How Cloudlead CEO Noman Siddiq grew to $3.1M revenue and 40 customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is noman siddiqui is the ceo of cloud lead formerly e-list guy he's motivated tech savvy and results-driven business leader with a thirst for achieving accelerated revenue growth and a diverse client base he's in been involved in assisting smes with head hunting executive search and building comprehensive b2b databases through outsourcing all right noman are you ready to take us to the top absolutely okay so what is cloud lead and how do you make money what's your business model um cloud bit is basically top of the funnel data resource sales company that helps you know b2b software companies marketing agencies and any company that has the marketing department with uh finding accurate b2b contact and account database to fuel their sales and marketing team with you know with their outbound processes okay and what do you charge per month on average so it depends it varies from customer to customer some customer let's say uh you know we don't have any contractual um what do you say uh pricing model it's more on the ps4 side where our customers pay for let's say as low as 500 leads per month and some of our best customers pay us on an average two thousand dollars per month for you know buying as low as 2000 leads per month so it depends from customers to customers on an average to one customer pages two thousand dollars per month on average okay and how many customers have you grown to total um so currently we have 40 full-time customers how many 40 40 got it 40. so you've grown to 40 full-time customers uh something so you're doing around 80 grand per month is that accurate that's right yes okay and what's the history here when did you launch the company it was launched in 2011 under the name of e-list guy which was which we are trying to rebrand as cloud lead um effectively this year uh we started off i started off as a freelancer myself and i was working for an executive research firm from the us and primarily my my job was to um you know it's more which was more on the sales development side and my job was to find identify contacts as well as um you know do the email campaigns as well as you know follow up by phone calls and i realized that there was a huge gap between um you know between the you know between the sales and database side and i was basically spending 60 of my time identifying contacts from the web and that's when i decided to start the data company that's when i decided to actually start as a freelancer first and see what the market is like and so where are you in terms of in terms of the tech what's behind the platform are you just paying for kind of clear bit and full contact to enrich your web scrapers and then feeding that excel list back to your clients um so we have a massive database of companies that we have built so far in the last seven years then we have a team of 60 plus full-time research analysts that help us source contact names from social sources using the database that we have and then we have a excel lead cleaner as well as an email verifying software that allows us to organize data that we have collected in the excel spreadsheet using different machine learning algorithms that we have built and simultaneously that tool allows us to validate the email address using the smtp outgoing outgoing server yeah for email deliverability yep that makes good sense so you said you have 60 people full time or what's your team size today um full-time research analyst yes but we have a non-productive not i i won't say non-productive but we have three people on the human resource side uh and five on the administration and finance and accounting side so sixty eight all together that's like seventy and what are you are you bootstrapped or if you're right 70 i would say um okay so initially when i started that's more on the bootstrap side i you know worked part time as a freelancer save money and then use the same money to start a company um last year we raised about 150 000 from friends and family to re-launch as cloud lead but that's about it was that debt or equity that was against equity yes how much so how much do they buy for 150 grand seven percent of the company seven yes okay interesting and what is the i mean give me a sense of growth rate so you're doing about 80 grand per month today december 2016 per star december 2017 what were you doing a year ago a year ago it was uh 40 to 45 000 uh per month and close to half a million dollars a year okay sorry you said 40 000 a month that's right 40 or 45 000 a month and what's driven most of the gross do you've doubled year over year how are you landing new customers okay so um as of now in the last seven years we've significantly grown from referrals only so let's say um you know people change jobs all the time we typically work very closely with sales and marketing professionals head of marketing or head of sales from the company so every time they change their jobs they took my contact information with them and you know that's how we grew with them and it was more like a referral based network where we had leads coming in to us versus we going out until um you know this year when we started rebranding with you know uh with a new name of cloud lead and we have hired a team of sales development we're trying to build a team of sales development reps and you know scaling up on their own our outbound processes mm-hmm and are you i mean what are you you know considering your scaling your team here and your growth or what are you spending right now to acquire a customer as of now it's it's next to nothing it's little nothing a very minimal amount of money we have uh we're allocating budget for next year starting off 28 january 2018 where we plan to invest on trade shows exhibitions uh conferences meetups and you know um outbound prospecting efforts as well as a little bit of inbound well so right now you're you don't have any sales people no marketing people and you're not doing any paid spend no we do have two marketing people and one sales person okay so you do have a cost so you just you take you add up their salaries over the past 12 months and then divide the new customers into those salaries i would say it would roughly be 12 to 15 thousand dollars right here okay so so all to i think you just said their salaries are 12 to 15 grand per year so if i multiply times three on the high side that's 45 grand a year and you know you have 40 customers i assume what maybe you got you doubled so let's say you got 20 last year so 20 into the 45 000 you could say what you're spending call it what is that about 2 000 bucks to acquire a customer um closely roughly you could say that yes well the reason i'm asking is you raise capital and you want to scale so i mean how do you think about customer acquisition costs in terms of scaling your team and scaling your paid spend channels i'm sorry i lost you there can you could you please repeat that again yeah so i i mean i'm asking these cat questions to better understand how you're thinking about growth you know you're going to do more spend next year you're trying to bring on new people i mean are you not looking at cac yes we're looking at tac and then for the next year we i have aggressive plans of maybe