How Cloudcherry CEO Vijay Lakshmanan grew Cloudcherry to $1,000K revenue and 100 customers in 2020.

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 help on global domination we just broke our 100,000 unit sold Mark and I'm your host Nathan lka this is episode 682 coming up tomorrow morning I love this story four very smart phds chose entrepreneurship instead of instead of a big job and as a result they raised $75 million for data in their in data indexing tool called calibra good morning everybody my guest this morning is venod muuk Krishnan he was first a sailor then a strategist and now an entrepreneur he was fortunate to have worked in diverse and challenging environments starting with the Merchant Navy a high energy mobile First Financial technology startup where he headed strategy and Global sales and now he currently serves as co-founder and CEO of a company called Cloud Cherry a tech startup based in Pleasanton California with offices in Singapore India and a new location we're about to see but not are you ready to take us to the top yes I am okay you're two days into a brand new office show us around what are we looking at here all righty so let's do this um so this is Salt Lake City um where we our first batch of five people undergoing training on the product just hold on a moment and while while you're walking around what's your current team size uh we have 74 people 7 74 yeah they're primarily between India and Singapore okay and we yeah and what how much Capital have you raised you've rais some Capital so we've raised 7 million in the last month total I think we raised close to9 half million okay and before you show us the office just quickly the on liner what does cloud Cherry do uh it's the it's the voice of customer platform for Millennials um who are having it's really the VOC platform for Millennials sorry a video platform uh VOC voice of customer oh voice of customer platform so what people can collect like testimonials from Millennials on it or what so I mean the point really is that Millennials are having very complicated Journeys with the brands they work with right some are on mobile some are on the web some are in stores some are social and if you really want to understand the customer in 2017 you need to be present in all of those channels right you need to inside of the app like uber does right you need to be able to people when they're in your web experiences you need to be able to speak with customers in store on ivr on social media all these channels that customers are present in on a real-time basis and be able to analyze act and do something about what customers are telling you so it's really a feedback platform but on speed so Cloud Sher helps businesses talk to Millennials on speed across all platforms absolutely time absolutely let's see this beautiful office guys if you're listening right now via the podcast on iTunes there'll still be very episode but make sure you check out this episode on YouTube so you can see this office of shown us around yes sir so this is the inspiration wall so whoever joins us usually comes in and puts up an image that truly inspires them so it could be anything from philosophical to downright funny but we believe that because you need to walk into your office every day and be inspired by what you truly believed in so this is kind of sort of an anchor this is the standard we hold you to Dr Seuss quotes pictures inspirational things I love it George Washington saying his prayer we' got something about sharks not complaining on Monday yeah we got we got all sorts of things so back in India office of course we got 70 more uh such images so we said whoever visits the US office will get to put their name on the wall so that's so that's that red is our brand color as you might have guessed might have guessed so we have six pillars of our culture uh which is freedom ownership smart work passion and a couple more I'll show you later right give us a wide shot real quick at the office just so we don't get dizzy so we understand where we are hey everybody say hello people that's Nathan he runs a phenomenal podcast and he's covering us this week so what's up guys I'll just I'll just put your L all right hey guys how are you guys do you all like Cloud Cherry as the new office like amazing amazing love it they were paid like vode paid them off 20 20 grand a pop to say yes nice meeting you guys all right um where are we okay let's go back so that's sort of a delight wall I love this so it's a pretty big office how many square feet is it are you there it's not it's not it's it's 2,000 square feet and what just out of curiosity but know what do you pay for 2,000 square feet there it's actually it's it's in south of $2 a square foot which is annually or monthly monthly I mean I was to say that would be a steal so about 3 four grand a month in rent what I really like and this is something you should see is the view that we got just hold on a moment this is the view what are you what am I looking at here so you're looking at the Grand America Hotel which is sort of an iconic hotel in in Sal Lake City and you're looking at the hills in the background I know it's a little little unclear but you got snow cap mountains in the background and it's beautiful it is it is it is okay let's let's dig into the cloud Cherry business so how many years ago did you launch it so we around three years old yeah three years 2014 uhhuh 201 and is your business model A SAS model pure SAS we are a pure play SAS platform okay so 2014 you raised you said $7 million total no we've raised around nine total seven was the last round okay and when was that last round what month September 2016 just just a few months ago okay a few months ago good uh you said 74 people and you've got offices uh we we covered that in the intro but now you have obviously one in Utah as well um how many customers are you serving to date so we have close to 100 cust customers um a lot of them in Asia because that's where we started uh but the massive push now is to grow the business in North America because we saw a lot of inbound demand but we were not able to service it remotely and hence we have the team here and is this I mean is this like an Enterprise play I mean if you have 100 customers and you're raising 9 million I assume in a healthy valuation these these monthly arpus must be pretty high that's a good question so I think um custom experience is not for a single single presence if you have a single store or a single restaurant you probably don't need a customer experience platform right so we we have an SMB practice that is serviced out of India the global SMB practice but the team here really hits midmarket and Enterprise so the True Value shows itself when you're selling into mid-market and and Enterprise that's where so what's the currently what's the average customer pay you per month um so I mean the smvs could be even couple hundred bucks a month but the average appu for an Enterprise customers is is the tune of a few thousand so a mid-market customer could be uh monthly at $3,000 a month an Enterprise customer could well be $155 $220,000 a month so that's the spectrum between midm market and Enterprise so I mean can I can I take a $3,000 monthly average times 100 customers and assume you're doing about 300 Grand in Mr or is that high or low uh we don't share any of our Revenue numbers I told you you can ask me the questions am I not give you the answers is there is is is the math wrong though right 100 customers times a three grand average is there anything wrong with that math um so we have a composite mix of customers we have customers who pay us more we have customers who pay us less so it's really somewhere in the middle so don't worry somewhere somewhere by Jan 2018 I'll actually publish my public numbers so give give us a range though like make it as wide as you want to keep it vague I mean are we talking like under a million monthly recurring revenue and and greater than 100 Grand like give us some big range yeah so I think uh uh a million North is is the right right ballpark you said sorry a million what north of a million is the right ballpark yeah Oh north of a million dollars per month yeah yeah annual annual month I was say Okay annually got it so you're doing you're doing more than 88 Grand per month which is more than a million dollar uh run rate you did the 9 million uh round in September or sorry 7 million round in September you have 9 million in total funding walk me through what does a company like this look like in terms of customer turn per month so we to be honest we have uh almost zero customer churn in SMB at the moment again it's a history of factor of us being a fairly young company uh in Enterprise the the churn is single digit like low single digit wa I never hear I have never heard with all the interviews I've done over 600 someone tell me that their Enterprise churn is higher than their SMB churn so if you look at Enterprise right if you if you have one customer going it's like 2 3% right whereas SMB we have had no churn none of our...