How rehook.ai (YC W22) CEO Sidharth Malik grew to $440K revenue and 2K customers in 2025.

he's had a ton of experience working in tech companies decided in 2013 to take the plunge himself and go all in with his two co-founders they've since raised a total of $9.6 million 1.6 seed 8 million in series a they launched Revenue in 2016 broke $1.5 million in total sales now in this month which would be June well uh May right May 2017 broke 400,000 bucks in Mr at about about a $5 million ARR right he wants to double by the end of the year so we'll see he does it December 2017 he wants to Gim for 800 Grand in monthly occurring Revenue still early on the economics at gr turn CAC they're just figuring that out with their team of 45 base between California New York and India again making it easier for mobile applications to understand what the heck users are doing in their apps this is episode 736 coming up tomorrow morning I talk with Patrick Bosworth 3,000 hotels are paying him to optimize their pricing and investors have put in $50 million will they win but first here's Days episode this is the top where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of Revenue or customer base you'll learn how much revenue they're making what their marketing funnel looks like and how many customers they have I'm now at $20,000 per talk 5 and6 million he isent on global domination we just broke our 100,000 unit so Mark and I'm your host Nathan lka hello everybody my guest today is seil Thomas he's the co-founder and CEO at a company called clever tap seil are you ready to take us to the top hey I am okay good good so tell us what clever tap does and how do you make money so clever tap you know combines uh People based analytics with user engagement so you put a little bit of clever tap into your mobile apps into your websites Etc and you can get to understand what your users do and you can use all that data to actually engage with send them messages you know push notifications email all of this we do it at real time and we do it at massively large scale and we make money based on you know the the the number of like we call it events but the amount of data that people use on our store on our platforms and use to LIC andiz their users is this like a mix panel for mobile apps exclusively yes this is actually like a mix panel Plus app boy kind of combination for mobile apps and websites also though got it okay good so I think this is really simple to understand right somebody I'm I'm making this up BBNT has you guys installed on their BB&T app on the phone they can see where I'm clicking how I'm clicking how long I'm spending to understand how to make the mobile app experience a better one is that accurate absolutely and then they can you know trigger based on your actions they can like BB app can trigger notifications to you like hey you left something in your cart you know or you uh you know this is a great feature that we've just launched weing to go try it out that kind of stuff and before we go back to Neil and capture more of kind of your launch story and how you got into this you know the good stuff help us understand what's the average customer paying you per month uh so our average customer average contract value for the top 152 accounts is north of $150,000 but don't obviously that's that's going to be skewed because it's your top cohort if you just take an average across your tire customer base what would that be about $2,500 to $33,000 a month okay sorry so about 2,000 bucks a month and that's all based on event data right that's all based on event data got it and just to be clear sorry because I cut you off um I want to get the average first your top cohort you said that will be in the 20 to to 50 Grand per month uh it is the 20 to 50 it's about yeah 10 10 to 20 grand per month and no the reason those folks are paying so much is they're just processing way way more events they're way more popular companies way more popular companies we do offer on the Enterprise side like highend data science packs and so on so uh you know they they they value from both they get value from both so there's a Professional Services element there to You'll customize some stuff uh a little bit it's mostly products cues so a data science pack you add on uh which gives you some predictive capabilities and some uh you know sort of data sciencey more insights into your data that automatically you know machines machines can do for you and have you raised capital for this thing or have you bootstrapped it no we raised Capital we are actually one of the few companies that are both Exel and seoa partners funded so uh so you know we we we have tier one inv investors and happy about it how many have you how much have you raised a total of $9.6 million so we had a seed round of 1.6 million and then we followed up followed it up with a series a worth $8 million and you mentioned both sequ and Excel do they I'm not aware of this do they not usually invest together because one of them wants to be the clear lead or or do they not usually Syndicate or what no no there are very few uh I mean there are like I don't know eight or 10 or 12 companies in the world that they have both invested in uh Dropbox being one of them clevers being another one yeah tell me more about your story so what year did you launch this company in we launched this this will we almost coming up on four years now uh 2013 yeah 2013 you know in a couple months it'll be four years uh we I mean we are three co-founders I'm a technologist by Heart by did my computer science engineering so by profession also uh I have done a couple of startups I've worked at Microsoft and HP and you know Lar Enterprise companies too I've been CTO at uh at infospace you know in the in the US and also worked CTO in India at a big group called Network eting so the whole need with clevertap came because you know we were like a personally you know run and managed apps for all my life Mo I mean websites and apps right used to be a lot of websites now in the last five 10 years it's become a lot of apps uh and there's just been a need to you know engage your users how do I cross sell upsell the right content to the right person but more importantly with mobile at the right time there is this concept of you know a mobile moment right when when you enter a bus you know it's like you know 20 minutes of your dedicated bus ride is when like you know you are most most success High utility right utility moments exactly uh and and you know we've been able to we' we've looked uh for tools all our lives not really found anything took a crack at trying something out on our own mhm so let me ask