WeCP Revenue, Valuation & Funding (2024)

hey folks my guest today is abhishek kaushik he's a programmer ceo sales marketing he wears all the hats at his bootstrap company uh which is now north of a million dollars in ar in just 20 months on their way to 5 million by 2025 is what he says he loves talking about first principles analyze internalization psychology hiring an early stage and he's doing this all at weekcreateproblems.com i'll be check you're ready to take us to the top yeah sure all right so just to be clear are you are you like a recruiting agency or are you selling software to help people recruit software people we are sas so we help technical hiring managers and recruiters use our software to sort of create talent code or screen name based recording tests to view them face to face and in one click on both them to their companies so it's really an applicant tracking system not not it's not an it is uh we are coding tests first and we are coding test and code pair tool first uh you know candidate sourcing and onboarding happens to integrations okay so you are you help people run engineering tests to engineering candidates to see if they're a good fit right okay and this is great okay so that makes sense so what are what are companies on average paying you per month to use your technology uh roughly uh currently we have 50 plus customers uh who all our big customers and largely we came to uh enterprise because we are enterprise software so we have roughly seven large enterprise as our customer today okay so you have your seven first customers yeah they are a logic price how many customers do you have today that are paying you that's my question 50 plus roughly 5-0 yeah oh wow okay this is great and and then i guess put this on give me the back story here what year did you launch the business so uh launching a business happened or in 2019 we we basically you know launched our product when we acquired first customer paying us five thousand dollars um you know as an mri that was a hammer and uh we we started um you know as a very simple uh you know use case it was just to assess their internal engineers uh you know to on on different technical skills and that's how we grew up then we the second customer came from the first customer because we got a reference and third customer came from the singing customer because we got a reference so for uh you know first five six customer came by customer referral and that's how we um started um our increasing our customer base and then we uh very recently we started spending on our marketing um you know and i'll see this effort so pretty much that's right so so you started at 500 a month a couple years ago what are customers paying you per month today uh so when we started uh you so it was five thousand dollars mr and from there uh we currently our average contract value uh is roughly twenty thousand dollars so it's per month or per year for uh it's annual contract value it's which is per year okay got it so you're doing about fifteen hundred dollars per month uh or twenty thousand dollars per year uh across fifty customers i mean so can we take 50 customers times 1500 you're doing about 80 000 a month in revenue right now yeah exciting more than that 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 to 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 founderprep.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 so you're north of a million dollar run rate and if you're at 85 000 a month today in revenue where were you exactly a year ago do you remember oh a year ago we were roughly 250k which was just you know which was our error okay 200 200 000. that's great so where did most the growth come from explain to me how you're finding new customers so it came from enterprises most of our growth uh came from you know referrals from one enterprise to another enterprise and because enterprise we landed in standard so majority of our revenue you know the 3x jump that you see came from enterprise selling uh all the rest of the customers are very small ticket sizes so we're still trying to figure out icp but we we have settled down somewhere around enterprise and large enterprises all around the world so and what is the don't tell me the customer logo but what does your largest customer pay you per year uh it's 150k 150 000. wow that's impressive and are you guys bootstrapped or you've raised capital we at bootstrap i love this i love this this is a great story okay so totally bootstrapped and are you the sole founder or how many are on the team oh we had two co-founders me and my cto and in total we are roughly 25 people in the company 25 people and where are you guys based so uh most of the team is here uh based on bangalore hq uh but uh we're trying to you know relocate to and we're trying to start up an office in usp area so we're in the process right now but everyone's based out in bangalore interesting and what are some of the problems you're running into in terms of launching an office in the united states uh not so far uh i mean we've just got the delver c uh which was fairly simple and now we're trying to uh land to a couple of uh you know large more enterprises to set up a sales team there and once once i guess like you know once we figure out how to uh spin up a sales team in u.s i will probably be setting up our offices and stuff but yeah it's a very early stage discussion that's going on right now so probably when i'm rethinking about you know situations so let's see very cool there's a lot of people wondering this right how can a b2b sas company set up a us-based sales office everyone's thinking about this yeah very cool all right talk to me a little bit more about expansion right so when you're upselling customers what are you what more are they buying is it a seat based upsell feature-based upsell something else uh it's mostly uh seats and um you know when expanded seats across different departments uh we also saw some you know upselling around features so for example we had um coding assessments then you know some department which is our project-based assessments where you know they can do live projects some departments which is face to face interview so they were expansion across features as well but you know majorly around suits interesting um very cool this makes sense now are you do you plan to stay bootstrapped are you planning to raise oh well um we are looking to expand now so we are planning to raise um especially slightly uh like a series around not a small one how much are you looking to raise uh roughly between three to five million three to five million and what valuation are you hoping that you get oh well oh right now so i mean oh it's trying to raise at roughly 70 mil valuation once 7-0 uh and and um have you had any pushback so far from investors yeah we had pushbacks uh we had pushbacks and um a couple of discussions are already going on so uh in fact we got one of the valuation done at 60 you know just just three months back 60 mil um you know for uh you know for a paycheck between three to five million so yeah but we couldn't go for that because of sort of other complexities but let's see why didn't you close that deal uh it's just the you know dumb complexities it's pretty good yeah it was something that i would i don't know why do you need an extra three million dollars you have a scrappy team or i assume you're profitable today why do you need the money so uh even you know i know this you know uh answer to this question very clearly uh the the only reason that i i was looking for two raises to actually expand globally um you know in enterprises so it was majorly like sales expenses so you know how to give salary to you know senior seasons people who can go and build relations on the ground and you know uh activate large enterprises so i had made like you know uh list of 50 large enterprises around the world were basically like global service indicators so it's like hey if you have to hire salespeople on the ground for these enterprises we're gonna hire very senior people so you know it just just doesn't have the expenses yep makes a lot of sense hey this is a great story obviously rooting for you guys let's wrap up here now that with the famous five number one favorite business book oh so i think not business book but i i like this book called deep book it's a cell phone book so what is it called yep number two is there a ceo you're following or studying sorry is there a ceo that you're following or studying uh yeah uh uh i follow elon musk i follow ceos like you guys number three what's your favorite online tool for building uh wcp uh mirrors a good one number four how many hours of sleep do you get idols six to eight okay that's good and what's your situation married single kids okay no kids no okay and how how old are you i'm 28 now 28. all right last question abhishek uh what's something you wish you knew back when you were 20 oh well so i i i would wish that i would have started earlier maybe at 20 because i started 22 i guess guys start faster their company's called weekcrateproblems.com they went from call at ten twenty thousand dollars a month a year ago to now eighty five thousand dollars per month north of a million dollar run rate all bootstrapped they're looking at raising three million now in a series a hoping to get north of a 60 million valuation we'll see if he can pull it off obviously a tough market but what they've done today has been really impressive they help again recruiting teams give out coding tests to quickly figure out if engineers are a fit or not and even do live work and live projects together as a test uh as they manage that pipeline that recruiting flow abhishek thanks for taking us to the top thank you evan 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 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