How Zomentum CEO Shruti Ghatge grew Zomentum to $4.7M revenue and 2.8K customers in 2023.

momentum doing 35 000 a month a year ago now doing 250 000 a month with their two-sided Network helping you grow faster with partner programs they've got over uh they've got uh over 2 800 Partners on one side of their Marketplace and SAS companies bring in another 1200 over 4 000 Partners on their platform as they look to scale again a two-sided Marketplace here 13 million series a at a little under 100 million valuation last year 75 on the team 38 Engineers as she looks to scale with their four-person sales team based out of Bangalore with 300 000 to 500 000 quota Target hey folks my guest today is Surety godkey she is the CEO of zomentum a revenue platform to help Partners and partner programs scale the platform fuels technology sells over 800 million today she was an investor investing in seed in series a SAS stars for jumping into the business and was named crn women of the channel 2022. so momentum was awarded a great place to work under her leadership she's now looking to scale all right shorty ready to take us to the top yes very excited to be here very cool okay so how does momentum work what does it mean to platform what does it mean to help people scale partner Revenue oh well partner programs and partner Revenue has been a black box for most SAS companies usually and and the reason it exists is because SAS companies and partners are trying to go to market together but they live in their own silos what we do as a platform is get both of them together on a single platform where they can come to get deals done right like that's how we look at it now who would you sort of put in your space I mean crossbeam comes to mind is that the biggest one or who else well the Cross Beam isn't uh is step one it helps you identify what are the opportunities are we come after that that once you've identified the opportunities how do you work together to drive them to closure interesting okay and and how do you think about pricing your technology what's the average customer pay you per month on average oh an average customer is a very per partner fee which which is a sliding scale and uh on the SAS company side but we also have a motion where we add partners by ourselves or who are paying anywhere between 100 to 200 per month to use the tool and and why would someone maybe pay you know more than that 300 400 bucks a month what are you upselling against uh on the partner side like it's a two-sided Network so we attract uh both Partners on one side and SAS companies on the other the partners pay for additional functionality like the basics of the sales tool that is built for partners is what the price I'm coding for but beyond that uh we do billing reconciliation uh separately we do assessments we help them uh integrate with a bunch of SAS vendors so all of that is at an additional password the partners and what do the SAS companies pay or is it free for them no the SAS companies pay for the partners that they manage our partners pay us directly the SAS companies pay for the connection that you're enabling right like you're getting these two siled entities on one platform and that's what they pay for which is the per partner fee and of course we do billing records what is that surely what is the per part so what's the average tax company pay you per month uh it can go as low as uh 30 per partner per month about what what's the big like what's your don't name the company obviously but what's your biggest SAS company customer paying you per year per month uh I'd say around 100K contract oh wow okay so if I'm if I'm a sales company paying you a hundred thousand dollars per year what am I getting like hundreds of Partners uh you're getting to manage your partner so it's a tool to manage your partners and a network that we come with ourselves so it's a handshake in some sense and very interesting okay very interesting now before I get more of your back story and how you launched and grew help me understand so this year if you if you look at a hundred percent of your Revenue what percent will come from Partners versus SAS companies I want to say uh the SAS company-led motion is a few quarters old so fairly new like that so partner driven motion is two years old so I want to say 60 comes from Partners today okay wow but but still 40 from SAS companies considering how new it is it's pretty impressive because it's an accelerated Bay of go to market because every SAS company adds to the network their own Partners right very interesting okay give me more of your backstory what year did you launch the company uh we launched in 2018 um later half of 2018 so it's been four years now who is we do you have co-founders or your sole founder I have a co-founder for Tech and product I take care of everything business very cool do you guys just play nice and split 50 50 at the beginning or what uh I don't think it's plain nice like that like the distribution but it's to the table which were very complementary 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 evaluation this year now the secret valuation 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 around 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 did you negotiate that though I mean this is a very hard thing for a lot of early teams to negotiate anything other than 50 50 tends to generate create some friction how did you go through that process oh well my co-founder I mean he's an engineer by background worked at Twitter and Drew break and but had worked very closely with partner teams um so he had a business sense and very strong on product he was just a techie by profession but I think he's more strong product person and I think product and business go very hand in hand and I think them think of them as an equal distribution only Tech maybe I would have thought very differently okay so you I mean it is fair to say you could just put a 50 50 then if you consider both those equal at the beginning correct which is why we did it right ah okay okay so you did split 50 50. okay cool now have you guys I don't think you have bootstrap I think you've raised but have you bootstrapped a raise capital uh we have raised Capital yeah so tell me fill out the funding story a little bit first off when when did you do the first round and why was it important for you to get that first round done oh I think like we didn't raise immediately most of the initial I wouldn't say like nine months went and Pro customer research we're not from the industry it was a very thesis driven startup for us um I mean some context as I used to be I used to work at Excel before this investing in a lot of SAS companies and we saw this problem and wanted to solve for it but spend the next six nine months just figuring out our veg into the market right like one it's a two-sided Network so we had to solve for chicken and egg but which side would we solve for how would we penetrate with such a sharp...