How JustCall CEO Gaurav Sharma grew JustCall to $12M revenue and 2.2K customers in 2024.

just got done editing this interview you guys are gonna love it before i do that though i want you to know that i'm going to be in the comments for the next 30 minutes or so answering your questions if there's additional questions you want me to ask the ceo next time i interview them leave them below or if you're just loving the data points i get ceos to share click the thumbs up button below that's your way of telling me you're loving this stuff and i'll get you more of it additionally again i'll be in the comments answering any questions you have all right for 30 minutes enjoy the interview hello everyone my guest today is gurav sharma he's a founder and ceo of sas labs inc maker of just call he's a chemical engineer by education but loves writing code he's a four times entrepreneur has two exits so the last business of the new york times he's now an active angel investor in sas companies ready to take us to the top let's do it all right so first off tell me about this company sold to the new york times is it a media company or what yeah it was a advertising tech company so i was running it from santa monica uh yeah so we we were doing so we were like probably the biggest players in influencer marketing what was the name of the company hello society okay got it and what year was that exit um 2015 i guess okay so a while ago not at this point did they did they can you give me a general sense i mean was that a really good exit for you or break even or like you know fu kind of money not really few but it was a good example all right let's talk about just call now so what does just call do and what's the revenue model so just call is a cloud phone system for sales and support teams and it integrates with all your crms so it just automates all the call logging and recording and everything uh it's a pure sas business which are like 25 to 50 dollars per user per month uh pretty straightforward business model yeah and how many users do teams typically sign up with or yeah so we have about 1600 plus paying customers users or customers or brands yeah businesses businesses okay i mean young businesses uh and they're paying about uh on an average 150 bucks a month okay very good so 1500 1600 15 bucks a month so what you you have like it's like team sizes typically like five to ten that's a sweet spot for us and that's average yeah okay and then i mean you told me before you listen to every episode soon i'm gonna do this can i take the 600 customers times 150 bucks you're doing about 240 000 bucks a month right now that's right okay and where were you a year ago about 80 000 a month good growth you know that's good growth you've done this before where did you get most the growth was it new customers or expansion revenue i think it's a mix of both uh so we worked a lot on our integrations so integration gives us free customers so we haven't spent any money on ads till date and we're now getting and investing money into marketing now but we haven't done that we get a lot of natural organic sort of expansion because people come with support team then they bring their sales team so it's a natural expansion going there and then there's upgrades from 45 bucks to 50 bucks for each of the months what are driving mostly upgrades like is there a utility based metric or is it all feature based in seat based it's it's mostly um two ways uh seeds based or it's feature based okay so once they start liking it and they want to get more out of it we they just go for a bigger plan okay so there's no like thing you measure like number of calls per month you know things like that and these are those there but we really can't uh predict those so we never really put pricing on that okay got it so just feature-based upselling and seat based up selling for now i mean we know that we know that if it's a sales team they're gonna be needing more powerful features on sales so let's build those features and put them in the premium plans yeah now you have on your standard plan it's just it's one phone number and one team member and again if they won't go anything above that it immediately goes up to 50 per user per month no i mean you can you can use the drop down and increase the number of users from there and you can see the bill i see i see i see okay so is that does it stay flat like if i go up to 20 customers it's just 20 times 25 or is there discounts no we play we play some something there so on a standard plan after 15 15 accounts you get like 10 discount oh yeah i'm seeing that very good okay and how did you so take me back you put this on a timeline when you launch this company so we launched the product on product hunt on six seconds december 2016 but we really got our first customer in march 2017. okay march 2017. when did you write the first line of code uh september 2016. okay and how much did you spend on the mvp before your first dollar revenue uh not really i mean we've been like bootstrapping so i don't know 20 20k maybe okay and who's we what's your team look like so now the team has grown up i mean we have about 35 people we just hired today about eight eight more people so it'd be like 43 now what were those eight people sales reps or yeah like support and sales yep um so how do you i mean what are you most nervous about in terms of seeing if these eight hires will pay off um i think on the sales cycle sales ideas i mean they should start kicking in from probably third months or so because all our numbers are depending on number of humans we have so yeah uh the maths will work only of their work what what have you put so let's say i'm joining i just joined you today as a sales rep and my base is thirty thousand dollars and then let's say i do hit my quota target right what is the quota target for these new sales reps see our sales are pretty much uh they're not really sales sales i mean we have a very strong inbound interest so all you have to do is give a good demo that's all uh so our our metric is just the percentage of a conversion so we normally convert like 60 demos into paid customers so we really don't have such uh whatever salary and all that so there's no it's all it's all based there's no commission i see okay and so fill out the rest of that funnel so 60 demo to paid each month how many new trials are you getting so another one thing uh so we don't give any free trials so our first month is at 70 discount so that's the unique sort of way we figure out you know so just to make sure that we are not losing any money because we are bootstrapped and so how many how many demos are you doing per month about 220 250 okay like yeah and we can what about 150 customers we get about 115 new customers you said 150 new customers or 115. 150 five zero one five zero uh that's that's more than a sixty percent conversion rate yeah i mean it can be like 200 demos at times so i'm just giving an average yep um it's about 200 something demos and like 140 158 about so about 60 um because i have stopped counting those last few months when i got a leader for that so yeah so i mean if you're signing up 150 new customers per month at 150 bucks a month i mean what you're adding like 20 000 bucks a new mrr per month that's almost like 200k yeah yeah that's i mean that's obviously a healthy machine you got cranky and people actually eventually expand they start with a smaller team right i mean they start with a single or two people team and then they expand so obviously not really always but yeah maybe more like five or ten thousand a newton true new mrr but they expand like whenever it's about 100k a month yeah now expansion is critical into your model new seats new features over the past 12 months what was your expansion revenue on average we're doing about uh i can't give you the number and expansion because i haven't measured that but it's almost about 1 00 106 percent as the retention net revenue retention yeah yeah what was gross revenue churn over the past 12 months um it's so we can we just measured it on a monthly basis so it's almost about three percent uh revenue term five percent lower chance okay so three percent monthly revenue term i mean if we extrapolate 36 percent annually right if you then add back another 42 in expansion that gets you to your 106 net revenue retention number that's right yes that's good and then so take me back to getting these customers again you're just bringing on sales people you have a good idea i imagine what your cac is what's it cost to get 150 a month customer it cost is about the same like 150 200 okay so you're getting paid back in i mean you're getting paid back pretty pretty quick then like second month yeah do you want to get more aggressive there i mean a lot of people say that whoever can spend the most for a customer will get the customer and you're not spending that much now we're gonna spend so what's the plan for last two years was do you know accumulate enough money to pay people for next 24 months so now that we have money in the bank and we are safe for next two years now we can...