How Jugl CEO Arun Kumar grew to $2M revenue and 400 customers in 2024.

guys there we have it 20 years ago he launched his agency cap digisoft he says he always want to launched a product that would impact Millions he's now building juggle they're doing a hundred thousand dollars a month in Revenue up from almost nothing just a year ago he put in 250k in a pre you know up up front to get it going uh and then raise another two raising three million right now 2.3 are already wired on a 15 million valuation burning 100 Grand a month uh per month right now but doesn't concern him he got plenty of Runway team of 24 15 Engineers again a platform that helps you motivate track and measure Employee Engagement hey folks my guest today is Arun Kumar he's building a tool called juggle that's jugl.com it's employee and client success management platform our own you ready to take it to the top oh yes sir all right whenever I see a startup founder or they've got two jobs listed as present on their LinkedIn I'm always curious so you're doing juggle but you also have cap Digi soft solutions for the past 20 years how do these things fuel each other yes cab digisoft is my my my my first business I own it's a tech company I have around 400 employees working globally in operating from four countries but I'm always passionate about product you know through product we can able to impact under times a thousand times more than what you do through service industry so so we found a bigger opportunity and and I formed a dedicated team for Juggle and as juggle is a separate entity and we rise the funding and it's going great and by the way thanks for having me on your show of course you've been doing captivity software for almost 20 years juggle has been only three years I I love a story where a SAS founder found a need via their agency is that the pattern you fall into here is captivity soft and agency and that's how you discovered the idea for juggle uh I would say yes and no uh I I found this myself personally or not my team or anybody because I know I want to form the product again to keep it a story interesting uh through Captain D soft always I invest under two quarter million every year to find the product which can impact millions of businesses juggle is my fifth uh try on those process so every time I invest I learn something and I decided okay this I'm not going to impact millions of businesses from this product so I scale down or I close so juggle is my fifth Venture like that so I always explore I always explore invest all right let's talk about juggle or give me a customer story how's the customer using you today um in a Juggle is mainly designed for non-tech business owners right and countries like Asia Middle East Central America those people are non-tech business owners they don't have a proper tool to manage employee efficiency employee communication task force they are not and they are not a tech savvy business owners either so they are generally using the available tools like WhatsApp and then telegram they're using those tools but those tools are not efficiently designed to manage employee communication and employee productivity so the problem what we're trying to solve is like you don't again when you introduce a new product like slack and Microsoft team it is a painful process for them mainly they're getting user adaptation because the users are non-tech people and the interface is different The Habit is different approach is different so they miserably fail when they introduce this kind of tools govern can you give a real example can you name a company in Central America that's using you yeah so that is a that is a company called bamboo they have uh 200 employees they their business is managing um the building they construct the apartments they construct the sobbing complex and manage it and we have our office Central America office in that building so they are the first customer in Central America who are Dr Dash so it's also at least 200 clients and they're using WhatsApp for communicating between employees interesting now is bamboo is are they representative of your average or median customer today about 200 employees yes 200 employees is my average that is my average uh customer customer size employee size per organization oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built the into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out I'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your founder path dashboard this 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right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of SAS valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your evaluation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform I hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview okay and then give me a sense of how you price what's a company like bamboo going to pay you on average per month or per year to use your technology so before before the pricing I want to talk about what is the impact jugular is giving so that I'm sorry my audience is extremely data driven and they're technical so I understand you want to talk about impact and all that let's talk about that towards the end though so on average what are these customers paying you per month or per year it is anywhere between three to five dollars per user per month okay and now that we have that so let's talk about the impact how are you measuring you know you know the impact bamboo is having by using juggle on their 200 employees all right you know let us say they are paying two thousand dollars per month salary per employee that is a that is a ballpark price and juggle will impact and improve 10 percentage of the productivity increase right we claim up to 40 percentage but I'm talking about minimum that means