How Kovai CEO Saravana Kumar grew to $32.5M revenue and 700 customers in 2024.

good evening everybody uh it's a always a difficult session uh after lunch and I hope Dan Martell and James has warmed you up uh to for the for this session so I think you know like when uh Nathan Latka asked me about doing uh doing a session on SAS hope and like you know you looked at multiple options like a growth hacks and SAS metrics and this and that and there's enough content now on the on the market to learn all those things so I thought you know what can I share from my personal experience like uh we've been in the business for over 10 years so I learned quite a lot in terms of uh how to scale the scale the business from 0 to 10 million plus and I I just thought I'll just share more of my experiences uh building and scaling scaling this business so my name is saravana Kumar and I'm a founder of a company called uh called kovai.co so this is a quick a very high level recap of the of the company so the company was started back in 2011. uh I just uh you know I was doing consulting for 10 plus years and I found a gap in the market and I started as a solo uh founder and then slowly scaled it to First from one employee to five employees to 20 employees 50 and then now today we are about 250 plus uh people in the in the organization so we are over 10 million dollars say ARR but they're slightly old number so it's a it's a 2020 21 number so we are above that's a publicly uh disclosed uh disclosed data so we're also a multi-product company like uh uh that's a I'm going to touch base on like why we are a multi-product company and what made those decisions to go into a multi-product company and the the mission for us is you know when you when people ask you like your viewer bootstrap what are you trying to achieve and the objective for us is to to build a 100 million dollar run rate business by 2030 like a sooner sooner if if possible so I just want to go one slide forward so this is a kind of the growth trajectory like how we have grown uh since uh 2011. so it's it's not like a like a hockey stick growth but it's it's organic uh growth of constant uh predictable growth over the last uh last 10 10 years so until 2019 it was like a study study growth and you know like that is when we we kind of made a decision like you know what can we do to scale uh bigger a lot of things changed since uh 2019 until 2019 we were only like 50 people organization uh you know if you wanted to put the number per head counted a number uh per employee like it would have been significantly higher when you compare 2019 data but today we operate more like uh VC funded uh business model so we invest pretty much everything and then we are ramping up everything towards uh towards growth so let me go back okay so today you know like uh today my talk is going to be like more on the personal level like uh like uh as a CEO like uh being a grown up this company for 10 years like what are the things you have learned and you know like I just bucketed it into three different items things you know like at a personal level as an individual whatever things I do and of course as a team like if my direct reports and how do I handle them and what are the things I I practice on a day-to-day basis and at a company level you know what are the things uh things we do so let me start with the with the personal uh personal thing I think one of the key things as you grow as a CEO is when you have like 258 50 people like one thing that becomes super critical is how do you manage your uh manage your time so in in my case you know I'm just I try to keep it as simple as possible and my calendar is pretty much free I keep everything uh in like a one point uh one if this this is how my calendar looks this is a typical week my entire week is the first 1.5 days you know like uh I got but the management meetings on the day one and then some items on the on the on on the on the day to Tuesday and after that you know like it's it's all about uh uh just ongoing activities and you keep it try to try to keep it uh as free as as possible um so so I think that the other important thing is you know like uh what I learned is everybody got an optimal time right I'm a typical like early morning person uh so I wake up at 4 30 in the morning and then first three hours is a completely you know kind of an I brought it more like a non-negotiable so I do only like a really high performing uh activities like you know you don't check your emails you don't check your slack or teams or whatever you are using that time is purely you know like uh you do like uh things what you wanted to accomplish on the day so a lot of times what happens is within the day within that three hours by 7 30 in the morning you know your my day is pretty much over like you're accomplished what you wanted to do on the day because after that once you reach the office around nine o'clock you know you really can't control too much on how you your day progresses so this is something the habit I build up uh right from the day one because the initial days the since it's a bootstrap company and you know the initial days I built uh built the product myself and I was working for Fidelity Investment uh some of you from us that know the company so my day is like in the morning I built a product I go to work and that continued for a year and that became more like a like a habit and the second day you know you know like a enjoy your work and don't try to do things you don't like you know this is kind of a counter counterintuitive but you know like when you're at the early stages or as a Founder like you tend to imitate people right like you tend to you see somebody who's Super Active on social media and you try to try to be that person you know you are you know like you you see somebody a very good in in speaking in conferences but you know like we need to understand like not everybody is same right you have you have a strengths and you have your weaknesses don't try to do things which you are not comfortable with for example you know I stopped tweeting like uh five years