you a question if I if I grab my phone like one of the things with these like mobile apps is like there are maybe four of them that I use on a daily basis right I mean so like I don't ever see a world where an individual consumer is engaging with 20 apps right every day which puts a I think a cap on your ability to grow since your revenue is based on consumer actions inside of applications is that a risk or am I overreacting no I think I mean it's it's it's it's from your point of view right but the the other point of view is our customers or the businesses point of view right where a USA Today or a New York Times or all of these I mean they want to be on your phone and they want to send you content so that you click on it read it and so on right so there is a uh there are businesses that people are trying to build uh and sure you you know the four apps might be might be Facebook Twitter whatever right that that you use but there's there's like just from a statistical point of view right there are more than 10 ,000 apps going into the app stores Apple and Android every day MH uh and irrespective of like you know how small they start out with you know even an Uber started off with an app store launch right so yeah but know come on let's not joke ourselves dear I would guess 99,999 five of those daily apps get like two downloads right well I'll take uh like our you know our pricing starts like at 1,000 bucks a month I'll take ,000 a month from like you know 100,000 apps yeah hey so make that make that number real for us for a second so like I don't know if Uber is your customer or not I I don't know if you can say but how many if Uber was a customer how many like events per month are they processing if you had to estimate uh so a good estimate I mean we use this uh internally to calculate to give proposals and things like that right you're typically a monthly active user does you know 15 to 20 things uh 15 to 20 events a month in your app so these could be a couple of sessions this could be one long session whatever so an average monthly active user you know ends up doing you know so he looks around browses you know reads three articles updates a profile you know orders some so this might be way higher on Facebook but way lower on Tumblr right it just depends yeah exactly and how many customers today are you serving or are they paying uh so we have about 200 paying customers we have about 2,000 uh apps that are sending us live data 2500 apps that are sending us have a free plan we have a Premium plan uh that is actually very very lucrative like a 10 million events a month is actually our freeer plan yeah uh and you know there are some limitations on how many campaigns Etc that you can send out in that free plan but uh you know that's when you pop over into the paid plan yeah what's your I'm curious what's your conversion from folks that start off on that free one into a paid like in the first 12 months uh it's actually very very high it's not of 30% and it's actually people get addicted to to it once they see it right and they just want to do more that's great now can I do the math with 200 customers you earlier said our po was somewhere around 2,000 so you guys are doing at least 400 Grand per month in Revenue y math is pretty good okay go that's good that's good talk talk to me about some of the other kind of things related to growing one of the like a SAS company like this I mean do you compete with folks like you know app Annie or or is anyone else competing in the space yet no we don't we don't compete with app Annie so there are two three uh I mean sort of tiers if you will so there is the app an which is more app data right people use it for intelligence people use it for sales funnels and all of those kind of things app brain app an apptopia mix rank there's a whole bunch of those there's another uh set if you will of what are known as attribution providers apps flyer and you know Branch to some extent and apps and uh people use these attribution tools when they do a lot of Facebook ads Google ads whatever to to get their apps downloaded uh we are actually in a third bucket of user engagement and app analytics we compete with the likes of mix panel uh amplitude uh flurry to some extent you know on the analytics side we compete with uh app boy and uh Urban Airship and and people like that on the engagement side yeah we the only ones who put these two things together so we actually help you know reduce the budgets to to to become one budget you don't have to evaluate sort of an analytics and an engagement tool provider and plus you get all the capabilities of using all your analytical data right for user engagement and what are you at right now in terms of gross churn monthly uh actually it's very good I mean we we are very very low churn we haven't had a customer more than uh I mean paying us anything north of like I mean $1 thousand or more is zero got it so of everyone on on of everyone on a $1,000 a month plan who started at some point in the past three years or four years nobody has left nobody has left and we actually started monetizing I mean it's a broad product because you know people uh we are tackling like analytics and engagement right these are two individual broad products so we started monetizing only about only 12 months ago it was like May last year that we actually got the first first money in so all our growth wait so that's impressive so you went from no Revenue obviously obviously you had a very nice tool a really nice tool and and a community you're building but you had no Revenue 12 months ago and now you're you know caught 400 Grand per month that's that's an amazing growth rate yeah yeah yeah we are very very happy about it and we are you know we just need to keep that going it's been amazing what's your team size now we are about 45 people globally uh 10 11 11 in the US uh 30 32 in in India right now got it and which part of the us uh we are in Sunnyville uh La San Francisco New York is just sprinkling of people here and there and is most is most the dev team in India and the most sales and marketing in in the states is that how it works yeah our head of product actually Paul BR is here you know in San Francisco with me uh so we uh we we also have some content marketing people here we have a VP of engineering who sits in La uh and we have some customer success people also here in the US but a lot of core engineering about yeah team of the core engineering team is in India right now that's great and then what are you paying to acquire new customers well it varies we have a good Machinery of you know marketing qualified leads coming in through