How Konnect Insights Reached $8.5M ARR and 500 Customers While Staying Bootstrapped and Profitable (Interview with CEO Sameer Narkar)

Introduction and Background

Nathan Latka

0:02Hey folks, my guest today is Sameer Narkar. He's an electronics and telecom engineer who spent seven years in software before founding Konnect Insights, which he still runs as a CEO and chief architect. He's known in the bootstrapping community for building a fully self-funded enterprise SaaS company through a partner-led distribution model rather than VC money or big sales team. Sameer, you ready to take us to the top?

Sameer Narkar

0:24Yeah, hi Nathan. Thank you for having me today.

Nathan Latka

0:27We were just chatting, you were on the show you said five years ago, huh?

Sameer Narkar

0:31Yeah, that was five, six years ago when we were making less than 500k a year. These were early days for us. And I had a chat with you. I think we were discussing about soccer World Cup as well. This was so it was fantastic chatting with you and you're happy to be on your podcast again after so many years.

Nathan Latka

0:54Why'd you decide to come back? Did you get a good or bad response after the first one?

Sameer Narkar

0:59It was great. mean, you're a very famous person anyways, Nathan. So you have a great community of SaaS founders. Not only that podcast, but I follow you on LinkedIn. ⁓ I think I read all your posts. I see, I hear quite a few podcasts that you do. So it's a pleasure to be here again with you, Nathan.

Nathan Latka

1:03⁓ Well, it's a pleasure to have you. You're the one in the trenches, you know, scraping away every day, hustling, trying to bootstrap your business. So for folks that missed that first episode we did together, why don't you just tell everyone in sixty seconds, what does Konnect Insights do? What do you sell?

What Konnect Insights Does

Sameer Narkar

1:31Yeah. So today we are an Omnichannel platform. It's a CX platform. A ⁓ lot of platforms in this market talk about being an Omnichannel, you know, giving you data from across the channels. ⁓ We ensure that as a brand, when people communicate to you, they may choose, you know, channels like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, emails, calls, chats, or, you know, every non-voice channel we cover, you know, that's our strength. ⁓ first thing. Apart from that we give you very good insights and on you know what people are talking, where they are coming from, what is the sentiment, how you fare against the competition. you can do everything within Konnect Insights. So it's a platform for CX, customer experience, as well as it is platform for marketing. ⁓ And CX traditionally has been for agents, right? What we have also done in addition to that is offer CX for the boardroom with CX intelligence, ⁓ or we call it as Konnect Research Cloud. That's a differentiating factor, and that's something that... ⁓ almost no products offered. So that's what we do here at Konnect Insights.

Nathan Latka

2:44I interesting. And are you still bootstrapped today?

Bootstrapped and Profitable

Sameer Narkar

2:49Yeah happily bootstrapped and profitable.

Nathan Latka

2:52I how profitable? Ten, twenty, thirty percent?

Sameer Narkar

2:56⁓ Profit margins you're saying, I think it's upwards of 20%.

Nathan Latka

2:58Yeah. That's incredible. You should be so proud of your well, you should be proud of yourself if you're doing a lot of revenue. So you're doing you're doing half a million a year about five, six years ago. Are you comfortable sharing what your revenue is today?

The Growth Journey So Far

Sameer Narkar

3:12Yeah, we are at 10 million AR or anything. We'll close upwards of 11.

Nathan Latka

3:15What That's incredible. Congrat dude, Sameer, that's incredible. Congratulations.

Sameer Narkar

3:25So we took five years from 1 million to 10 million.

Nathan Latka

3:29That's insane. Okay, now I'm curious. How did you do it? How did you go from half a million to 10 million revenue profitable with 10, 20, 30% profit margins over the past four years?

How the Partner Network Drove International Growth

Sameer Narkar

3:40Yeah, so we started from India and our first few customers were from India. These were direct sales. But later on, when we started racing out into the international market, we partnered with a lot of similar solutions. Not exactly what we offer, but let's say contact centers or CRMs. And we built integrations that helped us initially, but then we leveraged the partner network of lot of other ISV providers. network helped us to accelerate fast. So the whole idea with the SaaS platform was, how can you penetrate faster? Why not use the existing network where people are selling the software products and leverage that platform to penetrate the market? That's what we did. ⁓ we started getting a lot of international customers early 2023. And from there on, in next two to three years, we almost got customers across 30 plus countries. So I think that really helped us. The partner network and the ISV network helped us to accelerate faster.

