How Coditas CEO Mitul Bid grew to $219.4M revenue and 40 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is mithul bid he's the founder and chief coder at cody toss he believes coders are artists whose art is the code they write he's a computer scientist uh from iit bombay and has been delivering quality software solutions for them 16 years believes he's just getting started now building again codytoss.com and two are you ready to take us to the top yes okay so what is cody tots is this a marketplace to hire developers or the staff's tool what are you building so korean is essentially a team of engineers and designers who offer an entire software development live cycle services so right from user experience of architecture of software development deployment support uh quality assurance so the end-to-end services are on the software development lifecycle and when did you launch this this services team this is in uh november 2014 uh yeah 2014. okay and walk me through how you got your first customer and then the story that i sort of want to dig into here is you are the exact persona you start off doing custom work and then eventually you go oh my gosh so many of my customers have the same problem you build an internal tool and before you know it you're building a great sap stool so we'll work we'll build that story but take us back to day one who was your first customer so my first customer actually had a couple of customers um and these are all people i have known from my previous roles in you know it was before i started uh i had reached out to them about to start and but i was amongst the first quarters of the company and you know i built myself one or two months and built the team are they giving you a spec and they're you're paying for a product or is it or an ongoing retainer how did you monetize it's always time and material for me we've always charged for the hours that we've spent on it and uh the initial projects were largely ongoing projects uh which were already there and we just needed some support around uh getting a few more developers in the project okay do you remember that first year in business 2014 how much revenue you did so uh because of financially in india ends in march uh it was barely uh you know i have to convert it to dollars but around uh upward of uh 150 000 that was like [Music] and in that six months did that feel like success to you were you happy with 160 000 in sales yes and then what happened in 2015 2015 it grew and grew to almost 2 million and then since then it has been growing on here only or more than 50 percent or at least you know upward of 50 percent so what you did about 5 million last year or something like that look movement uh this is 2014 last year we did upwards of 10. you did what about 10 more than 10 minutes more than 10. so so this is obviously i would say one of the you know the hugely successful right sort of services firm you must have had software ideas do you have some internal software products you're using actually no so uh i was very clear about this that you know the that's a that's the biggest problem by a lot of software services companies are not able to you know scale well because they are always in two minds they want to build their own ip and they want to offer services i saw it as a conflict of interest i wanted to make sure i focus on what i was actually building i know continuing to support services so we have zero ip even today we have lots of uh things which are repeatable reusable we've now not gained like i just see it as a conflict of interest right now services are doing really well i strongly believe in it okay so you see it as a conflict of interest so you really are 100 services there is no sas tool here what's your team size today how many people full-time uh we are about 440 440 and how many of them are engineers so almost would be around can you can you explain a lot of my listeners are trying to open up or find firms like yours in bangalore right or or just you know other places in chennai other places in india help me understand how and what it's like working with a development team in india what what's a big mistake that americans make when they try to open an indian uh you know an indian center for development right so actually that's the one of the biggest reasons so the story about why i started in this first place about this was exactly because of the feedback i got from a lot of colleagues you know the first 10 years of my career i was a borderless you should travel to the us and i'm going to develop a conferences a lot of developer conferences i used to get one very very common feedback uh uh around the code quality which you know india produced when someone if there was some matrix which would get an average for quality which india right it would be below standard below average and i as a coder in india very personally i was a clean coder i was very passionate about quality coding and i wanted to make a change and the fundamental difference in reason over here was it wasn't the indian order was not good because that most software services businesses in india looked at it like a business nothing wrong with it but you know they missed the mark by looking at the building block which is good so clean code was not something which was promoted by a lot of companies and i was fortunate to have worked in companies where clean code was genuinely promoted and you know while starting the company i wanted to make sure i focus on that so you know if you look at the name of the company code the tagline code is art strong philosophy hasn't changed from day zero and that's the biggest thing you know you're the people who have tried to work with india and uh that and found that difference right so when you're working with techies from the bay area for example we work with them they expect a similar level of thought process you know multiple ways you know so that's number one and the number two which i really really also wanted to focus on was entire cultural aspect about work-life balance making sure the team is culturally aligned with the clients and the timelines you know making sure deliverables