How Whelp CEO Seymur Rasulov grew Whelp to $520.7K revenue and 300 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is seymour rassoloff he is a ui uc graduate he had one previous exit in baku as hazard how do i say this country azerbaijan azerbaijan yeah yeah it's it's where that it used to be a post-soviet country i mean it is apostle it used to be one of the soviet countries 15 and after the independence yes we were the second one to get independence after ukraine so it's a it's a country with formula one with oil with good caviar and good food of course hospitality so you're always welcome to visit them well you're building wealth dot co now it's boots you boot drop it for six months pivot in 2021 now you've tripled mrr you're a techstars alum as well as 500 startups the company i believe is playing in the sme space to automate and consolidate customer support right using ai and ml that's correct yes we use artificial intelligence and machine learning specifically to provide customer support across 100 languages so that we want to capture we want to close the gap between the countries and the language so even if you are a small and medium business based in siberia or in south korea now you can actually using our solutions you can sell to english speaking or vice versa and what like help me understand what customers are paying you for today and what they pay you on average per month so currently we're this month actually we hit the 59 thousand dollar monthly recurring revenue this is the second month this is repeating and buy rx exp but we expect to close a year at 650 total revenue 650 000 total revenue so the customers are currently paying for us specifically for on-premise solution on-premise installation because we offer on-premise and we are the only one in the in this space offering on-premise these are financial institutions insurance companies they respect the privacy of the data so they prefer on-premise solution so we charge them we charge them one-time fee as well as retainer fee sort of a maintenance and support fee so and then and then we also have a cloud-based solution that's a subscription-based service got it what is the setup fee typically set up fee one-time fee is about 45 000 and then on a monthly basis they pay about 25 to 4 500 on a monthly basis to support maintaining and then we also build new integrations for them on a monthly basis and that helps us to have this lump sum stream of revenue right and then continuously uh supporting these customers they stick with us it extends a lifetime value but at the same time it brings additional revenue to us how many customers today today we have more than 800 customers in 16 countries not all of them are on premise on premise about 20 of them hold on 800 when what do those 800 customers be on average totally or they are they have their own separate plans they are on different plans so some of them are on premise some of them are monthly basis on average what the customer the 800 customers what do they pay per month on an average just recurring on average on average it changed from 250 to 450. a month yes a month i see got it so i mean can i i can take 800 times 250 bucks a month that should that equals 200 a month we write about 60 000 a month right yes so right now we offer a lot of free trials as well and then not all of them not all of the 800 customers are paying actually to us right now there are we also offer one free account so that they can start how many of 800 are paid paying customers about 30 35 of them are right now paying customers okay so call that like 300ish are paying customers you have 800 users what converts someone from a free user to a paid usually in the beginning we were actually doing seed based pricing but this year we switched to volume based pricing and when they hit the certain volume of 10 000 messages just like slack they need to convert otherwise they will not have the previous messages or the message history so many companies either will stay within 10 000 or convert with us we also introduced revenue per message revenue per conversation so we offer free chatbot and free unified inbox the moment chatbot closes a ticket or an agent close the ticket using our solution we charge them 10 cents per conversation so on a monthly basis then we send an initial invoice to them i see and if you're doing 60 000 a month today what were you doing about a year ago a year ago it was very low i would say to 2020 we were doing about five to six thousand per month then we reached about 12 000 and this month this year we actually went up after tech stars we got tons of customers seymour sorry i want to try and calculate a growth rate so in in september of 2020 how much did you do that that month one year ago in september 2020 we were doing about thirteen thousand dollars thirteen thousand now you're doing sixty thousand dollars a month where did all the growth come from the growth came from uh expansion conversion we started converting the free trials we also started doing a lot of content marketing and we became partners with we had we found partners that also started reselling our solution we we did one thing very well we also introduced white label solution that companies could take our solution and then resell it tell me about that so if someone is selling a white load your solution what kickback are you paying them so we generally offer like 30 per user per month and they can sell it on top of that they can charge 50 they can charge 60 on top of that but they will have to pay us 30 per user per month so that's fixed fee but there's everything is included so we do not divide the components of the platform like knowledge base or the chatbot or outbound marketing everything is in one yeah you know all your numbers and so you must listen to the show or something we love your show i mean honestly speaking nathan lefka get latka has become like a crunch base for sass now what what i'm learning because i am the second time founder but you know like outside the us outside of north america this startup ecosystem is gradually slowly i mean there are certain countries that are way ahead of us but azerbaijan is an emerging market so here we don't have that much data or learning resources but nathan latka and the magazine and the getlocker.com and the excel sheets that you share they have become the bible for us and literally we love it we learn a lot and we see that there's so much to still learn yeah well and of course your and of course your book your book right i'm going to walk you keep going this is nathan you have to name the things with the names right like there when there were no resources that we could learn aspiring entrepreneurs your resources were there and they were freely available specifically those intriguing emails right with the specific subject line it's like you gotta open that email you gotta look check that out and you're like and what i notice is that every single email is written as if it's addressed specifically to me and i'm like is nathan emailing it to me only and i swear i had that feeling multiple times i i sometimes it is me what i would tell you is i know a lot of people when i get a reply it's always me replying back sometimes i will send to a lot of people at once but if you reply it's always been your blind bags that's great anyways we appreciate that we appreciate your hard work you bet you bet tell me about how you funded the business are you bootstrapper did you raise so in the beginning we started in 2018 we started the baku azerbaijan it's a small country 10 million people and being a post-soviet country people investors and companies do not believe in something that they don't see or they cannot touch now and software as a service was something new to them so when we went to companies and banks and travel agents in 2018 they were like this is strange to me instead of paying 200 to you i will hire someone to will do the job for me so the mindset was different so in 2019 we decided to take the company to the us we got incorporated in us as a c c corp delaware and then we got our first exercise program and started ventures in new york and after that we just it started taking off so we started offering the platform and we got customers from middle east the question is have you raised capital if so how much yeah so far we have raised half a million dollars and we have about we we did the 500 startups and tech stars and 500 startups gave us about fifty thousand dollars as it was a safe note and then texas gave us hundred thousand safe note but then it's the rest is uh bootstrapping and our own investment okay so the 150 that you raise so there's 500 raised basically at what valuation uh right now we are right now we are raising 1 million 10 million valuation as of now yeah okay the risk this is what i'm asking is that what you already raised what evaluation was that at that was at three million three million valuation i see okay so what does the capital look like today how much do you own right now cap table is very clean we have 500 startups and tech stars and then two co-founders we keep it clean how much do the two co-founders own each co-founder owns forty percent and then we have wordpress yeah and then how much does 500 zone 500 setups it's a safe note they're about six percent and tech stars is seven percent there are safe notes for now got it so eighty percent plus six percent plus seven percent where's the other five percent of the business um they are on...