setting up a company in the us by summer next year where i want to go live with the sales development team in the u.s versus here in the bar here in karachi or dubai because i feel if you hire a sales team in the us they would better understand the importance of data versus um you know versus hiring a sales team here so i think we are allocating a budget of at least 1.5 million dollars for for the next year to set up a company in the u.s to hire a team and go live with full-time sales from the u.s version is to buy your karachi are you raising money right now where are you going to get that 1.5 million from um in the last seven years i i have significantly saved a decent amount of money that i'm going to use to bootstrap the company versus raising money because raising money is not just getting money i'm probably going to be very careful because i want to get partners involved who help me contribute to the growth of this company versus investing just investing money i would say so this is interesting i'm interested in this and i'll tell you why it depends on your tech stack um i'm doing a lot of research in this space right now a lot of people just buy clear bit data and full contact data there's nothing really proprietary about what they do but there are very large venture capital firms and the largest private equity firms paying me a lot of money for my database at getlatka.com which is basically b2b sas revenue numbers things like that and they're going nathan you should really invest here you're the only one with revenue numbers and customer count numbers but you should build out other things that mattermark and datafox and pitchbook have and a lot of them like pitchbook i know uses a massive team over in india to basically scrape the web they have some ai and they pay for other data sources i'd love to talk to you about doing some kind of jv in the united states that's a very tricky question i mean and that's a very good one um yes i know there's a lot of noise out there in this space and i don't know um based on my past experience of raising money from [Music] friends and family and losing seven percent of the company to them um i realized that and then of course reading about past experiences from different companies have raised money i think it's a very tricky one because um when you raise money not only losing the company you're actually losing your yeah no man sorry i wasn't saying you should raise capital i was saying i i'm interested in potentially partnering with you and launching something like this in the u.s oh okay right now um absolutely that sounds like a good part that sounds like a wonderful opportunity but we have to look at the downside or maybe the cons first versus um launching something in partnership in the u.s because um i don't know we have to look at multiple side of this well why why do you feel like you need a partner at all in the us why not just do it yourself why work with me at all that's because um that's because um there's a financial side attached to karashi or even dubai when we talk about the financial side but the biggest challenge that i face in the past is let's say if i call up a big company for um working with us and i tell them that hey guys i'm based in karachi pakistan and i have a front office in dubai they um i immediately lose customers because there's a trust deficit the media perception about pakistan is totally um different um than in the us and peop you know generally big companies enterprise customers are more comfortable sending money or working with companies that are more physically based in the u.s so that's the challenge and that's where i want to address this issue yeah no man that's what i'm saying we could potentially do something special together you know i have enterprises paying me in the ranges of millions of dollars for different kinds of contracts i'm signing right now this is a space that i'm definitely going to get into um the reason it's opportunistic i'm talking to you is you know first thing i like to try and partner with the company uh and i like you and you follow me so that makes me feel good right but if i can't find a partner to partner with i'll build it myself or i'll just buy a company you know this space is very crowded there's a lot of companies in the space so as you look for a way to go into the us market um you know a bit about me because you listen and you know we you you've said you've listened how would we work together i mean where would i bring the most value do you believe um in in in bringing a new customers managing relationships with existing customers um there's one side where i lag behind is uh the financial side of the company in terms of um you know calculating the cost of acquisition per customer or managing the entire finance or even at times i remember when i was just alone by all by myself managing a team of 10 researchers and when i was managing the finances i used to forget invoicing my customers so i potentially i can say that i've lost up to 10 to thousand dollars just to customers because i forgot to invoice themselves by the way over the last 12 months how much total revenue have you done over the last 12 months we have done uh i can tell you from january 2017 to november it has been seven hundred and ninety thousand um dollars thus far yeah that's something that's current this year till november and are you cash flow positive or no or are you losing money oh no we are very cash flow positive we're not losing money to date in the last seven years uh i've always been positive in terms of um you know profits and making profits well no one we should definitely chat more uh kind of after this podcast uh i'm interested in the space and you have some good traction that you've built over the past five six years so that'll be good in the meantime let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book um be obsessed or uh be of average be obsessed or be average number two is there a ceo you're following or studying right now yes i i follow satya nadella from microsoft and mark zuckerberg from facebook number three besides your own what's your favorite online tool um gmail google number i use it for everything number four how many hours of sleep to get every night nine to nine nine point five hours at night and what's your situation married single you have kids oh i'm married i have two kids and how old are you i am 31 31 last question no man take us back uh 11 years what do you wish your 20 year old self knew um if i could turn back time i would probably go back and travel much more than i do right now what i've done in the past there you guys have from now on he would have traveled more launched his company many years ago in 2011 since renamed it cloud lead he's got a team of 68 between pakistan and dubai they're helping over 40 customers paying about 2 grand a month so they're doing about 80 grand per month in december 2017 in revenue about a year ago in december 2016 they were only at 40 grand so good growth fully weighted cac is around 2 000 healthy economics looking to expand in the u.s soon and he recently sold about seven percent of the company for 150 grand actually near the start of the company looking to scale now no man thank you for taking us to the top welcome thank you nathan for having me on this podcast