they are gaining two hundred dollars more productivity from the employee so when you do the comparison when you get 200 more productivity paying five dollars is no brain at 40. yeah but people have to believe the number you gave about productivity gains and increases right so like people that don't know you well would say well how do you measure 40 increase right how do you measure we have a free trial 30 days and we give a complete use case we take one Department we Implement juggle and then we also tell them how to measure that 10 to 20 productivity increase how do you know what their Baseline productivity was to know that you improved it 200 because we will we give them a blueprint of how you can measure uh the the productivity before juggle and after juggle but what what is the productivity metric like you know gallons of water for example or number of API calls or what is the actual thing you're measuring you see again you know how many tasks they do and how efficient they do this is the two datas we are looking for correct and when you are saying a task and there is no follow-up and there is no reminder for a task employees always go slow on the task base right not every employee is disciplined to check what is their task day to complete no so business owners doesn't have time to remind them give the list in front of them they don't have mechanism right now but in juggle they will get a reminder hey you have X number of tasks remaining correct and if you do this that is an encouragement waiting for you it's a psychological motivation task management the psychological motivation for people to complete it I see and then okay so a company like that has 200 full-time employees paying three to five per use dollars per user per month that means the average customer is going to be paying you 600 to a thousand dollars per month something like that correct correct okay interesting can you now that we understand sort of the economics there give me the back story when did you launch the company what year uh we launched three years ago and interesting is we pivoted twice uh since we launched you know we launched as a personal productivity and also business productivity app uh so we went to the market and Market says if you go to the personal they say business is there it's not for me and when we go one person to the business they say a personal is there it's not for me correct so then we came back to the drawing board we completely re-engineered everything exactly focused towards business correct and then we go back give me an example of that give me an example of something you you a feature you killed because it was too personal um well we okay we introduced a new feature band Cullen the new feature is creating a workspace for the business so nobody can get into the workspace no disturbance whatsoever correct personal you will see the message from business also in Personnel in the same screen the distraction comes in I see in this page we introduced a one workspace where business exactly fit into it and then they don't have any distraction I see okay so you get going in 2020. when you write the first line of code for the platform was that earlier a 2020 uh I think 2020 middle okay okay and then how long how long were you writing code before you closed your first customer uh I would say eight months okay so my question to you as a business owner how much of your money did you plow into this thing before you had your first customer uh if I can say close to eight hundred thousand dollars does that make you know that make you nervous uh to some extent but since because of my background technology background and other product experience me personally I felt that is a reasonable investment from my perspective because we have a chat engine we have a chat system we built and that is a custom chat system like like slack like owning a custom chat system with a task for 800k I think that is a that is a brainer no-brainer for me personally okay so then you got your first customer after that where'd you find that first customer do you remember uh you know I am a good networker I I talk to people I have my own social media channel I publish and I talk my progress I have around 100 000 followers so as soon as I published I have 500 companies who signed up they want to try but we spoke to people and we selectively identified which company is suitable for us and then we onboarded one by one so now we have 400 organizations using our app very successfully so today you have 400 paying customers yes okay and can I take the 400 paying customers times the average monthly article you just told me uh you're doing about 280 000 a month in Revenue um I would say under thousand would be reasonable because not every company has 200 employees many companies have 250 employ sorry 25 employees 40 employees it's all over the place well you told me quote my medium number of employees is 200 earlier in the interview now this is our target market but our launch strategy is not go to the bigger one go to the smaller one get the product stability and then go to the larger one now everybody just to be clear your your median your median customer today that is not 200 employees correct see again as I said we claim the ladder the first letter we climbed is 25 average employees okay but I don't want to go into the 200 employees in the first step I want to stabilize the product by introducing to 200 but now our target market is 200 employees that is I understand but a target market of 200 is different than what your median customer is today so I understand what you're saying but I just want to clear that up for the audience yeah yeah yeah sure sure you can say that 25 employee is but eventually when you ask me next year it will be different number I see okay so if you're