How Adapt CEO Gautam B grew Adapt to $2.1M revenue and 500 customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is surrender nadarajan he uh he has over 15 years of experience in the industry with over seven years of leadership leadership experience in the data industry adapt.i o is his first entrepreneurial effort he started his career as a developer moved up about our quickly into leadership roles and co-founded adapt two years ago on the family side he's married for six years now and has a couple of lovely daughters surrender you ready to take us to the top absolutely all right adapt.io so what's the company do and how do you guys make money sure so um started up two years ago as you mentioned and we had a lot of experience in the data industry specifically in business information and we had an idea to give it a twist so the current providers focus on quantity in terms of building a data a river of data while we focused on building the delta which focused more on the quality and the change in data itself um in terms of how we make our money we are a typical uh sas product and a premium uh model and that's how we get our paid users so okay first off interesting business i want to talk more about the technology and how you're building this but on average kind of what's the customer paying you per month or per year for the technology uh so we have uh two segments basically so uh becomes difficult to put an average so one is the online the self so model that users come and use the product tested out and purchased by themselves and we have two plans which is uh currently the basic which is 49 and a growth that is 149 a month and we also have our inside sales team and doing uh the sales from their part and uh and that and the deals the the deal sizes of those deals are pretty uh are bigger than the ones that we get on the on the side like how much bigger so um so uh we we do uh deals that are you know that are thousand dollars a month to ten thousand dollars a month so it varies uh very spreading interesting and what are the pricing axes you price against in other words why is someone gonna pay you 10 grand a month versus 49 bucks a month largely it is the number of contacts that they would want to purchase from us so our our database is what drives uh uh the uh uh the pricing interesting okay so it's just number of contacts they want to purchase not like number of seats or like number of data fields per contact or anything like that so beyond a certain number the number of seats doesn't matter because the number of contacts is what drives the price and we we also have integrations with the the popular crm solutions so some of the crm solutions cost higher than a few others so so those are some of the axes that uh determine the price so that's good so understanding those two cohorts are valuable but just for the sake of simplicity if i did force you into an average right would you say maybe it's maybe it's like three four hundred bucks a month across your entire customer base um i'm not sure i can give a number across the entire customer base yeah you know in the online model we would be around 150 to 200 dollars but okay on the inside sales i'm not too sure if you can give a number there yeah that's fine that's fair enough okay so around 200 bucks a month on kind of your online self-serve portal you launched you said two years ago in 2017 that's right yeah and have you chosen to stay bootstrapped or have you chosen to raise capital uh we've chosen to stay bootstrapped from day one so we uh we started generating revenue pretty early from six months into the business and uh we have been we have been pretty much cash flow positive you know a couple of months later we became cash flow positive mike my kind of my kind of founder i love that all right and so now are you operating at like break even or no you're taking 10 20 30 per month to the bottom line no we are very much a profitable company very much cash flow positive and we do we do over 40 uh of profit wow that's amazing so over 40 percent ebate margins that's great yeah and what's your team size today look like how many people um we have 25 members on the team okay and are they all where are they all based we're all based in india coimbatore okay that's very good okay so the team okay so this team's again 25 folks you've stayed bootstrapped you've founded about you founded the company about two and a half call it two years ago what have you scaled to today in terms of total customers on the platform um so i'm not going to give you an exact number but we have you know a few numbers short of 1000 paid customers as of today but we are a premium product so we have over 200 000 users using our tool but we have we have now less than thousand customers who are paying us okay sorry you said uh less than a thousand or a thousand less than a thousand okay less than a thousand cool now i mean can you put a bottom on that so less than a thousand but more than is 500 fair to say yeah 500 2 000. okay that's good all right good and then um and then so so you are you suggest you're you said you're doing a freemium option right so freemium can be very difficult if you don't know where to kind of put that paywall so how do you decide where to put the first paywall what do you get for free and what do you make people pay for yeah that's uh that's an interesting problem that we've been continuing to solve so it's uh so currently we offer five credits for free so anybody who wants to test the product can come and use the product we have we have multiple tools in which you can consume the data and what's a credit by the way one credit equals one contact that's correct yes so one credit is one contact and uh and after five credits is when we show the paywall uh but but it's it's a constant experiment though and we keep experimenting with the number we try to move some of the other axis also and try to put a paywall that makes sense to customers so that we give enough value for them to convert so once i hit five for free then i'll see a pop-up says if you want more it's 49 bucks a month sign up now that's right yes okay interesting what else have you tested um we've tested the features of course so you know some of the exports are not available to users uh to the free users so they'll have to pay to get some of the integrations that we have uh we've tested this number quite a lot we've done five we've done 50 we have done 100 as well so so we are we are varying these numbers uh also so and uh we are also experimenting some features like limiting on a daily basis and limiting on a weekly basis etc so there are a number of experiments that we've been constantly performing and why'd you land now on five you said you tested 550 100 y5 yeah this gave us a a pretty good number for at least a month um in success and so so for a month we were able to get pretty good success from this particular number so that's why we've uh we stuck to this number for a while now uh but we're still experimenting you know we could be changing in the next month to come and then surrender i mean i can take your now these are going to be minimums i think you're probably doing more than this but at a minimum 500 customers doing you know an rpoo of 200 bucks a month i mean that puts you north of a hundred thousand dollars per month in revenue is that accurate yeah that's okay and where help me understand growth i love bootstrap folks that are obviously growing uh 12 months ago about where were you um we've grown four times compared to last year forex is our growth oh wow okay so you're getting about last year so you're doing about 25 000 a month a year ago uh yes that was from the online sales stuff so we were doing uh slightly higher on with the inside sales as well okay okay fair enough yeah yeah but but maybe we'll call it 30. 30 a year ago now you're up north of a hundred so i mean healthy growth there is most that first off is that is that accurate did i get that right uh yeah i cannot give you the exact numbers around there okay and as most the grow i guess what i'm interested in is most the growth going from 30 to north of 100 today coming from your inside sales model or your kind of freemium kind of paywall 49 a month model i think uh i think largely from the inside sales because last year we did not have uh last year same time we did not have a full-fledged sales team in place uh we were driving most of our sales through the online sales so we did very little inside sales and uh that is uh and in the last few months is when we put together a full-fledged sales team that uh that's pushing the inside sales how many people are on the sales team today uh six okay and what's the split like do you have like sdr to ae to cs rep or what do those six people do yeah we have we have three hdrs and three account executives so uh that's the split right now and it's a one-to-one ratio one sdr for 180 it's not anything it was updated so is it one sdr forever for every one sae yeah that's right yes okay and help me understand like are the sdrs quota carrying or just the aes...