GroupFiorevenue

hello everyone my guest today is ravi srinivasan he is the ceo and founder of a company called group feel a retail guru that has helped many retailers achieve a 360 degree view of the customer and omni channel world he's a specialist in leveraging data analytics to increase profitable sales he also implements strategies and tactics to compete with amazon on an online market places robbie are you ready to take us to the top absolutely all right what does your company do and how do you make money is it a pure place sas company yeah we're a sas based company we make uh money by giving customers a increased value property so we use all our data analytics and give them an advanced uh view of targeting customers in order to increase sales and they love to do business with us because we give them a methodology to increase profitable sales okay and and help me understand like when they start paying you what are they actually getting is it a piece of tech do you sit on their platform is it a javascript code price optimization they actually have an entire job of a java application uh it's an application that allows 360 commerce to work with the point of sale with the e-commerce and any of the other environments that they might have including social media so it is a full platform for all customer interaction to be recorded and managed inside the application and what do people and companies pay on average to get access to this uh depends on the size of the business yeah but i mean that's why on average by the way just cause we're short on time sure on average it's between three and five thousand a month depending on the size of the retailer okay interesting and they're all retailers all your customers all retailers and and distributors there are some cpg but not many okay and break me through the kind of walk me through the timeline here when'd you launch the company what year i launched the company in uh 2010. so we've been in business for eight years congratulations thank you and uh we are now in us and robbie over the past eight years how many customers have you scaled to we've scaled to 75 customers okay 75 customers and break that down for me in terms of what that means for your team today how many people we have 45 people in the company right now okay uh spread over internationally okay so all remote offices are the all remote offices except one in chennai which does have 20 people and therefore there's a physical office there okay and have you bootstrapped the company or raised capital it's completely bootstrapped we're getting ready ravi i love that yeah did you say you're wait hold on did you see you're getting ready for financing well we're ready for financing because we need explosive growth right now we're ready for explosive growth so how much do you want to raise uh we're looking for somewhere between 500 and 750 000. and and what will you spend the money on mainly for wrapping up some product development components and also for sales and marketing to recruit a reseller channel and in terms of scale today 75 customers paying your minimum three grand a month that puts you about 225 grand a month right now on revenue is that about right um it's actually a little less than that because we have some lower end customers are taking from the early days so it's a little bit less than that right there and they were grandfathered yeah okay how far less what are you doing right now per month uh right now per month we do about a hundred okay about a hundred grand a month that's great and then if we divide 75 customers into that that obviously gives us a more accurate kind of average revenue per employee about a grand or a grant you know a 1500 bucks a month yeah that's great um okay so 100 100 grand per month today and where were you exactly a year ago a year ago we were at 70 000 so we are growing and we're going well that's great where's most growth coming from new customers or expanding old ones um both um i would say about fifty percent of our growth as new customers and fifty percent of our growth is from existing customers needing more services what growth channel are using i mean how are you signing up new customers specifically we specific sign up by just targeting uh specifically through linkedin um and we associate go after retailers that have omnichannel or we sense they're in trouble because either amazon is giving them problems or they have difficulty in omnichannel uh and we go after specific customers that in industries like the footwear industry is running into difficulty so we go after that specifically we go off to specialty retail as well interesting do you um when you say linkedin so walk me through actually tactically what you're doing so you log on to linkedin you're targeting what term are you searching for uh we're searching for retailers omni channel we're looking for topics and subjects where people are posting questions well give me an example like a specific example okay a specific example is i have a problem with customer churn uh i have a uh difficulty in uh same same store sales are not increasing so what do you mean people's people you type that into the search bar on linkedin search we we do that in google as well in linkedin search i just look for retailers i just look out for retailers i look for people that we know personally either ourselves our executive team and then uh build contacts individually okay so there are millions of retailers how do you figure out which ones to spend the time