Founder Interview
How Uptime Labs Reached $216K ARR with 3 Customers After a $1M Pre-Seed Round (Interview with CEO Hamed Silatani)
- Interview Date
- February 13, 2023
- Interviewee
- Hamed SilataniCEO and Co-Founder
Company Metrics at Interview Time
ARR (2023)
$216K
Customers (2023)
3
ARPU (2023)
£5,000 per month
Pre-Seed Raise (2022)
$1,000,000
Valuation Cap (2022)
$4,000,000
Historical Snapshot
These numbers were reported by Hamed Silatani during his interview with Nathan Latka in February 2023 and are a historical snapshot, not current figures. See Uptime Labs’s current numbers.
Key Takeaways
- 01Uptime Labs had 3 paying customers as of February 2023
- 02ARPU was £5,000 per month per customer at interview time
- 03The company closed a $1M pre-seed round in 2022 at a $4M valuation cap
- 04Total team size was 7 full-time employees, with 5 in product and engineering
- 05Each customer pays for 5 seats, which can train up to 20 engineers over the course of a year
- 06The first customer was signed in October 2022, ahead of their Christmas peak period
- 07Hamed left his permanent job 6 months before his co-founder, which drove his larger equity stake
- 08The 2023 growth target was to sign 5 additional visionary customers by year end
Company Metrics at Time of Interview
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| ARR (2023) | $216K | Founder interview, Feb 2023 |
| Customers (2023) | 3 | Founder interview, Feb 2023 |
| ARPU (2023) | £5,000 per month | Founder interview, Feb 2023 |
| Team Size (2023) | 7 | Founder interview, Feb 2023 |
| Engineers and Product Staff (2023) | 5 | Founder interview, Feb 2023 |
| Co-Founders (2023) | 2 | Founder interview, Feb 2023 |
| Seats per Customer (2023) | 5 | Founder interview, Feb 2023 |
| Engineers Trainable per Customer per Year (2023) | 20 | Founder interview, Feb 2023 |
| Pre-Seed Funding (2022) | $1,000,000 | Founder interview, Feb 2023 |
| Valuation Cap (2022) | $4,000,000 | Founder interview, Feb 2023 |
Growth Breakdown
Revenue
Uptime Labs reported $216K ARR in early 2023, generated by 3 customers each paying approximately £5,000 per month. The company was prioritizing learning from visionary customers over maximizing near-term revenue.
Customers
The first customer was signed in October 2022, ahead of a busy Christmas period, after Hamed met them at a meetup. By February 2023 the company had 3 paying customers, with a goal to add 5 more by end of 2023.
Team
The team stood at 7 full-time employees at interview time, with 5 focused on product and engineering and 2 co-founders. Two additional early colleagues remained involved as advisors but did not take the same equity risk.
Funding
Uptime Labs closed a $1M pre-seed round in 2022 at a $4M valuation cap, selling roughly 20% of the company. Hamed noted the capital provided enough runway to build the base product and weather the difficult economic environment.
Growth Strategy
Live Events and Meetups
The first customer was discovered at a meetup where Hamed explained the Uptime Labs product. Direct community engagement at live events was credited as the primary early customer acquisition channel.
Targeting Visionary Customers
Rather than optimizing for volume, the team deliberately sought customers whose leadership vision aligned with the product direction. Hamed described these as visionary customers whose feedback would shape the product for faster future sales.
Seat-Based Training Model
The product is structured so that 5 seats can rotate through up to 20 engineers per year, giving customers a scalable way to upskill large teams without buying additional seats. This model made the value proposition concrete and repeatable.
Incident Drill Depth as Differentiation
Hamed argued that no other product allowed engineers to compress ten years of troubleshooting experience into three to four months through realistic incident drills. Positioning around this unique depth helped close early deals where customers faced urgent skill gaps.
Best Quotes
“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.”
“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 of experience within three to four months.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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 a lot faster next year.”
“Without without that money we wouldn't be able to to build the base product to start going to market. 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.”
What Happened Next
This interview captured Uptime Labs at a very early stage in February 2023, with 3 customers, $216K ARR, and a freshly closed $1M pre-seed round. Hamed had set a goal of signing 5 more visionary customers by the end of 2023 while continuing to refine the product. The numbers here are a point-in-time snapshot from that conversation and will not reflect what the company has achieved since. Visit the Uptime Labs company profile on GetLatka for the most current available data.
