WeSoar Revenue, Valuation & Funding (2024)

[00:00] Guys, wesoar helps you motivate your teams. They just passed $23,000 a month in revenue, up from 14,000 just a year ago. But buried under that is a lot of that revenue a year ago was consulting. Only one k was SaaS. Now almost 21,000 of this is SaaS. They went from 11 customers down to four. So they're moving away from SMB and more into larger market, larger enterprise deals. They're burning $23,000 a month in revenue with about [00:23] a 100 k in the bank, so he's happy with three to four months of runway. Small team of seven, which are staying and focused on being hyper efficient in terms of acquisition. They're using word-of-mouth, AI blog posts, things of that nature. Hey, folks. My guest today is Nisheeth Pathak. He is on a mission to elevate employee experience and bring fulfillment to a billion lives. He's building wesoar.ai, which enables performance and elevate elevated experience for employees. Alright. [00:48] Nisheeth, you ready to take us to top? [00:51] >> Yeah. [00:52] Alright. Sure. So give us an update. You came on you came on a year ago, and you had just broken 10 customers. You were doing about 15,000 a month in revenue. Where are you today? [01:00] >> We've gone to about 23,000 in revenue, but the split has changed quite substantially. So last time we spoke, I think we were doing about 1,000 on SaaS and about 14,000 on consulting. We are now about $20.21 ks on SaaS and 2 or 3 ks on consulting. Obviously, consulting changes. [01:25] Congratulations. That's exciting. It's very hard to sell an employee engagement tool when everyone is laying people off in a recession. How have you kept your churn low? [01:34] >> So we are actually moving upscale. A lot of customers that we did refer to in the last kind of meeting about a year ago, we don't work with them anymore because initially when the product was new, had no choice but to work in the SMB space. We no longer work in the SMB space. We are working with much larger companies in the [01:57] SMB And how many enterprises are you working with? [02:00] >> Four right now. [02:01] Okay. So you went from 11 customers down to four, but you increased revenue. [02:05] >> Yes, that's right. That's great. We had customers which were giving us $20 a month. So obviously it does kind of show as a count on the customer table, but it doesn't really give you much. [02:17] Yep, that makes sense. [02:19] >> So what we are now kind of working on is the internal target of at least 100 ks ARR per client. [02:29] And you're at about 6,000 a month right now per client, about 70,000 ACV per client right now, right? [02:38] >> So some of the clients are at the very early stage of implementation. So I'm not counting the revenue in right now. So basically we are talking about on an average 10 ks a month for each kind of properly implemented case. [02:52] And have you gotten the business to the point where it can be sustainable long term? You were burning 25 k a month last time we chatted. [02:59] >> It is still about the same. Maybe it has come down to $23.24. [03:03] Okay. So have you raised more money or you're still using the 205,000 pre seed round you raised last year? [03:09] >> There is no money better than revenue. [03:12] Okay. So you didn't raise more? [03:13] >> No. We are not going to raise anymore. [03:15] Okay. That's right. Do you regret raising the 200 ks last year at the 10,000,000 valuation? [03:20] >> No, I think that was more around the kind of close circle of people who trusted me personally rather than trusting the product. So that's a separate thing. We needed a little bit of money to get started. But right now, I think we are at a stage where I would very happily self fund for another six months, one year. [03:39] And how many folks are on the team today? [03:42] >> Seven. [03:43] What about the product side of things? What is it doing today? Give us a customer use case study here. [03:48] >> So we've matured the product substantially. While I said we are seven people, we are actually doing the work of 25 because a lot of junior roles are now being done by AI. So we don't have any junior product, junior information security, junior marketing, any of those. So all of those roles have been kind of taken over by AI. Interesting. The existing people are managing. So each one of us is literally doing the work of five people [04:20] >> using AI. [04:21] Name a task that you've used to have someone doing a person that now is done [04:27] >> by AI. Information security policies, for example. [04:31] Mhmm. [04:32] >> Right? Writing blogs. You don't need people to do that anymore. [04:37] 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 [05:00] 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 [05:24] 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 [05:46] 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 three point seven 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. [06:11] Maybe you'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 [06:34] second, but 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 [07:00] back into the interview. Okay. So where I'm on your blog right now. What what which of these can I click on that was written by a Mission AI? [07:08] >> Sorry, I didn't get that. Say that again. [07:11] I'm on your blog right now. Well, actually, how do I get to your blog? [07:14] >> You can find the blogs on LinkedIn published by the wesoar handle. [07:19] Oh, I see. You don't put them on your website. [07:21] >> We don't actually use the website. So the website is there just for people to know that there is a website, but we don't attract traffic through the website. Every customer we are getting these days is through word-of-mouth, every single customer. And literally after the first enterprise customer, the cost of client acquisition is zero. [07:40] Got it. Okay. Got it. I guess, so how do you go get you have four right now. How do you get more customers faster? [07:51] >> We are not in a hurry to get customers faster. [07:54] Well, you better be. You're burning $25 a month. [07:57] >> So we'll cover it. We'll break even by the time we get the next one paying their [08:04] >> fee in advance. So we will break even with the customer. We don't need to worry about that, which is why we don't need