at about a hundred thousand dollars a month today in Revenue where were you exactly one year ago so we can calculate growth you were asking after one year no if you're at a hundred thousand dollars a month today in Revenue where were you one year ago so we can calculate growth um I would say zero because we didn't have any Revenue at all last year because last year people using it we gave a free trial so so we we don't have any Revenue at all we didn't have any Revenue everyone you told me that you wrote the first line of code in 2020 and your first paying customer you got eight months later that would have been early 2021 but you just told me in 2022 which was last year One customer pays it doesn't so when we get thousand dollar five hundred dollars I don't really consider that as a revenue but like excitement is okay we got one customer paying but when you talk about Revenue means we have five customers paying every month that took long time we signed up the first customer they're ready to pay and we start focusing only on that one customer what you want more what you want more so we didn't onboard the second customer for a long time and we didn't we didn't and we gave three months three months free trial for every other customers so was 2022 total revenue under call it a million bucks or under 500K no I would say less than a hundred thousand dollars okay so under a hundred thousand so you you've you've then scaled over the past 12 months from nothing to 100 you did you collapse collected a hundred thousand dollars on last month in Revenue correct no in 2021 okay but you just you just told me that your total monthly recurring Revenue today is a hundred thousand dollars a month is that accurate 20 20 22 yes you just told me that your total monthly occurring Revenue today so as of last month was a hundred thousand dollars that's July or 2023 is that accurate yes okay so if you're doing a hundred thousand dollars a month today and you are doing zero a year ago that means you've added a hundred thousand dollars a new monthly recurring Revenue the past 12 months does that make sense that's right that's right okay how did you do that uh again aggressive marketing and I use B2B means I always go and talk in a conference it's an educator educated approach right you know you educate business what problem they have because most of the business owners they don't know that they have a problem and they don't know that that is a solution so educate the last conference you spoke at where you got juggle customers from it I spoke in India and we launched juggle in front of one thousand one thousand business owners Umi or what was the conference uh it is not SAS boomi it is uh you know SAS boom is a take take conference but I chose a conference uh it's called Kitco they have a one specific Regional business owners all aligned it's uh it's called keep call launch annual meet and there are around 1200 1200 business owners were presented in that and what do you put in your slide deck to get people watching you on stage to convert to a Juggle user so we I talk about problem Dave this is a problem business owners are facing I ask a simple question do you face this problem and I ask them to raise their hands and that's when I raise my I raise mine I say yes that's you don't you still don't have my email though you still don't have me signed up as on juggle how do you how do you get someone from Raising yeah I have a QR code display on the screen I said Okay can this QR code download the app our team will call you and onboard you interesting so how many people scan that app from 1200 total in the audience I think 240 I would say but I don't have exact number but 2004 session signed up on that particular conference that's impressive okay very cool tell me more about how you've capitalized business it's a bootstrap or have you raised capital uh first initially bootstrapped uh quarter million invested by by me and other co-founder and then uh we raised 2.3 million so far but my seed round is three million dollars and we'll be closing three million dollars in next few months when was the last close what month you mean like when I received the last investment in the same amount yeah I received last week okay so you closed a 2.3 million seed round this time I'm not closed as of it is a three million dollar seed round I've not closed yet I've received a 2.3 so far and I'll be receiving 700 000 in next few months and close the 3 million seed around in next two months okay so sorry you've done the first close of the three million seed round you've had and received 2.3 million of wires you tend to get the rest of the three million here shortly and officially close the round in the next couple of months correct exactly right okay what's the market like today I mean do you go out and sell 10 of the company for 3 million bucks or how do you think about it uh I I I'm diluting 20 percentage of my company for the three million dollars okay so it's a 15 million post money valuation then right does that feel fair to you for me yes why do you say that because we we did an intense study on valuation and we also hired a consultant from California who is a very strong Mna expert and you know we got opinion from him as well and he says I don't this is fair value well why would you use an m a expert to come up with valuation when VC valuations are very different I I know that and I have very close associated with VC form as well and in many house also and I took advice from everybody that's a 15x multiple on your current revenues how do you make sure you grow into that valuation to prevent a Down Round in the future uh this is you know we compared with other product and this valuation is based on the stickiness once customers start using this it's sticking us you take