How Qtr.AI Reached 150 Early Users With a Bootstrapped Visual Planner (Interview with CEO Swami Venkataramani)

Introduction to Swami and Qtr.AI

Nathan Latka

00:00On this one. He's building 0.25.ai. It's a to do list application. That doesn't suck. We'll we'll see what he does with it. He launched it a couple months ago. He's planning on charging 17 to $25 a month for it. 150 installs so far via his wait list. Team of four founders split equity evenly, 25% each. We'll see what they do next. Hey, folks. My guest today is Swami Venkataramani. He's an engineer, designer, and photographer at swamiphoto.com

00:23and now the CEO of qtr.ai. That's qtr.ai. Swami, are you ready to take us to the top? Sure. Alright. What is qtr.ai?

What Qtr.AI Is and How It Works

Swami Venkataramani

00:33>> Quarter is a visual planner that makes it really easy to plan your months, your weeks, and your days. We make it efficient because we bring all of your planning tools in one place your journal, your calendar, your planner and your task manager. But efficiency is only one part of the equation. The other part is can you be effective and that's to do with your systems and your methods and routines. We've created a framework that we call

00:57>> Go Far. Essentially how it works is you start your quarter by breaking down some of your goals into smaller steps, putting a plan around it, a big picture plan and then methodically narrowing down your focus for each month, for each week and day, and even down down to time slots. The problem with the current tools right now is that they do a good job at organizing your stuff, but there isn't enough clarity on how my my

01:28>> daily tasks are connected to the big picture. So it's not very easy to know what to focus on that's gonna have the biggest impact, and that's really the problem that you're trying to solve.

Nathan Latka

01:37Mhmm. Well, is tough. First off, the website's beautiful. So so well done. It tells like a really compelling story. The the the flip side of this though is like, this is such a freaking hard space. I mean, there are so many free tools in this space. It's hard that you're competing with engineering teams that are 200 people and the tools for free and free. They don't even charge for it. The the second thing is, like, you

The Problem with Existing Task Tools

Nathan Latka

01:56know, one of my one one of quotes I was talking about all the time with my internal team at Founderpath is we tend to overestimate what we can do in a day. Right? We're about accurate we can do in a week, but we definitely underestimate what we can do in a year. And so people can't you can't even necessarily trust people to set their own benchmarks in that way. And then when you have to move something

02:12from, you know, you know, you we all have a to do list, and then the same thing sits on the to do list for weeks and weeks and weeks, and we go, damn. Should we just delete this thing from the to do list? And then there's no process for elimination. There's only process for addition. And if there's no process for elimination, you just end up confused long term. How do you solve these, like, very deep human

02:28problems?

The Snoozed Task Problem and Time Framing Solution

Swami Venkataramani

02:30>> That, you know, that reminds me because I used to use to do list, and I I remember getting a task once, and the alert was it's been snoozed for one hundred sixty seven days. And so that's what happens in these task managers, right? The list just keeps growing. The way we are trying to solve it is by time framing, is we want to give you a handle of your time. So I wanna be able to jump

Monetization Strategy

Swami Venkataramani

02:52>> to any time frame and know what my priorities are. If I can help you visualize what your commitments are, at any given time frame. So what are my commitments this week? What are my commitments for this month? And that helps me pace myself, make sure what I'm focusing on today is actually having an impact on the overall timeline. And so that that's the goal here. We'll see how it works out.

Nathan Latka

03:19Interesting. Now what's your model free or paid?

Swami Venkataramani

03:23>> Right now, we're still yet to release our paid plans, but it is gonna be a subscription subscription model.

Nathan Latka

03:29Okay. I wanna talk more about that, how you're thinking about your initial pricing plans. But let's just start with free freemium today. Let's get the backstory. When did you write the first line of code for the platform?

Swami Venkataramani

03:38>> February, just about two months ago.

Nathan Latka

03:40Oh, wow. Amazing. Okay. So two months old. This is great. How have you gotten your first couple of users then?

Early User Acquisition via Personal Network

Swami Venkataramani

03:46>> Through my professional network. Just most of them have been most of them are just busy professionals, leaders in in in in in in big companies, but they have, you know, a lot of things going on outside of life. So they they're interested in a tool that can help them keep track of all their activities.

Nathan Latka

04:05But tell me specifically what that means. Do you post a link and say, hey, friends in a WhatsApp group. I've got a new app. Check it out. 0.25.ai. Or is it a Facebook app? I mean, how do you tell me specifically.

