How Vonza CEO Uyi Abraham grew Vonza to $704.1K revenue and 150 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is dr ue abraham he came to america with only 100 bucks in a suitcase that closed with over 20 years as a creator he was frustrated with the complexity and the time required to simply create and sell online he is looking to fix that with vanza follow along at you ready to take to the top hey nathan i'm so glad to be here man i've been looking forward to being on this show for a long time omar are you a big listener i am i binge watch on the show in fact my wife knows your voice you know so when i told her i was coming she was like yay they were like i was at the founders uh saw me which was the best founders event i've ever been to i text my wife that is the greatest event i've ever been she's like did you tell anything i said hi i said yeah i told you guys my wife said you know so i've binge watched on the show man and thank you for what you do for the culture you know you bet well i hope you enjoyed meeting everyone at founder conf i know you got some one-on-one time with henry shock the ceo of zoom info in the vip room i hope that was valuable but i'm looking forward to focusing on you today okay yes let's do it all right so vanza what are people paying you for so what bronzer does is that we make it easy for creators to create and sell online courses memberships products and pretty much run the entire business in one place so before bonza i as a creator somebody like you too you know we need like 12 plus tools to do what bonza does for them so you need one platform for your courses another one for membership another one for scheduling another one for payments and it's just all about the place is a very stressful experience for creators and just people just started out in business so what we did was that we built a really good easy and simple all-in-one platform that helps anybody with a knowledge of content or something to offer online to easily grow their business online monetize it and also to serve their customers i love that okay and how many paying customers do you have today so uh we've done so right now we have about five thousand customers have paid us uh we have uh we did a one-time specials and also two we have about uh about 20 something thousand dollars in mr arrow right now um but we have about five thousand that have sign of our platform and about two thousand i paid us for one special that we offer that study times how many are paying a monthly recurring fee so right now about 100 on something that puts us at about 20 something uh thousand a month in mlr okay got it so about a hundred customers pay two hundred dollars a month something like that some more some less yeah i'll buy a hundred probably close to a hundred and fifty something 150 okay got it okay well this is great so so how are you converting people that are free 5000 of them to a paid plan so right now we really have just been really focused on really the product you know because starting a sas company and being bootstrapped is a full-time work you know so we really have not spent a lot of time trying to monetize those freeloaders so to speak on the platform um but right now we looking at you know raising some funds and also to you know building a good marketing team and onboarding team and help those who are just kind of stuck on the free plan to become paying customers how much are you looking to raise right now right now trying to raise five million dollars at what valuation probably at 40. 40 million pre-money or post uh free free money okay interesting and um how's it going uh just in the beginning process of doing that uh in the midst of talking to different investors right now so i'm hoping that the next two or three months uh we should be able to close with the right partner and you're bootstrapped to this point or have you raised already we have bootstrapped to this point 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 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 going to 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 doctor ooh you got twenty thousand bucks a month in revenue why go give up a bunch of equity why why why go do a raise why not just keep building and using profits from customers yeah they probably the reason is because you know competitors you know they've raised a ton of money kajabi they just raised 550 million dollars last year you know uh teachable just so thinkific the public now they raised like 300 and something million last year it's a little pressure on us and to kind of get a little funded so we can grow a little faster hire more team because we've grown all this while we just word of mouth virtually spending zero marketing so we feel like if we have a little bit more fun to put into marketing it will help us to tell our story faster and help us to serve our customers better and if you're doing 20 000 a month today in revenue where were you exactly a year ago probably about 15 15. okay so that's obviously that's not a lot of growth it's gonna be hard to get a 40 million valuation when you only added five can new mrr the past 12 months yeah well you see too you know it's not just only uh we we premier we're doing a lot more than 20 20 something thousand right because of the consulting are done for you services which is not included but at least this year last year we generate over 300 close to 400 000 from our subscription plus down for you services and consulting services as well so uh we a year before that was about 200 000 and kind of that money we brought in so we look at it now we see that there's a lot of growth but also to considering that we've really just you know been focused on the product i'm not spending a lot of money on marketing then also too and now reason we're looking at our valuation as that is the size of the market the market is so huge right so we're not seeing it just as only what we're doing right now but we see hey in two three years from now could we be that forty million dollar company could we be that fifty million dollar company right so that's kind of how we're also looking at our valuation and dr lee how many on the team today so we have about 24 25 people where are they all based our tech team is based in pakistan india malaysia but our support team is based in the usa so we are in about five continents pakistan malaysia united kingdom belgium all over the place and what is that like i mean is your engineering centralized in any of one of those locations in in pakistan how did you find the team