to raise cash urgently or anytime soon. We're happy delaying the fundraising a year or two years down the line. [08:18] How much runway do you have in the bank today? [08:21] >> We've always had a three to four month runway. [08:24] Okay. So you're comfortable operating with just today about $75,100 ks in the bank and then you're burning 25 ks a month. So that's three to four months of runway. [08:32] >> Because we know that there is constant kind of business coming through. It could be a one off consulting deal, which is high value. [08:42] >> So our pricing is also annual in advance. We don't have the monthly payment kind of a thing. So we get cash upfront. [08:50] Yeah. I guess that makes sense. It's just how do you keep top tier talent when they know you only have four months of runway left? [08:56] >> We're just three people in the core team. We will not hit 10 people in the next seven, eight months. I don't need to hire more people. [09:06] You don't think you can pick off the top sales rep from your biggest competitor and add customers faster? [09:11] >> Not right now. As I said, we are building a product that takes time and skill and love to build, we don't want to rush up and do anything which is suboptimal. We are competing with SAP, Oracle, Workday, Glint, those kinds of companies. We better be much better than what those companies offer for us to stand the chance. So we are not in a hurry. We want to take it easy. We want to go with our close [09:43] >> circle of initial customers who are helping us co create the product, building the product with us. We are not in a hurry. [09:50] I mean, if I'm listening to this as a listener to the podcast and I hear a founder go, we're willing to take it easy here. I imagine I would be thinking this is going be eaten alive. This company is not going to exist in two years. [10:00] >> Your Airbus A380 doesn't take off vertically. [10:05] When did you launch the business? [10:09] >> The kind of beta testing started happening late twenty twenty one. [10:13] Okay. Okay. Got it. So over two years, you've gone from nothing to $23,000 a month in revenue and you're happy with that growth rate? [10:20] >> Yeah. We have grown. So if you take the last kind of discussion we had, we were at one k. So we've gone from one k to 23 ks or 22 ks in a space of twelve months. [10:33] Well, you were at $15,000 is what you told me, at least, is you were doing [10:36] >> 15 Yes. Thousand dollars a But consulting, a lot of that was consulting and not recurring. The ARR was the MRR was about one k. So one k goes up to twenty twenty one k. [10:48] You seeing healthy unit economics? Are people has anyone paid you on the SaaS fee and also canceled? [10:56] >> The initial round of customers, the SMB customers, we attracted a lot of those. We realized the product was not benefiting much from that association. They were using 10% or 20% of the product features. The product was not becoming any richer. So there was attrition in that lot. But in this current round, we also kind of insist on at least a two or three year contract. We don't do a month on month kind of a thing anymore. [11:23] When someone signs a three year contract with you, do you build in a natural accelerator from year one to year two of four or 6%? [11:30] >> We give them a discount for a long term contract. So we kind of assure them of no price increase over the three year term. [11:39] Why would you do that? I mean, a key thing of building a SaaS company is net dollar retention. You handicap yourself if you basically tell them we're never going to try and sell you more or build more value for you. [11:48] >> We build more by adding new features, not charging more for the existing features. Right. So, for example, [11:55] the other use case that you just described is what if you build new features, you can't now charge for the [12:01] >> No, that will be a separate sale completely altogether. [12:04] Okay. So you can upsell them. [12:06] >> Absolutely. And in fact, a lot of focus is on getting more closer value and more closer alignment with the existing set of customers where we go very deep in our relationship with them, understand them like a true partner, and then build on the size of wallet that we have with that customer. [12:26] I see. Okay. That makes sense. What other growth tactics are you trying here? Team of seven, LinkedIn's working, AI blog posts, what else? [12:35] >> Word-of-mouth. [12:37] Okay. So okay. Pure word-of-mouth. We are giving How do you incentivize how do you incentivize word-of-mouth? How do you ask a happy customer for a review or an introduction? [12:45] >> We ask them and they do it. We don't have to incentivize anyone. Do it because [12:50] Ashish, what do you say? So is it an email after you deliver the first product spec that says, I hope you enjoyed this. Can you please introduce me to any of your other friends? Mean, specifically, what do you ask for? [13:01] >> So it is generally an email or WhatsApp or a phone call where we ask for reference. Some of our customers have moved on to new jobs and we are in discussions with them in their new jobs as well. So, that's how it is working. [13:17] Is that a good or bad thing if a customer of yours changes jobs? Do you lose the business that they were the internal advocate for? [13:24] >> We always try to make the product talk, which is why the whole company should start loving the product. And it's not just one person sponsorship. And this is a fact of life. People do move on, people change jobs. You can't change any of that. You have to live with it. [13:43] All right. Very good. Let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite book? [13:48] >> Still the Black Swan. [13:50] >> All right. Black Swan. [13:51] Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? [13:54] >> No. I've become a little bit illusioned with a lot of CEOs recently. [13:58] Number three, what's your favorite online tool, Nisheeth? [14:02] >> Currently, it's ChatGPT. [14:04] Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night? [14:07] >> Six. [14:08] Okay. And situation, married, single kids? [14:11] >> Still married, still two kids. [14:13] That's good. And and and, Magnus, you had a birthday. Are you 45 now? [14:17] >> Yes. Recently, I Congratulations. Have [14:20] >> Happy birthday. [14:21] Last