How bip.so CEO Phani Sama grew to $350K revenue with a 1 person team in 2023.

hey folks my guest today is funny Sama he's one of the founders of bip.so prior to bippy founded redbus.com the world lar the world's largest online bus ticketing company with operations in six countries and sales over a billion dollars After exiting that company he co-founded another one and worked for government as a and work for the government as a chief Innovative officer for the government of Telangana India he's also a young Global leader ygf a world economic Forum has received the fortune 40 under 40 award twice he serves on the board of Tea Works India's largest Hardware prototyping Center but again today focused on bipsa which is a workspace for build and public teams funny you ready to take us to the top yes yes thanks Nathan so what does what does workspace mean what do you mean by that okay so it's a space uh it's a document and task management tool I see okay got it so folks aren't and is it for our specific team Engineers marketers or everybody it's for everybody people building together it's for the team yeah okay and so walk me through you have a lot of experience with pricing because of your bus company over a billion dollars in sales so how do you price bipso is it per seat or something else okay so basically bip is a social workspace so what we are uh doing is I mean basically we're building it for the future of work and we think that the future of work is changing rapidly uh until now people use people build as teams full-time employees but in future people also engage Outsiders Freelancers uh because the best ideas are outside uh outside the team and uh people outside are also willing to engage in different uh companies so bip actually is a tool that enables that to happen uh so how it makes that happen is uh uh let's take we have a workspace like notion uh on bit selectively I mean bip is like notion it uh it has documents and it has task management funny my question my question was on pricing so so what what do you think what do you charge on average per month uh okay so right now we haven't uh figured out pricing yet um Revenue ah yeah pre-revenue but what I wanted to say is the pricing uh cannot be per uh seat because it engages a larger audience uh so it probably won't be per seat understood so let's walk through the process of building a wait list and building Demand right before I do that though obviously your pre-revenue how much of your own money have you invested so far in the company so we have a birth of about 20K per month so I would have spent about less than 200k uh so far yeah does that make you nervous spending you know 200k before before you have your first customer no no because we have seen some good adoption we're seeing uh uh attraction how do you measure adoption uh so the number of uh users coming in and uh starting their workspace uh on web so we're finding very good Traction in the web 3 space because uh that's how the work happens in web3 web3 uh products are built as communities uh uh and web enables uh collaborating in a community so what is bip is uh think of pip as a notion worker funny so I don't want to go but we've explained the product already so we'll go back to that second but I want to go back to this adoption concept you say your measure adoption based off number of users coming in and starting their own workspace so in the past 30 days in September how many new users have come in yeah we have about 100 uh 100 workspaces created and smart is that is it a one-to-one ratio of a workspace to a person or do you have thousands of people in those 100 workspaces yeah we have thousands of people in a workspace okay so a hundred workspaces were created just in September yes amazing and how many total workspaces created to date so totally we have about 3 000 workspaces uh but I would say that uh we have a retention of about 10 percent so out of this 100 we'd expect uh like uh 10 of them to be very active uh going forward oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you 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talk to them we don't have customers yet so there's no customers to talk to but you're talking to users who are signing up my question is a lot of times people will think activation is tied to one metric and then they learn you know what actually our users are using this in a totally different way our activation metric should be this other thing so why why do you believe your activation metric is number of documents moved over from Google Drive to bip it's not the number of documents uh we look at it as becoming their primary uh yeah funny how do you measure that primary that's that's not a number how do you measure something behind the primary workspace yeah so they create documents here the new documents see earlier they would have document in a Google uh drive and from there they would copy and paste here but uh they stopped creating on Google Drive they start creating only on it how do you know they stopped creating on Google Drive yeah because there's a continuous creation of documents so they they create uh maybe one two documents a week and we also talk to such customers I mean such users who are creating that and but someone could create one or two documents per week on bip and still be creating 10 documents per week on Google Drive how do you know if they've stopped using Google drive or not yeah we talked to them we talked to you've talked to all three thousand work workspaces no no out of which maybe 300 is what we talked to because as we see that they're using repeatedly that's where uh we engage with that okay but by repeated usage what you mean is they're creating at least one document per week for many weeks is that like what is that metric yeah yeah one or two documents is what they create per week and then we talk to such engage users and we learn that this is their primary workspace now okay so you're when you say