How Wrky.ai CEO Dheeraj Mehndiratta grew to $30K revenue and 50 customers in 2022.

workie dot AI helps you set your okrs they've got 50 customers paying 50 a month right now for 2 500 a month in Revenue they did a hundred three thousand dollar pre-seed round at about a 1.5 million valuation they sold under 10 there now using that money to scale net burn per month is about 15 000 bucks they've got a team of six looking to move their 17 free trialing customers into paid plans as they look again to continue to scale hey folks my guest today is DJ he's the founder and CEO of working.ai spelled w-r-k-y dot a i he started his career as a financial analyst built two stars previously in edtech and Healthcare manage Investments with an Angel Network and then build a community of 15 000 student developers during the pandemic to help students and startups with internships and trainings DJ you ready to take us to the top yes absolutely thank you all right so what is working tell me about a customer who's using you and how they use you sure working is helping companies to achieve their North Star it's all about people performance and potential we are working with smbs to help them with their goal tracking and Performance Management uh so we are helping small businesses especially the it first businesses and startups they are interesting to keep a track of their goals and starting their goal tracking Journey with us I love this okay so companies like Pandora First Site pay you what are companies paying you an average per month to use workie uh so we started with the nominal pricing a bundle pricing of uh between 50 to 99 dollars per month uh because we thought that with the first hundred customers we'll spend understanding what pricing strategy is something which works for us which works for the people especially for the ones who are starting their Journey with us of cool goals and performance Journey who are starting on our platform so it's a new experience for them as well yeah so so the average customer today pays you about fifty dollars per month is that right yes yes okay and give me the back story when did you launch the company what year so it's been uh it's been around a year uh so we started uh with one principal in mind that we'll build this product on first principle basis since we are not from this industry from past uh I mean we are not from someone who is experienced in five years ten years we just spent last year understanding and learning about this industry and uh we found out the problems that Founders and small business owners face okay right the two things which are really important for them uh their focus as a company and their key Talent what what are they doing to keep a track on these two things right if we keep the market uh a considerable market market conditions are capital aside so key talent and focus of a company this is where we are targeting and helping these companies so DJ I think we're told enters in the products I appreciate that you launched one year ago in 2021 fast forward to today how many customers are you serving so we are currently working with uh 50 companies and uh uh so we spent actually six months uh working a competency framework product which we thought is more for our Enterprise scale customer and we are not ready to uh necess of the Enterprise scale customer as of now that is something we see in the year three so we started with our learnings uh from the small size companies like I said 30 to 100 people-sized companies are the ones with whom we have started and we are working really well with them so DJ today you have 50 customers paying 50 a month which is about two thousand five hundred dollars per month in revenue is that right absolutely absolutely and how much revenue were you doing exactly one year ago uh so uh initially we were doing the uh free trials uh in order to understand the market or to understand the customers uh I think that was the learning which made us realize that uh tapping the Enterprise Market is something which is uh not good for us at this point uh so we were mostly on the free trials when we started building the okr and Performance Management for small businesses uh we gave them uh on a free trial for a quarter and in second trial we started building them so that is approximately six months we are working with these companies and from October we have started building them so I I must say this is a pretty interesting quarter we have started DJ sorry my original question was how much revenue were doing exactly one year ago the answer is zero because you just launched prices a couple months ago yes yes okay 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 the 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 evaluation 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 founder 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 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 raise 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 valuation 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 many folks right now are on the free trial uh so uh currently uh 16 companies are on the free trial one six or six zero uh 16 is 1 6 yeah okay and how what do you know what do you try and get them to do in the free trial to activate them to increase the likelihood they start paying uh so uh basically in this time uh they are understanding how the okrs work whether this really works for them or not uh this is their more of a discovery Journey where we have a DJ what does that mean what do you need them to do in their free trials it's set up 10 okrs is it send five emails is the ad for team members what do they need to do so that they're more likely to pay Mission uh so uh in the free trial we allowed them to uh add a one function or one Department from their organization and run the ocals for a quarter uh where we help them in understanding whether this is going to work for them in a long run so we are we are basically playing in their favor they must realize whether this thing is paying uh is bringing an Roi to their organization and then they are likely to stay with us for the next couple of years where we believe three to five years we are going to be deeply embedded into that