How Leadmonk CEO Naveen S G grew Leadmonk to $24K revenue and 50 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is navin sg he's the co-founder of leadmonk.io having 20 years of i.t industry experience across sales product development consulting and entrepreneurship leadmonk is an online appointment scheduling software levine area takes the top yeah hi i'm okay look i'm looking for this and here's why a lot of people go you can't invent another appointment scheduling software calendly has already won how would you respond okay i know uh as you know that we are all moving towards mobile first business world and in this world mobile number is first becoming the customer identifier and all the traditional softwares which are there like calendar acuity scheduling they are all built for email address based appointment only okay so that's the reason we decided to come up with this okay because you know as you can see here not everyone is comfortable using the email address except millionaires and working professionals think about people in the informal sectors retired professionals who are not net savvy so for them if you ask them to book appointments only using email address then it's a friction for them okay and also in first yeah for some sectors yeah for some sectors email address based appointment is not really not needed like a real estate agent insurance agent doctor's appointment dental appointment they don't need see mobile number is the customer identifier you can call them you can message them you can send the quotation you can do everything i mean understood when did you launch the company what year uh only in the not this year january this year it's been yeah eight months and what are you working on how did you decide what your first pricing would be what are customers paying you per month right now they are paying six dollar per month that's an annual plan okay so how we came up with this pricing is we just compared with benchmark with the other applications that are available we said like why don't we introduce an introductory pricing so that you know uh people who are not familiar with this mobile number based appointment scheduling they can explore it and if they like it they can start using it so that's the introductory pricing and what month did you sign up your first customer last month because last month only we activated the subscription in fact we had not activated we had a lot of free users uh we are you know we enabled the subscription and we in the very first week itself we were fortunate to get it yeah user paid users from california how many free signups did you have before you launched the paid plan uh we had 500 plus 500 okay and how many now how many are now paying uh yeah ten no around ten percent of them are paying right now we have about five zero yeah yes so you went from zero to fifty customers in the past 30 days uh yeah yeah first uh for 45 days yes but uh the main point is we have not invested even a dollar in the digital marketing campaign oh hold on before we go there before we go they're not being so let me see you built a 500 person wait list how did you do that okay how would you do this we went ahead and listed our lead monk in all the listing sites on the product of them yeah slate monk and every listing sites we listed no no naveen name name a couple products on where else yeah product hand and then get app uh captera all the review sites like 50 plus review sites are there like good business sas finder and google workspace google workspace is also google workspace marketplace yeah we get a lot of leads from there and then it's microsoft after marketplace we get a lot of leads from there as well so in all these marketplace we listed and that's where from there yeah yes okay and we have users from 24 countries 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 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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 so you listed all these marketplaces for free is that the only tactic you use to build a wait list of 500 uh yes okay so you build the wait list for five and when did you start building the waitlist what month um from january children okay so right at the beginning january this year january through sort of july you're building a waitlist you launch pricing in early july and now you have 50 customers okay so my next question is you have a 500 people on the waitlist how did you convert 10 of those into paid customers what was sort of the paywall that you put up so i mean they were all using this and like many of those customers did share the requirement as well and to be honest from that finded list we could convert only like you know or hardly 10 customers but remaining 40 plus customers we got in the last two months who are the new customers who came on board see what happens is all these pilot customers right they will have some kind of a preconception like okay this platform is that this okay this okay some features are not there like that but all the new customers who signed up in the last two months they were very happy with that because when they signed up they got most of the features they were expecting was there uh i mean did they sign up for a free trial or do they start paying on day one before they used it no we have 14 days uh you know trial period and we also have freemium model do you require a credit card in the free trial no okay so they went to your pricing page that says six dollars per user per month best value they click on they click on get started yes and then what you basically say is okay and i'm actually doing this now so i can ask you better questions i sign up for app.leadmonk.io i continue with google and eventually i'm gonna basically say i can use it for free for 14 days yeah free for 14 days and if you have a basic scheduling requirement it is free forever if you if you have advanced scheduling requirement then only you have to go for the subscription plan only after 14 days i love this though because once i sign up see a lot of people make the mistake of dropping people directly into ui you're qualifying me this page says complete your account setup what does your day-to-day role at work look like and you have education leader freelancer sales and marketing okay so i'm going to pick leader plus entrepreneur and then you say update name and url so i'm customizing my booking page now with with uh with who is nathan still available yeah yes we have reserved it for you oh i'm gonna did you really i almost got really excited okay so now i'm connecting the calendar okay cool so finish sign up okay so where do i see okay so now you drop me into the ui and my try on the upper right says 14 days left if i click it it says i have 10 seats trials expires in 10 days there's a coupon code for the annual plan but what if okay so what do people click here typically when they upgrade so when they upgrade they just have to go and click on the eight dollar plan i see for the year when yeah yeah eight dollars per month that's in the you know but we also have given a coupon code where user can avail 25 discount on that as well i see so no one picks the 10 per month they all pick the yearly one yeah yeah all all of the paid subscribers your subscribers have opted for that as well because it's it's a bargain deal six dollar versus ten dollar what about the text message credits do people buy a lot of those uh yes uh like there is one the very first customer who is in a leading immigration law firm in los angeles they buy i mean you know because all their appointments are mobile number based like they they book at least 30 appointments per day and as if it is a mobile number you need sms number to send your appointment confirmation reminders and all and they buy they buy at least like five dollars of uh sms every month on top of uh the subscription plan so naveen how much revenue will you do in august just from the message credits just from the message credits in the august month electron yeah um yeah ten dollar only ten dollar we got it