thing. Something you wish knew when you were 20. [14:25] >> No. Nothing in specific. Nothing in specific. I I think in retrospect, the life I've led is a is a good life, decent life. [14:33] Guys, wesoar helps you motivate your teams. They just passed $23,000 a month in revenue, up from 14,000 just a year ago. But buried under that is a lot of that revenue a year ago was consulting. Only one k was SaaS. Now almost 21,000 of this is SaaS. They went from 11 customers down to four, so they're moving away from SMB and more into larger market, larger enterprise deals. They're burning $23,000 a month in revenue with about [14:57] a 100 k in the bank, so he's happy with three to four months of runway. Small team of seven, which they're staying and focused on being hyper efficient in terms of acquisition. They're using word-of-mouth, AI blog posts, things of that nature. We'll see what happens next. Nisheeth, thanks for taking us to the top. Sure. Thanks, Edwin. One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM central. It's called Shark Tank [15:17] 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 p. M. Central. Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at two [15:43] 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 SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a big fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or else. I don't want you to miss it. [16:04] Additionally, if you want to 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 up for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be [16:27] 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. We got to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I [16:44] appreciate your guys'support. Alright. I'll be in the comments. See you.

Introduction hey folks my guest today is nashif patek he's on a mission to reimagine hr using technology and drive workplace happiness while helping organizations improve productivity after career spanning two decades of which 17 years were in senior hr roles he founded we soar dot ai to break the status quo in hr using conversational ai nishith you ready to take us to the top yeah thank you you bet okay so who's paying for we store is is it folks any any company that's hiring uh yeah so we are a performance management platform and employee engagement platform we have 11 paying Currently serving 11 customers customers uh so far congrats on your first 10 that's great thank you in about one year of having a some form of a product yeah but the product is still getting built out so we've got 11 paying customers we've bootstrapped so far Raised we've got a couple of angel investors how much did you raise on the angel side uh external funding is 205k the founders put together contributed 310k what was that like i mean is 310 000 a lot for you i mean is it a big risk for you or no it is a huge risk are you married yes i am will your spouse leave you if this company fails and she she wouldn't leave kind of putting the pressure on me every single day till i succeed all right and how many found are that you and one other founder how many founders i have a co-founder who's an ex colleague so we used to work together in our last job for five years and then we kind of decided to kind of put this up together we have a third member in the team a core team who's our cto uh the cto is based in india my co-founder is based in dubai i'm based in london so we kind of manage just the two founders that put in 300k total yeah and did you guys split equity 50 50 at the start or no so i put in 260 my founder put in 50. my co-founder okay so you got more yeah and then i've also been on a no salary structure for two and a half years now yep so you started coding this tool back in what early 2020 early 2020 march 2020 is when we set up when we had our first set of engineers exactly three weeks before covet wow okay and the range around you 205 000 pre-seed around what year was that uh it it we we actually closed the round just about two weeks ago so it was an open round uh the first angel investor was my skip level manager in my last job so the ceo of the bank that i used to work in in dubai he was the first angel investor the treasurer of the bank came in second and then we had a partner in pwc who came in third so we've just got three three angel investors yeah it's been a kind of constant grind uh basically managing a very tight cost ship uh obviously not no it wasn't the best time to raise money it wasn't the best time to sell because we lost like three or four quarters to covet so when you lose 50 percent of your total time to factors completely outside your control it's it's it's a very different ball game i understand and so that 205 000 you raised how much equity did you sell to investors when you raised that about 2.6 2.6 okay that's not that's not too bad so what is that that's a 205 times 50 that would be about 10 million 10 million valuation yeah 10 million valuation free money yeah yeah so how i Monthly recurring revenue mean that's a big valuation for 11 customers do you have revenue i mean how much revenue are you doing today so all put together so we have consulting and we have subscriptions so obviously we've got two components and initially it's difficult to kind of ramp up subscription that quickly so subscription is fairly small we're talking about without any enterprise customer we're talking about 15k arr but with consulting we've managed an average revenue of about 15k per month 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 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 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 okay got it so you're doing right now like last year or i mean right now last month you did about 15 000 in consulting and about a thousand in true recurring monthly revenue 14 plus one let let's put it that way you know we've done everything a bootstrap founder has to do in order to keep the lights on no i think it's great you've managed dilution nicely because you raised it attendant i mean my real question is how are you able to negotiate a 10 million valuation with only 12k of arr see the the kind of traction is not so much in terms of existing revenue the traction is in terms of the partnerships we are trying to build so our business model is is a little bit