How BlogVault Inc CEO Akshat Choudhary grew to $9.5M revenue and 20K customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is akshat chaudry he's the founder and ceo of blog vault malcare and wp remote these services allow over 20 000 customers to build and manage high performance websites with ease ah you ready to take us to the top yes absolutely thank you for having me you bet so 20 000 users that's a ton of customers are you playing like in the wordpress extension ecosystem or some marketplace yes we do we are a part of the wordpress ecosystem so we are a software as a service uh and not a plugin per se i see i see so which of these tools is the biggest blog vault malcare and wp remote which one has the most users i think malkia today is our biggest uh biggest product and it has the most revenue as well uh it's i think fairly well though i would still say malcare is uh is uh is the leader so all three products are you know it's a sweet they all go hand in hand okay so explain how they work together what's a customer pay you for what do they get so they can buy individual products also but they can buy the whole street and uh wp room also you can buy blog vault individually for 90 bucks a year you can buy malcolm individually for 100 bucks a year for a single site uh or you can buy them together at 149 there's another planet 299 for a single site and then if you have more sites then it goes all the way up to actual sorry people my audience doesn't know what these tools do if so if people buy the tools tell us what the tools do all right yeah so so if you're running a website a wordpress website you want to protect it because especially if you're running a business critical website if anything happens to it uh you can lose you can you lose customers you lose seo ranking you will lose uh you will yeah it's a big loss to your business so you can't afford to have it go down what you do is we protect your business your web business website and uh blog world lets you back up the website malcay lets you secure the website interesting wp remote is our agency offering where if you're running an agency and you have hundreds of websites and you use wp remote to manage your entire or a large number of websites and that includes backup security and more i see okay so it's all about website security how many websites have installed one of these three tools hundreds of thousands your website says four hundred thousand is it accurate yes uh more is it it would be even higher than that i think that number has to be updated have you passed them half a million 500 a thousand we don't actually actively track it let's uh okay yeah there's a lot of funny numbers there also there are paying customers uh there are free customers so yeah well of the of the two of the 400 000 installs or 5000 installs how many are actually paying for one of the three tools uh again actually we don't track it in that matter what we do track is we have more than 20 000 paying customers which have more than one or more websites on our platform i see okay that makes sense and there's over 400 000 websites on the platform yes i see okay give me more of the back story here when did you launch the company what year so 2010 so we go back a long way and it was launched as a site project wow i've been doing it full time for 10 years now are you the sole founder yes so you still own 100 equity today yes oh that's amazing how many folks are full-time on the team now we are 35 36 now wow okay tell me about the team how many are engineers uh over half the team is engineers and where are they based so we are all almost all of us are based in bangalore amazing i hear the talent over there just incredible is that true yes it is it is it is a silicon valley of india talent you'll get the best engineers in india here that's also highly competitive oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're going to get a different valuation a vc is going to pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when i hover over here right so the teal is what a vc would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on youtube all these datas are built from real time valuation data points founders share with us on the show so attraction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 to their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of sas valuations than what you can get now inside of founderpath and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your evaluation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform i hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview so what do you pay a senior engineer at your company but yeah it's we pay we are one of the top players so the best engineers in our company would get as much as they would get in most of them i don't know what that is though how much is it it can it can go to a hundred thousand dollars oh yeah okay so so a good senior engineer would be doing really well if they're making a hundred thousand dollars in bengaluru yes okay amazing and then um uh so 16 engineers 36 full-time uh now are you bootstrapped or have you raised capital they're fully bootstrapped i love this so how do you incentivize your employees like do you give them options or not how do you incentivize them that way that's a good question so we have a very generous profit sharing program where we do it based on the number of years you have spent at blog vault and seniority so combination of that and so as you spend more number of years it almost acts as uh but yeah we've tried to keep it as fair as possible wait action everyone wants to know how to do this everyone is trying to do their own version of this but no one ever talks about it my audience is mainly bootstrap founder so so let's roleplay for a second let's say i was an engineer that joined your company uh five years ago so i've been with you for five years what other inputs would you use to calculate my profit share this year so five years would be yes the the seniority that you have that would be number one so we create the people at the company based on uh various factors but the the impact essentially the seniority that you have and then the number of years you have spent at blockbuster so for example if you are a very senior person but you have only spent a year in blog one then the uh then the profit share would be lower than a person who is who might be junior than you but has spent five years at blog one yeah so so actually let's use a real example right so i joined as a let's say i joined as a senior engineer and five years ago so i'm a senior my management level is a senior uh and i've been there for five years what would the math be so that i could back into what my profit sharing might be for last year so it would be tens of thousands of dollars would be would be well no but i'm trying to get the math equation so that other founders listening can set up their own plans so it depends on many factors frankly like we we take out we we give up almost twenty percent of our profit to