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 done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're going to get a different valuation a vc is going to pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when i hover over here right so the teal is what a vc would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on youtube all these datas are built from real time valuation data points founders share with us on the show so attraction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 to their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of sas valuations than what you can get now inside of founderpath and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for 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...