How MyAlice CEO Shuvo Rahman grew MyAlice to $5.2M revenue and 60 customers in 2025.

hey folks my guest today is shivo oramani is the founder and ceo of alice labs the company behind my alice.ai they're helping you increase sales through conversations shubo you ready to take it to the top yep pretty much right so first off is this software or is this a consulting firm so it's a sas solution first of all so it's a software that's available online you can subscribe and start using it so what it does basically it integrates for e-commerce it integrates all of your channels like the sales channels like messenger instagram viber all into one single place and then it helps you to automate and also your agents can handle the conversations and convert it to sales so it also connects with e-commerce like shopify e-commerce so that you can streamline all your operation in one single place so what are you starting per month on average to use the technology so we have our subscription starting from 15 per month and there is the layer of 50 and 300 and for enterprises it can go up for the time being we have around 14 kmr and we have around 60 paying customers so on an average you're seeing around 200 from each customer and if you're doing 14 000 a month today what were you doing exactly a year ago so a year ago we weren't there honestly speaking so we started back in 2020 first of all and but we devoted a lot so he started with sort of a conversational ai chatbot and then gradually in this year uh in april we raised our citron of 500 000 us dollars and after that we focused uh on only on the e-commerce side and he started building a sas product before that it was sort of a software that only the enterprise was using mostly for the chatbots but now we have more focus whereas the e-commerce shopify u-commerce is turner so that they can easily connect all their channels and restart automations and help desk as well and shibo did you did you found this company yourself did you have 100 at the beginning equity i have a few angels from the very beginning so i started back my career in software engineering and then moved into business we have four partners in a software company and later on i moved more towards alice so my partners backed up a little so they have some sort of angel investment but i have the message of sharing the company so and sort of all of that equity wise 65 okay 65 and how much do the angels have angels have uh 15 percent and the rest basically gone in our sea down so you sold 20 in your seat round yep yep okay this makes a lot of sense so so five hundred thousand dollar seed round at what was that a two million dollar evaluation free money yeah two million pre-money 2.5 post yep yep okay that makes sense where do you invest the money so mostly we initially invested our money in to make sure that we can work with our gtms so a little bit in the product building little bit building the gtm strategies so far we haven't spent a single time in marketing but that's what we are going to do from january because we are mostly after the product market feed we are trying to see if we can provide the values and we now in a stage where we can more or less confidently see that we are providing that well like for our e-commerce customers who are using my allies we have been helping them by automating almost 30 of their queries which is actually saving their time and cost and also most of the cases we are increasing their sales in between 20 to 40 percent so this is through the automations and this is through the increasing efficiency and all the data that we provide them of their customers yep and you've done this you've executed well 60 customers today how many people are on your team today we have 35 people in the team right now 35 how are you paying 35 people with 14 000. my company is based out of bangladesh so the labor cost in bangladesh is pretty low all my engineering team are based out of there we have around 17 product people right now and the rest of the 17 is sort of new hire after the raising so they are mostly focusing on building the support team building the inside sales team and now mostly the marketing team so as and and what are the rest of the folks doing so six people in the product team product meaning the product manager qa ui ux and uh five people in the inside sales team who basically are now targeting different countries in southeast asia south asia middle east and trying to onboard people who falls into our icp one of our core gtms is mostly to work with partners we have partner managers we have partners in uh nine countries right now who actually resell our product into those countries and the rest of the people are mostly marketing people so a few of them are part-timers pretty young people but they are now working on mostly the designs productions i mean we want to also understand the people yeah if a partner brings in a 200 a month customer how much do you pay back to the partner 20 to 30 percent depending on the their total sales okay so 40 to 50 a month is going back to the partner if you got the customer okay so of the 14 000 mr you're making today how much do you have to pay out per month to partners and 2 000 2000 all of them are not not from partners yeah okay got it okay so that's not that's not too high that's sort of your affiliate cut and which partners are selling the most so we have a partner in myanmar that that's totaling 40 percent we have now another partner in philippines that's almost closing to 25 of the old partnership and i think rest are distributed in singapore malaysia nepal uh dubai as well very cool and talk to me about how you're getting these new customers right so you're paying 20 out to these folks the people that come direct are you doing paid ads or no no we haven't spent nothing in ads so far as i said our core gta was focused on building the inside sales team and the partners till now but as we are now eyeing more towards the product marketing fit so starting from january we're investing in the marketing so we have around almost three hundred thousand dollars in our pocket right now and we are going to invest most of them in the marketing starting from january we'll be launching you know appszoom we'll be launching in product and a few other campaigns for shopify marketplaces and woocommerce marketplaces as well got it 300k in the bank today um very good and then um i mean you mentioned appsumo you know how do you why would you launch an app sumo and sell lifetime plans it reduces your ability to drive true recurring revenue yeah so we wanted to make sure that we have the initial tractions first of all and secondly we have the amount of trust as well as you can understand majority of our customers now from the apac reason and we also want to target the north communities also appsumo gives us a platform where we can onboard the initial level of customers and at least get the feedbacks out of them and help them on board and also take the name my allies out there so uh money is actually not our goal in case of appsumo but mostly trust and also the attractions that we can build from this campaign yeah but why would you want to put your product in front of discount shoppers effectively which is what appsumo users are they're you know enterprises are going to pay you 10 20 30 grand a month you know in four years are not hanging out on appsumo today so even if ltd is basically limited by monthly active users so uh it's not like you can use it as you want so if your mau grows then you will have to pay extra as well well i mean appsumo will push you to give away a ton to their users to get a deal done and usually it's a lifetime plan that's pretty feature rich so how do you plan to enter that negotiation so honestly speaking our goal was to make sure we got the early adopters from uh around the world and you also get the impression so i think absolutely helps us to do it of course there are pros and cons i mean we're giving away the ltds but in return we want to get some advisors and some customers throughout the world whom we can at least play around and see how our product goes with them all right well we'll see how it works on that note let's wrap up the famous five number one favorite business book yeah i would say shoot up from phil knight number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh not ceo but let's say cto thermistor from hubspot number three what's your favorite online tool for building the business uh i use amplitude and metabolize a lot to understand how much value i'm providing and also the tractions and of course a little bit biased but we also provide our support with my allies number four how many hours of sleep are you getting every night six and what's your situation married single kids kids how many i have a kid okay one kid and are you single or married married i'm mad okay married one kid and how old are you i am 28 i got married pretty early last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20. sorry something you wish you knew when you were 20. uh i think i wanted to work for uh companies like google microsoft as i am from the software engineer background but i think uh i believe i'm what i'm doing right now i'm pretty satisfied with that so it's not about something that you would change is this something you wish you knew when you were 20 oh i wish i knew i think i wanted to...