How Aeroleads CEO Pushkar Gaikwad grew Aeroleads to $1.7M revenue and 200 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is pushkar guy wad he is the CEO and founder of a company called arrow leads which is a bootstrap project generation software startup with over 20,000 users we're not working he likes to work on finishing his time machine we'll jump into all of it in a second push car are you ready to take it to the top absolutely good okay what is arrow leads and what's the business model how to make money all right so the b2b or prospect a new generation software it primarily works with various social media sites so it find prospects by crawling the web and you know doing something at the background it gives you the data and then you can pass the data to your sales team who take it forward so you're paying for like for contact access clear but access you're doing your own web scraping and and validating data points and selling it to people o follow companies like full-contact they're moving to B to C or whereas elites primarily works really well with b2b business data okay got it that makes good sense and what's your price amount of this ass oh yes absolutely so just ask model or we start somewhere in the range of 14 in dollars per month or you can get like about 100 qualified prospects with melody melody and then it goes from there on what do most of your customers pay on average would you say Oh that'll be mostly there in 114 in dollar range so somewhere in the 1/4 or can 150 bucks a month yeah okay and give me more the back story when did you watch the company oh so you read started it was a soft launch we were building another product in parallel and we just decided to work on arrow leads so the fish not will be somewhere in between app will make 2015 so it's about two and a half years normally okay so 2015 and then obviously you mentioned in the intro your bootstrapped right yeah and what have you grown your customer base to how many folks are paying for the platform so the customers are in between couple of 100 or so this includes both the product as well as services you know to be also for some services around software because there are lot of people who say that we don't have the FDR's in our team right now maybe if we can just use the software and give us the data what's your team size today roughly we are about 10 people in how then about 5 to 50 people work from home ok and they're all working on the software or they're also doing like consulting and agency work the whole team is working on elites and promoting it ok and then I mean can I do the math base and kind of back into your monthly recurring revenue if you have around 200 customers paying 150 a month you're doing what like 30 grand a month something like that something that you okay and what percentage of that is true monthly recurring revenue versus one-time consulting fees Oh find you the agreement and that kind of makes up for a very big chunk of that amount oh yeah but you should that 30 grand a month anytime someone sends up for an annual plan you then divide by 12 to figure out what I've seen it's your monthly recurring revenue so when you when you say 30 grand are you including the whole year payment in that 30 grand or 112 none dozen B 112 112 okay good so so like last month you did how much revenue do you do about 30 grand something in that range something mentally okay and what Nina give me a sense of kind of growth what were you at 12 months ago would you say sube have come along B I'm gonna say about 10 percent on-month or narrow reach that if you get one because the most certainly it becomes like 5000 do you know so we're into that narrow range but on an average and so on December of 2016 about 12 months ago how much how much revenue to do that month probably 12 key I think okay so you kind of be about double your rear which is great what about this space is a notorious for charm because people sign up for a month they get a bunch of leads then they leave what is your churn and how do you manage that oh actually you know like oh this is part of the business I think you know we knew that this will happen because the requirements are always going to be right now and not on month to month basis but that is perfectly fine I think this part of the business primarily right now what we're looking to do is we are looking to add more features to IRRI needs to make it not just completely detail-oriented but like for example you can prospect needs from social media like from Sweden and some other sites Instagram acceptor so like let's have those kind of all those features as well which kind of you know or just takes us or it miss also all in one prospective lead generation software what do you add out today in terms of churn how many customers are you turning a month oh I think primarily I will say the cycle is about three months and also usually those they use it for about three months let's say $49 of the three monkeys like okay I have enough credits like you have okay so you're churning around pushkar just to get to the point you're churning about thirty percent of your customers every single month in the media okay so like that that is not a SAS business that's a dying business right because that means in order to stay even you have to sign up first to fill up that gap I mean how are you driving any growth with churn that high we don't have any fees for marketing both a like most of the users are coming to the left side the sign up how are they writing you know they find us through search engine so we do ramp for like lot of keyboards so for this like the cost of the querying customer is almost nothing and even she comes to be 500 are you spending any money on paid like ads Facebook or Google previous products so feel like you know I could do this maybe work out here as well how did you decide to jump into kind of this business it sounds like you're an idea guy you have a bunch of different ideas including a time machine just know be exploring some other options you know v8 bill tomorrow getting posted in the boss and it was kind of doing okay but I believe that it wasn't going anywhere we just thought okay you know maybe we can build something which people really want see ourselves needed something like here who needs without looking fine you know that just went is that cool then it took off really well initially and we thought okay fine it's working out we are making money collectors stick with it mm-hmm okay that makes good sense and so what's your planning what do you want to do with the business you know you're you you're growing you're for 30 grand it's taking you know two years to get there what do you want to do over the next 12 months Oh [Music] organically and somewhat slow or but then the targets are definitely there is it has to be hundred K per month or by the end of next year the dollar 100k per month this year and actually but somehow you know we just stopped focusing on development and we kind of lost track a few months why do you think adding additional features and development expenses the way to grow this it sounds like you already have paying customers why not focus more on content marketing and ranking for keywords good retention part you know that it's just the nature of business is such that people are going to use the soft feel because of the immediate need and then move on so you can solve that like part you can solve that I have interviewed others in this exact same space where their churn is nowhere near that and there's simply there's one change you would make make your credits expire every month if I have put something I want to have the credits even if I'm not paying for the sauce these are movies just to be clear I thought you said that people paying monthly they don't if they don't use the credits you roll them over to next month did I misunderstand you yeah so look that's it that's like a that's a key that I would say that's one difference between you and other people that are much much much lower churn because it encourages people to use embolism yeah you know do you want to raise cattle you wanna raise capital no I think okay do you have a have you raised capital and like a past business and had a bad experience thought off you know back in no I was a bad experience it's just that I'm probably not the right there for that and I think for fast we are kind of okay if you need outside capital I'm looking for that but right now the need is not there yeah what would you value your company at today oh I don't know it depends maybe some girl in know about a million dollars or maybe a little bit here and there but it I think it not what's asset let's make them in that late yet feeling Avenue yeah yeah interesting okay very good let's wrap up here push car with the famous five number one what's the last business book you read oh I think other things do is all forms the everything store yeah number two is there a CEO you're falling or studying right now [Music] [Music] okay number three besides your on what's your favorite online tool oh the kind of difficult you know Oh fine pipe drive good number for how many hours of sleep to get every night oh ho me sleep it let important it has to be at least seven dollars okay and what situation married single you have kids oh okay sin no kiddos...