Pricing, Customer Tiers, and ACV

Nathan Latka

4:51⁓ what's the average customer paying you per year today?

Sameer Narkar

4:55I mean, if you look at the customers that we have, we divide them into enterprise, mid-level and small, right? So if I average it out straight away, it's a difficult math, right? But an average pricing for a mid-size customer would be somewhere around 25K per year annual contract value. Whereas the enterprise customers, have customers who are paying over 100K USD. And of course, there are small tiers also. So our platform is also available for customers who are somewhere around 10 to 12k per year. That's an entry level. See, we've been an enterprise platform. We are not very exclusive to only enterprise platforms. We say that, if you want to start small with just an email or chat, and today, tomorrow as you grow with social platforms, you can go across channels. So there are many customers who started with as low as 10k, but today are paying 60, 70k because the adoption of the product itself was within a year. ⁓ Because what happens usually in SaaS is people come to you with a very small requirement. ⁓ And your product may offer eight different features. So if they're just starting from one or two, get started and grow those accounts. So we internally have a very solid growth team, which after the sales team starts working with the customer, it helps us to retain the accounts. But at the same time, it also helps us to grow those accounts because we have more to offer to those customers.

Nathan Latka

6:28So just before we move on past the pricing and customer question, I want to talk about how you expand accounts and drive your net dollar retention up. But it sounds like today, how many paying customers are you servicing?

Customer Count and the Enterprise Mix

Sameer Narkar

6:39Yeah, we have more than 500 plus customers, Nathan.

Nathan Latka

6:44Okay. Five hundred customers. So I mean can okay, five hundred customers. Can we I mean can we divide that into eleven million of revenue? That means the a I know you don't like averages, but the the average would then be about twenty-two thousand per year.

Sameer Narkar

6:55Yeah. See on the higher side, enterprise customers would be about say 20 odd percent would be enterprise customers. And these are very large telecom brands or airlines or large banks. They follow under the enterprise plan. ⁓ Now there could be a large bank who might be paying us upwards of 100k in and there could be a bank who might be paying us as less as 20k but then our focus is to take that customer from 20k to how can we get them to a 100k account because we have a lot of

Upsell Motion and App Marketplace

Nathan Latka

7:37So what are they what do you tell me what you're upselling against here on tell me where to go on your website. So which feature do they typically start with and what are your most pr successful upsells?

Sameer Narkar

7:46Perfect. ⁓ When they start with right, they can, the most, most probably they start with something as less as social care, you know, where they would say social listening or social care as we call it. Now in that they would say, fine, let me, let me respond to the customer queries on X, Facebook, Instagram.

Nathan Latka

7:57Social listening.

Sameer Narkar

8:11Then they go ahead and also add their email channels, okay, ⁓ where they can, which comes under Omnichannel ticketing. Omnichannel ticketing, right? So the channels increase. Now the...

Nathan Latka

8:17Which one is that? Yeah, okay.

