Freelancing Led This Dropout to a $50K/Month Software Biz

Yash Chavan is the founder of SARAL, software that helps brands find and hire influencers to promote their wares 🤝

Looks like they only launched in January 2022, and Yash reveals in a recent interview that they’re already doing $50K in monthly revenue…

Our user base is now over 200 paying brands who actively use SARAL to run their influencer campaigns. They work with over 13,000 influencers!

They have a database of over 150M+ influencers, and brands can reach out to them via the platform.

🚀 Yash tells the origin story…

[It] began with my work with clients when I used to run a marketing agency.

After dropping out of engineering college, I started freelancing and eventually landed some sales jobs at early-stage startups.

That’s where I was exposed to the cold world of cold calling and closing 1:1 sales. It gave me the foundation needed to eventually get into marketing.

Sounds like Yash evolved his freelance biz into that marketing agency and eventually…

We managed programs with over 10,000 influencers, but the process was entirely manual, which became overwhelming for me and my team.

We searched the market for tools to streamline our influencer marketing efforts but we found out that existing options were both expensive and too old.

This frustration led to my “aha” moment, realizing there had to be a simpler, more affordable, and user-friendly alternative. That’s when I decided to create Saral.

So it was his experience working with clients for several years that led Yash to the big business idea 💡

To validate…

we conducted market research by reaching out to potential users through email and LinkedIn. I cold-emailed close to 2500 people in my target customer segment during this time. I got on ~35 calls with founders and marketers in the ecommerce space to simply talk about their problems and frustrations around the influencer marketing space (no selling here).

Additionally, I pre-sold the product to five early adopters who paid $99 each, demonstrating that there was a genuine demand for such a solution before we even began building it.

Yash’s advice for starting a business 👇

A lot of founders mess up because they don’t know their marketing and don’t interact with customers. I’m on calls with customers almost every day.

Learn to understand people’s problems intimately so you can solve them with your business.

Also, I found an interesting tweet from Yash, posted right around the time he started SARAL…

Sell pickaxes in a gold rush.

You could say influencer marketing is something of a gold rush, and Yash built a tool he could sell to all the miners 😎

AI appears to be the new gold rush.

Could you build and sell some pickaxes related to that? 🤔

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