How Infilect CEO Anand Subramanian grew to $1M revenue and 12 customers in 2023.

you're gonna love this interview just got done editing it i'm glad i got it live for you i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes hanging out answering any questions you have in fact leave a comment below about data points or what you think is going to happen to the company and i will respond to every comment additionally if you're just loving the content click the thumbs up and i will go and check out your profile as well and give your videos some love as well in the meantime enjoy the interview hello everyone my guest today is super money and he is the founder and ceo of a company called infelect uh it's visual intelligence to retail brands he's got a strong research and product building experience for the past 15 years and is keen on building intelligent systems that can disrupt retail that's what he's obviously focused on now anonymous to the top yeah hi hi how are you guys hi we are well thanks for coming on all right so tell us about the company are you pure play sass yeah so we are a b2b stack startup focusing on enterprise companies which are basically retail brands as well as retailers and we are a global startup team we work with some uh clients across the globe uh we work with companies in india apac and okay and on average what are customers paying you per year to use your technology uh so so the average uh annual contract from a customer will be anywhere between 500 000 to 1 million okay um so obviously very much an enterprise play here now put this on a timeline for me when you launch the company what year so we launched it about two years back in 2017. okay 27 here bootstrap startup yeah so we are a bootstrap company so far uh we're not raising excel money and uh we are currently a few large customers uh uh approximately an error of about 800 uh okay so arr right now is 800 thousand dollars how many customers are you serving uh about 12 customers okay 12 customers today that's good now how did you get these customers take it back to day one how did you get the first one yeah so most of the customers we have got through a few direct referrals in the network so we started engaging with some of the large brands uh we keep players in the large brands and then understood the key problems that they have right and we work with them together and then develop a solution which would help them uh quite well so the problem that we're solving for retailers is uh real brands right we take retail brands like procter gamble unilever uh colgate or save the net late right so all these brands put their products in retail stores but they don't exactly know how their products are actually positioned there what are the competitions in the store how do customers interact with their products in the store right so they don't have any visibility of this so we do we use uh the latest technology which is artificial intelligence as well as computer computer vision to analyze images as well as videos that are captured in retail okay and by doing this we provide very deep visibility for brands and they are able to know how customers are interacting with their products that way they can improve their marketing strategy okay so you've done this in a bootstrap fashion you're doing 800 000 per year right now what were you doing a year ago do you remember uh yeah yeah so so when we started this project of course uh it took a few iterations uh so we did a few iterations we closely worked with the customers so in the first year we had about two hundred thousand dollars of error uh but uh slowly and steadily we have improved our customer base and we are working with what did you close out 2018 with about 200k i thought you said 2017 was 200k 20 sorry 28 2017 2018 so uh so you mean 2018 right so the last year uh was about 600 yeah okay got it and then this year you'll pass a million yeah yeah we are already about 800k we are most likely going to pass a million okay that's good and is most the growth coming from upselling customers or getting new customers all together uh right now we are in the mode of getting new customers because our contracts are usually annual contracts so the customers are either in their first contract our chess have reviewed some of the contracts so so far it has been mostly from you okay a lot of new customers and are you guys profitable today are you burning cash we are already profitable i mean most of the money that we reinvest in technology as well as hiring so we are cash flow positive um and we've been we've been using we have basically we are completely running the company from the revenue that we do okay and team size today is how many people 30 people in the company how many engineers uh engineers uh machine learning engineers about 12 engineers uh we have both back-end developers and front-end developers about four of them and we have about uh three to four a salesman and we also have about 10 people who are into data curation uh data cleaning and because in any machine learning setup that is one of the most important concepts now that all makes sense and then you know obviously getting these customers to stick is really really critical what's your gross revenue churn uh so far uh uh again uh so since our contracts are annual we have seen one or two customers who have not renewed the contract but most of them have so far what was the size of that contract that didn't get renewed uh about 120 250k okay so it's like call it 10 to 15 to annual churn yeah got it and what about other companies that have come up for renewal have you been able to expand upsell them uh yeah so right now we are uh we are targeting one function of retail customers so which is sales and audit which is the function that we are mainly focusing for retail brands but we already have another address and product which is focusing on merchandising design as well as marketing so we have been upselling that product with your product got it okay so is your net revenue retention more