are met saying no at the time a lot of people do not know how to say no so we are super transparent you know we we never promise a bug free software for example right so you know uh you know most of my counterparts are the companies will say we give you birthday software uh anyone who promises about software has never written software or has hasn't been [Music] look for companies which are honest which are focusing on the basics around good quality and you know you speak to us i speak to any who's like a lot of my friends have something completely i know not many companies like robert so it's it's very easy for you to if you dig in you ask the right questions you'll get the right people uh there's a lot of uh there's lots of kind of companies in india right uh which are the offering services but i think this should be the largest differentiator around focus on the code quality or you know focus on the quality so since we are offering services which is a very wide variety like we also have qualitation and services project management services uh user experience services and we have people with all experiences we have people who have just one year of experience to people with 25 years of experience so the range over there is very light so it starts at literally 10 to twelve dollars an hour to up to fifty plus dollars an hour right uh and a lot of our rates also blended so we typically do not uh we avoid charging or even getting some of our key guys as dedicated people on the projects and like a cto like you know uh we have people at the cto level but they are never dedicated on a single project they'll be here on multiple projects and that that's how uh you know a lot of our clients get the benefit they get the top people uh share it across budgets and you know they get the knowledge that they want uh initiated how many clients did you work on for at least an hour last year so uh last year so we we currently have around 35 40 active clients and that's the kind of size we've been maintaining over the lifetime we would have served more than 150 clients because what happens is we we used to get a lot of small projects in the ghetto but our engagement now has largely been product development uh in fact for a lot of our clients uh we own the entire engineering for them right end-to-end right from so we are the cpu we are the like hundred percent of the software product engineering is being done by us and i have clients whom i began with six years ago who are still with us we have clients who are playing a multi so it's going so a lot of we're moving towards you know longer teams and larger uh projects uh now but 30 35 plans is that kind of an average it should go on his head yeah that makes sense i mean if you did if you had 40 clients last year and you broke 10 million revenues here they're paying something on average of like 20 000 a month something like that right right so again the average is a you know good metric but you know we have club projects we only have only one developer we have projects with 90 developers right so uh difficult big big range yeah right what what did your top of the 10 million of revenue did last year what did your top customer make up so um so i have uh three four large clients so one of the largest uh was in the travel and loyalty space um and then you we have clients in the uh you know the uh the person who introduced this connect and cell which is into you know the automated dial dial space and then we have people in the genetic space uh we have a very wide variety of processors so at one end we are doing you know cancer detection based on your genetics and then at the end we're building software to manage horses right uh so it's a big variety and uh so as a company i have never looked at a domain or even a technology as a niche area we are fairly open uh so we have a very large breath that way yep that makes sense i mean so i'm trying to put my head in my listener set so let's use connect himself for example chris came on my show gave a great interview it shocked me when he said he scaled to 25 million in revenue and basically the entire dev team is you yeah so so if chris ever wanted to sell connect himself and an acquirer got and started doing diligence and realized the whole tech team was with you is that a good thing or a bad thing for the acquisition it really depends right uh on what the acquire is acquiring it for first of all right and we do and so we've got this question very often especially from potential investors so you know we we bake in a clause whereby the client can potentially buy the team uh you know if they want uh as well the acquirer can buy their team for some so yeah that that can be fixed at you know a pre-agreed amount on the contracts and there's a build up rate transfer agreement or a transfer of team agreement that we have uh usually not a preference because you know even so we've had some clients who've been acquired but they've continually grown the teams with us because you know these are different they've understood the whole thing very well they came and met us and they've grown the teams or we have multiple such instances but yeah what you're talking about yeah now it's very it's very interesting because a guy like me that doesn't care about chasing a vc valuation or even exiting one day i just want really good developers to build a great product this is a way easier solution than trying to hire developers directly train them set up their environments etc you know you do this for a living can you handle more clients or are you sort of tapped out at 40. no so we've always been on the edge right so since we began we've uh i think the biggest challenge we've always had is getting the talent at the quality levels we are kind of hiring for uh so we've stepped up the game in our learning and development you know coaching and you know uh so we have we are overall improving our you know our way to getting more people uh hire more people uh and that's the challenge clients has never been a challenge but you know between projects we always generally have some small capacity a lot of clients who we've done well with our clients