How Bizom CEO Lalit Bhise grew Bizom to $56.9M revenue and 307 customers in 2025.

hello everyone my guest today is elite bizet he's an enterprise mobile mobility veteran with 17 years of experience building over 150 different products he invented hybrid mobile programming and has a patent in visual merchandising using image recognition his six plus years of salesforce automation experience with fmcg market leaders has resulted in bism being at the forefront of digital sales transformation in india helping over 250 enterprise enterprises achieve data-driven transformation via automation and analytics lolite are you ready to take us to the top let's go for it all right tell us quickly about the company and then jump into your revenue model how do you make money right uh so bizom is the name of the flagship product bizom stands for business on the move it's a mobile first cloud solution aimed towards consumer product good companies uh to digitalize their sales force their distributors and their retailers especially in emerging markets uh in simpler terms it is a bunch of workflows in their sales processes on their distributions that we digitalize and provide roi to businesses in terms of efficiency improving manpower efficiency or improving channel performance or improving product placements are especially targeted towards india and other emerging markets and for consumer product goods companies which is like fmcg companies uh fashion companies and so on and what do you price around is it a pure place sas model volume gmv what it's a pure play sas model so it's it's a paper used per month and paid in annual or quarterly cycles okay and walk me through just give us a i want to get more your back story here but what's an average customer paying you per month would you say uh an average customer for me pays me about 2 000 a month okay so call it mid market maybe pushing enterprise a bit yes that's right that's the right market pushing enterprise yes absolutely and if someone's paying you two grand a month what are they getting for that uh so what what the organizations or the our brands are looking for is in terms of improving the efficiency of that so in emerging markets uh we end up having a lot of large fetal street uh workforce can you actually can you actually tell me this story through is there a real customer you can mention i know you have a bunch listed on your website no no no that's fine yeah that's a good idea so [Applause] i i'm trying to think about a global name uh on top of my head coca-cola hershey's yeah pepsico is for example one of the companies that we work with in india so pepsico has in india i don't know 10 000 odd feet on street sales executives who go in the market talk to these mom-and-pop retail shops generate demand for pepsi products make them aware about pepsi products generate demand for them and get orders for them which are then passed on to the local distributors local distributors will come and deliver those orders to those retailers it's a very complex large organization which goes in remote areas of a large country like india right so keeping the track of this particular manpower and improving their efficiency directly impacts business top line in general and that's where your software comes in that happens to our software the second part where our software helps is improving the performance of the channels the channels are retailers as well as distributors figuring out what is the right channel which is the right performing distributor what is the turnaround time of a particular distribute what is the fill rate of a particular distributor is how the right retailers are identified and then the product performance so pepsico may be one interested in saying as a high margin product in certain kind of outlets so is that particular what are the kind of schemes discounts are working on that product and so on so forth so essentially all of these three parameters combined together pepsico looks at increasing their sales and reducing their cost or increasing availability in the retail shops and what are what are the actual numerical metrics though that they're paying you two grand for versus a 10 grand a month client is it is it number of locations is it what is the numbers you use it's a distribution read so if it's paid per user per month for us a user is a sales executive or a distributor i say primary right so so the number of sales executives so pepsico has 10 000 so they may pay me more an sme who has let's say 500 would pay me less than another sme who's only 100 would maybe even lesser yeah makes good sense okay give me more of the backstory here what you're doing company in uh so bizota the product was launched in 2012. uh this is our six year old product now uh i i am a technologist i mean i am a geek i have no idea how the i did not have any idea how this whole fmcg and distribution and other stuff work chance meetings with couple of other entrepreneurs who were building products in that particular space they talked about their difficulties in understanding the sales on the ground working with this mom and pop fragmented distribution ecosystem in a place like india it looked like a really silly problem to me to be honest with you it looked like a simple problem that a technology or a mobile application could solve in 2012 if you remember smartphones weren't as prevalent very as prevalent as they are in india uh today although ios was uh fairly popular it was too expensive in a country like india to afford uh android phones weren't as cheap as they are today uh so there was this kind of a barrier to entry for all of these brands you use mobile first technologies but for me it sounded very simple as a smartphone app connected to cloud a workflow automation platform which can digitalize multiple workflows so to say so i converted that business problem into a tech problem uh built a quick uh so to say mvp uh for first two customers we rolled it out in the market measured that roi my first customer had only four users if i remember correctly and was that like was that one of your friends uh it was one of the guys two guys that i spoke to in the first place so i essentially told him will you pay me money if i build this and he said okay here is uh not only that i'll pay you money here is my first check they preach they prepay they kind of pre-paid how much how much was that first check uh the first check was uh about ten thousand dollars that's great instant validation absolutely which is even better so fast fast forward to today how many customers are you working with we work with about some you mentioned 250 plus actually the right number is somewhere around 307 so yeah or 307 odd customers three zero three zero seven yeah okay and again if they're paying you on average two grand a month what it's fair to say you guys are doing about six hundred grand a month right now something like that yeah something around that time yeah and what does we do what does growth look like so if you're doing that today go go back a year what were you doing look uh for last whole year or last two or three years we have been growing at like eight percent month on month so we don't track arr as much as we track mrr our mrr has been growing at somewhere around eight seven eight percent month on month for last three years okay do you know after just to make that easy for my audience to kind of grasp it if you so today you're doing 600 grand a month if you go back 12 months do you know what you were doing the same time last year yeah yeah we were doing somewhere around 350k uh a month okay got it so july 2017 caught 350k a month now obviously almost double that which is healthy growth whereas where is most that growth come from new customers or expanding current ones uh so actually they're both parts of it uh for the longest period of time we were just focusing on new customers uh to be brutally honest because that's where we saw the growth was somewhere last year we realized there is a lot of potential to be gained from existing customers as well existing customers were growing organically not as fast as the new customers were growing uh somewhere last year we put focus on what we call as farming uh customer success would you say uh that meant we now have currently have two growth engines so certainly how so my you know my board asked me the question saying you know okay great that you're growing at seven eight percent month and month how can you provide 12 percent month on month so the answer to that was essentially look i have there is a lot of untapped potential in my existing accounts which i'm not uh good news for us was though was the churn was less than uh less than uh one percent at any given point in time what is what is turn today uh it's about uh so last month it was a zero churn uh but on average over a year it's somewhere on uh one point three percent or something okay so i'm talking about logarithm just to be clear that's that's gross logo churn or net logo churn uh it's a gross location okay i'm talking talking about network net logos will always keep on increasing i mean at this point last year we would have what i don't know less than 150 or accounts yeah now do you know do you know the revenue side of this so what's net revenue retention annually uh so the so the corresponding mrr churn again gross mrr churn is somewhere around point three nine percent uh which is essentially we are not okay with the growth returns as long as that is from the lowest end of the mrr and again lee that point three nine percent number that's on that's all right that's on a annual really that point three nine percent that's an annual uh number correct yes absolutely okay so are you at that negative revenue...