How DBSync CEO Rajeev Gupta grew DBSync to $12.5M revenue and 700 customers in 2025.

hello everyone my guest today is rajiv gupta he has extensive experience with application architecture and on-demand computing and over 16 years starting and growing tech companies in 2002 he co-founded avancia which was one of the first companies incubated by salesforce the enterprise gave this that enterprise gave raise to db sync a data management platform that provides a wide range of functionalities including integration backup and archiving rajiv are you ready to take us to the top yes okay so db sync first question is it a pure play sas company yes it is a pure play sas company we are in the ipas and cloud data application space that's great okay yeah so give us an example of how a customer is using you uh if you're salesforce.com customer and you want to integrate your sales force with your accounting system be it quickbooks great planes or any other systems you'll likely gonna call us um we degrade you know sales being completed into invoicing and what payments getting received anything to think about cloud data into other applications we do those and and how do people pay you on average is it kind of annual contracts only monthly yes so we do ask contracts um we do annual contracts and um it's uh basically a 200 a month and it goes up to a thousand dollars a month so wide range based on what services you are uh you're looking for what would you say is a fair average in terms of acv is it about 200 bucks per month so 2400 bucks a year i spun 500 to 600 a month okay got it so maybe closer to call it you know six grand a year something like that right that's great and put this on a timeline for us so it sounds like you got pretty active at salesforce you launched this in 2007. yes so early days uh we bootstrapped that all the way so we launched the the first version got launched in 2007 and then that was a desktop only version we rebranded the company and we set it up in 2009 and that's when the sas the ipas got launched i see and what have you been able to scale to today in terms of total customers on the platform so we have about 700 plus 700 okay that's great so fairly healthy and um i want to dive more into kind of how you're growing in this space where you see the space going but first i mean can i take seven uh well no you said arpu was about 500 bucks a month right right yeah so that would put your if i take 700 times 500 bucks a month on average what you guys are about 350 grand a month right now in revenue something like that uh less than that okay of those numbers is which of those numbers is wrong the 700 customer account or the 500 average 500 well that's the reason where you're you'll you're going to likely look at whatever has happened from 2009 to so if you were to average that um it will be more like uh you can have it as um 250 okay so by the way that's that's pretty typical to start off cheap and then kind of increase price over time so 250 as an average across your 700 customers that puts your revenue more about 170 grand a month is that right yeah okay yeah and give us a sense of growth so a year ago in october of 2017 what were you doing per month so uh you know last year we have grown about 63 percent okay so call it maybe about 110 grand a month about a year ago yeah that's great and help us understand that the story here so where's the growth coming from new product lines deeper you know customers paying more or just new customers all together it's new customers customer adding stuff um so they've just had two connectors now they have they're having three and four and five uh that's where the growth is going from 250 dollars to you know more like five six hundred dollars um so uh we're having a lot better retention rate now um we have what's a better what's better so what's your retention rate today um again we don't disclose those numbers but it's uh it's improved by you know seven percent of last year okay um i mean churn is like the critical number in a sas company can you give me some insight into what your turn is and how you manage and how you've improved it it depends um the classical way to think about chune is if you we have a wide spectrum of customers we have very small customers and very large because now large customers we don't lose them it's like more like 97 retention rate but small customers on industry average is about 2 percent a month so that's 24 we are round about that percent on the smaller side okay but if you ignore customer size and this is why people look at revenue churn instead of logo churn so if you look at your revenue churn across your entire base per year what is that so we are about you know again we don't disclose it um i would say range if you want yeah so it's going to be about you know 13 to 20 13 to 20. yeah okay so if you're you know if you're churning 13 to 20 percent of your of your revenue per year sorry the customers that's the customers yeah and that doesn't quite correlate with their revenue revenue churn is less than 10 okay yeah that's what i was asking because any i mean by the way i don't know why this is why revenue churn was invented it was to make up for differences in customers that have much different rpus because usually higher acv accounts you keep right in terms of a logo basis and churn on a logo base is much higher for low rp so this is why people measure revenue churn so your revenue churn is only call it 10 per year is what you're saying less than 10 per year that's great and when people are churning why are they churning it's you know any integration company up there they just have two points of integration and we drop one point like they're signing off from salesforce microsoft outgrowing quickbooks into new systems that's when the churn comes in so that's really that's where we see especially in the smaller larger segment we don't see that much at all and can you help me understand more about kind of your team today and the breakdown between sales and engineering sorry your voice was breaking really gotcha can you ask me that question again what's your total team size today oh we have 55 folks 55 and what's the breakdown between sales and engineering so sales um we have about 11 in sales again um we have 12 in engineering and then we have seven eight in services account management we have three four and the rest is support and where's everybody based so we are scattered all around so we have couple in the united states uh majority are there in bangor india uh we have a presence in europe and south america okay and obviously this space is you know growing rapidly would you say that most of your success is directly tied to the salesforce app exchange or are you getting customers from other sources uh again your voice was breaking you will have to repeat that one more time yeah my question was is most of your growth tied directly to the salesforce app exchange or are you getting customer growth from other sources so yes a good question uh we we initially started with salesforce that still demo uh dominates most of ours but we have got into microsoft space that's where something we are doing pretty well and then there are other other sas integration spaces like e-commerce so doing very well in the inventory management space and e-commerce with channel advisor or skew all those kind of spaces so right now we have the growth area is around those ecosystems so as you look at growing amongst new ecosystems i'd love to understand more about how aggressive you're being in terms of cac so if a new customer is paying 500 bucks per month or 6 grand per year how much are you willing to spend fully weighted to get that customer oh so we break even second month for most of the customers so our cost of acquiring the customer extremely low um mainly because a lot of this is through our relationship sales that we go through in each of these ecosystems and our cost of sales from sales and operation being in india and um the way we have optimized it so we normally break even you know like two or three months yeah so just be clear if they're paying 500 bucks per month you're spending anywhere between a grand and 1500 bucks to acquire the customer for a two to three month payback yes okay and where are you typically spending that money is it the sales rep traveling around is it direct paid spent on facebook and google where is it so it's partly it's uh marketing again we don't do a huge spend most of it is the sales where as soon as the inbound sales comes and the time spent from sales uh to demo to uh closure that's when that's where we spend most of our energy and time i see and talk to me about kind of funding history have you bootstrapped this or raised capital yeah bootstrapped it all the way oh i love that that's so great more ceos need a bootstrap that's wonderful how have you resisted the urge i i think right now we are making more cash we are trying to figure out how to invest that first before we go ask for more money we are rapidly hiring across our every look every department so um i think as soon as the cash starts to uh trim down that's when i would see but i think my problem right now is to invest this cash coming in back into the business and more efficiently cash flow positive today then uh yes that's great very good all right let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what is your favorite business book uh...