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 uh we got about 1500. well you got 426 upvotes that drove 1500 signups yes yes what is it what is it what do you consider a sign up an email signup a registration onto the platform for accounts yeah you can say that that requires an email right yes okay well that's incredible uh i i rarely see someone get more signups than the number of upvotes you did the other way around no no i'll tell you how how it happened was in our case we launched it on a saturday but uh when we launched it we launched it in a i mean since it was a saturday the upwards are less but then by the time we went into the week into the next week we saw traction coming from linkedin and other social media websites so overall it was 1500 okay so not just from product time this is just like launch week in general including social media yes yeah but you can say the product hunt was the uh i would say yeah yeah and then but it sounds like 10 of those signups converted to b2b customers and what a couple dozen converted b2c customers no it's not that we never asked anybody to uh um i would say pay it was like we it is on an invite basis only at the moment we are inviting people to join and we are inviting them to uh uh uh to test our products what do you look for in the 1500 signups to determine who to invite see the in the these invitations are not uh based they are they are the people who we know in our business community who can give us uh feedback and honest feedback when it comes to what the product is and how the product is and how much how all about all we can improve and based on the feedback that we have got we are going into phase two and hopefully by the year end we should be launching phase two up up okay so you're doing two thousand dollars to twenty thousand a month right now on revenue what were you doing a year ago nothing nothing that's awesome okay and bootstrap trader have you raised capital bootstrapped as of now hopefully god willing by next year may june we should be in a position to start talking to investors why do you want to raise money um see right now uh we want to do a lot of stuff when it comes to the product and for that we would require external capital and um and right now since uh we uh we would also would like want to hire a good ais research scientist because at the moment we are only we are two of us i'm not a research scientist so my my my co-founder tushar is so based on his understanding of things we would be requiring a lot of people in in this domain for that we would require funds and that in order to hire good talent so we'll be spending money on raising uh on hiring good talent as well as on promotional activities and how much capital would you want to raise at the moment our basic estimate is about six hundred and fifty thousand dollars and what's your team's eyes today how many people at the moment we are seven of us seven wow how many engineers we are how many one two three engineers three engineers okay so are you guys did you have to put a bunch of money into the business yourself to get it going or you how much did you invest personally personally i've invested about uh in dollar terms about sixty thousand dollars yeah okay so you were was that just money you had saved up or from your old job or what my old startup is that all your money does it make you nervous do you have to make this work or is that like play money for you see uh to be honest uh you have to take those risks and it's not it's not i'm not nervous i know it's gonna do well and uh we have seen uh i was nervous on the day of the launch on product hunt but then to our surprise uh things went up up up not down and uh the invest the the investor community and the incubator community across the world including canada and the united states there if they genuinely appreciated the product and some of them did contact us to understand more and invited us to join their incubation cell so we are still in the in the discussions of where to join what to do hopefully by say november you will hear the news as to where we are going awesome on that note let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite business book famous business book would be art of the starter by guy kawasaki number two is there a ceo you're following or studying i have been uh studying many people but then the biggest one is steve jobs number three what's your favorite online tool for building the business there aren't any i use i'm a traditional guy so i don't i mean being a lawyer so i generally don't use a lot of tools number four how many hours of sleep to get every night it does and situation married single kids i am single i've got a four-legged son he's sleeping around somewhere his name is bo i've named it after barack obama uh amazing okay no kids and how old are you i'm 35 35 last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. something i wish i was in my 20s okay something you wish you knew you wish you knew in your 20. oh which i wish i knew in my 20s uh i would say i wish i was a techie i ended up becoming a becoming a lawyer i wish i was a techie i could have done a lot was she was a techie well he is now vidboard.ai launched guys a couple months ago they're already doing 20 000 bucks a month in revenue and it would cost 10 customers invite only over 1500 on their wait list successful launch on products with 426 upvotes it's an ai powered platform that allows you to put up a picture and they'll basically make the mouth move and put up any text you want it's really useful for translating the same audio into different languages or things of that nature when you're creating courses or training internally for your team we'll see what happens next ashwin thanks for taking us to the top thank you so much thank you so much take care nathan 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 notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want 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