How Zenspace CEO Mayank Agrawal grew Zenspace to $1.4M revenue and 30 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is my uncle agrawal with a background in engineering and sales and a passion for innovation he uncovers ways to improve the spaces in which we work as ceo of zen space he and his team develop technology enabled office pods that create quiet private workspaces and open offices and public venues my auntie ready to take us to the top yes sir thank you for inviting me i always walk by these things in the airport and i go to do people use these you swipe your card on the outside and you probably pay per minute or something for a quick call or zoom call or something and i go i never see anyone in them though do they get used well uh so we are going live in public spaces uh uh from uh september 1st and you will start seeing them popping up in three cities to start with san francisco las vegas and philadelphia so uh honestly that would be the first time i will learn about how the experience is but by far we go to events and the usage is 100 we have a very hard time we turn around people actually come so we go to events for three or four days uh business events major large business events in las vegas and many other cities across the country and the usage is just phenomenal the feedback is phenomenal so okay so how many here's my question to you because i want to get a sense of kind of the scale of your testing so far um how many ven like unique pods have you if you take all the all the conferences you've gone to and you add up all the unique pods across all those conferences how many pods have you tested out in the wild so we have 15 pods in our inventory right now uh one five and uh we have been testing them in different sizes different numbers in different events and so the arrangement we have as event organizers we set up a business launch for event organizers and these are normally two to three day event uh in different cities so we bring them to the event and we tear them down uh at the very last day very easy to assemble very easy to move them around so uh we have done around 15 events so far okay so 15 times 15 units is about 225 kind of unique times each of these units has been in the wild yeah unique uh yes unique events um unique parts yeah absolutely that's actually great for the metrics okay and what does it cost what's the hardware cost on one pod uh you're looking at approximately 12 to 15 000 depending on the size give or take and we um you know uh so a two seater we have different dimensions of the part so two seater and four seater units is what we are promoting right now and the price you're looking at is around twelve to fifteen thousand dollars uh sorry how much twelve to fifteen yes to build and then what do the conference organizers pay per pod so we actually rent them for around 1500 a day fifteen hundred yeah okay yep on a four-seater on a four-seater unit that's the going price 1500 per day uh but having said that that's actually our even rental business uh we will be uh slowly transforming we will not necessarily be pursuing that business because uh we're going live in public spaces we are making deals with convention centers all across the country and uh the idea is to have them permanently placed inside the convention center rather than moving them in and out okay so what's the model there so then the model is actually we offer two different models that are leasing so a convention center can lease the parts from us on an annual basis and they can then rent it out or you know people can swipe the credit card and uh because there are smart pods i'm sure you're aware of that right yeah yeah so these are smart uh pods um um what would what would the convention center pay for a year for a four-seater to lease it um so a four-seater would be fifteen thousand dollars uh fifteen thousand dollars on a four-seater uh for the year for a year but it includes uh all the revenue collection maintenance we maintain a uh team of uh people in every city which actually does a daily run because these are smart pods it's uh it requires certain level of maintenance as well uh there is a technology upkeep uh hardware maintenance furniture and it's public usage as you can imagine in public when you have a product like this it does takes the beating uh from uh you know all kind of things whether it is the furniture itself there is a bunch of electronics okay so so got it so fifteen thousand dollars for the convention center the austin convention center in austin texas to lease one of these pods stick it next to the whatever the meeting or the starbucks in the convention center for a full year they can then charge whatever they want is it per minute per hour what does your software allow them to charge by uh per minute or per hour whatever that they decide they can actually tell us that what is the minimum time they want to charge on that specific part and our software platform allows them to configure them so we can actually charge for 15 minutes for instance i mean it doesn't make sense to go smaller than 15 in my personal view but uh it's a choice that they can make we can charge per minute or 15 minutes is there something related like surge pricing where during a massive convention they could triple the price point they can so right now the price change has to be done manually the the space provider the owner of the pod actually gets that gets that um you know uh a dashboard just like airbnb dashboard where he can change the pricing uh manually but at some point once we have enough data and our ai engine kicks in at that point we will actually also bring in search pricing kind of concepts yeah okay um so just be clear you've done 15 of these venues 15 conferences 15 units and kind of at each conference to test this thing out um how many unique people have like swiped their card or like gone in conference attendees oh so by the way uh event organizers pay us directly and most of these event organizers don't charge their attendees anything it's so so the price is set as freeze zero dollars per uh i know i get that i'm trying to get a measurement of usage though so how many times did it attendee go in or out of one of these right so uh we are talking about uh um so the signed users if that is a question that you have um we have currently around 3 000 users signed up uh on our platform at this point individual uh um uh users i mean of course uh they are one-time use customers because uh all these customers see them them at the respective event that they are yeah of course that makes sense yeah yeah that makes sense uh so 3 000 people have kind of gone in and out across the 15 pods you've put at 15 different conferences so there's 225 kind of uh uh days of pod availability right and 3 000 have gone in and out so i can take 3 000 or sorry to you know 3 000 right divided by the 225 instances you're averaging about 1.3 kind of instance per day pod well 10 uh uh well 13 approximately sorry sorry you're right you're right 13. yeah 13 per day pod yeah well 13 per event so basically you have uh an event is actually two to three days so you're looking at around four to five uh uh users per day per pod yep yeah is that right so 3 000 total you've done 15 events so you've had 200 kind of visits on average per event divided by 15 pods it's 13 per pop oh i see what you're saying yep you're right per day because each event is three days and then yeah it's two to three days event right yeah you got it you got it um and all this these have been free though right do you have any revenue yet yeah so we make revenues uh well uh i can't disclose the numbers at this point uh at the show but definitely happy to chat um if there is any uh further interest by uh people well i mean you've already shared you've already shared some i'm just asking did you give these away for free on the 15 test or did you charge me so there are very some events are so critical for zen space success you know promotional events so we offer a broader deal we don't actually charge the event organizer anything in return they give us free space so those are non-revenue generating events but i would say 10 of our events have generated revenue for us so far yeah that's great and you know just to give you a ballpark i mean uh you know you're looking at ten to twenty five thousand dollars per event uh revenue uh you know that's the kind of ballpark per event that we have generated yeah and i mean i guess what i'm trying to get at is actually like monthly requiring revenue but this isn't really a sas company well we are going to offer our pods in a sas model purely size model right so it's a subscription-driven model we don't sell the hardware so basically as i described 1250 per month uh austin convention center you give an example for instance uh they pay us 1250 per month that's all that's like hardware as a service it's not really saw i mean i guess i guess it's kind of like here we'll sell you an if you're airbnb we'll sell you a house we'll save the software yeah by the way we do use this term hardware as a service workspace service in our business plan so it's uh definitely a combination of hardware and software which comes together uh with you know uh which we offer as a service...