Kalyan Varma explains to Nathan Latka why Almabase avoids monetizing purely through transaction fees on alumni donations.
Disclosure
Almabase plans to avoid massive VC rounds in favor of debt
“We're certainly going to be not going to be type A, which is like raise tons of money and hopefully get there. But yeah, we're more of, I mean, at this point, money is not really our bottleneck. There's A few things that we're solving for, but whenever money i…”
What-if
Almabase's pricing model would fail if built entirely in San Francisco
“If I were to build this team entirely in, let's say the San Francisco Bay area, it's never going to work out with that, that kind of price point.”
Disclosure
Almabase adds donation percentage cut to SaaS revenue model
“It's a SAS model primarily, but we've been recently over the last, I would say, 12 months or so, we've started making some revenue out of the cut of the donations as well.”
Disclosure
Almabase average contract value is $6,000 to $7,000 per year
“So, I mean, it ranges between, you know, I would say 4000 dollars a year for some of our products to somewhere like 15, 20,000 dollars a year for some of our products. But if I had to like just take an average across all of our customers, all of our paying cus…”
Insight
Alumni relationships rely on loyalty, not true connection, says Almabase CEO
“The relationship between alumni and their alma mater is just based on loyalty and not like a true relationship, which is where we realized that this needs to get fixed”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Almabase serves 240 institutions, with over 90% based in the US
“So today, in terms of paying customers, we have 240 institutions. A majority of them are in the U.S. About 90, 92% of them are in the U.S. Roughly a half and a half split between independent schools and higher education.”