How Kissflow CEO Suresh Sambandam grew Kissflow to $90.3M revenue and 1.5K customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is suresh sambandam he is the founder and ceo of orangescape makers of kissful disruptive sas based enterprise level work automation and collaboration platform with more than 10 000 customers across 160 countries he's an expert and a round entrepreneur on a mission to democratize automation and create immersive work experience for enterprises of all sizes so you're ready to take us to the top hi all right hey how are you okay good so let's it sounds like kiss flow is the main product here so i want to focus on that tell us what the company does what kissfull does and specifically are you a pure play sas company or not we are a pure place as company and kissflow is basically solving collaborative work management problem for companies of all sizes uh at this point in time we have a large number of uh small medium customers although we have 50 plus uh fortune 500 customers who are using our product as well okay so kind of large range here we don't have time to go down kind of every cohort but give me a general sense i mean what's the average customer going to pay you per year per month to get access to your technology uh an average customer would pay something like 300 to 400 a month and what would they get for that so they basically get uh somewhere around 50 users uh who can use it on a monthly basis okay but but people aren't familiar with it so describe what the product does so typically uh when you go to a large company uh like it's a let's start with a midsize company if you if we go to mitch's company they basically have some sort of an accounting software and maybe some crm and that's about it and most of the other uh you know for for other processes they do not have software in place when you buy caseflow they end up automating these processes using our platform this is a workflow automation platform as well so for example if somebody wants to apply for a vacation request or wants to make a capital expense they need to go through a multi-level approval they can actually use case flow and make their own process it takes them from step a to step b to step c and then completes the process end-to-end and they can do they can do all of this without programming so you don't have to be a technical person to do this very cool okay so we got the product now put this on a timeline for us when you launch the company we launched at google i o in 2012 and we were for in beta for a few months we started billing uh commercial billing from 2013 so this is like uh roughly five years uh commercial production and so as you said in the bio you've scaled to about 10 000 customers those are all paying customers uh we have around 15 to 20 percent of them uh are paying customers uh remaining our uh free customers so we came on to a premium plan so about 1500 kind of organizations are paying and the rest are still on the free plan okay and greg can i multiply can i take 1500 times a 300 per month average you're doing about 450 grand a month right now uh we'll be doing more than that because we have uh some some large uh enterprises uh who pay us like quarter million to half a million dollar like we have customers who pay 20 000 who have 20 000 employees who are using our software so okay so correct me yeah what are you at today about in terms of ar so we'll be around sub 10 million okay sub 10 will you break 10 million here before the end of the year you got about 20 days left yeah we do our financial year uh is in march uh next year so we will be hitting close to 10 million uh next year yeah very good all right that's great and so we'll say maybe you're at call maybe a nine million ish run rate right now where were you exactly a year ago so we can understand growth rate uh so we are roughly doing uh doubling every year so last year we did 180 growth okay so if you grew between between over the last 12 months if you've grown 180 that means you would have been doing about caught 280 or about 300 000 bucks a month a year ago is that right yeah something like that and where so so educate us here seresh where is most this growth coming from how are you signing up all these customers uh we are a hundred percent uh digital marketing company uh so all of us uh all of our leads and sign ups are coming through inbound marketing uh close to 99 of them i would say so we are pretty much very strong in organic seo uh we we come we we have around three thousand keywords for which we rank anywhere between one to twenty positions in google and then we we do a quite a number of google adwords we do linkedin campaigns uh facebook campaigns or paid and a number of digital we list in all the online marketplaces so we have to name a few others like for example we are uh we are on captura um we are on g2 crowd uh you know uh get app uh finance online there is a number of such platforms on which we are listed yeah we also pay their premium take their premium subscriptions and rank uh top on their website yeah so how much would you when you look at all your kind of direct paid stuff so ignore organic seo but all your kind of like direct paid stuff i mean are you i mean you guys spending what 20 30 grand a month on this kind of stuff or more oh uh we will be running uh totally uh somewhere around 150 000 to 200 000 a month yeah yeah i was gonna say i know people that spend just 30 grand a month just on captera oh yeah and captain alone uh will be maybe fifteen thousand or two thousand yeah yeah per month i i'm putting together google adwords and everything together yeah yeah so break this down for me in terms of your fully weighted cac right to get a new customer what do you spend to get to that customer uh it is a spectrum i think it can go anywhere between six hundred dollars all the way to sometime thousand dollars so uh a fully weighted car is any six hundred two thousand dollars it's a spectrum depending upon the size of the customer service even a thousand is good though i mean if you've got customers coming in paying 300 or 500 bucks a month i mean you're getting paid back in four to five months yeah actually our payback is pretty strong yeah it's about four months right uh four to six months yeah um have you bootstrapped to raise capital uh it's a sort of a mix we have raised one million around six seven years ago in 2012 uh after that we pretty much bootstrapped the company in fact we spent that money and then we pivoted from there and found case flow launched it and then after that we pretty much grew revenues from case flow itself are the is that million bucks are those investors still on the cap table and kiss flow yeah definitely okay yes that's good that's obviously super good there and i assume since you haven't raised a bunch but you've scaled nicely you're casual positive at this point yes we are uh we are profitable for the last three years that's great are you looking to race capital now no you like the bootstrapped life huh right now no actually uh because things are looking looking good and we have a recurring model and every month we are getting a predictable revenue base uh so you know i think things are going good that's great right now no plans yeah that's great and tell me more about uh team size how many folks today uh we have close to 150 people okay and where's everyone based i have a few mountain view very few in in the us in mountain view and indiana uh uh these are the two locations in the u.s okay so kind of remote all spread out and then wrap out the last kind of critical economics here so churns critical what's your revenue churn per year would you say actually we are minus uh uh two to three percent uh every month which means like uh we actually gain uh we have negative churn for revenue yeah yeah no i understand that so i want to break that down right so i want to know what gross revenue churn was then add back expansion and that's how you get net negative so so what is gross revenue churn um i don't know the exact math okay so uh i think i i remember the net revenue churn uh which is minus uh two to minus three percent on a month so on a yearly basis it's like twenty five percent uh i think one point eight six uh last month i checked it was 1.86 uh on account on a monthly basis percent one point eight six percent one point eight one point eight percent revenue churn per month yeah less than two percent uh uh two percent accounting i mean two percent a concern and then we have negative uh revenue yeah okay so people measure those things all kinds of different ways i want to try and say this so that everyone understands so you're churning two percent of your revenue per month how which is about 24 per year however your net revenue retention is about 125 which means your expansion makes up the 24 you lose and adds another 25 on top of that right so your expansion's about 45 is that accurate yeah that is right but there are there are some semantics there but technically that is correct uh because you know what's happening accounts because when you when the churn happens with young accounts right their churn is very small uh in terms of revenue but also then although the number is higher but but technically what you said makes...