousand dollars a month in Revenue they did a million dollar pre-seed around last year at a four million dollar cap today seven folks on the team two co-founders 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 to date so they can respond quicker in a real life situation we'll see what they do next in terms of growth Ahmed thank you for taking us to the top great thanks Nathan thanks for having me one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm 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 our poo 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 p.m Central additionally remember these recorded founder 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