How FolkTalk Is Building AI Video Translation With 11 Beta Users and No Revenue Yet (Interview with CEO Armaan Puri)

Introduction and Company Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Folktalk. In hopes you translate your videos in a multiple language instantly using AI. They align video with the audio, including pauses. They've got 11 on their beta list so far. They got this through cold emails. There's four co founders. Armaan's got the most equity, and they also set up an ESOP pool, right, to start to motivate folks like the one engineer that's doing some work for them right now. Hoping to go to market and launch their

00:20first price plan later this year. They're bootstrapped so far. You can check them out at folktalk.in. Hey, folks. My guest today is Armaan Puri. He's an AI researcher and entrepreneur with experience at top research labs in India and Singapore. He's created an innovative vernacular of AI products resulting in multiple patents and research papers that demonstrated market success. Today, he's working on automated dubbing for creators at folktalk. In. Armaan, are you ready to take us to the

00:46top?

Armaan Puri

00:47>> Definitely.

00:48Alright.

00:48>> Good to be here.

How Creators Use FolkTalk

Nathan Latka

00:49Talk to me about how a creator, a customer who's paying you that's a creator and how they use you.

Armaan Puri

00:55>> Right. So currently, the way a customer would use us is simply by providing their product link or their video link, I should say, and the target language that they want us to convert the video in. So and also we ask the creator to specify the kind of features that they want us to include in the converted video. So our offering includes things like lip synchronization, which is also our USB that we offer high quality lip synchronisation

01:29>> without sacrificing on video quality, which has been a serious concern for creators. And also voice matching, where we try to match the cadence, the speech style, the pauses that a particular creator would take in their original language and convert it into the target language. So these are some of the inputs that we require.

Nathan Latka

01:49So just to be clear, if corporate McDonald's records a new message they wanna send out to all of their worldwide employees, they could take that one thirty second video and in in, you know, English, right, the American language in English, put it in your system, and you're gonna create the take the exact same video, but the mouth is gonna be AI, and it's gonna speak in sort of Indian or Chinese or Russian or whatever the language

02:11is that you need to convert it to.

Armaan Puri

02:13>> Yes. Precisely that. So let's say if the target language is Hindi, then they would the lips would move in a manner that this actual speaker or the original speaker is speaking the language. And we would also ensure that the voice timbre and the the pauses that are required, those are at the right moment so the audio also matches with the video. So, yes, that's exactly right. It would we would try to make it look seamless.

Nathan Latka

02:39That's great. What do customers pay you on average per month for this?

Planned Pricing for Creators and Enterprises

Armaan Puri

02:43>> So right now, we are in our beta stage. We have unpaid customers who are using our product and testing it and getting ready to kind of use it commercially. But on average, a content creator would pay us about $150 a month. And it's different for enterprises, as you mentioned, McDonald's. So if McDonald's were to use it for their internal or even for their ad campaigns, then our pricing would be somewhere around a thousand dollars for enterprises,

03:13>> for ed tech, and and so forth.

Nathan Latka

03:14But just to be clear, you're guessing. You don't have paying customers yet?

Armaan Puri

03:19>> No. We don't have paying

Nathan Latka

03:20customers so long? What what when can you launch pricing?

Armaan Puri

03:24>> Right. So what's taking so long, I would say, is the fit between the expectation that we have from our from the content creators. So we have been able to match the expectations on the video end. So, as you mentioned, the lip synchronization and the visual aspect of the video is something that we specialize in. We are trying to expand our range of languages. So we have, for example, Hindi creators who are ready to use our product

03:54>> for English and for Spanish. So they are ready to use it in those languages. But for Indian regional languages, which are in AI terms, they would be low resource languages. They don't have as much data available. Those are the challenging languages for us. But we do have solutions and we are acquiring customers or unpaid customers right now who are expressing interest in converting to.

Nathan Latka

04:22Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this, you love watching these interviews with SaaS founders, but imagine if we all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 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 Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you connect your

04:45Stripe account, you see your valuation real time. You can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna get

No Paying Customers Yet and Launch Timeline

Nathan Latka

05:10a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation, Private equity firm is different. If you're gonna 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.