that you sign up a hundred new folks in September workspaces and you believe that you have 10 retention 10 will be very active your definition of very active is they create one to two documents per week for at least what three or four weeks is that accurate yes I know this is becoming their permanent workspace yeah true interesting interesting yeah okay and so how do um what when you look at your power users what your your most you're the user that created the most documents over the past three days how many documents did that workspace create okay so what happens is uh initially uh uh uh when uh I I think document creation life cycle is also it is front-ended so for example uh one of our uh active users probably has like 300 documents but most of them are created in their first like six months of usage and uh because that's when they are ideating when they create a new product they're ideating they're creating marketing plans they're creating uh product prds and Etc and all that but over time it reduces a bit and then the task management thing takes off the canvas boards and Etc and all that that is almost a daily repetitive uh thing okay so your most active account has created 300 documents in their workspace uh yeah usually about 200 yeah true yeah true what do you mean what do you mean usually 200 I'm just saying your most active account has 300 documents created yeah that's true yeah okay okay the reason I'm asking is when do you ask that's your power user if anyone's gonna pay it's that user when do you start talking about pricing yeah so yeah so that we've been postponing but we can't postpone it uh for log uh yeah we need to figure that out soon uh the only thing is we are figuring out if there is an Innovative way to price uh we know that it's not going to be perceived uh per user because uh each Community is large uh but we are we are thinking on One Direction we're thinking okay if there is uh bounties because we cater to where three communities and there are bounties so we're thinking hey uh can we take a percentage of that Bounty that is uh placed uh using pip so that is one thing that we are exploring and hence we are not really jumping into pricing uh yeah well what if you launched this though on this most active customer says I'm not willing to pay that then it's bad luck uh then we need to figure it out uh again but that's what I'm saying is like why are you waiting I actually don't understand why are you waiting so long you've already put 200 000 of your own money in this thing what's taking so long to figure out if people are willing to pay for it yeah I think yeah we need to we need to try that out soon yeah no I'm not asking I'm not asking you to agree with me I'm just asking what's the business reason that you haven't brought that pricing question up yet there's there's a reason you haven't yeah so the reason is this I mean uh we we I mean until now we've only been Building Product uh we're always falling short of uh bandwidth to build products so it just needs bandwidth I think it's the bandwidth uh problem though I mean you're working on this full-time right yeah yeah I and uh we we are 10 of us working on this full time but uh there are all these other features that we need to build we need to get uh feature parity with uh uh with let's say a notion because our customers move from notion and they ask these feature parity and Etc so we'll spending a lot of time on the product uh but how do you balance that if you wait to launch pricing until you match Notions product you're never gonna I mean you're never gonna catch up because notion has more Engineers than you do yeah that's true but uh at least the major features I mean I I can't say we'll have all the features but uh uh the major ones yeah yeah but the space is like there's the the closest comp to this is smart Suite right I'm I'm close with John and he said Nathan we can't launch until we have all the features that click up has which is kind of in the same space that you're in well funny he spent 1.5 million dollars of his own money on the MVP right before before like before we launched pricing he spent another six million that was on money before he had his first customer so like are you ready to spend 7.5 million bucks to keep chasing feature parody with notion before you have your first paying customer um yeah no no I think uh no I think we'll we we will hurry up uh we we have to do that yeah so so okay so you already have an inclination that you might price around a bug but basically a percent of the bounty what do you use how does this user respond when you when you pitch that to them see right now uh basically most of our users are web3 users and uh they uh pay using their own tokens yeah out of the treasury project tokens and they're generous with those tokens uh because they make their own tokens uh so they're fine uh to pay as a percentage of their tokens uh but we have to think how do we convert the tokens into uh USD soon and at what value and things like that uh so it is a little more uh involved thought process uh and I think that's one of the reasons why we have not jumped into pricing yet well how do you how do you though deal with the volatility in crypto markets I mean everyone's treasuries today if they're tied to Fiat you know they're like they're way way down 80 90 no one wants to have bounties right now because it's extremely expensive you know it's dilutive long term in terms of the total token pool so yeah I mean is this the thing where you don't have a real business until crypto takes off again no no uh we can so basically when the token price goes down I mean we will pay our price on their USD I mean uh it's just that they have to pay more tokens uh to catch up with that pricing uh and for us to uh de-risk ourselves from the volatility we need to convert the tokens into USD quickly enough uh but we need to figure out that whole thing uh before we jump into that side uh but uh