ago I don't do I don't get into Twitter anymore like you know like because it's not my cup of tea and same you know talking in conferences not for everybody but if you see like somebody is doing and you try to do it you know the the problem is when you're trying to do something which is not your regular where you are your core strength is it tend to take you know five to ten times more of your energy and you might be losing more you'd rather you know like like do things which you are good done uh and the other the third point is you know like actively working on things uh you know you need to stop working on things on uh taking tasks what I mean by that is you know like you you should your thing your thinking should always be if it's if something comes along it should be more of you know who who can I delegate to rather than how am I going to do it so once you touch something you know at that scale when you have like you know 200 plus people uh once you start doing things of your own it's not the most efficient way you can you can operate because uh it's it won't stop just at that level you know like you do something and then the follow-up comes and it goes on and on it always think about how can you delegate it and how can you you know like pass it on to people when you have like a lot of people uh on board and uh the final point is you know like uh I you tend to do like you know like at scale you tend to do like quality is more important than quantity if you can achieve like you know like a two or three really good items in a given week that's a much more productive week than you know firefighting with a lot of things throughout the week you there's a difference between being busy and being productive right you you want to be more productive rather than being busy like you know if you keep you know engaging too much on your emails and too much on teams and at the end of the day you will feel like a lot of meetings as another Killers you know like if you do a lot of things at the end of the day you feel you'll feel like you're you're so too busy but probably you don't have to achieved anything so you'd rather focus more on you know like uh uh being productive and doing things which will yield you uh the right things when it comes to team the next I'm going to move whatever I explained so far is more on the personal level and the next thing is more on the how do you manage their teams and the first very important thing I want to convey is you know like as a Founder there'll always be difficult conversations right uh either your key resource is leaving or you know somebody is not performing well or the team a specific team is not performing at the at the max whenever this has a difficult situation comes in it's better to you know like engage and try to solve the problem as soon as possible but the normal tendency is you tend to not to you know not to talk about it you know you won't give the feedback what's required for the person to perform at a higher level that only you know hurts that person and also you know the problem won't magically go away you know like it's going to come back and hurt you it's better to to avoid it and the second thing when it comes to the team is is like more you're you're more like a driving instructor or you can take any analogy where you are like a coach right your objective is to make that person as productive as possible and as soon as possible because the tendency otherwise is you know like you try to jump on and keep doing things again and again and eventually you know like uh you you can't come out of that Loop but they rather you know like uh you spray invest your time you you make sure like you know you can train that person you can you can come out of it and that's that's so that's the only way you can scale it over a long period time and don't build a flat structure because what typically happens is when you're in the early stages like you know 10 people 20 people Etc you try to build a flat flat structure right everybody reports to you and it's it's fine but once you start scaling when once you reach you know 25 50 100 people that is not going to help you like you know like you will have more reporting lines and you know like you you sometimes even struggle with you got two people like you need to promote one person which which you can't do it you keep keep promoting them all of them at the you know like at the same level and it's not going to go away so you try to you know like uh just to build a don't build a flat structure and try to build the hierarchy as as quickly as possible and also you know like uh the in terms of direct reports you need to don't try to keep it at a reasonable level six to seven is a ideal ideal number anything above that it's it's not manageable because you need to invest your time on them it's not just uh just uh you know like uh uh it requires a lot of investment to build a team so you know you try to keep that uh to to a minimal level uh as as much as possible so this is you know as a sample or chart like you know we try to do it at every level so that you know you try to build up the hierarchy you know like uh as soon as possible and at the company level you know like some of the things I wanted to share at the company level so why we are a multi-product company like uh there are a few few uh reasons why we are a multi Product Company so we were a single product for like a five six years and you know like I'm coming from a more from a technical background like you know one you know like you know I spend a lot of time building the initial team I invested my time and we had really got a Hardcore team uh we built up in the five six years time and being an engineer you know at some point you know they're going to get bored right because only you so much you can do in a product after after some time otherwise you'll be like you know like all the core parts are over and it's more like you know like you're building things patching here and there and you know like rewriting some stuff so there's nothing exciting for the team you know that's one reason why we thought we'll