Sameer Narkar

8:30ACVs don't only increase by adding features, they also increase vertically by consuming more. So our pricing works on how many channels you connect, how many users you have and how much data you're consuming. Yeah, getting my point. And in addition to that, if you also want to do competition analytics for public data, then that's the way you're, you know, vertically you're also increasing that account. And these are some of the features that you see on the pricing page. They are tier based. So if you go for a professional plan, there is also a scope of vertically increasing the plan because your number of users and your usage is increasing. ⁓ ⁓ There are many integrations that you can see in the app marketplace. So if you want to go ahead and integrate with a CTI, where calls can also come into our platform, or you want go ahead and add some CRM integrations. So we have built an app marketplace where all these are plug and play integrations. You don't really have to build them customized. It's all working across platforms. So data flows across systems and you get one view of the customer. So the whole idea in today's world is have a system that is nicely connected with your your stack, you know, so you get one view of the customer. That's what our app marketplace does. And then you, course, upgrade to a Konnect AI Plus plan, which offers your AI Essentials, Agent Empower and Konnect Research Cloud. So these are these are AI features on top of what we have to offer. ⁓ Agent Empower is more like Agent Force of Salesforce, right? But just that we have more channels, so we have more context to offer to you. But as an agent, while you're resolving the queries, it gives you entire insights on what can be your next best action. Can there have been automated response sent to the customer? Do you assign it to the contact center? So we offer all that within our AI features. And Konnect Research Cloud is a different product altogether, which helps you with insights where you can simply ask questions and get answers. ⁓ More on that I'll talk later on CX Intelligence at KLC.

Acquisition Offers and Why He Is Not Selling

Nathan Latka

10:37I saw you were integrated with Freshdesk. Obviously Girish is a very famous success story over there with Freshworks IPOing. if he offered you a hundred million all cash for you to sell the company, so 10x revenue, would you take the deal?

Sameer Narkar

10:51Okay, so ⁓ I'll tell you what I do get offers for selling the company not not hundred million so far I've got little close to 50 or so but then that's not the thought process right now Nathan I mean I don't think too ahead from now I'm enjoying what I'm doing right now that doesn't mean that we will never sell our company whatever survey we'll see but ⁓ I believe as a founder you cannot be doing two things at one time ⁓ focused on building something and also thinking of selling so my philosophy is you build not to sell you build to build something and on the way ⁓ something comes up then then that's a decision that you have to take at some point but I don't think I'm ready for that right now

Nathan Latka

11:41So you've turned down forty, fifty million dollar acquisitions already.

Sameer Narkar

11:46Thanks

A Team of 150 and the Mumbai Engineering Hub

Nathan Latka

11:48This is this is a tough negotiator. This is good. Who are you building this with? Tell me how many folks are on your team today.

Sameer Narkar

11:53Yeah. When you interviewed me last time, we were a team of 24, because we had two offices where maximum 12 seats were there. So we were around 24 then. We are a team of 150 now.

Nathan Latka

12:11Well. What's the breakdown? How many engineers?

Sameer Narkar

12:13And I think we have an engineering team of about 55 folks, which is all in our headquarter in Mumbai. ⁓ And the sales team and all other teams are across other parts of the world. We have folks in Southeast Asia, in Singapore, Indonesia. We have guys in Saudi Arabia, ⁓ UAE, Egypt. in Brazil ⁓ and Nigeria. That's our team right now globally. ⁓ We are still not very strong in the US to be honest of all the 30 countries that we speak of we don't have a lot of customers in the US that's where we are now getting to ⁓ but apart from that UK, Africa, Latin, Middle East, Southeast Asia and India where we started from we are very strong.

Sales Team Structure: AEs, SDRs and Partners

Nathan Latka

13:03Well I mean I so obviously have a large audience of US folks, right? ⁓ you know, I I'm gonna ask you later on, you know, if they're listening to this, why should they give you a test? But before we do that, I just wanna understand your sales motion. How many of your full-time employees are account executives who carry a quota?

Sameer Narkar

13:18Right. So this is region-wise. Now in Southeast Asia, I have two account executives. In India, I have five. In Middle East, I have four. In Latin, I have one. And in Africa, I have one. So that's my account executive team. To support the account executives, we have SDRs. Now that's much bigger team. In India, we have seven. In Southeast Asia, we have three. In the Middle East, we have 10. In Africa, we have two. In Latin, we have two. And then there are folks who are working on US and UK as well. But that's not a bigger deal. And then we work with partners. apart from India, We prefer to work with partners globally and in certain markets we clearly say that we are not going to deal directly with our clients. It is always via partner network. So our SDRs generate leads, give it to the partners, partners close it and from partners also we get a lot of leads. So it's a very win-win-win setup that we have done with the partners.

Nathan Latka

14:29Just last month, we're recording this on June 9th. In May, how much how many new leads did you get from partners?