okay because all the other users are from the b2b world okay i know they don't need you know sms you're doing 50 customers six bucks a month paid annually but you're doing about 300 per month in mrr yeah yeah interesting okay and you just launched in january when did you write the first line of code uh january only oh so literally the whole company all this year yeah amazing and have you bootstrapped or did you raise capital no it's a bootstrap uh company so i have invested uh around 300k from my personal savings oh naveen that's okay how did you make how do you have so much money uh because i had a services consulting startup earlier uh which i ran for seven years where i worked with lot of overseas customers and plus as i mentioned like i have a 20 years of experience so a lot of savings are there so we wanted to i mean it's an inspiration from your website like we were really wanted to bootstrap the uh you know this company and we wanted to reach a certain revenue target to you know because it's kind of an invalidation on our idea and our the approach i love that you were inspired by the website uh to be bootstrapped but like here's the thing my gosh like um just a lot of people my listeners don't have 300k to spend so like why did you have to spend so much to get the mvp live why couldn't you you know get something easier to build you know live earlier no i mean 300k in the last eight months because to field energy to build a full-fledged product and we had couple of freelancers also working for us how many yeah like around three freelancers uh we were you know on different points in time and plus that also includes something you know some of these subscriptions aw gcp subscriptions and also this website and also some explainer video how much should the website cost so website is what you know it's only uh 250 dollar okay that's not bad so where does that money go to the three freelancers the engineers yeah yeah why couldn't you code it yourself no we did we did okay because we also decided to use the uh the latest technology as well like google flutter and the gcp and also initially we didn't have that experience so that's the reason we on board at them in the initial only for three four months we onboarded them for four months now me and my co-founder we are the only two guys who who have built all the advancing features did he put in 300k as well uh no no no no no no it's a shared amount yeah i see yeah so you own fifty percent of the business each today uh yes like fifty four so yeah fifty four forty six fifty four you have fifty four yeah okay fifty why did you split it that way uh that's because i started uh a bit earlier that makes sense i think it's a good reason yeah all right so now you're scaling which i love you've avoided having to do a seed round because you used your own money that's usually the most dilutive round you now have some revenue what do you think you get your monthly revenue to by december so we want to grow by at least by 10 10 or 10 times in the next six months so that's why we are going to run the marketing campaign from uh next month onwards that's like next week why not more growing 10 times is only going from 300 a month to 3 000 a month why can't you get up to 10k per month by the end of the year no because that's requires more money in the digital marketing so if you already invest a lot of money so that's why you know we wanted to see when you are the bootstrap company how much of the money do you want on we want to spend now but why why would you want to spend money if you don't have to no that's because organic uh way organic route we are now we are getting only what in under 10 to 20 new users every day but if you have to grow at 10 times then i need more users at least like you know 50 plus users signing up every day so that's that's the reason uh you know we have to go for the marketing campaign the content marketing uh all the other things all the other channels like how do you avoid just flushing money down the toilet though where are you gonna test spending money first and how much yeah so the one sure shot which is which has worked and which is working for us is content marketing for that we probably will hire the few content writers well what's working right now what's the what's the key word you're ranking for that's getting traffic uh okay uh so the the one is uh uh like the 14 you know yeah email templates uh to invite to book appointments politely some of these long keywords we are focusing mainly on the long keywords because all the short keywords are taken over by the calendly acuity scheduling all this we can't really bid on that that's why we are focusing on the long keywords like upon email autonomy email templates to book appointments politely yes i love this and you rank number one 15 email templates to share your scheduling link politely how many users have you gotten from this uh that's the one which actually gets us at least uh 10 15 website visitors every day that's amazing and how many how many like sign ups would you say it's driven your lifetime um i i don't know because we are not put any we are not building any logic to see how many of them came to the platform because the app is different and this one is different that's one and another one is like how to update your booking link in your google business profile so that is also another blog which gets a lot of uh lead yeah but yeah to our website how did you how do you know for someone listening right now they might say i want to copy to be and go find long tail keyword strategies for their own niche how did you know to write a post on the polite way to share your scheduling links it's just that right i didn't know i mean to be honest when i started working on this i wasn't familiar with all this yeah i just started writing in fact i wrote several blogs around 14 15 blogs and that's the one which which started giving us more you know yeah traffic i didn't know that i started i wrote so many blogs uh in the last eight months that makes sense man that makes sense well you're building something special i can't wait to watch you grow um just to be clear there's two of you right now that are full-time everyone else is a contractor yes yeah uh right now only uh two full-time we don't have any contractors in the last four months okay so we are the only two guys managing everything naveen on that note let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite book favorite business book uh no i don't um i don't say no no no there is one sorry uh sorry favorite bookish thing fasting slow number two thinking fast and slow yeah number two is there a ceo you're following or studying no i'm not following um three what's your favorite online tool for building lead monk um favorite online tool is and also a fresh marketer uh yeah freshdesk a lot of these tools i use number four how many hours you sleep to get every night how many hours of sleep do you get every night uh five to six hours okay and what's your situation married single kids uh married with kids how many kids two two all right and how old are you i'm 41 41 last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. yeah i mean yeah i should have i mean i should have started this journey at the age of 20 itself guys start sooner he's building leadmonk.io to go compete with countley using long tail keywords as a way to get their traffic up uh he has uh 50 customers today paying six bucks a month to 300 a month you're recording revenue or 3 600 an arr they got their first 500 people on the waitlist by posting on review sites now scaling bootstrap he spent 300 000 on the mvp the question is can you 10x's revenue over the next six to 12 months we will see what happens naveen thanks for taking us to the top yeah thanks one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm 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 arpu 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 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and 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