LetsChat revenue, CEO Ankesh Kumar, team size, customer count, churn, and more in 2022.

just got done editing this interview you guys are gonna love it before i do that though i want you to know that i'm going to be in the comments for the next 30 minutes or so answering your questions if there's additional questions you want me to ask the ceo next time i interview them leave them below or if you're just loving the data points i get ceos to share click the thumbs up button below that's your way of telling me you're loving this stuff and i'll get you more of it additionally again i'll be in the comments answering any questions you have all right for 30 minutes enjoy the interview hello everyone my guest today is ankash kumar he was born in india educated in london and now based in silicon valley valley building a company called let's chat which is trying to make chat pervasive in sales he grew 80 systems to see from zero to 22 million bucks in four years and sold the tmp and monster he grew them for sonic to zero to 25 million bucks in four years raised 50 million and sold to chronos he sold patents to google for sharing as a page ranking mechanism prior to facebook's like button so he is in the mix and kiss you're ready to take it to the top absolutely all right so what is let's chat and what's your revenue model are you pure sas yes we are pure sass um well let's chat is basically a messaging platform and it's specifically based for business users and if you want to take a subset of that sales people i think the problem that we find is uh chat is not very uh pervasively used uh between sales people and and their prospects so what i mean is this like an intercom competitor um i guess intercom and drift will be the um closest uh options i think the difference between intercom and drift is that they're really focused on inbound um so they sit on websites and and there's a chat option on the website we focus on outbound sales um so if you you know a director of sdr's bdrs using this one to uh um attach to their emails as they reach out to people okay so they'll send in an out a cold outbound email from an abm team might at the bottom say click here to chat with me real time and then boom it starts a real chat that's it you got it interesting okay that's very interesting all right um help me understand kind of where you're playing so average customers paying what per month well we just uh just a quick background we actually just launched this about a month ago so we actually were working on another project and we we sort of had this idea and so we sort of did a mock-up in may and we actually entered salesforce demo jam and won that so we basically say well there's definitely a play here so we uh you know from may till basically now we've just been working on it so we built the whole infrastructure we built the integration into salesforce sales loft uh and outreach and now we're sort of in the process of getting our first early adopters to to build those metrics in terms of uh increasing engagement in conversion um and then obviously our revenue model is 25 a subscriber per month okay but no customers right now today pre-revenue still pre-revenue correct okay so what's the wait list look like how are you building kind of hype pre-launch well we're actually using our own technology uh to uh to to grow our base i mean so i'm reaching out to outbound sales people using the chat bot integrated into my brand email so they can see what it looks like and actually embedding their content so their case studies youtube videos etc because the problem that outbound people have is that they can only put a certain amount of data in the email either text or attachments so adding a chatbot to it gives the the buyer the option to learn more about uh the prospects so we're doing that and that's been really good we're seeing over 50 engagements of sending those out well tell me specifically how you're doing that so you sit down in the morning and you're like what do i do today how are you finding the next person you're going to reach out to like what are you searching for title wise what platform how to get their email so we basically targeting demand generation director of outbound sales you know so it's not the vp level or the or the sdr level uh sort of in the middle manages the team um so you know we're using third parties to get uh email addresses and contact your linkedin the usual staff uh lucia to get email addresses etcetera we have cia l-u-s-h-a lucia uh that that gets the email addresses so my target is 30 uh outbound emails a day and those are personalized um i think you know one of the things is that obviously in this market you have as you're familiar with products like sales loft and outreach those templated emails what we're hearing is a little bit of a decline people are getting a little overwhelmed with those sequences and so the personalization so when i reach out to a prospect uh let's just take cisco for example which is a little bit higher my target audience is 50 employees to a thousand we're targeting sas companies five zero 50 employees to 1000 correct so but just using cisco as an example you know you'd get all their content you know what what would a buyer want to know they'd want to know their social profiles they'd want to see uh customer success success stories so we can do that as a chat bot the real power of this nathan actually is is to do with the personalization because if a prospect starts engaging with certain pieces of content then uh the selling organization knows what they're really interested in and can personalize that subsequent follow-up so ankesh when you send out your 30 emails per per day what is your subject line on email it's usually introduction to the company i'm targeting so if you're emailing cisco cold their director of outbound you might say introduction to cisco in the subject line exactly and that connect peaks they're uh they're they're kind of like well what's this and then i actually the prospect email said learn about cisco we're the best in networking solutions a very short maybe a couple of hundred words uh which they'd probably get and then like learn about cisco and he might even actually say if it's nathan let's say nathan learn about cisco and so that they're like wow okay let me and then they start engaging with the chatbot so they can actually see how their um prospects would actually engage with this got it so you're you're essentially letting them feel the product you're not pitching them like on the sale of hey come try this you're saying you're just giving them the experience real time exactly interesting okay now what's your open rate on the 30 emails you send out oh we're up to a fifty percent five zero percent and what's your what's your percent of open to engage with your chat tool uh ten percent okay so is that good or bad uh if you take the industry average uh it's really good um the actual engagement from what we're hearing is one to two percent so if you've got organizations that are b2b uh sas companies are sending them out uh they might get somewhere between a five to ten percent open rate and one to two percent engagement um engagement and email for those folks would be defined as a reply correct yeah yeah interesting if there's a link or something like go to the website so they track all that as well so it could be a reply it could also be an active link okay now are you bootstrapping this company or have you raised uh i am fully disrupting it okay that's good now um help me understand what burn looks like today uh five pre-launch dollars a month okay so pharaoh i mean this is great this is nimble what's a team how many people two people two okay developer yeah yes great i don't pay myself unfortunately that's good so i mean let me ask you a question in