Sameer Narkar

14:36from the partners and inbound. I won't have an exact number, Nathan, I didn't come prepared, but I'll tell you on average how we do it. So I track it region-wise, So I know the number of logos that we acquired every region, and I know how many of those leads came from the partners and how many we sourced to the partners. So it's always both ways. ⁓ Now, because we are very strong in about six to seven countries, you know, ⁓

Nathan Latka

14:42Yeah, it's okay.

New Logos and New ARR Added Each Month

Sameer Narkar

15:06I recollect very easily is the number of logos that we have closed across the region in a month. So that always is on the lower side about 10, on the higher side we close about 20 to 22 customers ⁓ in a month. ⁓ A good day is when I get at least one PO from anywhere in the world. So if you work for 22 days, give me 22 logos, that's a good month for us. That's the philosophy. ⁓ And inbound.

Nathan Latka

15:36Yep. So twenty two thousand new logos per month at a twenty thousand average A C V. I mean you're adding about you're growing about half a million of ARR per month right now.

Sameer Narkar

15:45Yeah, so I'll tell you how much not exactly half a million but So that's a minimum that we have to add in terms of ARR ⁓ On the lower side today, I would say that will be about 450k, you know It's the new ARR that we add ⁓ and I want to take that to a million as we finish this year

Nathan Latka

16:04Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yep. What's the historical what's the historical growth looked like? I mean that's the monthly number, but if you're at eleven million of ARR today, where were you one year ago?

Sameer Narkar

16:15So I'll get as we start. Yeah, so we are growing at about, you know, so year before that was at 85 % and a year before that was at 60%. Okay, this is how my math works. From here on, if we grow at 60 % regularly, by 2032, we will be at 100 million. That's the math.

Nathan Latka

16:45Okay. So just to be clear though, ⁓ if you grew so it sounds like you had in twenty twenty four about four million of revenue. ⁓ that was a sixty percent growth. You grew to about seven million at the end of twenty twenty five, which is eighty five percent growth, and now you're at eleven million already with six months left in the year.

Sameer Narkar

17:01So I'll close this year with 11 million ARR. That's the prediction.

Where Revenue Stands Today: $8.5M Run Rate

Nathan Latka

17:08Your target okay, so where are you today though? If you just take last month's revenue or MRR times twelve, what would you run rate at?

Sameer Narkar

17:13⁓ I'll be at eight and half right now and I'll close this here.

Nathan Latka

17:16Okay. Very cool. Okay. So okay, so we understand a lot of your growth is coming from a team of 150. You've got thirteen account executives. They are supported by twenty-four SDRs, but those SDRs also send leads to your local partners. ⁓ when the partner closes the lead, how do those economics work? Are you paying them an affiliate fee?

Partner Program Economics

Sameer Narkar

17:38Yeah, I mean, there different kinds of partner programs that we have. The one that we prefer is a markup model. Okay. Where we recommend them that you take a pricing from us and we have built partner portal where there's pricing that they can calculate on their own. See, pricing never works on the list price that you have on the website. Like you just put in the numbers and number will come. It doesn't work like that. It has to have some math as to if more number of users and enterprise plan, then I can accommodate more number of profiles and mentions and all that stuff. So we have created a where you just punch in the stuff, gives you a proposal from the platform, does all the calculation in the backend and the proposal is given to you. If you are taking that proposal as a base amount and adding discounts up to 15%, you really don't have to check with us. Add a 25 % markup and your support and implementation fee is all yours. So 100 % implementation, 100 % support and a 25 % markup is one of the model with which we work with partners. ⁓ There could be someone who is an affiliate, not a reseller partner, because he's not putting a lot of efforts to sell, but they're just working as an affiliate partner and working as a reference. So we have a 15 % one-time fee for the reference. Okay. And, apart from that, there are specific partners who have an expertise on implementation, but they do not really are good at reselling. Okay. So in that case, our team does all the heavy lifting of selling to that customer.

Nathan Latka

19:04I see.

