How Letsign CEO Bastin Robins .KRobin grew Letsign to $21.6K revenue and 18 customers in 2020.

hello everyone my guest today is bastian robbins he's a seasoned data scientist who has successfully built data products for different verticals some for the largest fmcgs in retail banking telecom social government all from scratch and deployed it successfully he's now launched a company called let sign.org which is essentially doing digital certificates in a click best in you ready to take us to the top yeah yeah sean that's it okay what is a digital certificate uh so you know like uh right now most of uh credentials whatever the universities or the organization they give for accomplishment of their any kind of course or anything else like it's a certificate generally it these are in the form of paper formats but ultimately what the problem is in the present-day scenario you cannot use this every time whenever you go for an interview or with your sms so what happens is like most probably we are fully connected with linkedin so we should be able to add these into linkedin profile which was an added uh point for a recruiter to source you so these kinds of certificates which is digitally created are easily verifiable so that it is added very it is an added point for any kind of uh profiles which is digitally present interesting and what's your revenue model is it a sas model yeah it's a sas model it's a uh like a month-on-month subscription model and who's buying who are you selling to uh we initially started focusing on her different organization but we understood that our segment is mainly on the education sectors most of the universities are buying this product because they feel this is simplifying the process of creating even thousands of certificate just with the click of a button and what do universities pay you on average per month to use the technology uh yeah we have uh around four plans first plan is the free plan because most people are not aware in india what is actually a digital certificate is all about so what we did was like we enabled the free plan the other plans are like uh we have uh what to say a blossom plan and uh garden plan and forest plants what's the average pay though what's the average university pay you uh per month most of universities pay close to uh 80 to 90 pounds but most of them take a yearly subscription with around like 12 months of payment at one shot okay did you say 90 pounds yes 90 pounds okay so i'm doing i'm gonna do the pounds to usd conversion real quick so that's what it's about the same it's about 115 us dollars per month yeah yeah but what you're saying is they usually pay up front 1200 for the year exactly so whenever they are paying for 12 months uh we are just only taking the 11 months and we are returning back them one month free i see i see when did you launch the company uh actually we never thought of launching this company it was started like in 2018 we uh normally conduct a lot of boot camps on the area of data science and uh like programming so what happened was like i was the person who was conducting the sessions for three to four days at the end of the day there was a situation where i have to give them the certificate so again you know like i was pretty much hesitant because what is the purpose of giving them a certificate which they cannot go and validate anywhere because it's in the paper format so i thought like uh shall i write a simple mvp that is like let me write a simple program which generates certificates with the just click or button that's you take a csv file on excel file i think i think the product by the way i think everyone understands the product it's crystal clear i'm just curious when did you sell it for the first time uh after building the product around one month later the same university where i just tried out was giving my own certificate they came and said hey robin like last time you just gave a certificate it is pretty much interesting so can we give a try so that's how the first time i sold for the same institution what year was that what year was that uh it was in 2018 2018 okay and from that trial from your own university how many customers do you have now today uh right now we are close to 18 customers uh across different uh universities and everything was very organic we never went for any social media advertisement or any kind of marketing it was purely word of mouth it kept spreading so 18 18 customers paying 100 per month so you're doing about 2 000 a month in revenue it's different some people play pay around 100 uh pounds and some plans are 270 pounds plans are also there the number of certificate diverse there we talked about the average earlier though and you said 100 per month is that the average yeah yeah only few only if you are having a higher pay like that is the premium thing so are you doing about 2 000 a month in revenue then yes yes yes yes exactly so how do you i mean so you're not doing this full time then no no i'm not doing it the full time but uh right now i'm slowly setting it up into a full-time model and the plan why i'm coming up with this is like now most people understood that this this is simplifying a process of certification now i'm planning to build little more uh space around it like see like any company any organization can start a certification program and let them create the program in the same platform and only enable they will put their margin for each certificates for example like the course fees so we will do the rest of things uh including certificate distribution and also we are planning to bring the digital badges to give different levels for people for their cards i understand and have you bootstrapped this or raised capital no no we have purely bootstrap company i'm not looking for a capital because i feel it is more who is we myself and there are two of my colleagues are there so they're one person is taking care of all the growth hacking and another person uh gives more of the technical ideas so myself i like code and i go and sell so it's like both and okay so there's three of you guys did you just split equity three ways 33 33 33 uh no it's not like founding partners like we have uh one person out of this two person like one person is an employee who is just doing things for us we just pay some amount of small salary from whatever revenue we get it from this model so you have really two people you and somebody else that actually own the business yeah yeah it's one of my colleagues yes and you guys just split it 50 50. uh yeah we are into 50 50 model very cool uh interesting so no interest in raising capital when so when do you make the decision to leave your current job and do this full time uh my current job it's mainly like on data science perspective so i most of the time work remote so i get enough time to work on that sign password and even my own existing company itself it's asking like can we take let's sign into it and let's run it as a full-time product within our organization so i was telling no i just want to keep it like independent and let it grow like more of because that's where real fun comes in like when a product is going into a wheezy's hand i feel like i get restricted that way so here i can play around with and do a lot of things into it but why not quit your job so that then go all in on let sign then you have to make it work you'll be more motivated uh that is the plan for this year i was planning to completely shift to let's sign and apply a lot of my ideologies into it but let me see once this pandemic comes to a point most of and by the way this pandemic situation was really helpful for us because most people are going online for online classes and a lot of webinars are happening now the demand is high people are looking for us this is a bigger argument for that you should this is a bigger argument that you should immediately start doing it full-time you're just you're proving my point sure definitely we'll do it why not do why what are you waiting for no no i'm not waiting for because in the uh the present company clever is it also i have an equity it's i'm also one of the co-founder of the company which is purely a data science company so it's like half both are my babies so i have to take care of both what is the other company it's called clever insight the same company where i'm working now it's purely a data science company i see i see interesting and is that a sas model uh yes we are bringing a sas model in the same company which is more on building uh machine learning apis as a service so still now it's not yet launched because we have our platform which has been uh deployed but right now we are moving more onto a fast model so we can reach to the global audience so i see on on clever insight you do like you know banking and finance insights so what's like a tool you would build for a banking and finance firm uh basically we have our product called neuron ai it's a platform it's not a complete box product so the platform is like a server we deployed on the uh what is a customer what to say intranet and from there the data pulls into the system and from there it starts generating insights for them so in banking and finance we directly don't touch to the transactional records but in the other areas where the ppo and all these sectors come so we play a major role in that specific domains and mike's your partner there who...