go to multiple product because we assembled the team and then we start building new products because we know the strength of the team and they were able to do it the second thing is you know like you also need to understand your strengths and weaknesses like so we are predominantly the the team is based out of India uh we got a team in headquartered in UK we have about 10 people in in London but the remaining 240 to 50 people are based out of India so you need to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the team with you know it's harder to build a single product 100 million dollar business then you know like it's fairly comparatively easy to build like a 20 30 million dollar businesses that is also another reason why we went into multi-product we also Play Books of you know like scaling uh building a pro building products at that level so that gives up kind of uh you know that's one of the reasons why we went into multi-product and into the company and the second they say you know frugality mindset like one of the examples I want to give you is still I approve a lot of invoices okay there are you know like it goes to a workflow the people uh put through everything but the final approval the money that going out of the bank is actually you know like uh I I control it I won't control it in the sense like you know I have visibility it's very important to have that uh have that visibility like uh that that keeps you you know like uh uh having a having a transparency of you know like knowing how much money is going where it helps you to be you know Be Frugal and understanding so recently I've watched a master class from Richard Branson and he he mentions exactly the same thing like you know he used to uh maintain that uh approving invoices you know he recommends you know to to keep it as long as possible and the executed reporting is another big challenge right like how do you get uh how do you know what your team are doing like you know like uh you need to get some level of reporting we tried various formats over the years and what's working great at the moment is you know at the beginning of each month uh following month our executive team need to give a document it's two page document it's a precisely you know they need to cover it within two pages two a four pages the first page is all about their personal achievements and what did they do that month it's more about I rather than a v because when you have an executive team and when you have like 30 40 people reporting to them it's easy to come and say like you know they did this they did that and it's all more of a team update so it's important you know like uh at your executive team understands where they are spending their time and also it's good like you know I personally write my own executive report I tell that the entire team like you know like uh what did what did I do last month you know these are the bunch of activities I did uh uh you know like that helps understand everybody so the executive reporting is uh is basically two-page document the first page is all about the personal thing and the second page is all about what they achieve as the team and that helps uh significantly and the final point I want to convey is a risk register I don't know like how many of you are aware of a risk register as a company there'll always be bunch of risk dependency risks right like being a Founder uh there are a lot always some you know five or ten items that depends on uh dependent on you without you it will fail it's good to maintain a register so that you know that you at least the team knows what are the dependencies and if something happens uh what could be done like for example the svb case is a really good example like five six years ago we used to have like uh banking in a single Bank uh which which is registered on a risk register because you know like it's a big risk and you start listing all those items what you think as a risk in your business and you try to address it over over a period of time so that's a it's impossible to eliminate all the risk but at least you know you can minimize and mitigate your risks if you document it correctly so this is just a slide showing that the executed reporting the personal level and then and then the team level so just you know covered as I said you know I just covered uh uh as a CEO like how your how your day or days or weeks or uh structured what do you do on a personal level what do you do at the team level and what do you do or the other at the company level so these are our products so we got four products in our company so the first product 360 is very specific I don't think it will be appropriate for this audience it's more of an Enterprise Integration space and the second product server is 360 is a more of a management monitoring tool for Microsoft Azure and document 360 are the two products where we are focusing on document 360 is a self-service knowledge base you can think of like uh if a if you're taking a stripe as an example right is a is for stripe to have a old class documentation is very critical and they might be having 50 to 100 people working on that platform to produce a documentation and with document 360 we provide the platform so you don't you know you don't need to focus on the the platform itself and rather you can focus on the content so for example our table uh for a lot of you know like they their documentation is running on document 360. uh because they have 20 30 people writing documentation and their challenges are completely different right so they need a workflow they need to have some kind of uh a lot of analytics to understand how their platform is performing and also the millions of hits per day kind of a scalability and churn 360 is a customer success product it's you know today everybody we are on subscription business retention and churn are the two important things and we got a product which which covers this this part I think that's all I have for today I hope some of the tips I have shared could be useful for you thank you thank you very much nice to meet you thank you thank you take care