Sameer Narkar

19:19Then in that case, we offer only the implementation and the support fee to the partners. So there are about three programs in which we work. We have a very dedicated partner team within our organization. There are about six folks who only work on nurturing the partners. ⁓ And then there are about one or two who also try to acquire the new partner. So we work on various...

How Many Partners and How Many Produce

Nathan Latka

19:40How many current partners do you have?

Sameer Narkar

19:43So we totally have signed up with about 68 partners with whom there's some level of interaction happening, of which I know there are about 30 dedicated partners who constantly bring business for us.

Nathan Latka

19:57And the reason you have your SDRs send the leads through the partners is because the partners actually help your future customers set things up, get on board, and that's what drives your future retention and expansion. Is that right?

Sameer Narkar

20:09So when we acquire a new partner, the partner team focuses on at least closing one or two deals with them in first three months. And trust me, that 90 % or 100 % effort is all ours. Partner just takes that money. ⁓ But what happens after that, they open up their book and they probably have 10 more customers where they have sold some other product. that's where the business starts coming because after one or two deals where the trust is built, it's easy to sign up with a partner, get an agreement, sign up with the partner. It's very difficult to actually close deals via partner because ⁓ even if your product is great, they haven't seen money as yet via your product. Once they start to see money, is when they, you know,

Nathan Latka

20:38I see. Makes sense.

Sameer Narkar

20:59Because today if they're selling Zendesk and Zendesk is giving them money, why would they sell Konnect Insights? Unless they see money, ⁓ That's the whole idea. It's common sense.

AI Roadmap and Why This Cannot Be Vibe-Coded

Nathan Latka

21:08Makes sense. Let's wrap let's wrap up here. We have got two minutes left. I want to talk about AI. And the reason Sameer wanna talk about this is I imagine there's people watching this interview going, Nathan, I'm seeing you show Konnect Insights website. I build dashboards like this myself by vibe coding. Why do I need to pay Sameer? So tell us how you're adding value, your future product roadmap here related to AI.

Sameer Narkar

21:29See, it's not really about the data or building the product yourself. You you manage 30 plus channels. There are so many APIs, webhooks. In fact, you cannot become partner of so many platforms right away, right? So there are a lot of layers to building the product itself. So it's not just a platform that is ⁓ saving data. It is actually building a lot of Dashboards, of course, we have today, but I'm also not a big fan of dashboards. I believe that dashboard should be created just by giving instructions. it should give you answers to the questions that we have and that's where KRC plays the major role ⁓ where you ask questions and get dashboards. So this is not a product that can be vibe-coded because you have to first manage 30 plus channels, manage the API costs, we pay a lot to APIs already for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and so many other platforms that we bring data from and in addition to that, it's a very vast product.

Nathan Latka

22:25So are people using I mean I'm sh I'm screen sharing Konnect AI right now. Give me some usage numbers or or is it still pre pre pre launch?

Konnect Research Cloud Usage and AI Metrics

Sameer Narkar

22:32No, Konnect AI Plus is there for more than a year now. KRC is a new product for about four months. We are having about 20 customers who are using KRC, Konnect Research Cloud, which is part of the Konnect AI Plus. But all these features that you see on your screen right now, which is AI Essentials or Agent Empower, that has been now shipped to a lot of our existing customers. Our ⁓ growth team does that. So all the customers that we are.

Nathan Latka

23:01What are you measuring though, Sameer, though, for for like Agent Empower? Are you measuring number of chats per day? Like, how are you measuring if customers are getting value from these?

Sameer Narkar

23:09Exactly. So agent empowered pricing is definitely on agent based, know, so it's somewhere initially we launched it at a $29 per agent to use it. Now, how do we measure it? If there is a query and earlier if we are taking five to six iterations to resolve a query, if that has now gone down to a couple of iterations, that is the value add. So a customer sent six queries before a query was resolved with Agent Empower, it just took two iterations. Okay. How many of your L1 queries were responded directly by the Agent Empower and you did not need an agent for that? Okay. That's how we measure the success of Agent Empower. So Agent Empower measure success is on how much work of the agent was reduced and how fast your query was resolved. Whereas, AI Essentials measure is ⁓ how. how fast it is acting on the signals. So we do automated AI classification, we do automated reports out of AI Essentials, we do auto sentiment out of AI Essentials, language detections. So AI Essentials is more on the signal on data, Agent Empower is more of AI for the agents. And KRC is an AI for CEOs. That's how we have.