different we are not another hr tech startup trying to sell to smbs we are looking to sell to the enterprise space and we are trying to do it through our partner network so in terms of the partner network we've got microsoft we've got oracle we've got advanced discussions with sap and discussions with workday going to commence next week on the consulting side we've got partnerships with pwc a regional middle east focused consulting firm and we are in discussions with other firms like eon and mercer and angelia so our kind of traction is more in the partnership mode because you know once you get these partners on board and they understand your value uh selling to a enterprise that that they are already kind of engaged with is not that difficult yeah yeah okay got it so so 11 customers on the platform today and how are you up selling them is it based off the number of employees they have or what's that stat yes so the subscription is basically on a per user per month kind of a value so it's a typical sas model but but yeah so far our kind of lights have been on through consulting but consulting not in any space consulting in the space that is adjacent to our product so we do consulting and performance management and employee engagement in workforce redesign etc yeah that makes that make sense um got it and so today obviously you've raised 200k from pre-seed angels you put in 300k personally as the founder how much are you burning per month right now Profits burning about 25k a month does that make you nervous uh not entirely because this is pretty much the lowest we could have gone down to maybe we could go down by another three or four k but that would be cutting down into the bones yeah but what we are excited about is the fact that we've now reached a stage where the product is absolutely ready and tested and mature so we are not trying to sell a half-baked product to an enterprise you know and it's a different ballgame if you want to sell to smbs they don't ask you difficult questions they don't ask you to fill a 40 item information security checklist but when you do want to sell to an enterprise you have to be ready for that and we are ready for that mm-hmm that makes sense um the team today how many folks are full-time uh we've got about 11 people full-time 11. and how many of those are engineers except seven so there are four non-technical people and the rest are all engineers hmm got it and are they based in india they're all based in india with your with your cto yes yeah so which city we've got a development center in india which city it's a place called indore it's in central india it's it's a smaller town but it's a it's a good town it's and the reason why we chose indoor over say bangalore is because it's a much lower cost of operations and the workforce is a lot more stable i just interviewed a founder with senior engineers in bangalore he told me that he pays his senior engineers a hundred thousand dollars per year which is really high what do you pay a senior engineer in edor about 30 percent of that wow so it's about 30 000 a year yeah wow big big difference okay i i know because i have a lot of friends in bangalore who are in the tech space and what they pay to a fresher is what we can get a person with five years or six years of experience yeah it's really what and why hasn't like you know freshworks net core charge b why haven't they opened offices in edor if they're such cheap talent so i i'll tell you what i think it is going to become a lot more prevalent going forward with people working remotely because see earlier what used to happen was the large the moment you would hit a certain threshold you would like to set up your own full dedicated office you would be constrained by a 10 mile radius in which you hire people and you would always want to be close to where the founder is based so that that was one of the constraints now i don't live in indore and i don't care where my people work they could be working in vietnam tomorrow or ukraine and i have no problems with that so we have kind of looked at it from a complete remote perspective as well and the second thing is at this point of time we are not looking to hire 200 engineers and that may be difficult you know in a place like indoor if you have to be really picky and choosy but if you have to get 15 engineers or 20 engineers that's fine i see interesting nasheed we're rooting for you you're going to see how you grow here as you land more customers and get your next 10 signed up in the meantime let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite book uh the black swan number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh i want to take the best from everyone but my favorite is steve jobs number three what's your favorite online tool for building we soar uh hubspot right now yeah that's number one i use every day number four how many hours of sleep do you get each night six and what's your situation what's your situation married single kids married with two daughters two kids okay and how old are you i am turning 44 in a week ah happy early birthday thank you all right but uh and last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20 i was quite happy-go-lucky i wasn't i wanted to become the prime minister of india when i was around that age then and i i found a better pursuit and uh for probably a better utilization of my time guys there you have it we store ai launched in 2020 as a consulting business they still do about fifteen thousand dollars a month today in consulting but are building their sas now a thousand bucks a month from 11 customers they're burning 25 grand a month from 300 thousand dollars the founders both put in and 200 000 they raised out of seed round they only sold 2.6 my business though out of 10 million valuations so super healthy cap table management again as they look to break into this space of employee performance management here rapidly we'll see what happens next she thanks for taking us to the top thank you 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 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 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 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 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 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