How Limechat CEO Nikhil Gupta grew to $4M revenue and 60 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is annika he's the co-founder and head of growth at lime chat the leading provider of customer support automation and conversational commerce for e-commerce brands annika are you ready to take us to the top yeah all right so the website is lime chat dot ai tell me about who you're selling to yeah so we basically uh target mid and large size e-commerce brands so these are brands which have their own website on shopify and we help them kind of give their visitors a very guided buying experience on their website and also leverage conversational channels like what's a messenger imessage to give a complete end-to-end buying journey when you sign these customers up what are they paying on average per month to use your technology uh they pay around a thousand dollars a month five hundred thousand dollars depending on their size of course it is uh psu based on the usage that they do but that is the typical amount that you paid how do you measure usage uh so we charge in the basis of number of conversations that happen on our platform uh right since we gave a guided buying experience which is essentially a conversation with their users so we charge on the basis of number of conversations that we have i see and how many customers are you now working with today we're working with 60 brands now currently 6-0 yes and when did you guys launch when did you get your first customer we launched just around a year back in september 2020. we started in march and we got our first customer in september first customer who was the first customer do you remember yes yes it is a brand called bellavita organic we're very happy to be working with them right now as well and we're constantly in touch with them they have actually also grown more than 10x in the past one year because the e-commerce brand space has been booming but it has been an absolute pleasure now can we take 60 customers today paying 500 a month you guys are doing about 30 000 a month in revenue is that right yes that's about me and where were you doing exactly a year ago in november of 2020 um in november of 2020 we just had four to five customers with whom we were working very closely to build our product to achieve product market so in terms of revenue we were we were at uh roughly two or three thousand dollars a month that's incredible yeah so you guys are obviously growing really nicely here now up to 60 customers have you done all this and i get bootstrapped or did you decide to raise uh we we did raise a convertible note last year uh so yeah we are not bootstrapped uh in this particular startup all right we actually got selected into y combinator as well but we uh so we raised from there and we were able to raise a convertible node after that so that is what has gotten us doing we didn't dilute too much in this entire process and so when you how much did you raise in your precede last year right so we raised around 750k uh usd and uh we we raised it as a convertible note at an uncapped uh valuation and a discount of 20 to the next round's valuation yeah when do you think you might be doing the next round so we know what that actually becomes worth equity wise yes yes we will be doing the next round very soon in the next one or two months oh okay so you're basically i mean you're basically raising now then how much do you want to raise yes we're raising around four to five million dollars at around a 20 million dollar evaluation because we want to grow really really fast we feel that we have a cheap product market fit and we just want to push the pedal so so yeah we're actively looking to raise do you have a lead investor yet uh yeah we're in talks with several people i see and and and do you think you'll be able to get a 20 million valuation doing 360 000 a year right now in revenue that's a fairly substantial revenue multiple yes uh i believe that since we have a very uh very good growth rate we are growing at 30 to 40 month or month since the past six to seven months and we can kind of take a forward multiple when the round will actually close it will already be three months and our revenue will double at least so we are kind of taking a multiple on that right and that is how we are kind of justifying the valuation tell me more about the strategy you guys are using if a very specific niche you're targeting these e-commerce brands how are you going from five customers last year to 60 today into 600 next year hopefully yes yes so we have two major acquisition channels uh one is through shopify and the shopify ecosystem which is a group of communities and like blogs and uh basically word of mouth because the shopify ecosystem is super connected and of course you kind of get some inbound leads to shopify so that is one major source of creates for us let's see how many amounts do you get per month from shopify um current we've just started a shopify approach so we get around five to ten years per month so the majority of our leads actually come through our outbound approach we get around 30 liters per month at least to that and that is through sending outbound messages on email linkedin stuff like that what what job titles you target on linkedin uh we sell to the vp of marketing and the vp of customer support right because we have two products now internally one is remarketing product and one is a customer support automation book so for for these we target these two personas okay and what's that first message sound like give me a flavor of it sure uh so let me tell you if i talk about the customer support automation product uh it basically it says that you uh customer support giving good customer support being in touch with your customers is important and you if you actually want to do that you no longer need to put 10 to 15 agents right and pay them 50 000 a year to do that you can just have one human and you can put line chat spot and you can get incredible uh you can give consistent incredible support to all all of your customers and improve your attention and this is being used by a lot of top eight and nine figure brands in the world like mama or dwells in saints so uh like if this sounds interesting to you please jump on and call in let's move ahead thanks that feels like a really long message to send as a cold message on linkedin is is that really what you send it's a lot of text like that um i of course the messages this was like uh this had a lot of points in the which is actually sent in the first three messages uh the main uh the main thing we focus on is the value and the clients that we have in just two to three lines right the copywriting is obviously much much better there but but yeah like the the the one liner is that you can give great customer support experience and spend no additional amount i see anakin take me back to when you guys got going is it just you or how many founders do you have yes we have i have another founder there are two founders both first two founders and did you guys split equity 50 50 at the start yes and so today obviously we don't you still own 50 50 because the 750 ku race hasn't converted to equity yet right yes yes yeah but you anticipated right so that is one part which is how big is that we we allocated 10 percent as an eso pool because we yeah we wanted to give our employees a much bigger share in the ownership and we have around 20 employees now oh wow okay so you you own 45 your co-founder owns 45 percent you have a 10 percent esop pool and you have 20 employees right now how many engineers um i would say around 10 to 12 engineers and where are they all based aniket we are based in bangalore in india what's it like i you know i want to get over there i hear so many great founders building companies in pune chennai we have freshworks ipoing we've got kobai 360 with saravana it's just there's so much energy over there what's it like right so uh for the entire indian startup ecosystem there are several nodes but bangalore is like the central hub right the weather is obviously great like silicon valley uh but uh the startup ecosystem especially is awesome especially for sas uh there are a lot of great sas companies here like what obviously not raised ipo level like freshwoods but they are pretty pretty big like in terms of error and um but the main thing is the energy right uh there is an area in bangalore where like even if you go in a cafe you'll find people discussing their startup because that area is filled with entrepreneurs and startup founders and folks who are working at startups so so that is something which makes it very very exciting each and every day to be surrounded by people like that who surrounded to be surrounded with the best uh talented folks who are putting their energies in the right direction thank you very much that sounds like a lot of fun let's wrap up here with the famous five etiquette number one favorite business book uh the hard thing about hard things number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh we're following jeff bezos and number three what's your favorite online tool for building lime chat um slack is definitely uh super useful yeah number four how many hours of sleep to get every night i sleep seven and a half hours every every night that's good and what's your situation married single kids i'm single okay no kids how old are you i'm 36 26 or 26 oh 25 okay great last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20 i mean there are definitely a lot of things but the main thing is that you should pick pick the absolute right people to work with because uh like the the idea the problem or what you're doing is all secondary but the people whom you work with that that that defines the output and that makes you have the most fun right if you pick the right people guys lime chat dot ai ai chat bot for e-commerce brands they were doing three thousand dollars a month in revenue a year ago now doing thirty thousand dollars a month 10x year over year growth they raised 750 000 seed last year uncapped now targeting a four million dollar raise at a 20 million dollar valuation we'll see if they can get it done team of 20 building in bangalore again scaling up into these mid-market enterprise accounts annika thank you for taking us to the top awesome great great coming to your partners 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 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