Nathan Latka

24:25Sameer, I we're we're obviously rooting for you. It's so cool to have you on the show five years ago when you were less than a million of revenue, now you know, targeting eleven million by the end of this year with great profit margins. If people want to follow your story online, where can they find you?

Closing and How to Follow Sameer

Sameer Narkar

24:40Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn, Sameer Narkar and on Twitter at Sameer Narkar. Similarly at Konnect Insights on Twitter and konnectinsights.com. That's our website.

Nathan Latka

24:51Guys, there you have it. In 2023, they passed 2 million of ARR. They've grown 60%, then 85%. Now, today, as of this recording, run rating 8.5 million of ARR, targeting 11 million by the end of the year. They've got a team of 150 with their main engineering hub, 55 folks, based in Mumbai. And they've got a huge swath of customers. You can get started for as little as 10K, but some of Sameer's largest customers are paying over $100,000 per year. He's got a very successful upsell and expand motion. But in terms of landing customers, At the start, the top of the funnel, he's leaning on a team of 24 SDRs who drive traffic directly to his 13 AEs and critically to his 64 integration partners, which he says is a key reason they've grown so fast by empowering these partners who bring in customers every single day. Sameer, you've done this all bootstrapped. We're rooting for you. Thank you for taking us to the top.

Sameer Narkar

25:42Thank you, Dan. Thank you so much.

Nathan Latka

25:45Hut. Sameer, what'd you think, man? You have fun?

Sameer Narkar

25:48Yeah, fantastic. Thank you so much. It's great. I like your podcast because they're 20 minutes and I've been doing podcasts that are are that are about an hour and even I don't see that. So I like this.

Nathan Latka

25:51Why do you say I'm fantastic? You're falling asleep. How and you're the one being interviewed. Yeah, this is awesome. Well, look, I'm obviously rooting for you. You know, my self-pitch to you is if you ever want to get aggressive on anything, buying other companies, like I would love to obviously, you know, give you four, five, six million of debt that you keep all your equity. ⁓ regardless though, you know, you don't need it. You're printing money, man. I'm just I'm so excited for you.

Sameer Narkar

26:06Bye. I do raise money via debt. I mean, it's a small debt that we take sometimes if you're falling short of... We do a lot of events and also sometimes I do fall short of money. But it's all India-based so far. Our headquarters is in India. We have four registered companies for raising funds.

Nathan Latka

26:37Yeah. Who who have you used? For debt.

Sameer Narkar

26:48Yeah, I mean, what are debt funds that are available in India that we raise, but it's not it's not very high. You know, sometimes 300 K, 400 K majorly when I have to do events. That's how I've raised. And you know, you know, I mean, you don't get payments on time. That's where sometimes the deficit happens and that is that. But it is on very few occasions that I've done it. But yeah, I mean.

Nathan Latka

26:59Yeah. Yeah. Well, something to keep in mind real quick, just while you're at your computer, if you open a new browser window really quick and go to saastock.com.

Sameer Narkar

27:19Success.

Nathan Latka

27:21SAS DOC TO C K SAS DOC It you should see like a big event, right? So we just bought this conference. It's 30,000 attendees, 10 years, all software and SaaS founders. So if you want to start, you know, using a conference strategy to expand into Europe and the US, let me know and we'll work out a deal with you.

Sameer Narkar

27:47I mean, that's what we're trying to do now. In fact, to acquire partners in the US, what I've come up with, I'll tell you. Do we have five minutes?

Nathan Latka

27:56I don't. I have to jump on with another founder, but let's do this. Can I get can I email you my WhatsApp and w I'll call you later today or tomorrow?

Sameer Narkar

28:03Yeah, works fine. ⁓ So, I'm done, Nathan. Thank you so much.

Nathan Latka

28:05Okay, Sameer, great to see you again. We'll chat soon. See ya. Bye.