How Firsthive CEO Aditya Bhamidipaty grew Firsthive to $3.8M revenue with a 78 person team in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is aditya bamaripathi he's the ceo and co-founder of first hive the company co-founded with his partner in 2009. he acquired his engineering bachelors from jntu and postgraduate diploma in management from another university and then began his career with procter and gamble and soon moved into a leadership role where he was responsible for the southern region he turned around a loss making regent into a profitable one in record time and also the highest growth area for png he's also worked with iget and london before moving back to india to set up e-smart solutions and jump in to first time you're ready to take us to the top yeah absolutely looking forward to this conversation nathan all right tell us about first type what does the company do and are you a pure play sas company we are a pure place as company uh first hive uh is a product that we launched in 2016. uh it's about 30 months since we launched and we're very very excited about what we're doing uh it's essentially a customer data platform we go to large consumer marketing companies like banks financial services uh companies retail cpg organizations and what we're doing is we're helping them take control of their marketing if you if you're familiar with the marketing landscape today you know the number of tools out there that enterprises have to deal with have exploded along with the interfaces that have exploded and with all of this uh what has happened is consumer data today in a typical consumer marketing company is just thrown all over the place in many different platforms and uh and and we all see the result i mean most marketeers today struggle with uh a typical conversion rate of less than two percent which probably makes this the only trillion dollar industry with a 98 failure or a leaky bucket and that's what we are helping these enterprises take control of and and and solve and so help us understand if there's an enterprise listening right now what's an average enterprise going to pay you per year to use this this technology you've built uh it's it's it depends on the scale of marketing intensity that we handle for these enterprises if you if you look at a typical large enterprise which has presence across multiple geographies uh a few a few tens of millions of consumer interactions a day and you know a lot of international content and maybe anywhere from 30 to 200 different systems where they have consumer data sitting and and it is that dispersed uh when first hive comes in we connect into all of these channels and then we we are actually the world's first machine learning layer to build that unified entity so there's a lot of compute that happens which is directly linked to the marketing intensity the pricing therefore varies anywhere from i would say about 150 000 all the way up to a couple of million dollars depends on the intensity of integrations and these events okay now yeah again there's a big range there but just because we're short on time i mean would you say 150 per year is a fair average or you think it's probably closer to 250 or 500 or i would say that a typical large enterprise the average would be closer to the 250 000 at a couple of million events a day okay so 250 a year and which comes out to come and be 20 at 20 grand a month something like that yeah okay very interesting and then you said you launched in 2016 right tell us the story of how you got your first you know one or two customers oh absolutely i mean i am an ex-proctor myself and therefore have some familiarity with this space working inside one of the probably one of the original marketing companies of the world and then when i moved out and i moved to iget i was selling to companies like that uh you know selling analytics solutions and technology solutions to them and then i came back and i started you know a firm that ran for six years which was in the marketing services space so i got a very very interesting you know perspective into marketing and the opportunities that we saw both being inside an organization selling tech to these organizations and then servicing marketing campaigns and a lot of it was really born out of uh the opportunity that i saw in the data that was that was getting generated but not necessarily getting leverage most marketing campaigns end up being expensed out at the end of the campaign rather than looking at that as a data asset on customers on customer behavior customer experience so do you sorry just to be just to be clear your first what i'm looking for is your first couple customers and first time it sounds like you had a marketing agency for six years prior to this were your first customers and first time the software from the marketing agency yeah yeah because i had relationships with customers there and therefore i had access to a few cmos my first customers therefore were from relationship that i had built in the past and uh yeah and that's how we got rolling on this and then how many over the past caught three years how many customers have you are you now serving today we are now at 29 paying customers as an enterprise okay these are large enterprises which are you know across these two primary verticals that we mentioned that we focus on which is banking financial services and then manufacturing cpg and retail okay and what's the team that you built around you what do they look like how many people we're a 40 member company today largely engineering as you can imagine this is a heavy engineering product with 27 engineers led by our ceo and vp engineering and then we have a product management team that's again around ad tech and martech so that's that's really the core of the team and then we have a client customer success team which helps our customers leverage the product and aja have you decided to bootstrap the company or did you decide to raise capital a lot of a lot of first time has been built bootstrapped uh and i'm actually very excited in the way we've done this because while we did raise a small angel round uh early on as we started the first time uh the the core of the company was actually bootstrapped initially but we we ran a really really tight ship here and then we hit uh we we hit cash flow positive within 18 months of launch of the product and then uh so just to get the funding number so so total funding into the company today is about how much marginal less than half a million dollars okay less okay that's great no that's that's wonderful i look i like i love kind of bootstrap story so this is great say that again largely bootstrap yeah yeah well let's you're either bootstrapped or you've raised capital there's not like largely bootstrap so you've raised very little money as how i would say it less than 500 000. yes yeah very good okay and then and then um so so uh less than 500 thousand dollars raised you turn cash to a positive early on um how did you fund kind of the early creation of the technology did you raise early on or did you use like professional services stuff to fund the growth no the initial amount of it was bootstrap and then we uh we funneled some of our uh because of the marketing services company we had cash flows and therefore we funded that into the product i in the initial days and then we switched over to the product completely okay yeah that makes sense that was when we raised the little bit of capital that we raised and the initial 29 customers today at that price point you told me earlier you said an average of about 20 000 per month i mean that would put you out about 580 000 per month right now on revenue is that correct uh that's not that is not correct because not all our deployments are at that scale uh the typical scale that uh that we are at is closer to about a third of that number okay got it so so maybe closer so maybe more like seven thousand dollars per month or twenty four thousand dollar per year uh kind sorry seventy sorry eighty four thousand dollar per year kind of contracts yeah now and that would put you at about two hundred thousand dollars per month today in revenue is that more accurate that is closer to the act okay still by the way still great considering a bootstrap company three years in still a great story what's growth look like so if you're at 200 a month today where were you exactly a year ago do you know uh we grew about um we doubled in terms of number of customers over the last year uh and uh our revenue also kind of reflected a very similar number okay so revenue about revenue about doubled as well revenue has doubled as well revenue is slightly less than double because we are going in for a little more aggressive pocs at this stage uh and therefore uh you know the revenue is less than double but then the number of customers have doubled the exciting thing for us is what's happening in the future we just launched our operations in the us we started in bangalore uh for the last uh you know 30 months and then last month we set up our us us office and uh so yeah we're really excited we're hoping to kind of hit like a six to eight x uh growth in the next uh 24 28 months so we're quite excited about where we are what we are seeing right now in terms of the early days on the would you say in the next six to 12 months you want a 6x no 24 to 28 months so over the next two years you want to take 200 grand a month or 2.4 million a year and get up closer to 12 million or 13 million per year run rate 12 million run rate is what we want to and where do you see what's your best guess today in terms of...