your bio you talked about these exits i mean it sounds like you've made many millions of dollars why not put in more of your own capital you know get four engineers on this and move faster um you know i i one of the things i've learned is i think we're in you know silicon valley as in everywhere uh but we sort of kind of to uh drink our own kool-aid i think if i was looking at this like a helicopter vision down as an investor i'd say what you know questions that you're asking what is your actual uh customer acquisition cost um you know what is the lifetime value uh you know going through the competition i think we need to just fill that out a very low burn rate uh with 5k burn rate month you know with two or three customers with cash flow positive then use the positive cash then i'll have those answers so the investor meetings go a lot quicker when you have uh those answers yeah yep okay what other channels are using is it just those outbound emails per day 30 per day are there any other channels you're testing yeah well we're looking for distribution partnerships so as i mentioned we're integrating with outreach.io and salesloft and we also there's potential i think i haven't we haven't still actually been but like email signature companies uh like six stars why stamp correct yeah have a chat link you know and email marketing companies the mail chimps of the world the constant contacts you know so if you're doing a b2b sending it out and if it's the price point is that a point that it's worth a sales person talking to them i don't know like a dell or something you can say okay i want to buy some some hardware or whatever the solution is some you know networking solution then you can actually talk to a salesperson why do these guys care about little old and kish though i mean if they think this is a big market they build it themselves why stamp does or outreach or sales off so let's role play i'm kyle porter i run sales loft you're pitching me what are you pitching well we've got we've built a full uh chatbot builder uh so the whole environment of chief structure so you can i mean people can do it look you know development cost is not really what the uh i think you use the word nimble i think we move really really quickly from me to having something a product out here i think that what we're doing in the future is using ai machine learning to understand the interaction of the chatbot across many people so you start building that data set up uh and and we literally turn around features in 24 hours so i think nimble with any startup is where you've got to be at um and there's one of us right i mean as you mentioned there's a bunch of companies like those that might want to do that so they can't partner it's it's the build by decision um you know so it's it's what are their their objectives what's their 2020 roadmap look like where's the priorities uh but it's a case-by-case discussion yeah why don't you have paying customers already you're getting a response right on these emails you're sending out why not start charging people yeah i i to me it's more important to get the data uh i mean having our data which i've shared with you is is one thing but having a third party validate it so when you as you know when you go to bdb sales the sales cycle is long it's not like in q4 of 2019 uh uh sales managers say oh we need to have chatbots embedded in email this is like okay i get it what's the data maybe we can try it out so we've got a few people trying it out with like 5000 emails a thousand looking at what the uh the a b testing we're sending out a thousand without the chat bot and what a thousand with the chat bot and then once we have that data the way that as you know this works it's sort of i wouldn't say um everyone if you get if you get the data and you prove it it wouldn't say they're all followers but people want to see it you know once you get one everyone's like okay i got it let's let's try it out uh so i think that you you know so that's where we're at is having that data first to prove prove out the value you know the value of it yeah very good so what do you hope to be at in terms of revenue by the end of this year well that's not a metric that i'm using i'm just looking at five customers whether they're paid or unpaid uh you know hold on you don't have a customer if they're not paid it's called a user right so okay how many i mean look the ultimate measure in this is base is like will people actually pay for it right so what do you want to be by in december this year two three months from now in revenue no no just in paid customers people actually pay but i want to have five customers they don't necessarily have to be paid i i would rather have a partner all right a flagship account that someone's working with us as a in that relationship i think money is secondary at this stage in the company you know you just love these people to death so i mean that's just my approach i think i think where i want to get to if you want numbers in five years i want a million sales people giving us 25 a month which is 250 250 million dollars a month you know so uh so that's uh that's where i want to get to yep uh audacious goals and cash let's rack up with the wrap up with the famous five number one favorite business book uh well the one actually i like emotional fortitude books like uh uh joyful wisdom uh power of now yep number two is there a ceo you're following or studying well i really enjoyed me i met with uh tim west again from pandora and the tenacity and uh he just went through the whole struggle with pandora was really impressive and i mentioned uh mailchimp but i think uh you know ben chestnut you know being able to take that kind of that's sort of the aspirations that i would have number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company uh well we use asana uh you know google hangouts and zoom but i think my favorite one would probably be loom i love the fact to be able to take videos and then we share that you know like there's a bug or you know a quick demo so i think loom's really good number four what uh how many hours of sleep are you getting every night uh six to eight and what's your standard what's your situation married single kids married two daughters one at nyu one going to uc davis uh saturday easter east coast and a west coast you have a good diversity there right yeah i think the elder one doesn't like me much she wants to be away all right i'm geshen how old are you i am 54. 54. last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew well i think uh when you're younger you sort of rush to do everything i say embrace the journey right the destination is actually the journey um you know so sorry the journey is the destination so uh i think the destination is icing on the cake so be happy enjoy it make others around you happy and enjoy the ride guys he's sold many companies had a lot of success exiting now back to the grindstone launched this company this year in 2019 helping people initiate outbound sales people initiate chat sequences from an email to start right so not a javascript embed on a website but actually an email send currently no customers but launching pricing hopefully here soon aiming to have five customers by the end of the year they're burning about five thousand dollars per month here as they ramp up the development uh the development the code base all that jazz and onboard their first users uh two people so far on the team as they look to scale ankish thank you for taking us to the top appreciate it cheers nathan these ceos rarely give these kinds of interviews i hit them hard i get the data and i want to do it more so if you want to get more of this stuff make sure you subscribe up here and then additionally go check out one of my other ceo interviews right now