How GroupFio CEO Ravi Srinivasan grew GroupFio to $3.3M revenue and 50 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is ravi he's building a great tool called groupfio.com it's helping folks understand their analytics especially related their ir crm solutions robby you ready to taste the top yes i am all right so uh great having you on uh this was back in december i think of 2018. you've come on a couple times since then we're doing about 1.2 million in revenue back then where are you today and then let's jump into the product sure so uh we wrapped up the year of 1.2 and at the end of 2020 in spanakova to we're run right now around 1.3 million arr we may finish the year at 1.4 1.45 we have to see how the rest of the air plays out we've added a couple of suites that have made a difference so we've now launched up to four products and they all interact with each other so most of our clients use one or two of our products so we're also trying to leverage our customers uh to use other products that we have as well and also have an independent source of adding new customers one thing that i always wondered about about the business is you you own 100 right and it's profitable um it's it's profitable uh i like to run it in cash flow neutral but it is profitable if i uh if we do it that way right now we plow a lot back in and always ready for explosive growth if necessary without having to add management and we can always add people but you can't add management strength how do you get that growth i mean how do you run tests you've been sort of flat the past year i'm rooting for you i mean how are you trying to figure out how to grow faster okay so one of the things we're trying to do is our average price points uh on deals we've been focused on is between twenty five hundred dollars and five thousand dollars a month which is at the higher end of the market so one of the things we're doing is opening a marketplace in q3 that will allow us to go for that hundred to five hundred dollars a month price point where we can get the volume so i've put the challenge out to our biz dev and uh marketing teams to go from a zero to a thousand customers in 120 days and to do that you have uh today in the higher end we have about a hundred customers but that's in total some of them are the lower end some of the higher end and some are actually running a free model so um our expansion is going to come how many players are paying you something 40 40 40 customers pay uh us to build up that revenue stream right the growth of the 000 000 that we're targeting is going to come through the resale channel and the affiliate channels that we have some experience in working with but in the lower price point because we can't uh go with the direct sales force uh against those accounts it's just not economically viable so we're changing the model and that's how we're going to expand uh going forward how many resellers today have you recruited where they've actually sold at least one new customer okay so we have two successful resellers today uh one of whom we recruited in the last 30 days we have two more that are starting in the next 30 days because we have to join them out and they have five customers each they plan to bring on board in the first 90 days and what do you pay the resellers when they bring you a customer um our model is uh 30 points on the first year 15 on the second year and a trailing five uh life to date okay um and why did you pick that model uh because we want to incent them for year one to get a high growth and uh then we think second year you should scale back because the efforts less and from third year on we want to have a residual in play because we want them to be comfortable with what they have we will play with the model a little bit as we get more experience but we also don't want to have margin erosion at the same time we want to have some retention strategy in the channel so they enjoy having some original revenue but the focus is on acquiring new customers and are you profitable still today yes we are how much per month um okay remember i run cast on neutral but so if i run a p l it will run somewhere between 15 and 18 points depending on how much r d we decide to book back in the business we'll take 15 to 20 grand to the bottom line every month and many times you'll reinvest that to r d yep yep go back to r d and what is r d so how many engineers today and what things are they exploring okay so today we have a total of 15 engineers um three of them are dedicated most in fact two of them are focused intensely on just brand new stuff just just created stuff right so they would play around with python with high performance with going after big data sets going after open source and allowing them to be more creative the rest of them are just focusing on future development within the application and we're also changing our architectures instead of using a lot of source code management with github and branches we're trying to go to much more to feature management and feature development so it's a much more efficient method of delivering so they're trying to experiment with that and get that done right mm-hmm and what's the total team size today total team says across the entire company is uh 40. and we're split in in three countries so yeah yeah i mean you've sort of been flirting with it i mean even when you came back on first in december of 2018 right you had about 40 people on the team 1.2 and declined a little during coven now you're recovering from covid um i'm just curious you know for you i mean if someone came to you and offered you something like 2 million bucks all