organization that's why we spent first three months in rediscovered and have you bootstrap this business or do you decide to raise capital let me have this coverage when did you raise and how much so we raised in the beginning of this year around March we raised a an undisclosed around uh from a couple of angels from India and us so this enabled us to build POC and uh uh on board these customers um when you say Angela I mean most Angel rounds are under a million bucks is was you around under a million up to uh 150 000 uh US Dollars okay so you did an angel round earlier this year for 150 000 bucks now most Founders are selling between 10 and 20 of their business and their pre-seed round did you sell about 20 of the business uh no no no no this is uh this is less than uh ten percent okay and why did you need the capital well I mean what makes this expensive to build um I mean uh we made I mean we made our tries in building that competency framework her product where we spent the capital that initially initial money that we have invested uh and uh how much did you put in so uh we uh put somewhere around 20 25 000 uh me and my co-founder was that did that make you nervous was that like all of your savings or what yeah absolutely absolutely yeah all of us have to make this work then otherwise you're bankrupt yeah absolutely absolutely so actually we have came out of the you know that bankruptcy uh thing and okay so so you and your you and your co-founder putting together 25 000 bucks that that enabled you to build an MVP you then raise 103 000 from angels to keep growing um how did you and your co-founder split Equity at the beginning you just do 50 50. uh so basically uh uh I was holding 55 uh and he was sold in 45 percent uh but as he moved ahead we realized that uh on what functions he's performing on what functions I am performing what is our contribution so we uh reached a point where we split uh made the split equal interesting that's very nice of you yeah was that hard no no it wasn't I mean we were pretty uh you know uh I mean sorted on this thing from day one that this is something we are not able to decide as of now so we'll keep this uh 10 aside and uh we will see what we what are good we are going to do with this okay yeah that's a very nice just for everyone listening that is a startup founder I'm seeing this happen a ton where if you're trying to find a co-founder just take 80 split it 40 40 right and then wait a year to allocate the other 10 or 20 right because then you actually have a year of performance on your belt and you see who's doing what DJ would agree yeah yeah absolutely I do agree this keeps the things pretty sorted and you don't get to see any mess in the future with you and your co-founder what have you scaled to today in terms of total team members uh so we are a team of six people and uh now we are planning to hire a few more folks uh right in next uh two months that's a lot paying six people with 2500 a month in Revenue means you're burning money uh yes we are but we want to uh keep the team pretty lean uh till the time we reach 100 customers and then we will uh think of you know scaling the team but DJ you're burning it sounds like something like 20 000 in netburn per month right now right absolutely absolutely we do no is is that true you're burning about twenty thousand dollars of capital per month right now netburn somewhere around ten to fifteen thousand dollars every month and does that make you nervous uh no no because we believe that we'll be able to you know uh compensate this thing that we are burning now uh by the revenues or the growth that we will bring in the coming months and we are pretty sure of that uh uh and we have also thought of the SD market conditions are not favorable in the near future saying everybody's saying the recession is coming in early signs of recessions are already there so if we believe we are pretty much confident on that but I mean if you're if you're burning right now fifteen thousand dollars per month in netburn and your pre-seed round was 150k you've already spent some other 150k but that means you have under 10 months of Runway right uh so we initially our burn was less uh so this uh the burn the 10 to 15 000 one has reached in past two months so uh I mean uh 12 to 14 months is somewhat that we see from the fundraise that the runway we have I say but the uh Revenue pipeline seems pretty strong uh even if the funding account is not happening uh in the next couple of months uh we see that we can survive with the strong revenues very good well we're certainly rooting for you in the meantime now let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite book TJ uh uh zero to one uh by Beta Theory number two is there a CEO you're following or studying uh it's uh it's a CEO of Zeta CEO of the number three what's your favorite online tool for building workkey notion number three F4 how much sleep do you get each night uh four to five hours okay and what's your situation married single kids single all right no kids and uh how old are you uh I'm 29 29 last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. uh when uh I mean sell first and think about building a beautiful product or dark Theme website later guys there you have it working dot AI helps you set your okrs they've got 50 customers paying 50 a month right now for 2 500 a month in Revenue they did a hundred three thousand dollar pre-seed round at about a 1.5 million valuation they sold under 10 there now using that money to scale net burn per month is about 15 000 bucks they've had a team of six looking to move their 17 free trialing customers into paid plans as they look again to continue to scale all right DJ thanks for taking us to the top thank you Nathan for having me one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm 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 our poo 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 p.m 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 their 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 nathanlacka.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 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 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