Swami Venkataramani

04:13>> Right now, I'm just calling my friends. I'm calling people and telling them, hey. Do you wanna check this out? Going over sometimes just explaining to them what this is and how this might help them. Yeah. We also have a company interested in in in the team version of this. So we are in that process as well, for an enterprise version.

Enterprise Interest and Team Version

Nathan Latka

04:32Oh, 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 took 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

04:56your Stripe 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

05:20get a 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. 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

05:42not 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 by the event. Maybe you only wanna 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

06:08going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll 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 dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. 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

06:30if you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link. This link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. 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. Alright. Let's jump back into

Privacy and Data Encryption

Nathan Latka

06:56the interview. How do you deal with, you know, most people like, for me, my journal is the same way I imagine a Taylor Swift fan who's 13 using, you know, their journal at night before bed. You put your deepest, most sensitive, like, thoughts and challenges in a to do list. And this is why, like, I use Apple Notes. Right? It's because I'm like, you know, pretty darn secure, very small likelihood someone some CEO is reading this

07:18going, woah. I didn't know Nathan was doing this or, you know, that's his goal or whatever. How do you how do you get around that?

Swami Venkataramani

07:25>> How do you get around the privacy aspect of it?

Nathan Latka

07:28Privacy and trust. Your friends, even some of your friends, they might go, man, I've got all these goals, but, like, there's these two things I really don't want want Swami to know about. I'm not gonna use this to do app. He's gonna see it.

Swami Venkataramani

07:38>> Well, everything is encrypted if that's what you're you are getting around.

Nathan Latka

07:42Well, I'm sure you are secure. I'm talking about perception.

Swami Venkataramani

07:45>> Yeah. Well, it's a personal tool. It's and we use other to do apps already. We we we use journal apps. I use and I've been using day one. I have all my personal thoughts. And, yeah, you're right. Every time I write something really personal, that thought crosses my mind. What if somebody sees that?

08:04>> I would say that's not the problem they're trying to solve right now. But I guess it's it's a more relevant thing when we use this in the context of Teams. And we're still working through that with our enterprise partner. But yeah. I mean, everything is encrypted. No one's gonna see your data even we don't know what what you're writing, so that's the assurance that I can give.

Onboarding Process and Waitlist Form

Nathan Latka

08:25Yep. Talk to me more about how you're onboarding. Right? I think a lot of people get this wrong. When they first go to market, they get their first 10 customers. What you've done is nice. You've got a very professional looking website. For all I know, you could be doing 50,000,000 in in revenue. So it's a very nice website. I click invite or or I wanna try it. And you take me to a very simple like, you

08:41don't you didn't spend three years coding some fancy onboarding thing. You take me to a very simple Google form, and you ask the basic questions. And then you say, where do you work? What tools do you currently use? Why are you interested in qtr, and how'd you find out about us? Tell us why those questions specifically and what you do with the answers.

Surprising Early Adopter Patterns

Swami Venkataramani

08:59>> Yeah. So in this first phase, we are trying to nail who is this gonna be most useful for. And so those questions help the answers to those questions help us understand understand that. And we've already found some patterns from, you know, from from the submissions. And it was kind of surprising, actually, because we thought this would be used a lot by, let's say, you know, solopreneurs or entrepreneurs, but they've actually seen a lot of interest from

09:29>> senior managers and CFOs and CTOs from companies, and they want to use this for their personal life. So the the form has helped us, you know, figure out what what who is really interested in in in using Quartum.

Nathan Latka

09:47So what do you do? If I fill this out, do you accept everyone, or do you are you rejecting people?

Swami Venkataramani

09:51>> No. So we built a system where

09:56>> right now, most if you fill it out, you're most likely to get in. But we have a system where we have to go and approve you, and then you'll get an email. And in that email, we have a a walk through video and

10:11>> and and just the vision of quarter where explaining why we are building it, and then you can start using it.

Nathan Latka

10:17Interesting. Okay. And what is using it? Is it a web app, a mobile app? What do I get?

Planned Pricing and Paywall Timeline

Swami Venkataramani

10:21>> It's a web app right now.

Nathan Latka

10:23Okay. Interesting. Okay. So that's go to market. How many folks have have you let in so far?

Swami Venkataramani

10:28>> Right now, we're at about one fifty.

Nathan Latka

10:30A 150. Okay. Interesting. And have you started let's talk about, you know, your first price, your first paywall. Right? What's the price point? What do you put behind the paywall? What do you keep for free? How are you thinking about this?