than 100 yeah got it okay good now do you have any plans to raise capital or you want to stay bootstrapped uh we are uh in in in the market for rising capital uh because we see that uh we are able to uh solve a problem for which customers are ready to pay good money and uh we see that there is a proper product market established so at this stage we are thinking of raising uh our first round of external capital to scale our growth mainly because we are we are focusing now to come to the north american market and uh especially when we come to the u.s market we would want to i mean of course sales and all those things are going to be like more expensive so we want to uh get some extra capital to uh scale that part how much are you looking to raise what four million dollars as a first first round of revenue okay what valuation do you hope to raise that on um not sure about that but about 60 we are already making close to a million dollars right so we are expecting at least 28 multiple on that value sorry a 1x multiple okay 15 x 15 to 20 x okay so you think you can race you think you can raise four million on a 15 to 20 million dollar premium evaluation that is what we are here in discussion with a few investors that's what we're looking for any investors yet or no [Music] you okay still working on it good stuff now what about landing one of these new customers so again if you just be clear i'm gonna correct this from earlier you said all your customers pay between 500 grand and a million right but if you have 12 customers and 800 grand in total revenue each one's paying about 6 000 per month on average yeah see some of them are uh so it depends on the which country we are serving so some of the customers in the apac region so they are small ticket size i mean the same customer so if uh if for example we have two customers in japan who are uh so so those customers have an average of about 500 000 but uh customers in thailand and singapore wait and on how can they have an average of 500 how can two of your customers have an average of five hundred thousand dollars that's a million in revenue right there you said your whole business right now is eight hundred thousand dollars a year yeah that's right so so what i'm saying is one of our customers in japan so i gave you the average what would be the possibility of uh our ticket type 200 to one million is the possibility of a ticket you know a possibility is not what i would ask i said what is the average revenue per customer not like what's the possibility of what you might sell them in the future no i'm talking what they're currently paying you on average okay currently paying we have customers [Music] got it okay again but because you told me you have 12 customers and because you said you have 800 000 in annual revenue i can divide right so that's what an average is now no no i'm talking about annual customer value not the average customer value annual customer value from our customers acv right so annual customers i know what acv means i'm doing the math you can't if you're doing 800 000 right now in terms of run rate let's say a million to make the math easy you can't have of 12 customers you can't have the average be 200 000 a year because that would mean you're doing way more than a million in revenue the math doesn't make any sense okay so average uh i mean okay i talked about the annual customer value of our top customers some of the average customers are around 50 k 200 exactly yeah that's my that's my point i understand you have one or two customers that are paying 200 300 000 per year right but you also have a lot that are paying 20 30 40 50 000 per year the commercial model that we have is based on volume and the number of stores that we that we help with so based on the size of the country it's 15 right so that that's whatever what does the smallest customer pay you about 30k yeah and the biggest one pays what 300 yep got it okay very good um that makes sense so you're scaling there now what does it cost you to get a new customer fully weighted um anywhere i mean it depends on whether their customers depends on the region uh so anywhere between 50 to i would say 20 20 to 30k uh especially if it's the apac region because we are in india we are here in india and any customers that we are getting yeah very good and all right let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite business book uh zero uh zero to one number two is there a ceo you're following or studying i am the party is there a ceo you're following or studying not really number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company uh number four how many hours to sleep to get every night and what's your situation married single kids any kids one kid again how are you five i mean i'm on thirty yeah you're thrilled to say you are not okay you're 35 and last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew um i spent a lot of time in academia i would have probably started up when i was 20 years old guys there you have it inflect.com again visual intelligence for retail brands looking to raise four million right now on a 15 million dollar pre-money valuation 2017 to 200 000 bucks in revenue 2018 600 000 and we'll break a million this year serving over 12 customers that pay as little as 30 grand a year all the way up to 300 000 per year net revenue retention over 100 cac is in the call at five to 12 month range so nothing crazy they're bootstrapped today and profitable as they look to scale and on thanks for taking us to the top you guys know i fight like heck to get these data points for you from these ceos that rarely do these kinds of shows if you want more shows like this make sure you subscribe right now we're trying to get 10 000 youtube subscribers by the end of september here 2019 and it would mean the world to me if you clicked now to subscribe additionally i've got two more great interviews for you if you want more data points from the world's leading sas ceos 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