View Uptime Labs’s current profile and metricsFull Transcript
Chapters
- 0:00Introduction and Company Overview
- 0:40First Customer Story: Preparing for Christmas Peak
- 2:31How Incident Drills Work: Real IT Outage Scenarios
- 3:03Revenue Model and Pricing Tiers
- 3:44ARPU: £5,000 per Month per Customer
- 6:29Seat Structure and Engineer Training Capacity
- 6:48Current Customer Count: 3 Customers
- 7:142023 Growth Plan: Visionary Customers Over Revenue
- 8:27Pre-Seed Round: $1M at $4M Cap
- 9:03Why Raising Was the Right Decision
- 9:28Team Size and Structure
- 9:45Co-Founder Equity Split Story
- 11:15Famous Five Rapid Fire Questions
Introduction and Company Overview
Nathan Latka
00:00Guys, 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
00:20to 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?
Hamed Silatani
00:37>> Yes. Of course.
First Customer Story: Preparing for Christmas Peak
Nathan Latka
00:40Alright. 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.
Hamed Silatani
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
Nathan Latka
01:57So, 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?
Hamed Silatani
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.
Nathan Latka
02:29Well, give real examples. It'll be helpful.
How Incident Drills Work: Real IT Outage Scenarios
Hamed Silatani
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.
Nathan Latka
03:01That's great.
Hamed Silatani
03:02>> Break that scenario for that.
Revenue Model and Pricing Tiers
Nathan Latka
03:03And help me understand your guys'revenue model. Right? What's the customer pay you guys on average per month to use the technology?
Hamed Silatani
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
ARPU: £5,000 per Month per Customer
Hamed Silatani
03:44>> on number of drills that they run.
Nathan Latka
03:46And so again, what does the average customer actually pay you per month? A $100 a month? $500 a month? 1,000 a month?
Hamed Silatani
03:51>> Oh, £5,000 a month.
Nathan Latka
03:545,000. 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
04:19access 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
04:43on 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
05:05whole 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
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06:20I 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?
Seat Structure and Engineer Training Capacity
Hamed Silatani
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.
Current Customer Count: 3 Customers
Nathan Latka
06:48And 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?
Hamed Silatani
06:57>> We currently serving three customers the moment.
Nathan Latka
07:00Customers. Okay. So three customers paying $6,000 a month is about $18,000 a month in revenue right now.
07:06Is that accurate?
Hamed Silatani
07:07>> Yep. Almost.
Nathan Latka
07:08And what's what's the growth plan this year? How do you get up to 50,000 a month?
2023 Growth Plan: Visionary Customers Over Revenue
Hamed Silatani
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.
Nathan Latka
07:57The 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.
Hamed Silatani
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.
Nathan Latka
08:23That makes a lot of sense. How much was the pre seed round for?
Pre-Seed Round: $1M at $4M Cap
Hamed Silatani
08:27>> About just under $1,000,000.
Nathan Latka
08:30Just 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?
Hamed Silatani
08:44>> Yeah.
Nathan Latka
08:45Yeah. Okay. So something like a $4,000,000 cap, $5,000,000 cap, something like that?
Hamed Silatani
08:51>> 4,000,000. 4,000,000. 4.
Nathan Latka
08:53That's great. Now looking back now
Hamed Silatani
08:55>> think need to convert this in pounds and dollars.
Nathan Latka
08:57Yeah. No problem. No problem. Looking back now, was that the right decision?
Why Raising Was the Right Decision
Hamed Silatani
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.
Nathan Latka
09:24Yep. And what's the team size today? How many folks are full time?
Team Size and Structure
Hamed Silatani
09:28>> We have seven of us full time, five in product engineering, and then two cofounders.
Nathan Latka
09:36That'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?
Co-Founder Equity Split Story
Hamed Silatani
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.
Nathan Latka
10:04And 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.
Hamed Silatani
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.
Nathan Latka
11:04Hamed, 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?
Famous Five Rapid Fire Questions
Hamed Silatani
11:15>> My favorite book, Bad Strategy, Good Strategy.
Nathan Latka
11:18Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?
Hamed Silatani
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.
Nathan Latka
11:39Number two. What's your what's your favorite online tool for building uptimelabs?
Hamed Silatani
11:44>> My favorite online tool? Mirror. Miro board. Number
Nathan Latka
11:49four. How many hours of sleep do you get every night?
Hamed Silatani
11:52>> It's a tough one. Depends between between five to seven hours.
Nathan Latka
12:00Okay. And what's your situation? Married, single, kids?
Hamed Silatani
12:04>> Married and a boy.
Nathan Latka
12:07Oh, very cool. And how old are you?
Hamed Silatani
12:10>> 44 years old.
Nathan Latka
12:1144. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.
Hamed Silatani
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.
Nathan Latka
12:39Guys, 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
13:00to 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.
Hamed Silatani
13:07>> Great. Thanks, Nathan. Thanks for having me.
Nathan Latka
13:10One 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
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