How VidBoard CEO Ashwin Madhavan grew VidBoard to $200.4K revenue and 10 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is ashwin madiban he's a lawyer by profession and serial entrepreneur in practice technology has always fascinated him outside the practice of law and his newest startup has a deep tech ai video platform called vidboard the platform converts text to videos featuring humans in minutes in short his platform can convert a human photograph into a talking human without the need to go into any studio with just text as an input ash when you're a ticket to the top yep all right so you help people create deep fakes huh yeah you can say that but i would say that um deep face is a kind of a negative word so i would say uh we convert photographs into talking heads that's what that's how i see it it can i mean it means the same politician though could use it to create deep takes if they want it exactly you can say that but then in our case uh what we are doing is um we do not allow uh uh celebrity photographs to be uploaded onto the platform and apart from that we can also ensure monkey faces to talk as well so by that i mean we recently trained our model on a monkey and the monkey spoke in 125 languages so that's something that that's an achievement so yeah you can say that uh any front facing talking human photograph we can make it we can convert it into a talking head and make it speak in 125 languages and can you make like if you took a picture of me do you have audio on my voice can you make it sound like me as well not at the moment but yes there are certain other companies which are into voice cloning so if in the future we ever want to collaborate with such folks yes then i can easily clone your voice and yeah you don't have to worry about talking in different languages all you need is a script and the ai voice will make you talk and say german french english what are folks what are folks paying on average per month to use this technology uh at the moment it's on an invite only basis so we are charging between 50 to 75 dollars per month to the b2c clients and about two thousand dollars to our b2b clients that's a massive gap which one are you focused on at the moment we are focused on um gaining as much traction when it comes to b2b because eventually this bro this product will be we will be focusing on the b2c b2b segment but to be honest at the moment we are looking at we are on two boats but once we see traction and once we once our product is fully ready which should take about another six months then we would be going all guns blazing in the b2b b2b segment so do you know no customers then today on the b2b side there are about seven about 10 i would say there are 10 uh b2b to be customers okay so there's 10 paying 2000 a month that's 20 grand in mrr yes you can say that yes that's great now guess congratulations now i imagine the b2c revenue is small thousand two thousand a month something small yes you can say that yeah exactly how did you okay so this is fascinating to me so how did you get your initial customers was it all product hunt um product hunt but see i go back my this is my second venture so my first venture was in legal education so what i did was um i had several contacts in the education sector so we have you know we harnessed those contacts to get us uh b2b clients and when it comes to b2c uh what we did was uh wait hold on hold on on the b2b side why are old teaching why are your old teaching friends good b2b customers teachers don't have a lot of money right no it's not about teachers we are talking about edtech platforms at tech platforms and law firms say for example there is an online legal education platform called and helion they are plot they are our first users i was earlier working with them full time and how will they use you today all right so they have got online content in law so unfortunately for them they can't create videos at scale in different languages and for that matter in multiple videos of the of the of the content so they use our platform to create video content by just entering the script that is there the the educational content and outcomes the video 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 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 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 who who is visually in the video uh avatars and of course some of them are oh it's a cartoon not cartoon it's not human for like i can make i can click your photograph and i can convert it into a talking avatar well my point is if i'm at a legal firm and my boss right the attorney sends me 10 training videos to watch and i start watching those and it's not him or it is his face but i don't hear his voice like if that's not gonna work right so what is it you just make up a person and put it in the video no it's not that see i'll i'll i'll be very uh straight here it's not about whether um whether the voice is actually there what we have found from our customer bases they are not interested in whether we are able to clone the voice they are more interested in whether we can replicate a person in a normal video presentation without him entering the video studio to create his own video so what what we have done here but it won't be in his voice right why don't you just send them a podcast audio why don't you just send them an audio file i don't understand why the video is important video is important because people resonate with video a lot i have you know myself created video content and it is extremely extremely important for especially for uh legal courses and management courses where people want to see video content they want to see a presenter creating that video they want to but not your voice like if i was learning from you and you were my boss and you sent me videos of you it would be you but it's not it won't be your voice right it'll be your stock voice it it that doesn't matter we have not changed i think that really matters but you're seeing something different so i believe you because you're in the industry um let's go back and put this on a timeline when did you launch the business what year we uh we started the business uh the idea came in 2020 december it took us about eight to ten months to train our models and our mvp was ready in august 2021 but then when we entered the market uh with the mvp we wanted people to protest so they told us that we should have a proper video creation tool with us wherein people are drag dropping assets onto the canvas and creating templates colorful templates along with the avatar and then adding text and making animation around the text so that took us about three to four months and by june we launched it on product hunt and yeah here we are and so how many sign ups did you get from product hunt from product hunt that day...