How bip.so CEO Phani Sama grew bip.so 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...