cash up front i mean do you sell the business no i wouldn't because we're underperforming so that means there's an opportunity as far as i'm concerned so i'm going to keep this for the next 18 to 24 months and demonstrate that we can get a 40 50 growth rate and and have a 20 a bit at least and i think we can well set to do that but you've been trying to do that since 2018 and you will always be optimists about the future but you will always think that you'll grow it absolutely what when does it run out when do you say if i don't hit this growth rate by this date i'm selling okay so i i've set that price point for uh 2.5 to three years from now if i don't make this break i'm going to hand the range to somebody else and say here's what i've built obviously we're making some mistakes come in and do what you can with us so when i interview in 2023 if you're still doing about a million a year in revenue you'll say nathan help me sell it two or three million bucks i'm moving on i actually uh if i'm still doing that in april of next year uh i'll be coming to you and saying let's go find someone i i don't intend to stay at this level interesting and so let's let's just let's brainstorm for a second let's say you did you have two million now do you want you 100 so you have two million cash now in the bank post tax maybe it's one point whatever four million what do you do next open another firm and i'll go into a pure analytics ai with less overhead but focus specifically on pincer hit uh applications that are going to generate revenue and value uh but very focused but big data is very focused targeted area right now our icr platform is very broad it's for retail smb and it's a very broad platform if i'm going to build the next sas i'm going to go for a specific solve one problem and one problem only and go deep and and where there's at least general needs yes i would um the niche i would go in is there's a lot of work being done on hyper personalization but it's an overused word and nobody's really figured out how to marry all of the social media data all the transaction log data and give you market this message to this person that kind of analytics is not easy to find and i think we can give a point solution just for that one alone and if i do that i'd have like five engineers and i'd build up one thing and be really good at that way we can have multiple people use that platform so the obvious question is why don't you do that now i'm building it i just don't have the money to finish it i need i'm short for for strong engineers to do that at this point then you need to do four or five engineers to do that you have 15 today so fire 10 of them have more cash flow double down on five and build it build this thing you want to build i can and that's a decision that i'm going to do within the q1 i don't want to make that decision now because i have an existing business and i got to grow it i've got certain things in play i got commitments to channel resellers i got to deliver certain features and certain things they're looking for as well and they're deep dives in specific uh industry sectors yep yep all right robbie now when these 40 customers ones that are paying you are they sticking what's your churn uh our churn is uh like less than one percent people that have been with us have been with us for you know ten years eight years five years they don't typically leave because they like the model it's very economical and very strong very good all right let's wrap up with the famous five number one favorite business book faceless book this book for me still is uh good to great i like that book there's a lot of things in it number two is there a founder you're following or studying uh elon musk is very interesting he's very diversified and i just like the way he uh goes about inventing what number three what's your favorite online tool for building group fio besides your own i've liked what atlassian has done they're interesting interesting what they have executed number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night i get six and a half on the weekends i get eight that's great in situation married single kids [Music] oh married with four lovely kids and all of them do great oh that's great and how old are you robbie i'm 59 15 the big six gonna be 16 two weeks that's exciting happy early birthday coming up in two weeks all right thank you very much appreciate it nathan what's up when you were 20 um i was always going to be a pilot i wanted to be an astronaut and um maybe with brent and finishing what he's doing it's uh one of the incentives to sell is to take that rocket ship up there there you go pay for that seat on virgin galactic guys there we have it group feel playing in the analytics knight qrm they've been flat you know caught around 1 to 1.3 million in revenue for the past couple years but robbie's got a good plan with resellers to start scaling that much faster they are profitable so they don't have any timelines they have to meet they have 40 customers and a total team size of about 40 people robbie thanks for taking us to the top thank you nathan appreciate it 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 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2pm 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 click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathan lacka dot com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive i am on these shows but i do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that i appreciate your guys support all right i'll be in the comments see ya

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