website and through a lot of the content stuff that that we done and we nurture them sort of through the self-service product and eventually get to a paid uh level MH uh and on the outbound on the sales outbound side is where we hit you know bigger accounts and and that's like just prospecting and and like a direct sales model so we are not actually spending a lot of money in advertising and so on it's actually direct sales right if you do though like a fully weighted CAC though right so all the salaries of the sales people divided into the total like customer new customers per month I mean are we talking a thousand bucks to get a new customer 10,000 what's it no I mean right now it's it's well below a thousand because we not spending like ad money right sorry I'm I just to be clear I'm not asking about ad money if if you but if you do a fully weighted CAC which tip most people include like you know sales related headcount expenses yeah what is your what would your fully weighted Cat come out to be you think uh I'm actually not even sure I have that number right now uh okay is this something that investors brought up I mean usually when you're raising capital on your deck this is like a key question because they'll say well if I give you eight million bucks where you gonna spend it and you say well our cacta LTV ratio is blank so we're gonna spend it here right yeah yeah so uh so I mean so yes and no meaning we are early in our stage growth right so right now we are being being pressed on margins which are really really good but that's just cost of what's really good what's a really good margin for you uh we not of like 85% margin on just cogs right these don't include sales commissions your biggest thing there's what like hosting probably it is hosting it is actually hosting and we've built groundup technology it's our own prop proprietary like sort of technology that we built from groundup to do this we we ended up resisting the urge to use something like red shift or you know tools that people use and those tend to get really more expensive so it's purpose built for what we want to do uh and it's actually working out really well early you know early days SE I lost you there for a second you said early days what early days it's hard when you set out to build something right but now it's come out to actually really really benefit us y y now depending on obviously when you launched Revenue I so you launched in 2013 so you had no Revenue then no Revenue 2014 I think no Revenue 2015 right no what did you break what did you break in 2016 you had just launched pricing at this point right we just launched pricing so we are you know roughly adding a million or a little more every quarter since we since we of of annual ofn what you if you do if you uh break away from ARR for a second though in 2016 what' you guys do break I mean did you break a million in Revenue yeah we broke uh million and a half you know little little around that yeah yeah that's great and now you're again well up to what is that you're at a about a almost a $5 million run rate exactly exactly what's your goal by the end of the year uh I think we'll conservatively hit 10 that's my board number so don't you know I want to go past that yeah that's awesome that's so cool okay top tribe I have to tell you many people go Nathan you came out of nowhere your website's growing so fast how' you do it the answer is simple so I use HostGator I don't know if you guys know that but I use HostGator and the reason I do they have like about 4500 free templates I can use cuz I don't code they've got a great e-commerce plugin and guys I bug the heck out of their support they've got 247 support which I love so what I've done is I've worked with them you guys know I make great deals if you go to hostgator.com Nathan you can sign up get your own domain for 30% off and a 45 day money back guarantee okay again I make great deals for you guys go to hostgator.com Nathan to grab that now great let's and let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite Business book my favorite Business book is actually right now play bigger I'm reading this book called called play bigger it's really nice number two is there a CEO you're following or studying right now uh SATA nadela Microsoft CEO Microsoft CEO y number four besides your number three besides your own what's your favorite online tool like host skater uh uh actually I like uh slack a lot uh it's it's it's go to go to what we do I like it a lot and why do you like how do you use it on a daily that mean is it the first thing you check in the morning or it is definitely the first thing I check in the morning we have all kinds of you know small company so anytime somebody puts a credit card on file we get a slack message and all of that kind of stuff using our own tools so so there's a lot of good stuff in there that's great number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night I actually do pretty well I get seven to eight hours of sleep every night I try to do that and what's your situation married single you have kids married I have twins who will be 13 years old in in June oh wow very cool and what and how old are you uh I'm 47 1969 so do the math you did that all right last question take us back 27 years s what do you wish your 20-year-old self knew uh I wish I knew as much as my kids know at 13 man I had no clue when I was 20 there you guys have it seil wishes he knew as much as his twin girls or is it are they girl or boy girl a girl and a boy it's girl and a boy he wishes he knew as much as his 13-year-old kids did uh when he was 20 again he's had a ton of experience working in tech companies decided in 2013 to take the plunge himself and go all in with his two co-founders they've since raised a total of $9.6 million 1.6 seed 8 million in series a they launched Revenue in 2016 broke $1.5 million in total sales now in this month which would be June well uh May right May 2017 broke 400,000 bucks in Mr about about a $5 million ARR rate he wants to double by the end of the year so we'll see if he does it December 2017 he wants to aim for 800 Grand a monthly curing Revenue still early on the economics at gr turn CAC they're just figuring that out with their team of 45 based between California New York and India again making it easier for mobile applications to understand what the heck users are doing in their apps seil thank you for taking us to the top thank youan appreciate it very much if you enjoyed today's episode with Sunil go back and listen to Keegan yesterday his company helps come other companies that sell cannabis you know weed the drug manage their payroll systems