How Aikon Labs Pvt Ltd CEO Dilip Ittyera grew Aikon Labs Pvt Ltd to $115.2K revenue and 100 customers in 2023.

hello everyone my guest today is dilip attera he is the founder of a company called i engage dot ai he's an entrepreneur building the company uh all under a brand called acon labs the company is focused on helping you discover organize and reuse knowledge julip you're ready to take to the top yeah okay all right so tell us about the company what do you guys do and what are you selling thanks nathan for having me here um yeah so icon basically uh it's based out of a city called pune in india and what we do primarily is i engage which is a api based sas platform the focus has been to address this challenge of how do we actually discover knowledge from very unstructured conversations like the one we are having today uh how can we if we were to give record this or even stream it to i engage at the end of this uh potentially uh ing should be able to answer or give you insights in terms of what icon live says uh i engaged us and stuff like that so that's what how much are customers paying for this software per month on average so uh the sas based uh model we have multiple uh years that we have what's the average the average would be a per month subscription would be about eighty dollars a month okay that's great and and walk me through when you launched the company and what year and how you got your first 10 customers uh so initially when we started icon labs we actually had a solution for innovation management which we had built on top of the i engage apis that's how we started and we we hit we started uh some years back and we actually hit a roadblock we couldn't scale as a startup and that and at one point of time we were like really at a losses what to do and then when we when we realized that the value of what we have is in the apis uh two years back uh one and a half 18 months plus back we actually opened up the apis for access for the rest of the world for them to use it on a on a sas based model to subscribe and and build out uh build out the uh their applications which will make use of knowledge within their so the sas company was officially launched about two years ago yeah about 18 months plus got it so we'll call it the 2019 time frame and how did you get your first two three four customers well most of them have been through uh personal contacts in the network especially since i come from a technical background there were developers looking for of course those were the early days of utilizing ai especially in india we became one of the earliest ibm watson uh startup partners in india uh and uh utilized some of their apis to get started on this and through the networks is how we got it and we really struggled because uh in india it's not very uh very common to have api based sats plot api only sas platforms uh uh getting getting it to scale has been a difficult proposition so we so how many customers are you how many customers are you working within today today we have 100 plus customers we have we have been the api has been handled handling hundreds of millions of interactions uh over the last uh almost two years uh and how many interactions per month so we typically would have about uh um uh 10 to 12 million interactions that happen in a month and that's what you built and that's what you bill against right that's what you charge against that's a basic uh unit uh unit of cost that we have and then can i multiply eighty dollars a month times a thousand times a hundred customers you're doing about eight thousand dollars a month right on revenue that's good that's great and where were you exactly one year ago do you remember one year back we we had some of our we actually were lucky to get one or two marquee labels brands but working on a proof of concept so that's where we were we hardly had any revenues because we had completely stopped the innovation software which was giving us some decent revenues but not scaling after trying it for you for a few years we had two how much right the heart doing or the innovation software you know we were doing about 250 to 300 000 a year oh interesting okay and you just you just say you know what there's more opportunity doing sas yeah we tried uh we continuously we're at that level for about two three years and we realized that we are not scaling nobody wanted our realization was nobody wanted a separate platform for driving innovation yeah yeah interesting okay now have you bootstrapped the company or have you raised yeah so till last year we were completely bootstrapped i'm an extreme bootstrapper i sold the house that i stayed in with my wife and son and moved to a rented place and bootstrap uh but last i we were fortunate to find an angel investment from the us uh last year how much that's our first but uh find a thousand dollars five hundred 000 yeah and what valuation did you raise that uh i might not be able to disclose that right now the valuation part of it why is that because we are still a private company and i have uh investors i'm having i'm right now in a silent uh period where we are even having discussions on further investment so i would not be able to disclose valuations for that previous investment how much additional capital are you looking to raise we are going to this race this round which could be either a large seed round or like a pre-series say it could be about four three to four million dollars that's a lot of dilution that doesn't seem like something a serial bootstrapper would do well i've realized that either i do the dilution and get a foothold in the market because this is an area where people are competition is actually filling in very fast but how do you scale i mean you've been in it for 19 months and you're only doing eight thousand dollars a month in revenue or ninety six thousand dollars a year in revenue if you go raise three to four million dollars you better scale really fast in order to get to a price where you can actually exit or actually make money for yourself correct so we we during the covet period and when uh most of the struggles were happening we did two things we piggy we are piggybacking on two of the largest uh collaboration ecosystems in the world one is slack the other is microsoft teams we have a certified app you're built into the stock ecosystem yeah so we have an integration device that is correct so if you if you look check the slack marketplace we'll find there's a there's a product a micro sas product called arim and uh we just launched it and it is it is a riv rf rf stands for knowledge in sanskrit got it so you're in the select marketplace you've launched rf uh how many how many demos or trials are you getting per month from slack right now we currently have about 10 000 users in the in we have a waiting list and we have currently about 10 000 users using the the rf got it that's impressive how did you get so many users via the slack exchange did you get a bunch of five-star reviews or how did you optimize yeah we got uh we had some uh write-ups in some of the media in the u.s especially we also got we got into product hunt and we got into the top three or five uh for the day uh that gave us a lot of leverage in terms of uh people subscribing and today right now it's on beta so uh we plan we're planning a release which should be a paid release by end of february and uh that's that's how we got our initial customers so we still we are actually uh onboarding the customers on a batch mode so we we have more users coming up and then we just we will soon in the next few days you will find one in the microsoft app store as well for microsoft games how many people are on your team today we are nine people including me that's how many engineers most of them are um well most of them are mathematics and linguistics guys so we use a lot of nlp we use a ml ndl especially to discover knowledge from these interactions and we have folks who work on knowledge graphs and so the most of it is from people who know to code but more from like postgrad i myself is a i'm a drama how many people are writing code uh there are about six of us doing that i see i see and do you have any sales people or no martin do you have any sales exact people or no anyone doing sales yeah we have we have three of them and we have an outsourced uh you know lead generation uh from which we work which company do you use uh get me pilot get me pilot yeah and do you like them do you like them are they doing a good job yeah they're doing a good job very good philip i love this okay so you've got a great team that you're building out you've raised 500k you're raising more currently churn's critical in the sas business what's your churn today we currently have about uh like i said especially with the rf we are yet to face uh because it's not a paid subscription as yet we have yet to face too much of return but we still have 100 paying customers right that is correct i engage i engage apis not the array of subscriptions on the id understand so on the on the on the api side then how many what does churn look like you can measure increase or decrease usage yeah we have about 18 18 to 19 that's monthly turn or annual turn that's an androgen oh god that's actually i mean that's not horrible...