we started small with and we grew the teams together right so you know in fact a lot of clients we started the project from scratch you know we started with three people and today they are very large clients with you know or even post acquisitions have been become very large so well this is your advantage right if i tell you and email you one day hey we have three engineers i want to move faster can we double up to six you can flip a switch and have six instantly that would take six months of my time as a founder to go higher engineers correct correct that's true that that's that's one of the biggest advantages and now since we're scaling i mean we overall have a larger bench you know we always try to maintain a certain percentage of the team as a bench uh as you know buffers and available so it's always kind of for short term large busts and you can have have three of them for three more months and then again scale down back to the uh original three that's smart and one of my questions is going to be how do you prevent founders like me from falling in love with your developers and hiring them directly but you already have a plan for that there's a clause where you can actually buy the team already yeah so that is that's the eventuality and that's you know it's an expensive clause and that's for investors to make sure that you know there is an option to do it it's like you know when you're getting your company acquired you'll be a multiple of your earnings how much is that if i'm paying you 10 grand a month for three developers and i want to end up bringing them on to my team full time what might that look like so again it'll depend on you know we'll first have to agree upon a minimum commitment number one right so you know i wouldn't allow you to uh transfer them for the first minute one or two years right and after that it will be relatively high i typically would take a fairly minimum six to ten or one year of a billing kind of thing to execute that uh that's rarely happened in fact you know a lot of clients speak for us running the teams uh you know even a post acquisition or you know post the investor understanding this which is an option available right so uh you know in the worst case kind of a scenario but the other the other part is my ip is my team right uh the biggest challenge is not getting clients it's getting the right team members so we have a very strong non-solid station process which our clients understand you can ideally should not be hiring from me directly it's a relationship also um and uh our team members also have signed up with us that you know they cannot work with clients and they're loving it i'm seeing pictures of you guys rafting together on white water on on your website there's clearly a strong culture here which is important yes yes so uh we are very very clear that people first culture is you know uh i think you know i can go on record seeing and i don't care about investors because i don't have any um i'm moving inside your bootstraps 110 yeah so you know 1500 to whatever 15 million today so you so you personally when you launched you put in 1500 to start right and that was because that's a paid up capital required you know we you declare some money which you know with us starting so we put in 1500 why don't we even use that fully [Music] and we've now brought in a lot of team members at stakeholders and that's the what i want to do i want to keep on getting team members within the team to come and become skate stakeholders uh i strongly believe i want the buy to grow large i don't necessarily hold on to the share of the buyer do you pay any profit sharing out to the team so that's the engagement i had with some of the people who joined the stakeholders now so you know there was a profit sharing which i had with a few team members and now they're part of the larger [Music] they organization helped grow the team so i think one thing i always uh tell everyone is that the growth of the you know entire organization is dependent on each and every person you know everyone has contributed and that's very clear about how we want to continue moving forward also this is a this is a heck of a story thanks for making time for me let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite business book i'm not a much of a reader but uh recently um i i read a book by a friend called let's build a company uh a startup story minus a budget fairly uh i was pretty impressed by the book here number two is their founder you're following or studying i love uh zoho ceo great role model i just love him number three what's your favorite online tool for building kodi tasks i no longer code so as in because i don't have time for it but uh yep g suit i think that's where most of my time is right uh gmail particularly but g-suite entirely or companies uh number number four how many are they sleeping every night oh i need that i am very clear if i don't sleep i i i can't function so how many hours seven okay and what's your that we mentioned mary do you have any kids yep uh wow okay two kids and how old are you i'm 39 39 last question what's something you wish knew when you were 20. um i wish i knew people were complex uh so over the period of i've learned i've improved myself in my people's skills and learnt more guys so many stasios i have on would whisper in my ear and say we use this firm called cody toss in india to do all of our development like chris at connecting himself who broke 25 million bucks in revenue i said i gotta talk to the guy behind codytoss it turns out it's fatal and his wife building a great organization over 400 folks on the team they had over 10 million revenue last year really helping folks again build great development and software not bug free but highly responsive team they moved quick working with top firms 50 clients last year as at the computer scale all one hundred percent bootstrapped to mattel thank you for taking us to the talk thank you very much nathan one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 p.m central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then 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