to uh as part of the profit share but it again depends on how how how you want to structure it so there's 30 the all 36 employees participate yes you have to do finish a year to participate i see so you have to be with you for at least a year so there's 20 percent of total company profits available for profit sharing across higher than that yeah it's higher than that yeah but it is so what i'm still trying to back into is let's say someone listening right now saying okay i want to copy actually i do 20 of my profits for profit sharing my team is also about 30 people how would they decide what's the math equation to multiply that 20 percent by so that that senior engineer has been there for five years could calculate how much they'd make so for honestly i don't have the numbers or the formula in front of me but what we have done is we have assigned a grade uh and uh we convert so the way we do it is uh suppose you have let's for simplicity say suppose you've been here with five for five years with us okay and uh at for five years suppose the the multiplier we add is five though i don't know the exact multiplier i have the exact multiply in front of me and your grade is five uh and your grade is ten so i would do ten into five fifty and there's a second person who is at uh four years and grade ten so that's 4 into 10 40. what will you do is we'll add up all 30 people score and then divide the overall pool by this score by this total accumulated sum yeah and then multiply each person's uh factor to get the actual number okay so the two examples you just gave was a grade of 50 plus a grade of 40. so great of 90 together let's say your profits last year where i'm making this up a hundred thousand dollars you would take a hundred thousand divided by ninety so you take twenty percent of that so you take twenty thousand dollars okay and and then uh divided by ninety and then each person the two people will get five is to four ratio oh i see so twenty thousand divided by ninety is two hundred and twenty two dollars per person and then they were fifty sorry into into fifty the first person will get into 50 and second person will get into 40. yeah so again i'm calculating the unit right so one unit of grade is worth 222 dollars and then one would get 50 times 222 and the other would get 40 times 222. that's correct at a high level that's how you do it that's that's roughly the maths the exact numbers i don't have in front of me but that's roughly the maths we have that makes a ton of sense okay i love that very cool thanks for sharing and the fun fact since you are since you're speaking so much we really uh so the score is if the more time you spend with us the higher the ratio so you would see like a fifth year person would make a significantly more money than a fourth year or 30 percent so it's almost like stock options also so the value increases because we know that as in sas the business the more time it's a time plays such an important role in creating value yep yep so in 2021 how much total did you pay out to employees as part of this plan we're not disclosing this this is the number but it's it's uh hundreds of thousands of dollars is what we we give to do you think that'll break a million this year we would love to do it i i'm not sure we'll be able to do that it's not we're not that profitable okay okay interesting well your profit on your bootstrap which we love yeah so yeah but yeah i would love to do it and have 25 percent is not set in stone it's we see how so the actual other factor and which is why it's slightly more complicated is in sas we also what we know is that the faster we grow the more profits we are willing to give up uh in the sense share with the com with the uh with everyone because so that incentivizes us to grow faster and faster so what might be 20 at certain growth level it might even go up to 60 at another growth level i see very interesting now you mentioned ahead of the call that you can't share exact revenue but you could share a range what what revenue range are you in today it's a few million dollars it's less than 10 but a few million dollars okay do you think you can break 10 million this year very difficult okay difficult yeah it's very difficult but within a couple of years definitely so let's just say the number is 4 million divided by 20 000 customers because you're mainly selling one-time annual plans right no so we sell recurring uh uh recurring trends which are monthly and you also this is the interesting part about our business we have customers who pay us a hundred dollars a year and we have customers who pay us six figures per year what's the what's the big don't name the customer obviously but what's the largest customer pay you per year uh six figures per year it's it's a good sum okay so the large the largest customer is like a hundred thousand a year something like that yeah it's a it's a it's a big sum of money and yeah but because of the nature of the business there we have multi-feature and then the number of units number of sites plays an important role i imagine the mo the biggest reason someone's gonna pay you a hundred thousand versus just a hundred a year is number of sites right that's what they upsell against yes number of sites plus uh some other features yeah interesting what feature is the number one reason people upgrade uh uh i think people spend or as they get used to the platform they they want more security then we have some add-ons available like we have real-time backups for uh woocommerce for e-commerce stores so we have these add-ons which really add up to significant sums of money for people to upgrade so so we and basically the business that we are in you know so our uh we keep uh as we add features we try and uh or we try and do it in such a manner that we can get more and more uh we create more and more incentive for customers to upgrade oh that makes a lot of sense now if we want to calculate growth rate what did you what would you grow revenue out over the past 12 months i can't share that because the the the the like i mentioned right there are certain factors which we cannot share but we have been growing healthily at least 30 percent a year okay got it so you grew at least 30 over the past 12 months yeah okay very cool i mean so so if you keep growing at 30 per year i mean it feels like maybe not this year but maybe next year you could potentially break 10 million right or maybe the year after that 2024 2025. hopefully yeah hopefully yeah so we are being aggressive today uh today i think we are better place than we have ever been to grow faster than we have ever been so what do you remember the year you passed a million in revenue was it like 2013 2014 it was i think 2016 or 2017 26 2017 is then we passed away 2017. okay now we can't shop without talking about your growth you've signed up 20 000 customers that's a ton how have you signed up so many customers so fortress is a huge ecosystem websites like every business has a website right and it's a there are millions and millions