will you quantify that what's your gross churn you're saying yes I my customer lose my customer videos it is more than 90 percentage and that's annually yes annually on a gross basis yes correct okay so 10 gross annual churn and do you have a playbook in place to expand Revenue to make up the 10 whole yes so is your expansion Revenue the last 12 months more than 10 percent yes yes you saw that you saw the number right did I have anywhere else but we had hundred thousand hundred thousand last year and this year we will be hitting one million so 100 000 to 1 million is one side and then we will be appointing a lot of resellers across International and we are launching in Malaysia this month end and we are launching an El Salvador this month this week matter of fact and then you know so we'll be launching in Singapore so we are expanding yeah I understand that new customers do not impact your historical net dollar retention um so I'm asking about customers who signed up a year ago what you just told me is 10 of them will churn and what I'm asked no what was your question did you just said yeah we're just we're talking about standard SAS metrics gross churn expansion and net dollar retention those numbers are all lagging that you look back at the last 12 months you're not we don't care about future growth on those those metrics okay okay see last month we onboarded many customers they used it and they started paying only for this year so I will know the retention data but next year oh I see so you don't have a full year of data I don't have a full year date I think but but since they since I'm closely working with customer I can able to give you the data that you know since they're onboarding new new employees every day that shows that the stickiness is there I say I see I see that makes sense what's your team size today on juggle 24 employees 24. how many engineers uh I would say more than 15 Engineers OR tech people and do you spread them out are they all remote are they based in one central location no they are all across the place I have people from Poland I have people from Brazil I have people from us I have people from India how did you find and run a recruiting process for an engineer in Brazil you tell me uh that is the biggest biggest Pain any take entrepreneur will face you know so so it is our our philosophy is uh higher fast Fire fast promote fast so so we learned from many other successful uh entrepreneurs startup entrepreneurs we followed the same you know because since it is a very specific Tech engineering requirement you know you cannot judge by uh by interview or you cannot judge by reading profile you know you have to hire them take a risk of 30 days 40 days assign see if they are compatible for your vision that is only way we can find the talent and everyone are you burning money today are you break even or profitable I'm I'm burning money today and I should able to achieve Breakeven probably end up this year or next year how much did you burn last month last month uh I would say close to 100 000 sorry hundred and five thousand dollars does that make you nervous or you're good with that no man we work with data so I'm not nervous all right very good let's wrap up here with the famous five number one your favorite book my favorite book uh man uh the book is the hook designed by the the great UI ux designer how to create an app for engaging your users what's the name of it sorry the hook the hook the hook number two is their CEO you're following or studying a CEO yep oh okay I love I love uh Tim right now he's awesome he's doing great and also he follows from the picture stand up very good number three what's your favorite online tool for building juggle online tool for building juggle man I use juggle for my internal team process and everything I love Journey can't be your own yeah can't be your own tool oh you cannot be my own tool I think we used uh before what will be used oh man uh since we moved 12 months ago to juggle I couldn't remember the product we used well just think about tools that you use this morning right absolutely is the one we used before we use Journal number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night how many hours sleep six six hours and what's your situation or in married single kids married I have two kids two kids okay how old are you uh I am 46. last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20 years old yeah don't don't wait for others to believe in you guys there you have it 20 years ago he launched his agency cap digisoft he says he always want to launched a product that would impact Millions he's now building juggle they're doing a hundred thousand dollars a month in Revenue up from almost nothing just a year ago he put in 250k in a pre you know up up front to get it going uh and then raise another two raising three million right now 2.3 are already wired on a 15 million valuation burning 100 Grand a month uh per month right now but doesn't concern him he's got plenty of Runway team of 24 15 Engineers again a platform that helps you motivate track and measure Employee Engagement everyone thanks for taking us to the top thank you and appreciate and I I wish you all the good luck for all the followers and there is plenty of opportunity team I can tell you but the thing is like pick one problem and stay focused and prepare for the changes Market will demand something different than what you ask or what you plan for one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm 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 our poo 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 p.m 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 their 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 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