but these were three customers because they're moving from notion uh they're also equally okay to pay a SAS pricing uh but they would love if it is uh if it's uh uh if it's a tokenized thing because there's utility for that token and things like that I understand but back to my question right let's say there's there's token X right a company that you're selling to is token X right and they've got a treasury with a thousand tokens in it right and they need they need an engineer to do some work and they need to pay that engineer for one hour and that engineer charges 100 an hour right for 100 bucks they used to be able to just give him two tokens as the Bounty well now with everything devalued they have to give them 20 tokens for the same hour of work the same hundred dollars 20 tokens out of the total thousand available is way more dilutive than two tokens out of the total thousand available that's what I mean how do you deal with volatility in the crypto markets like this no one's going to want to issue tokens like this right now because it's very dilutive yeah yeah but I think uh uh I I mean at least the conversations that we've had people are okay to give uh the 20 tokens because they made their own tokens um printing its own money then you have inflation you can make a bunch of tokens you want but it's going to devalue the Token the Market's gonna go they're just gonna keep making their own tokens this token's but that's a compulsion I mean even the non-bet3 companies right today given the funding winter they're all diluting more for the same five million dollars they have to dilute more so it's not that uh it is different uh in web2 so it's a cost that uh everybody is paying today well no I mean web 2 they're using other sources of capital there's debt right there's no version of debt for crypto in this market uh is uh will also be expensive I run 150 million dollar debt fund so I'm pretty familiar with the pricing and I can tell you it's it's it's relatively Equity dilution it's not bad at all I don't know that that same instrument exists for web 3 treasuries I don't think treasuries have a backstop right there's no debt you can't take debt out against your treasury uh from what at least that's I don't know maybe you know something that I don't uh yeah in this market uh uh I mean all those fancy fancy things have stopped uh it is it is uh uh that's what I'm trying to get to the white higher price why Tire pricing to something that is so volatile why not just charge a SAS fee and be done with it yeah that's an option but yeah we also want to figure out if there's an Innovative uh way uh uh in a way to way uh yeah I mean the human thing is all about uh making progress that way right I will make uh take a chance uh uh and see if that works uh but that is one part of our uh business I mean bib stands for build in public we we are not we do not build this for web3 uh it's just that actually we built it as a workspace for people who are building in public because people are building in public uh our uh assumptions uh our hypothesis is that people are building in public also want to expose their workspace uh so that uh uh people who are following them uh have full context of that project uh so that's how we started building social workspaces but while we're building and showing it to the building public uh we found good Traction in Taos you know in the last uh 15 months I mean Taos and Battery was big so we we saw initial traction there so most of our customers now happen to be from web3 uh you don't have any customers yet I don't want to use the word customers because it misguides my audience you don't have you're you are trying to figure out how to get people to pay for what you've built something you've already sung 200 000 of your own money in yeah that's yeah we can say so yeah that's true all right well listen we're rooting for you I'm pushing you hard here because I want to see you make a lot of money uh but in the middle do that do that I mean if it is do that but yeah all right in the meantime let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite Business book uh it's uh Atlas tract number two is there a CEO you're following or studying yeah uh it's a Girish of uh fresh desk fresh ones yeah good good guy um number three what's your favorite online tool for building bib besides your own okay Sigma number four how many hours how many hours of sleep do you get every night oh I got seven eyes that's good and what's your situation married single kids I've added two kids two kids very good and how old are you uh I'm 42. 42 last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. that uh uh marketing and sales is as important as Innovation uh my previous startup was uh Innovation and we got a lot of Word of Mouth uh uh but yeah uh I wish uh I mean I would have built a lot of expertise in sales and marketing if I knew this in 20s guys there you have a bip dot so started building about a year ago they've got 3 000 workplaces created about 10 of them are active which means they're creating documents every week bip is a workspace for communities specifically focused on Dows early on but really for any communities that are building in public they're burning twenty thousand dollars per month right now Bonnie's putting over almost 200 000 bucks of his own money hoping to get pricing figured out here in the next couple of months so they can start building that monthly recurring or Revenue Bonnie thanks for taking us to the top thanks letter thank you so much one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm Central it's called Shark Tank for SAS we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back-end dashboards their expenses their revenue our poo CAC LTV you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every Thursday 1 p.m Central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM Central to make sure you 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