How Clockit CEO Basil Abbas grew Clockit to $120K revenue and 500 customers in 2019.

hello everybody my guest today is basil abbas he loves to make he believes that code and design are the most beautiful when done together he spent seven years in service before discovering a sas product that people would pay for and never looked back he's now building clock it dot io assass time clock software basil are ready to take us to the top yes we can start right away all right so you said you listened to the show so let's see if you can just do the show without me asking any questions ready go no that's not gonna work because waiting to listen to your format so it wouldn't make sense for me to defend the show all right tell me what's the company doing how do you guys make money okay so we are a time clock solution and we have we run our time clocks on things of like mobile web uh we have kiosks biometric devices all that can be integrated into one platform and we offer it as a sas platform like you rightly said and we have a very simple pricing based on teams so you know the larger your team the more you pay the smaller it's it suits almost all companies i love that okay so what's the average customer pay per month uh our lowest plan starts at 15 a month that's for up to 10 users okay that's great and put this on a timeline for me when did you launch the company uh 2016 is when we launched the product and what you were running an agency before that yes we were into consulting so for about roughly seven years we were doing mobile apps web apps cloud-based solutions all of that yep and now you're you're based in dubai did you launch the agency in dubai as well most your customers were there uh not really so we were dealing with a lot of customers back in india and after the product was launched we i decided to move it to dubai because it was more of a strategic time zone for me so i can i i do a lot of customer support directly with customers so that i can get their first hand feedback so it's more of a nice time zone to be where you can cater to customers worldwide and it's very easy to have calls with all of them so still how large did you grow the agency to before doubling down and building clock it i believe we were roughly about 40 people when we were on the agency level okay and how much revenue in your best year in the agency yeah in your best year um that would be roughly about three hundred thousand dollars okay and 300k revenue best year and then when did you basically shut that down was it 2016 that you went all in on the software so the interesting thing is that we wanted a time clock solution internally for our office and then we realized okay there's not much in the market so we decided to build something very simple internally and that kind of took off and then we started getting a lot of requests from companies okay they started looking at what we have internally they said okay how can we have that and then we thought okay this makes sense let's try to launch it as a sas product so we launched it just with the biometric uh fingerprint integration and very soon all these feature requests are coming in from world over and surprisingly our market in the us became big and i love that okay so how many customers how many customers today are paying customers or you want the free asset total what do you think you know you've listened to the show what's paying oh pay 500 and free uh roughly about 3 000. okay so 500 at 15 bucks a month you're doing about seven grand a month uh more than that because we do have some enterprise customers as well so roughly we're on the ballpark of let's say 10 000. okay 10 000 that's great and if you're doing 10 grand a month today what were you doing about a year ago did you really want to know that it i would i would shy away from that we were doing 2 700 mri yeah no of course i want to know because that everyone has to start with nothing right so you went from 2 700 a month to 10 grand a month where's most the growth coming from what's your growth channel uh seo direct uh website visitors that's something that worked really well for us and we don't do paid acquisitions so what's an seo term that you rank really well that drives you like the most new free leads per month uh very simple time clock that's that's the single most key just time just time clock yes yes so that's the core keyword we have a lot of keywords around that we have pto management and a lot of other things that's relevant to the industry when i search time clock though i see red court on the clock time clock wizard one time clock i don't see you pop up anywhere so it sometimes depends region to region as well if you look for uh time and attendance software we do come up if you search for keywords that you would combine together then it does come up okay well which keyword right now though like when you look at your google analytics which seo keyword that you've optimized for is driving you the most like new website impressions per month it's just time it's usually just time clock or time and attendance software time and what time and attendance attendant time and attendance software interesting okay yeah so i just put that in as well okay so both those seo keywords like how much would you say how many traffic how many clicks do they drive to your website per month per month uh we're looking at roughly about seven thousand to ten thousand range that many that's a lot all free all free yes that's why we don't look at any other channels for marketing the reason is uh we did try six months back and what we realized was the chill tends to be higher for any customers that we get through paid channels yeah okay seven thousand and ten thousand clicks per month let's just say ten thousand to make it even of the ten thousand how many sign up for a free account uh so the thing is that we removed the free plan i think about last year and we only went in with the basic paid plan so so when they hit your website how many how many of them get started roughly about three percent okay and what does that mean they're putting in a credit card they're paying yes they put in the credit card they start paying for the service right away no free trial no free trial no we do give a free trial 14 day free trial is available okay but they put the credit card in at the start of the trailer at the end no at the end okay so three percent put in their email address and their name and then at the end some portion of that three percent actually put in a credit card yes absolutely okay interesting um do you know what percent of the three percent actually put in their credit card at the end uh no not off the not off the hand that's okay that's okay adam percent uh put in his credit card okay great um that's a healthy growth tactic so walk me through some other stuff are you bootstrapped or you raise capital we've not raised capital self-funded and as of today we do get a lot of offers but the thing is that as of today it's not money that's going to solve my problem it's just basically time because our we do put on a lot of future updates and things there are good things that's going to happen in the next couple of months and it's not necessarily the money that's going to help me to grow what's your team size today the three of us plural that's great okay four of you guys um and is the company profitable are you burning cash no we've been profitable from six months off the product launch that's something that we do believe in so i would always look to become profitable as soon as possible all four folks based in dubai uh no as of today it's just me because i just migrated over here three four months back okay and we're just looking to bring the team as well eventually okay and um tell me more about churn what's your turn today uh logo or revenue revenue uh two to three percent monthly uh yes gross or net that would be the gross okay gross and then when you add back expansion revenue uh per month right so so so right now you said three percent revenue churn gross per month which means 36 revenue churn per year which means retention would be about what is that 64 per year but when you do you have any expansion revenue we do so it's as companies do grow then they do add in more employees into their account and that basically gets me the expansion rate do you know about how many percentage points annually that is uh no i don't have that number of things okay that's okay that's okay all right talk to me about cac so like when you did run a paid experiment what were you paying to get a new 15 a month customer oh we didn't we didn't deep dive that much into it so it was a very basic experiment that we did and i just i just ran it for roughly i believe two months and quantify it though how much cash was the experiment how much did you put in we just put down about 100 dollars to 200 to 200 a day roughly okay per day for two months yes for two months and how many customers did you get um maybe i would say i just got ten not even ten five customers more and it didn't make any sense to us so it just we just thought we'd focus a little bit more on the seo and that kind of that kind of has more benefits yeah...