How VidBoard Reached $240K in Revenue with 10 B2B Customers in 2022 (Interview with CEO Ashwin Madhavan)

Introduction and What VidBoard Does

Nathan Latka

00:00Hey, folks. My guest today is Ashwin Mataban. 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 is 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. Ashwin, are

00:22ready to take us to the top?

Ashwin Madhavan

00:24>> Yep.

Nathan Latka

00:25That's So you help people create deepfakes.

Ashwin Madhavan

00:29>> Yeah. You can say that, but I would say that deep fakes is a kind of a negative word. So I would say we convert photographs into talking heads. That's what that's how I see it. It can I mean, it means the same thing?

Nathan Latka

00:43Politician, though, could use it to create deepfakes if they want it.

Ashwin Madhavan

00:46>> Exactly. You can see that, but then in our case, what we are doing is we do not allow

00:56>> 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's an achievement. So yeah, you can say that any front facing talking human photograph, can make it we can convert it into a talking head and make it speak in 125 languages.

Nathan Latka

01:25And 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?

Ashwin Madhavan

01:31>> 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 in, say, German, French, English.

Nathan Latka

01:54What are folks what are folks paying on average per month to use this technology?

Pricing: B2C vs B2B Tiers

Ashwin Madhavan

01:58>> At the moment, it's on an invite only basis. So we are charging between 50 to $75 per month to the b to c clients and about $2,000 to our b to b clients.

Nathan Latka

02:12That's a massive gap. Which one are you focused on?

Ashwin Madhavan

02:15>> At the moment, we are focused on gaining as much traction when it comes to b to b because eventually this this product will be we will be focusing on the b to c b to b 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

02:42>> all guns blazing in the b to b b to b segment.

Nathan Latka

02:45So do you know no customers then today on the b to b side?

10 B2B Customers and MRR

Ashwin Madhavan

02:48>> There are about seven about about 10, I would say. There are 10 b to b customers.

Nathan Latka

02:53Okay. So there's 10 paying 2,000 a month.

02:55That's $20K in MRR.

Ashwin Madhavan

02:57>> Yes. You can say that. Yes.

Nathan Latka

02:59That's great. Now, congratulations. Now I imagine the b to c revenue is small, 1,000, 2,000 a month, something small.

Ashwin Madhavan

03:05>> Yes. You can say that. Yeah. Exactly.

Nathan Latka

03:07How did you okay. So this is fascinating to me. So how did you get your initial customers? Was it all Product Hunt?

How First Customers Were Acquired

Ashwin Madhavan

03:13>> Product Hunt, but see, I go back, this is my second venture. So my first venture was in legal education. So what I did was I had several contacts in the education sector. So we harness those contacts to get us b to b clients and when it comes to b to c, what we did was

Nathan Latka

03:37Wait, hold on hold on. On the b to b side, why are old teaching why are your old teaching friends good b to b customers? Teachers don't have a lot of money. Right?

Ashwin Madhavan

03:45>> No. It's not about teachers. We are talking about edtech platforms. Edtech platforms

Nathan Latka

03:50Give me an example.

Ashwin Madhavan

03:50>> Law firms. Say for example, there is an online legal education platform called Enhelion. They are they are our first users. I was earlier working with them full time and

Nathan Latka

04:02how will they use you today?

How Enhelion Uses VidBoard

Ashwin Madhavan

04:04>> Alright 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 thereby just entering the script that is there, the the the educational content, and out comes the video.

Nathan Latka

04:26Oh, 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 access this in a second. But you log in, you connect

04:49your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time, you can see what it 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 on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're

05:13gonna 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 whole thing outright. Now what's cool about this is this

05:35is 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 that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple. Maybe

06:01you'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 go back to the YouTube video here in a second,

06:23but 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. I hope to see you there. Alright. Let's jump back

06:49into the interview. Who who is visually in the video?

Ashwin Madhavan

06:54>> Avatars. And, of course, some of them are

Nathan Latka

06:57Oh, it's a cartoon.

Ashwin Madhavan

06:59>> Not cartoon. It's not human photo. Like, I can make I can click your photograph, and I can convert it into a talking avatar.

Nathan Latka

07:06Well, 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, that's not gonna work. Right? So what is it? You just make up a a person and put it in the video?

Ashwin Madhavan

07:23>> No. It's not that. See, I'll I'll I'll I'll be very straight here. It's not about whether whether the voice is actually there. What we have found from our customer base is they are not interested in whether we are able to clone the voice. They are more interested in whether we can replicate a person.

07:46>> In a normal video presentation without him entering the video studio to create his own video. So what what we have done

Nathan Latka

07:54Yeah. But it won't be in his voice. Right? Why don't you just send him a podcast audio? Why don't you just send him an audio file? I don't understand why the video is important.

Ashwin Madhavan

08:01>> Video is important because people resonate with video a lot. I have, myself created video content and it is extremely, extremely important for, especially for legal courses and management courses where people want to see video content. They want to see a presenter creating that video. They want to

Nathan Latka

08:20see 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 your stock voice.

Ashwin Madhavan

08:29>> It it doesn't matter. We have not faced any problems.

Nathan Latka

08:32I think that really matters, but you're seeing something different. So I believe you because you're in the industry. Yeah. Let's go back and put this on a timeline. When did you launch the business? What year?

Company Timeline and Product Hunt Launch

Ashwin Madhavan

08:40>> We we started the business. The idea came in twenty twenty, 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 with the MVP, we wanted people to test 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

09:09>> 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.

Nathan Latka

09:22And so how many sign ups did you get from Product Hunt?

1,500 Sign-ups from Launch Week

Ashwin Madhavan

09:26>> From Product Hunt, that day, we got about 1,500.