to write a personal message to um what we do is well our network is fairly large so everything's about timing so um we have about a thousand uh businesses would go after very targeted a thousand are and methodically go after okay and those thousand how do you narrow it down to them like are they a certain size yeah they're a certain size they're all above uh 50 million and under 500 million that's a sweet spot um and how do you know like where on linkedin does it tell you those revenue targets we i already have the database i already know all that data because i've collected it over time okay i'm ex-retail so i know a lot of retailers well so what where where are you pulling that data from you're paying to get it i assume from somewhere no um yes well i had a marketing research firm go and get the data for me uh there's also other websites that give you some very good quality data on omnichannel merchants and how big they are and how many websites what are some other sites um i i use um oh i forget the name because i stopped using them now it'll come to me i'll let you know i don't know the name of the site right now okay so 45 people today about 100 per month in revenue are you profitable yes we are profitable okay that's great so you're probably now are you operating right at break even um just above breakeven actually we are a bit as respectable so it's in the 10 to 15 range okay so you're adding like call it 10 grand a month to your to your bank then that's cool something like that yeah that's great very good okay so um you know churn's critical right in any sas company what's your revenue churn annually today the revenue churn yeah the revenue churn right now is about five percent from because we do maintain yeah we do a couple months a year we do maintain uh very significant customers that stay the course usually when we get somebody we keep them for about five to eight years at least um now we've only been in business for eight years so there are customers we've got we've never lost that's great so you keep them for call it 60 months or five years something like that what are you willing to spend to get a new customer that pays you three grand a month um first of all that's about a six to eight month sales cycle so it would easily cost us between ten ten thousand to twelve thousand to gain a customer okay uh but then they come with a big implementation as well so we make it up in the very first implementation you mean there's a big setup fee there's a setup fee what does that look like so if i sign up for three grand a month what's my setup fee probably oh your setup fee is going to be anywhere from 70 to 100 000 because it depends on how complex you want because they have to integrate the point of sale with universal social media their e-commerce site integrations to be done and also setting up and transferring data from their legacy systems interesting okay so healthy payback and then when you look at your net revenue retention so everyone who signed up exactly a year ago you lose five percent of the revenue do you gain does that same customer base expand by at least five percent so your net revenue retention is above 100 they they absolutely do the customers we tend to lose are the smaller customers that are having a hard time digesting or ingesting the kind of work we give for them um and and they're they're they're running into difficulty because there's some business pressures as well yeah have you you mentioned you want to raise capital i mean obviously raising capital can stink if you're giving up a bunch of equity it's obviously dilutive i mean have you looked at things like venture debt um i have not yet but they're all on the cards and that's what we're going to be looking at as well we have not looked at that seriously yet because i've just been you know afraid of the word venture that they see i try not to go there you know what a healthy dose of skepticism ravi never hurt anybody yeah all right let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book my favorite business book is um um the right seat on the bus the right seat of the bus yeah i don't know the name number that's okay number two is there a ceo you're following or studying yes the ceo of microsoft he's transitioned to cloud and did a great job satya nadella number three uh what is your favorite online tool for building the company online tool linkedin number four how many hours i sleep to get every night six okay and what's your situation married single kids married got four wonderful kids wow and how old are you uh there are 27 no 25 oh myself i'm 57 57 last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew sorry what's something you wish you knew when you were 20 oh i wish i started this when i was 25. it's fun i i work in the corporate world for a long time i wish i was an entrepreneur a lot a lot younger start sooner video again a solution to help brands especially retailers become more profitable 75 customers right now doing about 100 grand per month in revenue that's up from 70 grand a month just about a year ago so nice growth they are bootstrapped they are their ebitda margins about 10 so they're profitable about 10 grand to the bottom line every single month 45 folks on the team remote locations 5 revenue churn per year but net revenue retention higher than 100 spending about 12 grand to get a new customer payback is very quick because of big setup fees robbie thank you for taking us to the top thank you very much i appreciate it