Getairim Revenue & Valuation (2018)

hello everyone my guest today is joy chottery he's the co-founder and ceo of arum it was founded in april 2017. aaron is a virtual assistant that reduces the huge time and effort users spend and trying to find relevant information for them while exploring a website or a web app currently it's used by two it's used two million times a day in websites of businesses of all sizes across four continents so joy are you ready to take us to the top yeah all right so so you said you've listened to the show right yeah so you know you know you know what i'm going to ask right yeah i do have some fair idea okay well let's have let's have some fun tell us about the company what do you do how do you make money sure so we at arm uh started when we kind of noticed that a lot of companies are taking into uh inbound sales and uh uh when you move into an inbound sales model uh you have to present a lot of information to the customers uh so companies spend a lot of time creating marketing collateral presenting so much information and arranging them in the right ways on the website but that's like what happens is when a customer comes on a website they want to find the relevant information as quickly as possible but uh you know in the current ways people had to spend a lot of time figuring out of information and so an average visitor spends about like seven times uh on a website before deciding to even sign up for a trial so we wanted to reduce that to as low number as possible maybe three or four so we thought that we could create something in which we can uh provide relevant information to people in the quickest possible time so there is where we created this error widget and we started experimenting with like some of the websites uh within our network and then we gradually figured out that uh we were delivering a lot of valuable companies in increasing their conversions and then also yeah like uh reducing the time taken by the companies to deliver value in the quickest so what are people like if i hit a website that has you installed what i what would i what what might an average website impression like search for where you add a lot of value like maybe maybe i type in like what's pricing or something like that is that what you mean yeah things like that so uh let's say you have a website where you insurances so a lot of people come and look for the right paper policies for themselves and the right terms and conditions within the policies so they want to know what's what's the most relevant thing for them interesting and you're essentially scraping all of the texts all of the content off a website and then indexing you're basically a personalized google for each website yeah that's correct interesting i started with knowledge bases only and we eventually want to move to sleeping entire websites uh that's all right let's see what do people what do people pay for your tool on average per month uh so so we have plans of like 49 199 799 per month but the average lies somewhere between 250 to 300. okay 250 bucks a month and when did you launch the company what year uh 2017 last year okay last year good so over the past year how many customers have you scaled to so we have uh about 14 yeah 42 paid customers right now one four uh four two oh four two okay 42 paying customers that's great that's very specific you did you did your research huh i have a dashboard that keeps monitoring these numbers all the time which dashboard do you use what company uh so we use redash we basically write queries in sql and create dashboards to monitor all of them we also use heap yeah they're both smart um okay sorry sorry back to the data here so 42 customers paying 250 bucks a month on average you're doing about 10 000 per month right now on revenue yeah that's great and then a year ago so november 2017 just a couple months after your launch what were you doing in november 2017 [Music] oh actually uh we were just two people uh in november 2017 and now we are six so at that time we had uh five uh mid market and enterprise customers in our kitty so about 1300 a month huh uh it was way higher than that we had an enterprise customer who was paying uh like a lot more so how much were you doing per month back back a year ago so we actually scaled to about uh like 30k a month that time then yeah okay okay so sujoy break be transparent here i know it sucks but like what happened you're doing 30 grand a month now you're doing only 10 grand a month so what happened was we were doing a lot of services uh and uh in services we ended up not uh working on our product but rather than that we were like okay adding a lot of things which we were not supposed to do in the first place so we kind of ended that contract and went back into uh just focusing on the product rather than uh like getting it so just be clear that thirty thousand dollars that you just told me was that that sounds like that was like a project fee not actually true recurring sas revenue yeah okay what was just your true recurring sas revenue a year ago oh that was around four between four to five thousand got it yeah so you've more than doubled that yeah yeah that's great by the way that's very normal for early founders you're trying to figure out ways to make cash you do some side projects and professional services and then the trick is to slowly say no to those over time so you can double down and keep building the software product exactly that's great what's churn today uh the churn uh so we have lost only two customers so far out of 42 so it's close to five percent yep five percent logo term per month even a small sample size that's okay uh have you bootstrapped the company or raised yeah so we just got a convertible node and that's about like uh 20k dollars that's it okay so twenty thousand dollar convertible note yeah about from that it's all bootstrap that's great and then what are you paying i mean how are you getting new customers how did you get 42 customers so uh so earlier we were doing outbound sales we were we were reaching out to people in our network uh gradually we started doing inbound marketing and for that we started experimenting with the rights channels so we started posting on a few forums started taking feedback from potential customers started doing a lot of interviews and subsequently some people got very excited and then they started using it now we have seen that we are getting a lot of reference from the initial set of customers we started out with uh helped us get to a good extent and so today when you add a new customer what are you paying to acquire the customer uh it kind of varies to queries between like uh like it almost uh hundred dollars to about one thousand dollars depending on the size of the account i think the number right now is too small for us to have an average figure it's too early yeah when you do spend money though what channels do you test uh we have been using linkedin a lot we recently started out with twitter uh but most of all uh we have inherent virality in our products so in our widget there is powered by area written and a lot of people when they see this written on the website they click on it and then they come on our website and then try to uh sign up and start using the product so the conversion rate we have got by people clicking powered by erin is close to seven or eight percent that's great and then and where are you guys all based six of you yeah we are based in bangalore but uh i personally keep traveling around all the time that's good that's very good all right and so joey what's the plan you planning on on raising any capital anytime soon or selling the company uh not yet uh i think we have a good amount of rentals so far uh are you profitable yes we have been profitable that's so casual positive yes that's great very good all right let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book uh i think it's a blue ocean strategy number two is there a ceo you're following or studying right now i'm sorry is there a ceo you're following or studying right now uh so my favorites uh i really like the company front and the way they have been progressing so i'm following them a lot matilda in front they're great she's come on the show three times really really incredible story uh number three um what billing tool do you use uh stripe okay and do you use any analytics tools besides redash red sorry re-dash and heap on top of that uh these two are the most uh widely used but uh we use google analytics as well okay very good and then uh how many hours of sleep are you getting every night uh four okay sometimes six that's not a lot we'll say five on average and what's your situation married single kids that's nothing good okay uh no kids no kids all right and how old are you uh i'm 28. 28 years old great last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew uh i think uh the one valuable lesson that i would pass on to my twitter years will be that you have to focus on building a network rather than building financial wealth uh a good network pays off really well in your long term guys focus on building a network it pays off more than financial wealth he launched it air arium back about call it uh in 2017 so just about a year ago personalized self-service on websites essentially like a mini google for your website so that website visitors can more quickly find information they want which increases your conversion rates today they're doing about 10 grand per month in revenue up from four or five grand a month just a year ago they've raised