Nathan Latka

09:31Well, you got 426 upvotes. That drove 1,500 sign ups?

Ashwin Madhavan

09:35>> Yes. Yes.

Nathan Latka

09:37What is that? What is that? What do you consider a sign up? An email sign up?

Ashwin Madhavan

09:41>> A registration onto the platform for accounts. Yeah. You can say that.

Nathan Latka

09:44That requires email. Right?

Ashwin Madhavan

09:45>> Yes.

Nathan Latka

09:46Okay. Well, that's incredible. I I rarely see someone get more sign ups than the number of upvotes. You did see other way around.

Ashwin Madhavan

09:55>> No. No. I'll tell you. How how it happened was, in our case, we launched it on a Saturday, but, when we launched it, we launched it in a I mean, since it was a Saturday, the upvotes 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 1,500.

Nathan Latka

10:19Okay. So not just from product hunt. This is just, like, launch week in general, including social media.

Ashwin Madhavan

10:24>> You can say that. Yes. Yeah. But you can say the product hunt was the, I would say, the Yeah.

Nathan Latka

10:29Yeah. And then but it sounds like 10 of those sign ups converted to b to b customers and what a couple dozen converted to b to c customers.

Ashwin Madhavan

10:37>> No. It's not that. We never asked anybody to, I would say, pay. It was like we it it is on an invite basis only at the moment we are inviting people to join and we are inviting them to to test our product.

Nathan Latka

10:53What do you look for in the 1,500 sign ups to determine who to invite?

Ashwin Madhavan

10:57>> See, the in the these invitations are not, based they are they are the people who we know in our business community who can give us, feedback and honest feedback when it comes to what the product is and how the product is and how much how all what 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

Nathan Latka

11:20>> of Upwork.

11:20Okay. So you're doing $20,000 a month right now in revenue. What were you doing a year ago?

Ashwin Madhavan

11:25>> Nothing?

Nathan Latka

11:26Nothing.

11:27That's awesome. Okay. And bootstrapped it, or have you raised capital?

Bootstrapped and Fundraising Plans

Ashwin Madhavan

11:30>> Bootstrapped as of now. Hopefully, God willing, by next year, May, June, we should be in a position to start talking to investors.

Nathan Latka

11:37Why do you wanna raise money?

Ashwin Madhavan

11:40>> See, right now we want to do a lot of stuff when it comes to the product and for that we would require external capital

11:52>> right now since we we would also would like want to hire good AI research scientist because at the moment we are only we are two of us. I'm not a research scientist so my my my cofounder to 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

12:20>> on hiring good talent as well as on promotional activities.

Nathan Latka

12:24And how much capital would you wanna raise?

Target Raise of $650K

Ashwin Madhavan

12:27>> At the moment, our basic estimate is about $650,000.

Nathan Latka

12:32Mhmm. And what's your team's size today? How many people?

Ashwin Madhavan

12:35>> At the moment, we are seven of us.

Nathan Latka

12:37Seven. Wow.

12:38How many engineers?

Ashwin Madhavan

12:39>> We are how many?

12:40>> One, two, three engineers.

Nathan Latka

12:43Three 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?

Personal Investment of $60K

Ashwin Madhavan

12:51>> Personally, I've invested about, in dollar terms, about $60,000.

Nathan Latka

12:57Ah, okay. So you were was that just money you had saved up or from your old job or what?

Ashwin Madhavan

13:02>> My old startup,

Nathan Latka

13:03which 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?

Ashwin Madhavan

13:09>> See, to be honest, 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 we have seen I was nervous on the day of the launch on Product Hunt, but then to our surprise, things went up up up not down and the the the investor community and the incubator community across the world, including Canada and The United States. They genuinely appreciated the product and some of them

Team Size and Engineers

Ashwin Madhavan

13:41>> 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 and what to do. Hopefully by say November, you will hear the news as to where we are going.

Incubator Interest and Next Steps

Nathan Latka

13:56Awesome, Ashwin. On that note, let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, favorite business book?

Ashwin Madhavan

14:01>> Favorite business book would be Art of the Startup by Guy Kawasaki.

Nathan Latka

14:05Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Ashwin Madhavan

14:10>> I have been studying many people, but then the biggest one is Steve Jobs.

Nathan Latka

14:15Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building the business?

Ashwin Madhavan

14:20>> 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.

Nathan Latka

14:28Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?

Ashwin Madhavan

14:31>> Eight hours.

Nathan Latka

14:31And situation, married, single, kids?

Famous Five: Books, Mentors, and Habits

Ashwin Madhavan

14:34>> I am single. I've got a four legged son. He's sleeping around somewhere. His name is Bo. I've named him after Barack Obama.

Nathan Latka

14:41Amazing. Okay. No kids. And how old are you?

Ashwin Madhavan

14:44>> I'm 35.

Nathan Latka

14:4535.

14:46Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Ashwin Madhavan

14:49>> Something I wish I was in my twenties. Okay.

Nathan Latka

14:52Something you wish you knew.

Ashwin Madhavan

14:53>> You wish you knew when you're Oh,

Closing Thoughts and Wrap-up

Ashwin Madhavan

14:55>> wish I wish I knew in my twenties. 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.

Nathan Latka

15:05Wish he was a techie. Well, he is now. Vidboard dot ai launched guys a couple months ago. They're already doing $20,000 a month in revenue across 10 customers. Invite only over 1,500 on their wait list. Successful launch on Product Hunt 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

15:25into 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 top.

Ashwin Madhavan

15:32>> Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Take care, Nathan.

Nathan Latka

15:36One 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 live. It is fun to watch every Thursday 1PM

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