How Clappia CEO Ashutosh Thakur grew Clappia to $1.9M revenue and 600 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is ash - Sh Kumar he's an tech entrepreneur who always is always up to something he studied at a tech school in India and started his career as a software engineer at Cisco he moved into product management role there and then joined a small start-up called calm dot IO which was acquired by noon addicts he's witnessed the IPO of that company and has a software patent filed in his name currently he's working on his new venture clappy a-- that bridges the business apps innovation gap - - so are you ready to take us to the top yes very good all right tell us about clappy oh what's it do and how do you make money yes so clap you basically is Absalon claps and if you go to businesses different non-id businesses they have lots of application requirements and they can't get it the options that they have is either go to Salesforce or Oracle or hide your own team or get a freelancer and that kind of difficult problems are there or somehow managed with existing solutions so this is a huge gap so pyramid of the top of the pyramid you have sales force Oracle that kind of solutions and the bottom of the pyramid you have some Gmail whatsapp registers any kind of - so we have filling that gap we are eating that market people can create their own applications without any help of any external developer and just like you create an exit sheet and you can go ahead just drag-and-drop drag-and-drop application development platform is there these are so so an event company might create ticketing app or a company might create a reporting app or things like that yes yes and the distribution as well so what happens is there are solutions like that which provide you a drag-and-drop application creation mechanism so they give you an a/b cannot imagine it that you have an apk and you have to distribute it among 500 or 5,000 people that it sells because on a scale it become a very big problem so we have sold that kind of problem we have noted them down brainstorm and then figure out what is the problem that they are facing so distribution of application is another another problem that they face and a researcher real quick sorry are these people building applications for them to use inside their businesses or these are developers building apps for consumers to collaborate with employees vendors and and customers has been very good so this is b2b apps not someone looking to build the next Instagram no okay and how do you make money what if you will pay you on average per month so people use it so we don't charge on the application so we Excel or Google she doesn't charge you on the number of sheets that you clean the same way we want people to use applications everywhere so it's pay per user per month which is $5 per user per month and there's no limit on the number of apps and okay and I imagine when a company signs up with you they're not just buying one user usually on average how many users are they typically buying so it ranges from I've seen ten users most of the time it is effective when you have ten users to 200 users g-sensor averages those 1015 a hundred hundreds and is an average okay so it's fair to say then a hundred times five bucks to see the average company that signs up with you pay is maybe 500 bucks a month he is so we hadn't used to be sometimes give discounted okay got it got it very good give me more the back story here when did you watch company so we we did some homework before September 2017 last year and and and we incorporated the company over and from October 2017 so it's been 37 months and yeah in his first seven months what have you scaled to in terms of total customers so the total customers is 1010 paying customers around 20 50 customers are there as well because we have a premium plan so people use for a few use cases and they come and go and that's it but ten of the users have converted they have paid really well so in the venues around 80 to 90 K USD sorry what was 80 90 hey that's your run rate Carly total revenue tournament okay in the past seven months you've done eighty to ninety thousand dollars in USD what are you doing right now though per month 5 or 10k of seven seven seven g seven thousand bucks okay that's great so so just be clear you're you have you people are paying a little bit more right so if you have ten customers buying $5 per month seats they're buying more than a hundred seats on average to get up to seven hundred right or seven thousand bucks a month yeah yeah yes yes okay what about churn has everyone who signed up stayed with you have you asked anybody well we have lost a few of the customers I mean they had they had a limited number of customers only so so bigger customers have not left us yet the second seven months oh yeah so when people are when people are what is your monthly turn right now me are we talking like ten percent or two percent or what 10% I mean 10 customers you can't really say chandre I mean today churn seats though like so if they have you right now you have it sounds like about 700 well let me see you've got over a thousand seats on the platform do they'd ever churn seats oh yeah they do they do so what's that turn right because that's a much larger cohort much larger sample size it's okay by the way you can just say it's by the way you're early enough where you might just not measure it's totally okay to say you're not measuring that right now are you not measuring it right now yeah we okay so we are basically kind of doing the guerilla techniques or whatever works and something on whatever the techniques that we have and an experimenting every month as well yeah that makes good sense and then walk me through some of funding history here have you bootstrap the company have you raised we have bootstrapped we keep on going and we have allocated some time to go back to the investors and talk to them as well I haven't really found somebody who can invest a good amount that we are looking for but nevertheless we you always go back and then talk to them and then get to know what is the next step that we should be look working for and how have you gotten these first 10 customers how have you gotten them [Music] initial fire I will say most of them came from contacts and the next five you can say search engine optimization so they indeed Google as they were looking for some solutions we posted in kora we post it on a few forums and a few s/he was as well and they came to our website and they gave us a call and that we have to do something like this so you use kora use other forums what SEO terms were you trying to rank for what is when se what SEO terms were you trying to rearrange for so most of the time people were looking for things like calculation in Google form athlete app yourself create apps in minutes you have that kind of terms people were looking for you it's really a business process apps yeah and your optimism first keywords that's how four or five your customers around you yes very good and what's the team size that's they are you the sole founder no we have five right now five founders or five teammates five team so three founders two members we have we have got a couple of interns as well we'll be joining this one okay and where you guys base Bangalore India everybody yes very good and give us more so kind of give us more the Baxter here before 2017 what were you doing before this company so before I started as I mentioned I started as a software engineer at Cisco and after that I joined a company in Cambodia which was cloud automation platform got acquired by Nutanix Nutanix filed for an IPO and I was working as a product manager there so basically a product background and then moved into tried creating my own product which is clappy right now what drove is it'll leave that cushy job I'm sure you were making good money was very safe I see I see a big market opportunity I see that people are looking for solutions and most of the time people just look back to India for service based software solutions now now the cost is increasing day by day here as well the employee salaries are increasing as well so now ultimately you'll have to move people out and then get some system some automatic system or maybe modular approach so that with least effort you get maximum return so that is something that I saw and I jumped in to create that very good I love the story all right let's wrap up here are shoes with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book it's 0 to 1 0 to 1 number 2 is their CEO you're following or studying right now quite cliche this is Steve Jobs number 3 what's your favorite online - yep and number 4 how many hours of sleep are you getting every night and I'm six okay that's good and which is what's your situation married single you have kiddos single right now so no kids that you know all right no good and how are you 29 alright last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew don't worry heaven everything's gonna be okay hey guys there you have matches just don't worry take the risk he did a stint at Cisco then went through an IPO then in 2017 left to launch clap eeeh which helps you build business applications for you to use internally with your other teams for reporting expense management things like that the company was founded in Bangalore they've got five people totally bootstrap serving ten customers paying on average seven hundred bucks a...