How Niswey CEO Abhinav Sahai grew Niswey to $390K revenue and 13 customers in 2019.

hello everyone my guest today is abhinav sahih he is the co-founder of nisway an eight-year-old digital marketing agency they've been featured in bbc the week the telegraph and other media is a speaker on digital marketing entrepreneurship and in his free time he mentors young entrepreneurs and volunteers for bharat shiksha an ngo which provides free education to underprivileged children abhinav you ready to take us to the top yes absolutely okay so what uh first off is there any component of software in this agency or are you a traditional agency with 50 margins that kind of thing uh we are a traditional agency uh since about eight years now and this year only we forehead into products uh we have a few products going live as we speak uh we went live with the product in the beta phase a few years back but wasn't so successful now we're relaunching while we have another few products okay and do you have any products that have launched that are post revenue or there are pre-revenue they're all pre-revenue right now okay well let's then focus on the agency so when'd you launch the agency what year it was 2011. okay 2011 and how many folks are on the agency team today um 16. oh okay all based there locally are they remote uh mostly at the office in delhi one is in you know one of my co-founders is in luxembourg uh and one another you know teammate works remotely and and when you launch this in 2011 i mean you must remember the first project the first money you made like it was yesterday uh what was the project so interestingly the first customer that we signed up and that was even before we named our agency uh is still with us and it is in fact our biggest paying customer right now uh so i mean the first money was always you know it's always great you know well yeah again what was the first project what would they pay you for the first project and what was it oh okay i'm sorry uh so we've been doing digital marketing for this company uh so it's not a project it's been a retainer you know that's how agencies survive they work on retainer largely uh and it's been ever going so we are doing providing marketing services to this company it's an i.t solutions company and they sell you know services to the us market and what was the retainer they started with back in 2011 oh okay that's a good question i think thousand dollars a month a month yeah okay that's great and then how many customers are you working with today total we work with very few customers i think we just have about 12 to 13 customers right now and they're all retainer-based you're doing digital marketing yes okay and are we talking i mean so today your average retainer what you say is about what a grand a month 10 grand a month 100 a month uh it's about uh 2 500 a month okay and what do they get for that what are you delivering are you actually processing ad spend or just coaching and consulting on how to spend money it's a mix of things sometimes we'll be doing the coaching and consulting sometimes we'll be using the ad spends a lot of times we'll be creating the content and you know providing seo and advertising and you know sometimes even creating videos for them okay so can i take the 13 customers times that price point that would put you at about 32 000 per month right now on revenue yeah that's right and where were you a year ago do you remember um i think about 75 of that oh good okay so maybe a little bit lower so so grow i mean not not crazy growth but still good growth there um is that from expanding old customers or adding new customers all together so most of the uh last year has been expanding into the new markets uh last year we've been last two years we've been focused a lot working a lot with you know other agencies as well uh as white label you know services so while we will be doing the same kind of stuff digital marketing but it will be white labeled and you know we basically the u.s agencies they will be working you know with the customers directly well we'll be only be interfacing with the agencies there yeah and now have you gotten the agency to the point where it's profitable today are you still burning cash no no we're profitable uh thankfully a lot two three years ago we were you know we were we so we started profitably then somewhere down the road uh road we uh you know two three years down the road for about three four years we were you know burning cash then we became profitable about two years back again and now today are you talking like 20 to the bottom line or 50 to the bottom line how profitable yeah last year we did about 25 okay that's pretty good so you know taking that to a monthly approach right if you're taking 25 percent or a quarter of 30 000 to the bottom line i mean that's what like seven or eight thousand dollars a month in free cash flow right yeah you can say that i mean free cash flow and you can say that we keep reinvesting so for example we have been you know we've been building all these products which we are now going live with so there's been you know burning cash for that have you bootstrapped all those companies funded by the agency or did you raise capital from all always bootstrap okay which one have you spent the most money on so far uh we spend most of the money on a product called io spell with i-r-a-y-o i-r-a-y-o yeah the best on-page seo tool diy software so this competes with a kind of seo rush s these kinds of things yeah with moz and you know the likes of those guys ahrefs sem those companies yes yes yes that's right what are you gonna do differently uh so what we changed is that it was not about data it was about what you can make how you can make use of the data uh and we basically have features where the user does not have to know how to use the you know keyword volume and things like that the seo part they can just implement without knowing any marketing okay and i mean um how do you plan to get customers for this thing and what do you think you're gonna charge uh so the way we've been looking at it is we're looking at small business owners who want who are you know one or two people teams and they don't have you know a marketing agency to support them so they can do it on their own uh so that's our you know biggest target market uh we put in a price range of 29 starting upwards of 29 a month 29 a month uh let's see how it goes i mean we don't know yet whether that's the right price point or not and how much revenue we have to scale the sas business to for you to shut down the agency and go all in on the sas the higher margin sas business uh at least 200 customers uh ongoing okay so if you get two more customers paying 30 bucks a month that's only 6 000 a month in revenue um yes but i think that's where we can you know start thinking of moving to the complete oh do you mean that should i shut down the uh yeah so basically a lot of agency owners will launch a sas company but then they'll try and do both and both of them will suffer so there has to be a turning point at which you say okay we're using the agency cash flow to build the sas but now the sas has enough momentum where i can basically stop focusing on the agency so i'm curious how much revenue do you want to see the sas company doing per month before you turn away from the agency okay i want to see at least 50 000 a month 50 000 yes okay so if you charge 30 bucks a month that would mean you have to get about 1500 customers on it that's right yeah okay very good good plan let's wrap up here uh with the famous five abhinav number one what's your favorite business book business book okay um i like i really like actually the biographies and i really love phil knight uh the founder of nike his biography the best number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh a couple of them actually uh one is the founder of basecamp uh and then there is jason freedom oh jason freed yeah i just lost the name yeah jason frieda follow and then there is ryan fishkin from moz and now spark toro yep number three what's your favorite online tool for building your business um for building a business can you be more specific there what's the tool that you use the most on a daily basis wow okay i use hubspot a lot okay number four how many hours of sleep to get every night about five or six okay and what's your situation married single kids married no kids yet and ham i had been almost five years oh congratulations and how old are you i am 35 almost last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew ah i should have started coding faster learn to go faster guys learn to code faster nisway.com is an agency with 13 sorry 18 employees right now they've scaled to about 30 000 a month in revenue they're sorry 16 full-time employees 30 000 a month in revenue now launching a sas product that will compete with h refs or scm rush kind of in that space he'll turn away from the agency once that company hits 50 000 a month in revenue all right i've been off thank you for taking us to the top thanks so much 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...