WeCP Revenue, Valuation & Funding (2024)

[00:00] Hey, folks. My guest today is Abhishek Kaushik. He's a programmer, CEO, sales, marketing. He wears all the hats at his bootstrap company, which is now north of a million dollars in AR in just twenty months on their way to 5,000,000 by 2025 is what he says. He loves talking about first principles, internalization, psychology, hiring at early stage, and he's doing this all at wecreateproblems.com. Abhishek, you ready to take us to the top? [00:23] >> Yeah. Sure. [00:24] Alright. So just to be clear, are you are you like a recruiting agency or are you selling software to help people recruit software people? [00:31] >> We are SaaS. So we help technical hiring managers and recruiters use our software to sort of create talent pool or screen name business point test, review them face to face, and in one click onboard them to the companies. [00:47] So it's really an applicant tracking system? [00:50] >> Not not it's not an ATS. We are we are coding test first, We are coding test and code pair tool first. And, you know, candidate sourcing and onboarding happens to integrations. [01:02] Okay. So you are you you help people run engineering tests to engineering candidates to see if they're a good fit. Right. [01:10] >> Right. [01:10] 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? [01:20] >> Roughly, currently, we have 50 plus customers for all our big customers. And largely, cater to enterprise because we are enterprise software. So we have roughly seven large enterprise as our customer today. [01:36] Okay. So you have your seven first customers today? [01:39] >> Yeah. They are our large enterprise. [01:43] How many customers do you have today that are paying you? That's my question. [01:47] >> 50 plus, roughly 50. [01:48] Five zero. [01:50] >> Yeah. Five zero. [01:51] Oh, wow. Okay. This is great. And and then I guess put this on give me the backstory here. What year did you launch the business? [01:58] >> So launching a business happened in 2019. We we basically launched our product when we acquired first customer paying us $5,000 as an MRR, that was an MRR. And we started as a very simple use case. It was just to assess their internal engineers, you know, to on on different technical skills. And that's what we drew. Then we the second customer came from the first customer because we got a referral. And third customer came from the second [02:33] >> customer because we got a referral. So for, you know, first five, six customer came via customer referral, and that's how we started our increasing our customer base. And then we used we recently started spending on our marketing, you know, and our sales effort. So pretty much that's where I'm at. [02:52] So so you started at $500 a month a couple years ago. What are customers paying you per month today? [03:00] >> So when we started, you know, roughly one and a half year back, when we launched our product in '19 right? We it was $5,000 MRR, not 500. So it was $5,000 MRR. And from there, we currently our average contract value is roughly $20,000. [03:23] It's Per month or per year? [03:26] >> Per it's it's annual contract value, which is per year. [03:30] Okay. Got it. So you're doing about $1,500 per month or $20,000 per year across 50 customers. I mean, so can we take 50 customers times 1,500? You're doing about $80,000 a month in revenue right now? [03:45] >> Yeah, slightly more than that. [03:48] Oh, 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 [04:11] your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time. You can see what 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 gonna [04:35] 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 is [04:57] 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 you're [05:23] 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, but [05:45] 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 into [06:11] 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? [06:21] >> Oh, year ago, we were roughly 250 k, which is just, you know, which was our ARR. [06:30] Okay. 250 k to a million. That's great. So where did most of the growth come from? Explain to me how you're finding new customers. [06:38] >> So it came from enterprises. Most of our growth came from, you know, referrals from one enterprise to another enterprise. And because enterprise, we we landed in standard, so majority of our revenue, you know, the three h jump that you see came from enterprise selling. All the rest of the customers are very small ticket sizes. So we're still trying to figure out our ICP. Mhmm. But we we have settled down somewhere on mid enterprise and large enterprise [07:05] >> all around the world. So [07:06] that's And and what is the don't tell me the customer logo, but what does your largest customer pay you per year? [07:13] >> It's 150 k. [07:15] 150,000. Wow. That's impressive. And are you guys bootstrapped or or you've raised capital? [07:21] >> We are bootstrapped. [07:23] I love this. I love this. This is a great story. Okay. So totally bootstrapped. And and are you the sole founder or how many are on the team? [07:30] >> Oh, we have two cofounders, me and my CTO. And in total, we are roughly 25 people in the company. [07:38] 25 people. And where are you guys based? [07:41] >> So most of the team is here based on Bangalore HQ. But we're trying to, you know, relocate to and we're trying to start up an office in US, the area. So we're in the process right now, but everyone's based on Bangalore. [07:58] Interesting. And what are some of the problems you're running into in terms of launching an office in The United States? [08:05] >> Not so far. I mean, we've just got the delivery fee. It was fairly simple. And now we're trying to land to couple of, 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 spin up a sales team in US, we'll probably be setting up our offices and stuff. But, yeah, it's a very early stage discussion that's going on. Right? That's all. [08:33] >> Probably, but I'm rethinking about, you know, situations. So let's see. [08:38] Very cool. And there's a lot of people wondering this. Right? How can a b to b SaaS company set up a US based sales office? Everyone's thinking about this. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. Alright. Talk to me a little bit more 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? [09:01] >> It's mostly seats and, you know, expanded seats across different departments. We also saw some, you know, upselling around features. So for example, we had coding assessments and, you know, some department purchase our project based assessments where, you know, they can do live projects. Some departments purchase face to face interviews. So they were expansion across features as well, but, you know, majorly around seats. [09:30] Interesting. Very cool. This makes sense now. Are you do plan to stay bootstrapped or are you planning to raise? [09:38] >> Well, we are looking to expand now. So we are planning to raise, especially slightly, like a series around, not a small amount. [09:47] How much are you looking to raise? [09:50] >> Roughly between 3 to 5,000,000. [09:53] 3 to 5,000,000. And and what valuation are you hoping that you get? [09:58] >> Well, right now, so I mean, we're trying to raise at at roughly 17 mil valuation. 17. [10:09] 17? [10:12] >> 17. Yeah. [10:13] And and have you had any pushback so far from investors? [10:19] >> Yeah. We had pushbacks. We had pushbacks and a couple of discussions that are already going on. So in fact, we got one of the valuation done at 60, you know, just just three minutes back. 60,000,000, you know, for, you know, for a a paycheck between 3 to 5,000,000. So yeah. But we couldn't go forward with that because of certain other complexities, but let's see. [10:47] Why didn't you close that deal? [10:50] >> It's just the, you know, dumbest complexities. It's pretty yeah. It was something that I I would I don't know. I should share. [11:00] Why do you need an extra $3,000,000? You have a scrappy team or I assume you're profitable today. Why do you need the money? [11:08] >> So even, you know, I know this, you know, answer to this question very clearly. The the only reason that I I was looking for to raise is to actually expand globally, you know, in enterprises. So it does more majority like sales expenses. So, you know, how to give salary to, you senior sales people who can go ahead and build relations on the ground and, you know, activate large enterprises. Had made, like, know, of 50 large enterprises [11:36] >> around the world. What what amazingly, like, global service indicators. So it's like, hey, you have to hire salespeople on the ground for these enterprises. We're gonna hire very senior people. So, you know, it's just just the salary expenses. [11:50] Yep. Makes a lot of sense. Hey, this is a great story, obviously, rooting for you guys. Let's wrap up here now with the famous five. Number one, favorite business book. [11:59] >> Oh, so I think not business book, but I I like this book called Deep Work. It's a self book. So but I've [12:08] What is it called? [12:09] >> Deep Work. [12:10] Deep Work? [12:11] >> Deep Work. [12:12] >> Yep. [12:13] Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? Sorry? Is there a CEO that you're following or studying? [12:22] >> Yeah. I follow Elon Musk. I follow CEOs like you guys. [12:29] Number three. What's your favorite online tool for building WeCP? [12:35] >> Miro.com. [12:37] Miro is a good one. [12:38] Number four. How many hours of sleep do you get? [12:42] >> I do six to eight. [12:44] Okay. That's good. And what's your situation? Married, single, kids? [12:47] >> Single. [12:48] Okay. No kids? [12:50] >> No kids. [12:51] And how how old are you? [12:54] >> I'm 28 now. [12:57] 28. Alright. Last question, Abhishek. What's something you wish you knew back when you were 20? [13:04] >> Well, so I I would wish that I would have started earlier, maybe at at at 20, because I started at 22, I guess. [13:16] Guys, start faster. Their company's called wecreateproblems.com. They went from, call it, $10,000, $20,000 a month a year ago to now $85,000 per month, north of a million dollar run rate, all bootstrapped. They're looking at raising 3,000,000 now in a series a, hoping to get north of a 60,000,000 valuation. We'll see if he can pull it off. Obviously, a tough market, but what they've done to date has been really impressive. They help, again, recruiting teams give out [13:35] coding tests to quickly figure out if engineers are fit or not, and even do live work and live projects together as a test as they manage that pipeline, that recruiting flow. Abhishek, thanks for taking us to the top. [13:45] >> Thank you, Nathan. [13:48] One 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 one [14:12] pm 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 SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a [14:35] big fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or something else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if you wanna take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS 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 [14:57] up for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty 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. [15:16] We gotta push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. Alright, I'll be in the comments. See you.