How Witty Works CEO Nadia Fischer grew Witty Works to $1.5M revenue and 32 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is nadia fisher she is one of the top 10 entrepreneurs in sweden formerly head of marketing and sam and a san francisco-based startup she became an i.t project manager and thereafter joined pwc to build their digital experience center at witty works she is the ceo and acts at the interface of clients needs and technological implementation nadia are you ready to take it to the top yes sure okay so what is woody works what are customers using you for well customers have real trouble scaling diversity and inclusion and that's what our b2b sauce is for it helps them to write inclusively and to act inclusively and this thanks to a de-biased language ai and micro learning so give me an example maybe someone's putting copy up on their website that says hey guys we hope you enjoy your product and you might say hey the word guys is not inclusive try this language instead exactly and it goes also deeper like you know there's much language out there that is a lot of people do not feel addressed because their socialization is different so if you also write yeah we're really an ambitious team and performance is super important that's all kind of language that only attracts a very small part interesting so how what might you recommend i change that sentence to well talk much more of the cooperation you're doing like here together we try to reach a certain goal and you know we're we believe in taking responsibility within the team so much more the cooperative and supportive side of language interesting and you're doing this via software right people are paying you a monthly fee or annual fee yeah exactly it's subscription based i mean there's a freemium out there so please try it out we're happy also for feedback and everything please try it out yeah it's it's like while you are writing um it highlights the terms that are problematic and then they it get you get proposed with um alternatives so you can write inclusively and you also get more information behind the term but the bias is behind the term so you can actually learn about your own biases very cool and the website is witty.works if you want to check it out now nadia what are people paying you per month on average to use the technology so it's easy it's a license per year of 180 um us dollars per year okay so every customer is paying 180 a year there's no cheaper there's no more expense if it's all a hundred percent oh yeah i mean it's you know as soon as companies start to buy 2 000 3000 licenses we have uh yeah we have another pricing going like a gradual pricing i mean do you have a lot of those customers that are buying so it's 180 bucks per year that's per seat yeah exactly i see so so ignore the per seat cost because what i'm really interested in is when someone signs up for you guys are they signing up 10 people on their team or a thousand so what's the average customer paying you per month all in not not per seat yeah i mean we're not so old yet so we just kind of started out uh like a half year ago so at the currently the average contract values are between let's say five and then ten thousand i would say um but naturally we're hoping for the compounding effect that now it kind of starts to expand within the companies and you know with that it will reach acvs of like 150 to 200 000. that's great okay so you just started uh price it sounds like you just started having customers about six months ago when did you write the first line of code for the platform um like one year ago um about yeah we had a kind of the mvp which we tested the market with and found out that you know yes customers are actually ready to spend money on inclusive language and and then as soon as we had that we we started to build a real product i see okay so windy works you get going in 2021 last year now did you have you bootstrapping have you raised capital so yeah the first months we were bootstrapping and then we raised capital uh mid last year with the national and friends and family around 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 percent 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 gonna 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 how much did you decide to raise 750 us dollars 50 000 us dollars sorry but you're okay and and most folks from the raising your precede round in that range they're usually raising on a note did you use a note no this was a little bit complicated i guess in switzerland we made an equity round but in the aftermath i wouldn't do that anymore it's just you know in switzerland when you use notes it's rather very small notes like 20 to 25 000 so you would have to raise a lot of notes and that makes it very complicated so that was why we went for an equity round i think in the aftermath i'd rather go go to the us or bigger markets and see if i can you know attract vcs from the start and two nodes well how do you how do you priced around your pre-revenue i mean how do you guys come up with evaluation yeah this was actually a negotiation topic we were it was funny because in the thing in the beginning we thought okay this is a scientific thing right and so we researched and we calculated and calculated again and then we find out because we didn't have any experience with first time store toppers so we realized that it was much more of a negotiation thing so you come out with a certain number and then you know angels will tell you no that's too high or you know this is a little bit of a risk if you don't have any experience yet actually and also it depends very much on the market so in switzerland the valuations are normally quite low in europe a little bit higher and compared to how low in switzerland well you know if you come out as a pre-seed it's it's really hard to get anything uh like you the pre-seed valuations are like between two million and maybe three million something like that where i see when i watch now the us you know stuff like that can already be at eight ten million so yeah yeah okay so you sort of raised in the two to three million valuation range something like that yeah exactly i see okay now second question obviously it's very dilutive right i assume that was pre money so maybe you sold 20 20 of the business something like that yeah i mean did you need that capital to grow or could you could you bootstrap this why do you need the capital well we wanted to be much faster because we so we realized okay this is being bought by the companies but we knew we needed expertise from nlp and from machine learning also you know some more experts in front-end development and if we had done it ourselves yes we could do it and you know just continue like that but um taking up capital just meant that we could be much faster and you know in the end we brought the product out within half a year and and and if we had done it ourselves it would take it would take us much longer and nadia how many customers...