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...