05:23>> Right? So

05:23the 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 founder share with us on the show. So traction 1,200,000 seed round 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter

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06:37go 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. Alright. Let's jump back into the interview. So how many are on the beta list right now? How many have signed up but are not paying?

Beta List: 11 Unpaid Users

Armaan Puri

06:51>> Right. So right now we have 11 customers that are on our beta list or not paying. So out of that, one is a pretty big ed tech company. So inside the ed tech company, they have multiple educators and instructors. So, if we're not taking into account them, we're not accounting for them as separate from the EdTech platform. So, that's just one customer that we're counting them as. And the others are all content creators ranging from about

07:23>> a million subscribers to a few 100.

Nathan Latka

07:25Armaan, how did you find the fur these first 11 beta users?

How Beta Users Were Acquired

Armaan Puri

07:29>> Right. So that's interesting because our journey has been has relied a lot on network. So, I am connected directly to a lot of people in the content creator space. One of my co founders also is directly in touch with educators and content creators. So about 50% of them, we have acquired through simply emails, cold emails and pitching our product and

Nathan Latka

07:58What does the subject line of the cold email say?

Armaan Puri

08:02>> The subject line of our cold email reads so we have experimented with different things, but what seems to work best is

08:12>> acquire new audiences and increase audience by 40%. Something wrong. I'm paraphrasing, of course. I don't have it by heart, but something along those lines where we instead of talking about ourselves, we try to talk about the customer or the Understood.

Nathan Latka

08:30Are any of these beta users, have they said, you know, have they signed and said, let us use it for free and then we'll start paying a thousand dollars a month? Or have they no one's committed to any future revenue yet either?

Verbal Interest but No Commitments

Armaan Puri

08:42>> Right. So that's what we're working on right now. So to answer it directly, no one has committed at this moment, but we have verbal confirmation from about three d content creators and the big edtech platform. So that's one of our big wins at the moment that we have the ed tech platform on board. We are kind of creating the

Co-Founder Structure and Equity Split

Nathan Latka

09:02And you keep saying we. Do you have one other cofounder?

Armaan Puri

09:06>> I actually have three other cofounders. So Three? Yes.

Nathan Latka

09:10There's four there's four of you total.

Armaan Puri

09:12>> Four of us.

Nathan Latka

09:13Did you guys just play nice and split equity 25 each?

Armaan Puri

09:18>> So it's an almost. It's almost like that. So I originally started working on the product. So just to avoid a situation where we are split two and two and we are stuck on a decision, there is about 2% extra with me at the moment so that we can proceed and not create a deadlock.

Nathan Latka

09:37So you own 27%

09:39and the three of them own, like, 23, 24%? Correct. Correct. I see. Very cool. And have you guys bootstrapped to date or have you raised capital?

Bootstrapped and Fundraising Plans

Armaan Puri

09:47>> No. We are we're completely bootstrapped and our plan is to acquire at least 10 customers and then think of raising capital.

Nathan Latka

09:57When did you launch the company? When did you start working on this?

Company Founding Timeline

Armaan Puri

10:01>> So I started working on the AI algorithm part while I was at my previous job. So even there, I was working for a conversational AI vernacular company where I sort of

Nathan Latka

10:14What year was this?

Armaan Puri

10:17>> Right. This was last year. This was twenty twenty two July. So that's when I started working on the product development. I went through a few rounds of iteration of development. I got feedback from friends and family, and I had a decent working product by October. And then in November, I gathered my other co founders and I because, of course, I what I realized was I was decently good at writing code and creating like the base for

10:50>> the product and also strategizing how we can take this forward. But for marketing, for sales and for those things, I thought it would be best to expand the team and get it started as quickly as possible. So in November, we formed the team and in January, started speaking with customers.

Nathan Latka

11:10Interesting. And what are you doing right now

11:15willing to pay? If if you're doing customer calls, how are you structuring those calls? What questions are you asking? What are you watching and measuring in the product UI?

