How IPGeolocation.io CEO Ejaz Ahmed grew IPGeolocation.io to $440K revenue and 700 customers in 2025.

hello everybody my guest today is ijaz ahmed he is the ceo and founder of a company called ipgeolocation.io launched in june 2018 they've passed 100 paid customers and 3 000 plus developers actively using the platform they handle more than 100 million requests per month ejazz are you ready to take us to the top yes all right what's the company doing what's your revenue model how do you make money yeah our company is ip geo location service we provide some useful information from ip address of the visitors so the revenue model is we have a free developer plan and developers use us for free on for their project and then definitely they recommend us to their companies and companies use this data in various form including visitor analytics and other reports material stuff and also jio targeting their customer and they display lots of e-commerce businesses display pricing information in local currencies based on our geolocation service and also they have custom shipping and creating messages for visitors based on their location so fast yeah i was gonna say yes so who's paying you is it the company or the developer yeah the company the company okay interesting for developers we have just uh minimal request uh let's say we offer them a 50 000 free request for testing purpose and uh definitely on real production websites the traffic is usually higher than this and the company's payer so for small startups we remain free and some smart startups keep using us in their free plan unless they are circles so companies who pay you what do they pay you on average per month uh on average we have uh 50 bucks a month okay so 50 or something on average 50 bucks a month and then you said you have about 100 customers today so you're doing about five thousand dollars per month okay and you launched just this year right in june yes that's great now are you all in on this are you full-time or are you still you know have a full-time job somewhere else no we are full-time and other than me there are three developers and one customer success manager and there is one customer support person as well so total team sizes how many four that's great four and everyone's based in uh pakistan or where are you guys based one is from ukraine and everyone else is in from pakistan okay ukraine and pakistan very good and okay so so uh we've got some good revenue there walk me through how you got your you know you're fairly new less than call it 12 months where'd you get your first 100 customers from yes so our first i would say first 10 customers they were from paid campaigns on bing and adwords and then mostly from quora and now we are getting lots of traffic from organic search okay so now we are the paid campaigns on bing so like what keywords or what what what did the ads sound like yes uh the ad was let's say ip geolocation api the keywords were ipg location and ip2 location api so we showed them the okay the accurate ip to location api service and then displaying some upper pricing and also a free tier for them to start and most of companies should start with the free play they integrate with their solution it takes a couple of weeks for them to integrate and launch so they start with first month usually they start with free plan and then go to bed and are you bootstrapped today or have you raised capital no no capital we are 100 bootstrap okay great totally bootstrapped and are you burning money or are you casual positive right now right now we are not cash flow positive but uh we have to uh reach this principle okay because uh we have seen a consistent 20 to 30 growth on monthly basis and we are not uh investing too much in marketing so initially we wanted to spend some time with the customer and interact with our initial customers to understand our market fit and then uh move to scalability right now we are in scalability mode so we hope to double down in two months hopefully it just how much cash are you burning per month [Music] uh well we have some revenue and i think it's about uh six to seven k we are burning per month other than uh its own revenue i don't understand you're spending seven grand a month you're making five so that there's only two thousand you're basically burning two thousand dollars a month seven minus five no no seven plus five it's uh per month so you're spending twelve thousand dollars per month so you're losing seven thousand dollars per month even after the five thousand in revenue i see and so you said you're bootstrapped but you're losing seven grand a month you have to make up that seven grand somewhere who's putting money in the company ah it's uh uh previously we were a service based company and uh we started with some savings in the bank and we still have enough left for us to uh keep earning that so i see so so are you i mean you are personally funding it or do you have your other how many co-founders i'm personally friendly oh god i don't have any so you're all in does that make you nervous no no you like it because uh yeah are you married does your wife like it yes she supports you right yeah exactly so we are very positive so uh just to let you know i can't disclose just today we closed a deal which was [Music] two thousand dollars per month uh two thousand dollars not per month but uh annual customers so that was a good customer and uh every day we wake up and i check out my mobile notification oh we got so many customers well congratulations congratulations that's exciting nice work yeah exactly what about um churn have you lost any customers yes okay what's your turn last month was uh was we lost two big customers so without that our figure would have been quite different so we contacted them and they told us actually they were doing some geosegmentation and for a couple of months to a party for a particular audience and they completed that so they no longer need this api so we have yeah there are a couple of others who churned out and we contacted them and they said that again the usually the same question that we were doing analytics and for a marketing report and we used it and we have to use it again as well so okay so how big were those customers how much revenue do they make up together one was uh 250 per month and the other one was 1000 plus per month yes okay wow so so about so you lost essentially 20 of your revenue in one month yes is that a red flag for you [Music] no we contacted those customers they were happy with our service they did not leave us because of anything related to us they just they were one-off customers they wanted to perform some analytics because we have two types of customers one who consistently use us as a part of their business operation to display shipping and etcetera this information and there are people who use us for performing some sort of analytics on their visitors yeah so these type of customers are just one of customers they come they purchase some credit or some subscription they perform analytics and then leave so we also have a an interesting customer who uses us every after every three after every quarter so after every quarter they perform uh they prepare a certain report and they come to us they purchase our plan and they start using us after re after that report they cancel their subsea yep now i understand very good uh talk to me so you said you did paid you used paid spend on bing to your first 100 customers what were you what was it costing you it was just first 10 to 12 months okay yeah what were you paying to get customers yeah we paid both on google and bing but bing was awesome for us because the cost of acquisition was very low hello so uh i think five dollar per person so it's five so it was five dollars to get a a customer that paid you fifty dollars a month [Music] well not everyone who signed up converted to that customer and the figure how many paid customers of how many free customers converted to paid is missing in our analytics oh i see so you don't know you just paid five dollars per lead and then you needed some number of leads to get a new paying customer got it okay very good so you're it's too early there uh very good all right um any plans to raise capital anytime soon [Music] no no you stay bootstrapped do you like it all right let's wrap up here with the famous five jaws number one what's your favorite business book [Music] well it just what's your game what well or what's the last book you read i still think i haven't read any business book no what's just the last book you read do you read yeah yeah uh i read so i usually read the last book i read was on elasticsearch elasticsearch very good number two number two is there a ceo you're following or studying well i personally like steve jobs and denmark and i do follow mask of course jobs is no longer here but i personally like it number three what's your favorite online tool my favorite online tool is i would say github number four how many hours of sleep to get every night more than i think seven to eight hours okay and what's your situation well we know you're married any kids yeah two kids two kids great and how old are you i'm technical 32 last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew well i think i was on the right path at after 20 years because i really wanted to learn lots of things before jumping into so uh i tried to learn in my job in those years and started business when i was confident enough that i can do it guys learn learn before jumping in coming from ejaz launched...