How BlogVault Inc CEO Akshat Choudhary grew BlogVault Inc 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...