How Hellotars CEO Ish Jindal grew Hellotars to $240K revenue and 150 customers in 2018.

hello everyone my guest today is Ashton doll he is the CEO actually he's the founder of a company called tarz he's been working on start offering products for over the last five years and has been both in the b2b and b2c worlds he's very bullish about the future of sass and I can build profitable bootstrapped companies ish are you ready to take it to the top tell us about tell us about ours what do you guys do and how do you make money right so we help you in building chatbots and monkeys basically use our chat BOTS to replace their landing pages and forms so think of if you have a form on your website as a landing page from your advert campaign you can just replace them fit apart and BOTS help you create and birthdates right in terms of selling itself it's a classic sass money subscription model people pay us on a monthly subscription basis yeah and Emily pay you per month on average per month okay you said 150 yeah okay and and what allows you to charge more or less is a number of subscribers your chat bot or feature sets or what right so it's a number of conversations so basically how many people chat with your boss on a monthly basis that's one so it's basically the leaves being generated to your bot and the second is not a BOTS created from your account so if you're a marketer you will be creating boss for multiple campaigns and that's why you would want more thoughts so that's that's how we do the expansion it's great and give me more the Baxter here when did you want company so we started working on this in December of 2015 our first deployment was in Feb 2016 so it's between two and a half years yeah okay very good and what's the team size look like today so we have OBB okay oh you when where's everybody based subscribe appears of Bangalore in India and one guy in st. Louis in the US and what I'm curious what's the st. Louis guy do he works on the content and the marketing very good ok very good and then again so launched two and a half years ago what have you scaled to today in terms of total customers right so we would have about one could be our paying customers okay about 150 and how have you signed those customers up where are you finding them album sales emails and selling on cameras and stuff right now it's organic inbound for us okay so that one guy writing cart in st. Louis is pulling in eyeballs and it's closing deals for you but they can you beat a bow in biology building the products every part has this powered by Tom's branding on the box and that's like that generates 80% of the traffic for us it got interesting and it what's revenue today per month it's about $20 sorry how many twenty thousand twenty to twenty thousand okay good and and what was that just a year ago I think we would have about five or six key oh wow so good good you're growing like you should in the early years right that's what it's supposed to look like and and most of that growth is it coming from just adding new customers or are you expanding current customers and upselling them and more expensive plans like a month back it was from new customers so we were signing up new customers we never focused on the expansion bit and just in this month our expansion is like 50% so before before July this year you would not even doing a single expansion and you're losing out on a lot of revenue and now you basically psychics so but the long-term is just the new customers and what is your sure look like today would be about 3% month I yeah yes and that's gross or not so it would be like oh maybe people not doing anything span until sixth pretty much is seeking us it's basically the same thing did you lose out you know exactly yeah it's the same thing and you bootstrap the companies so far right yes are you thing about raising capital or no I'm not sure at this point so we wouldn't want to reach out to a million the era and then think about it but at the moment I think we can easily reach a million so let's get there and you know then maybe not at all easy why would you choose to build I mean obviously it's a hot space but it also has risks right you're basically depending on other people's api's to work if facebook makes a change or shut you off like that's potentially bad for the business how do you manage those risks so we are not dependent on any platform so we don't do Facebook bots apparently poor is website bots so our bots walk on your heart on your web browser so think of it as a is a web page simply HTML web page so aren't BOTS analogy I would give is it's like a time bomb so you can just share it with anyone so here you can just share a bottle Inc with are you okay and so there is no opt and it's just based off website traffic cover hits the site even chat with yeah or you can just do what you would do a can being a paid campaign and then just land people directly okay guys so this is more like inner calm or drifts yeah okay got it yeah got it so so how do you tricky thing with that is people don't get value out of this and thus they drive traffic to their website which many people is actually difficult right so and it's properly frustrating with some interns from UB and they say I didn't get any engaged when you're like way yeah you get one website visit a month before making possible so if you don't have to say five to ten thousand visits per month on your website you not the right customer for us okay so I'm just noting you have some scheme you won't see that from our product that is one and secondly people have been driving traffic to their ports to these AdWords campaigns is one secondly people do a lot of email and SMS campaigns as well so you just I mean we're essentially the place right so think of how you would land on a farm you just replace them that's what our position is if someone you said you wanna go to a millionaire before he's not raising I mean what about is this your first gig have used heavy built and sold a company before no I've got a b2c company before but it could be okay okay guys so so you know right now you're doing 50 or 20 grand a month so call it 200 and what is that 80 grand per year on revenue I mean if somebody I'm curious if somebody came in and offered you you know a million bucks to buy the whole company if you would sell today I've won because I think we can make a lot then and now I think we are the right steel to grow the last best bet so I want to sell the company for a million possible yeah very good what do you assume lifetime value as of these customers I think this customer would Steve does what about 15 months or 15 months that's that's usually so like that money would be about 59 255 about $2,000 yeah in terms of lifetime value in dollars right yep that's great and calc you said really almost is coming by powered by so you're not doing any paid spend right now very good let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book I'm not this is what the lastt would look at at this teeth look which is it on how it would be as own videos number two is their CEO you're following or studying right now I've been falling on David cancel so yeah why are people why would people choose to use you over drift good amazing right and that's what we've been thinking as well but it's about clearly a different sector so drift is going after b2b SAS companies or P to B companies and we're going after pretty much those companies who are focusing on increasing that motivates a generation false so it's a pretty different segment a category for us they basically think it's a different way of buying from businesses and amazing now do you want to increase it on both of its on Legion forms that's very time all right number three what's your favorite online tool for building your business besides your own okay so we use fellow quite a bit twice oh yeah good number for how many hours of sleep to get every night I get a good week it's so healthy there and what's your situation married single we have kids see not married no kiddos no all right and how are you 27 last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew I'm to start with a b2b business because it's just to talk to ability to see in the early stages collapse guys there you have it start with a b2b business he launched Tarte the chat bot tool for landing pages back in 2016 as teams now four people between Bangalore and one in the US they've got 150 customers paying about a hundred bucks a month sore north of that a little bit doing 20 grand a month right now and revenue that is up 4x from July of 2017 where they were doing 5k per month in revenue they got about three percent revenue churn monthly it's too early to talk about CAC they haven't figured out a scale that way yet be a paid again lifetime value in terms a months about 15 months two thousand dollars and lifetime value ish thank you for taking us at the top thank you so much