of websites so the problem we are solving is essential to every business well let's be really specific right you how many signups per month do you get from the wordpress marketplace uh you know we actually don't get that many signups from the wordpress marketplace we get it mostly through word-of-mouth and organic traffic got it okay how do people find you organically so one website has installed you do you have like a powered by blog vault button or something uh so organically seo plays a role we a lot of articles talk about us because we have been around so when you're when you when you have a sas product which is 10 years in the making brands get created micro mini brand gets created what's your top keyword what keyword drives you the most traffic i can't share that well i can just open it yeah yeah but uh we get like frankly a large number of keywords but the reason we don't share it is you can look it up but it's a very competitive space so i don't want to uh um but anyone can look it up anyone can look it up on semrush reps why don't you just save me the time and name one or two keywords so there are so many like the the okay don't give me your best one give me like your third or fourth best one well i'm just thinking about it like we we we would rank for we're trying for all sorts of stuff but random stuff like how do you configure a wp config file so we have that we have a long range of these things and you would be surprised by the number of search volume we get because of it so those are also there are so many factors over there and which will which doesn't show up in fact if you ask me on day one whether that keyword will rank and give me so much traffic i would have been like crazy we ended up writing that article uh or with being oblivious to the potential interesting um okay that makes a ton of sense so seo now who do you have someone in-house running your seo yes we do i see how did you find that person for people listening that want to hire their own seo in-house person uh it was we've we went through the different we posted the jobs in different forums and we got very lucky i think this person came through one of the local forums in india what was that job forums in india i believe it was indeed the i'm not sure like we posted it in a bunch of places and we got lucky like finally finding but finding good talent is you have to get lucky yeah what's his name or her name uh so it's excellent but he's no longer actually yeah his left blog well just this month just 15 days ago so so you're replacing you have to replace him now yeah we have to replace him now interesting okay there's a lot of people buying companies in the space obviously saeed comes to mind there's a lot of other people uh i assume you've gotten m a offers before have you we've got but we're not really looking to sell i totally understand that which is great i'm curious though what's the highest offer you've gotten even though you said no to it we haven't we haven't entertained anyone so we don't uh while people have sent feelers we have been very clear because we are better positioned today we have a better team but actually i'm not disagreeing with any of that you're doing the founder you're answering this like a founder which is fine which is we're not for sale we're better positioned but that's not my question my question is just what's the most anyone's even hinted at offering no so if you just the good thing is once you let people know that you're not looking for to sell then they know they don't they know that it's just no one's no one's actually no one's actually made you an offer no one said we have not entertained it at all so we have shut it all up right off the bat would you what would you value the business at today i don't know we are very conservative so maybe we will say four four five x revenue is what good value so what like twenty thirty million bucks something like that something something i mean if wordpress comes along and offers 30 million all cash up front don't you have to sell i mean it's a perfect partnership no we don't like i mentioned it's uh money is not affected because it has something to do with money wordpress is your perfect partner if you're trying to help small business owners manage websites why wouldn't you sell to someone like wordpress their biggest competitor so i would be like i'm here to keep their ass so you want to beat wordpress even though you play in their ecosystem so automatic is the company yes and we would love to yeah we think we have a better product than them and which is what's exciting about the whole thing sorry i thought wordpress owners weren't installing your app on top of the wordpress instance so wordpress is wordpress is an open source software right and the the the uh there's a company uh automatic who's i know automatically we've had we've had matt mullen on the show before exactly right so yeah yeah right so matt melinda uh matt mullenbeck's company create uh created uh math malinva created wordpress wordpress but math mullin works company also plays or makes software for wordpress okay so that like frankly the disjointed thing and there's a bit of confusion there but what we what we do is we play in the open source we so our customers use open source version of wordpress oh understood understood and not what automatically got it got it well hey listen we're out of time last quick questions here what are you spending to get a new hundred dollar a year customer cac-wise so uh most of it is organic so it it's it's a marketing team content teams did you spend anything last month on paid ads last month we have experimented but we don't it's it's just experiments okay got it well let's wrap here then with the famous five number one what's your last book that you read well last book i read would have been uh what's the let's call it atomic habits number two is there a ceo you're following or studying it's been a long time so jason pohan who founded wp engines i i closely uh follow what he does number three what's your favorite online tool for building blog vault uh i think google street is something which we swear by number four how many hours you sleep to eat every night it does that's good akshat and uh what's your situation married single kids uh married with a daughter okay one kid oh and how old are you i'm 39 39 last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. that i'm extremely fortunate guys there you have it blog vault launch as a side project back in 2010 they now do millions of revenue 35 employees bootstrapped and profitable they paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars across their profit sharing plan last year their employees uh again mainly based in india 16 in bangalore uh actually now scaling nicely with three key products all helping folks built on top of wordpress secure their sites blog vault malcare wp remote we'll see what happens next shot thanks for taking us to the top thank you so much for having me again 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