Armaan Puri

11:23>> Right. So what we are specifically asking customers is three things, essentially. So we want to identify whether the pain point for a customer is the translation, which would be, let's say the original video is in English and we're converting to Spanish. Then are we using some very typical Spanish words which normally a person would not use in their daily usage, which often happens with AI translation systems. So, we try to identify pain points in text or

11:55>> in audio if the audio sounds unnatural or it sounds robotic or it doesn't match with the original speaker's speaking style or is the problem with the video. So we have sort of broken down the potential pain points into these three elements of text, video, and audio. That's what we try to figure out.

Team Size and ESOP Pool

Nathan Latka

12:17Very good. And it's it's just four of you today, is there other folks on the team?

Armaan Puri

12:21>> So there's four of us, and there is another tech person who's helping us with the the whole dashboard that we want.

Nathan Latka

12:30How are getting into work for you to give them equity? Are you paying them?

Armaan Puri

12:34>> Right. So the fifth person would get equity from the ESOP pool, And, of course, the cofounders are working

Nathan Latka

12:43Is there an ESOP pool set up today?

Armaan Puri

12:46>> Yes. We already have the split.

Nathan Latka

12:48So that's what we're basing the fifth How

12:51big did you set up that ESOP pool at the start?

Armaan Puri

12:54>> So the to start with, we've set up about 10 to fifth 15% is what the ESOP pool size is at the moment. And from that, we are planning to

Nathan Latka

13:04Okay. So you don't own 27%. So you own something more like 20% and then your three co founders own like eighteen, nineteen, and then the ESOP is 15%. That's how we get to a 100.

Armaan Puri

13:13>> Right. Right. Right. Right. Exactly. So from the 90%, we split that way so as to avoid the deadlock problem.

Nathan Latka

13:21That makes a lot of sense. Well, we're certainly rooting for you. You're off to a good start. In the meantime, though, let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite book?

Armaan Puri

13:29>> My favorite book would be Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. Would recommend it to anyone I can.

Nathan Latka

13:35Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Famous Five: Books, Tools, and Habits

Armaan Puri

13:39>> Not one in particular, but I am following I mean, I try to gather things from a lot of CEOs, but not one in particular. I can't pinpoint.

Nathan Latka

13:49Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building folktalk?

Armaan Puri

13:54>> Online tool. That would be Hugging Face. That's quite a boon for anybody who's in AI and who's trying to build an AI program. What's it called? Hugging Face. H u g g Yes. Hugging Face.

Nathan Latka

14:09Got it. Number four. How many hours of sleep do you get every night?

Armaan Puri

14:13>> Six to seven, I would say on average.

Nathan Latka

14:15And what's your what's your situation? Married, single, kids?

Armaan Puri

14:21>> If there's a fourth option, I'd take that. Not not single, but not married.

Nathan Latka

14:25Got it. Fair enough. So no kids right now?

Armaan Puri

14:28>> No. No.

Nathan Latka

14:29And how and how old are you, Armaan?

Armaan Puri

14:31>> I'm 25.

Nathan Latka

14:3225. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Armaan Puri

14:37>> Something I wish I knew well, there are a lot of things I wish I knew when I was 20.

14:44>> One that I can think of right now is consistent 80% is better than an inconsistent 100%. That's probably one thing I would like to know.

Nathan Latka

14:54That's a good one, guys. Folktalk. In hopes you translate your videos in a multiple language instantly using AI. They align video with the audio, including pauses. They've got 11 on their beta list so far. They got this through cold emails. There's four co founders. Armaan's got the most equity, and they also set up an ESOP pool, right, to start to motivate folks like the one engineer that's doing some work for them right now, hoping to go

15:15to market and launch their first price plan later this year. They're bootstrapped so far. You can check them out at folktalk.in. Armaan, thanks for taking us to top.

Armaan Puri

15:23>> Thank you, Nathan. Thanks for having me.

Nathan Latka

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