in pakistan like what's their website so the first place i went was up work so our cto is also a partner with me uh i found him at upwork and there was one that pretty much just helped to recruit and build the technical team how much equity did you give them i don't want to release right now was it more or less than you know 30 percent definitely is less than that because my wife and our chief engineer will have equity they're also leaving like a 10 percent pool for future employees so do all 25 employees do they have at least some equity no just right now just the the co-founders for right now i see i see okay so looking at raising capital twenty thousand dollars a month in revenue that's pure sas more in available mri but our goal this year is to get to one million dollars in a.r.r this year right but when you say ar you mean total sales consulting just just subscriptions just in subscriptions yeah because that's really what investors care about you know how are you going to grow fast i mean you only added 5 000 in mr the past 12 months what makes you think you can add 50 000 in the next six months yeah because our product is a lot better now than it was a year ago and also too we now cannot we build a lot more brand equity we get a lot more sign-ups than before we're getting more conversions than before and also too you know we're working on getting somebody to really spare the marketing because we've really not done any marketing things so we believe that it's going to really help us to grow faster they've also been looking at some partnerships and stuff so we are really just you know planning to get to that one million in ar out this year i see okay and of the 25 how many on your team how many are engineers uh pure engineers probably about eight pakistan right eight in pakistan yeah yeah and so what what do you pay per month to your engineering team all together um i don't want to disclose that right now because i'm going to put in the information right there but it's pretty pretty decent are you profitable today or no we are profitable okay and did you put any of your own money in the business yeah i put a lot of my money into the business how much a lot i don't know what a lot are we talking like 10 000 or a million a little bit under in two years we've been building now for two years a little bit under but close to yeah okay you put in a little under than a million dollars yeah but also that i also got to investments too from friends uh you know they're putting a couple of money in initially two thousand helpers as well but we primarily just grew it from the consulting of rather fun the business from our consulting and done-for-you services yeah that makes a lot of sense very cool dr ue okay so you're building your building talk to me quickly about product before we wrap up what's next on the product roadmap so right now we're just trying to go deeper making our product a little bit better and stronger you know but uh we're trying to add some more features like sms and crm you know which you believe would be a good uh game changer because a lot of our creators that use the platform are also coaches as well a lot of coaches they need more than just a scheduling tool you need to be able to map out their you know put their customers their clients in the final system and help them to get results faster so those are the features that we are planning to bring up soon but the primary to really focus right now is that we really have a really really good product and we're just trying to build that you know go to a market engine to help take this product to a lot of people because a lot of creators don't know that now it's easy to get one good two to run your business instead of 12. so they still using 12 tools because they just don't know that vanza is around so we believe as we tell this message and help creators to see and use bonsai they're going to really love it well dr lee i love this story on that note let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite business book i would say rich that poor dad number two is there a ceo you're following are studying i would say zeb evans of click up yep number three what's your favorite online tool for building the business i'll say click up go use it every day number four how many hours of sleep to get every night average five and what's your situation doctor are we married single kids you mentioned your wife earlier married any kids right three children three yeah wow how old are you i'm 40. 40 years old last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. to be okay i would say to be more courageous right because in my 20s i was a little bit more concerned about what people would think and all of that stuff so i'm not just more like just more confident in following my dreams because you know another thing that is so interesting nathan before you go when we started building this only one platform two like two years ago a couple of people that were telling us in this big means that just focus on one two yes it was a one two but in the last two years you know many software companies now don't just offer just one product many software companies that are not trying to be like two three four products you know so we feel like we're kind of a palm here because in 2018 we started thinking about really good early one two and now you see a lot of people are trying to catch up with you can't just offer just one pro these days i said you're really really good at it you need to help up your customers to use less tools you know it's a better experience for them guys dr ue he's funding his business from agency work but he's slowly growing that sas revenue now doing 20 000 a month in revenue competing with like kajabi thinkific teachable helping course creators run their businesses online he's got 150 paying customers paying about 150 130 bucks a month uh he is profitable today they're looking at raising 5 million at a 40 million valuation in the next six months we'll see how that goes team at 25 today with eight engineers all right dr ue thanks for taking us to the top thank you so much 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 1pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2pm 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 you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathan lacka dot com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive i am on these shows but i do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that i appreciate your guys's support all right i'll be in the comments see ya