Swami Venkataramani

10:42>> We're thinking of somewhere around

10:46>> 17 to 25 on a on a monthly basis and maybe, like, a week week free trial.

Premium Positioning Discussion

Nathan Latka

10:56And can I ask you a question? Before you build this in, like, whatever price model you really wanna use, I would just see, for me, like, when I hear $17.20 for to to do app, I go, it's not interesting. But if it, like, caught my attention and you use pricing for marketing, it was something like, why on earth are top CEOs paying a thousand dollars a month for this simple to do app? Then I'm like, woah.

11:16What is that? I wanna try it. Would you ever consider trying something where you go under that messaging? Like, make it the most expensive CEO only to do app out there.

Swami Venkataramani

11:25>> Yeah. And I know some companies, they pay a thousand dollars for Asana, for example. And

11:33>> it makes it feel more premium, I guess. And I know that what we are building here is premium, is the stuff that we are doing here is not just another to do app. But

Nathan Latka

11:43So why price it like another to do app then?

Swami Venkataramani

11:47>> I guess I'll say that it's introductory pricing because, like you said, the market is really crowded, and our first goal is to get people in. And

11:58>> and, you I mean, I'm not gonna say the pricing is gonna stay the same.

Nathan Latka

12:02Yep. Yep. Yeah. We'll we'll see what happens. Okay. So that's the pricing. When are you planning to put pricing wall up?

Swami Venkataramani

12:09>> In a few weeks.

Nathan Latka

12:10Okay. Okay. And what how do you think about will will everyone have to pay who you send the invite link to?

Swami Venkataramani

12:19>> We are still thinking through some of those things. I think they're gonna offers an introductory discount or something like that for our first users,

12:29>> But eventually, everyone will have to get on the paid plan. Yes.

Team Structure and Equity Split

Nathan Latka

12:32Yep. Yep. And are you bootstrapping us or you've raised?

Swami Venkataramani

12:35>> Yeah. Bootstrap.

Nathan Latka

12:36I love that. That's awesome. And who is you keep saying we. Do you have a co founder or just you?

Swami Venkataramani

12:40>> We are actually four of us.

Nathan Latka

12:42Four. You split at 25 each?

Swami Venkataramani

12:44>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

12:45Oh, wow. You just did it even does that mean you guys couldn't have the tough conversations about who's worth more?

Swami Venkataramani

12:50>> I think they're all worth the same. I don't think this would have existed without any of those people's contributions.

Famous Five Rapid Fire Questions

Nathan Latka

12:57Alright. Fair enough. Let's wrap up here, Swami, with the famous five. Number one, your favorite book.

Swami Venkataramani

13:04>> Culture Code from Daniel Coyle.

Nathan Latka

13:06Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Swami Venkataramani

13:11>> Right now, I'm following my cousin, Kartikain. He's a CEO of DataGenie, and he's a little bit ahead of me. So glad to get his notes.

Nathan Latka

13:20Number three, is he using your Task app?

Swami Venkataramani

13:23>> Not yet, but Got it. You know? Alright.

Nathan Latka

13:27Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building qtr besides your own?

Swami Venkataramani

13:32>> Oh, come on. I was gonna say qtr, but Yeah.

13:38>> We use Slack a lot. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

13:41Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?

Swami Venkataramani

13:44>> Seven to eight.

Nathan Latka

13:45Okay. And situation, married, single, kids?

Swami Venkataramani

13:48>> Married.

Nathan Latka

13:49Any kiddos?

Swami Venkataramani

13:50>> Nope. No kiddos.

Nathan Latka

13:51And how old are you?

Swami Venkataramani

13:53>> I'm in my early forties.

Nathan Latka

13:55Early forties. We'll say 41. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Swami Venkataramani

14:02>> I wish I focused more on discipline and planning my life a little bit more.

Nathan Latka

14:09Alright, guys. There you have Focus on discipline. He's building 0.25.ai. It's a to do list application. That doesn't suck. We'll we'll see what he does with it. He launched it a couple months ago. He's planning on charging 17 to $25 a month for it. 150 installs so far via his waitlist. Team of four founders split equity evenly 25% each. We'll see what they do next. Swami, thanks for taking us to the top.

Swami Venkataramani

14:29>> Thanks so much, Nathan.

Nathan Latka

14:30One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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, ARPU, CAC, LTV, you name it, they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live. It is fun to watch every Thursday, 1PM

14:56Central. 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, the 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 SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a big

15:18fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or something else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if you wanna take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS 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

15:40for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty 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

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