How Clik.ai CEO Parag Goswami grew Clik.ai to $3.8M revenue and 400 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is prague goswami he is the co-founder and ceo of click.ai he began his tech career as a software engineer at i trust financial advisors and after that founded house that dot in integrand analytics that company was the first online property listing website that generated 10 million plus in property sales over two years and then integrated analytics or integrand analytics was a leading cre focused knowledge processing outsourcing firm that supported seven billion dollars in loan and investment transactions between the globe between 2013 and 2018 after that he founded click dot ai prague you're ready to take to the top yeah absolutely thank you all right so what is click.ai c-l-i-k-i so we are a software platform that helps commercial real estate investors do their due diligence and transaction investment due diligence much much faster than what they are traditionally doing today and are they paying you they're the ones that are paying you customers yeah that's correct so let's for example whenever they receive deals from brokers they would run those files through us and instead of doing a lot of manual work they use the platform to do it much faster okay what do they pay on average to use the tech so uh the price pay range between the lowest subscription ranges from 250 dollars per user per month to anything between 500 so there are different layers to the pricing structure uh traditionally typically we've been selling so far enterprise contracts uh so depending on the number of users they purchase so at price bdb says so and the and you launched it sounds like in 2019 so we we kind of like uh launched the platform just very briefly in 2018 so it's been about two years uh that we but 2019 and 20 was when we actually started doing a lot of work for them okay so pre-revenue no revenue in 20 and 2018. uh a little bit of revenue so you know because of the platforms kind of it's a document extraction driven approach so we started uh like taking some service contracts and from there on move them move those customers to more like sas how much agency revenue did you do in 2018 so the 2018 during our first launch we did about uh 200 000 us dollars uh next year about a half a million and today um you know last year we just crossed seven billion so that's great now that 200 000 though you did in that year one again that was more like agency dollars right it wasn't pure place ass yet no it was kind of like i would say 80 80 services 20 product then next year was more like uh you know 50 50 and then last year it was 70 30. okay so this is it this is great so uh customers pound over 250 bucks per month and then your mrr last month was about how much so about 100k uh right now 100k that's great nice growth and where's moses growth coming from how are you adding new customers uh most of them were founding us online like they're most of the big banks and large broker companies they have digital transformation teams who are looking for more automated solutions so they found us uh some of those growth came from referrals and a little bit from content marketing okay and how many customers are you serving today today we have about uh 15 customers uh overall okay so okay got it so in order to get a hundred thousand dollars of r from 15 customers there must be paying for what three four five hundred seats uh yeah so close to that we're about that many users but i would say that you know top seven customers contribute about 70 of their revenue yep okay so do you have really i mean usually when you see customer concentration like this um at this acv level so pretty pretty expensive you see expansion revenue be really high like you can focus on seven customers and expand them every year what is your expansion revenue look like on a percentage basis over the past 12 months so typically you know across so that's that's our ideal customer which ranges from thirty thousand dollars to 250 and from there on i think there is a potential to go 50 to 100 percent more over the next two years is that what you've actually done over the past 12 months have you ex are there accounts you've expanded by 50 or 100 percent yeah our biggest account actually expanded more than 50 wow and what about churn any downgrade revenue or return revenue so on the enterprise like on the top customers not really but on the smaller we do sell you know single user licenses to some small private equity groups too on that i've i'm seeing 10 20 percent here well give it to me on not a logo basis give it to me on a revenue basis so even if a small person churns well it's not a lot so it's going to be very small churn so what's the revenue churn over the past 12 months um it's hard to quantify but i would say you know uh about a few thousand dollars per month okay got it yes that's i mean that's not a ton at all that's great so super healthy economics here over a hundred hundred twenty hundred thirty percent net revenue retention um how are you getting these banks there's a huge trust factor here walk me through how you're closing them so we just like a product driven approach we have trials going on we open up pocs uh one thing that we do is we fully integrate their existing workflows so once they're all their financial models a lot of their existing uh spreadsheets and stuff are integrated they feel really like like a very highly automated environment and that's why you know there's a little bit of sticky next to the product as well have you have you bootstrapped the business or did you raise oh we bootstrapped and uh you know till 2019 2019 we did our first outside run round for about uh 2 million part of that was some debt from friends and family that converted got it so two million dollar round in 2019 and what valuation did you raise at uh we raised a 10 million dollar price post money do you regret that or was 10 million the right price i think it was a little higher uh could have been a little lower but just for about series a right where we are doing an array around right now so that becomes a benchmark both for us as well as investors but you know eventually it should be okay so you're looking to raise now how much are you raising we're raising about six million dollars and what valuation are you targeting um we don't have a lead but looking at about 18 million free money okay got it and you think you'll get it you think you'll get it done uh hopefully yes but there is a lot of strategic interest you know especially in the proptech sector there are a lot of space coming up so definitely strong momentum how would you work with the spac if they approached you and you liked them i don't think we are at that stage right now but the way i look at it this pack is more like you know they're replacing series c and d but an early early entrance into these strategics would be pretty creepy because again it's a private equity game you know enterprise b2b sas so that's how we're looking at how much cash are you burning per month right now uh silicon please how much cash are you burning per month so we're burning around 100 20 100 to thirty at this point on a gross or net basis on a on a gross basis okay got it and what about on a net basis are you break even uh i would say 20 30 per month is the the kind of like the deficit right now that's not bad at all so you got plenty of runway to get this round and i assume you have some cash in the bank yeah we do you know we can always uh raise from an existing investor but i really would like to have a little more sophisticated uh parties involved just from a growth perspective and tell me more about the team size how many folks today so today we are about 25 people half of that in tech and then some half of them in you know support functions like management um any quota carrying sales reps uh no not so far okay interesting and then we got it so about 15 13 to 15 engineers and another 13 or so marketing and ops and everything else yeah great this is interesting and how are you i mean do you model cac do you look at what it costs you to acquire a new customer since you have again there's so few um very hard but i've tried to do it for smaller accounts and for that it's ranges anything between thousand dollars two hundred thousand dollar hundred thousand dollars right now sorry what a thousand of what a 500 to six of thousand dollars for smaller accounts okay six thousand dollars to get a customer that pays you about 250 a month yeah so 500 dollars to thousand dollars the cost of acquisition for for customers that's paying anything between forty two hundred to six thousand percent got it okay got it very good and where do you think moisture growth is going to come from this year i think uh uh you know where we're launching a full transaction platform very soon so that basically enhanced the entire workflow for a lot of uh investors and banks and that's where we see quite a lot of growth will come on uh we have seen we're seeing quite a bit of traction on single user accounts and smaller groups and that's where you know looking like a healthy pipeline mm-hmm interesting would you ever look at i mean do you want to definitely sell six million on 18 pre you definitely want to sell equity would you ever look at doing a deal where you're using founder path to turn some of your mrr and upfront cash uh i think i would like to build a company right now i...