How Nittiolearn CEO Gagandeep Josan grew to $239.4K revenue and 15 customers in 2020.

hello everyone my guest today is gaijan deep joson he's a corporate warrior he survived for 17 years did product management for nokia in fairna and amazon before turning in into an entrepreneur in 2015. he pivoted his company natio learned from edtech to corporate learning at the end of 2016 and he's convinced that just like crms no one learning tool can fit an entire part of an organization guy john deep you ready to take us to the top sure let's go ahead okay so natiolearn.com n-i-t-t-i-o is the website and it sounds like you're a learning management system for inside corporations is that accurate yes it's an lms but it is focused on providing learning to the distributed workforce in companies so your field force which could be technicians which could be delivery people logistics operations or your frontline sales people in retail stores the problem i've seen in this space with other lms tools is the head of hr will purchase it but they can't get the actual people on the ground they can't get the employees to consume the content and then they churn how do you solve that so uh absolutely we faced the same problem when we started off and then i pivoted the company so uh what we have figured is that uh it's the then it's the head of operations who faces a challenge and is looking for training as a solution to his uh challenge that's when it fits really really well so we work actually more closely with the ops team and in with the training teams which are directly under ops so sometimes the learning and development teams also but it does fit in better uh when the training team actually is operating to the is reporting to operations uh heads so who's usually the person actually paying you at the company is it is the ceo most of the time it's the operations head or the ceo uh some of the times the training budget does roll up into a chat yes saying okay now that we understand the product give us more backstory here when did you launch uh so this version of the product 2016 and is when when we launched it for the corporates yes and when was the first version launched okay so the first version was an edtech version of the same product which we were trying to sell to schools uh without sales oh it was a hard tough sale and we couldn't make much money out of it uh realize that took some time and just pivoted took the same technology and took it to another market but when did you launch that first company uh that actually was launched in 2013 by my wife and my friend and when i jumped in 2015 into the same company and then within a year decided that that's not the way to go so is your wife working with you at natio learning uh no he uh left uh nithyalon two years back and went back to her corporate career both of us being in the startup just stopped making sense at that point of time but you're still married and in love right absolutely that's good that's good okay so 2016 was the pivot help me understand your pricing model today what's the average customer paying you per month so we are uh we have focused on india right now and our average customer is paying on a per user per se active users user bases uh comes to around two to three dollars a month and on average how big is a team signing up how many users do they sign up with so this could be something like a 1000 to 2000 users we do have corporates with even more than 10 000 users who are on the platform okay so is it a fair statement to say that your average customer has a thousand users and they paid two dollars per user so they paid two thousand dollars per month on average uh yes that that would be fair ever i mean if i calculate my um average contract value itself comes to around 1500 annually so that would be less than that but that's also some historical pricing which has gone to older customers i see got it so so you have some sorry when you say two dollars per seat that's annually not monthly no it is monthly it is monthly okay so you have people paying as little as uh as a hundred and ten dollars i'm i'm really sorry did i say 1500 it actually uh it's not 1500 our annual contact value is actually sixteen thousand dollars six zero or one six one fix one six okay 16 000 yes i see okay so you have customers paying as little as 1 400 per month all the way up to 2 or 3 000 per month yes yes and who pay more yes i see i see when you add up all of the paid users on your platform how many total uh we have in excess of a little in excess of 100 000 users across how many companies uh right now uh fifteen teen okay so yeah this really is an enterprise sale are you doing most the sales oh yes i was a one-man sales and marketing team till about six months back when i hired my first two sales people people founders never know when to make their first sales higher matt bellows at yesware says the founder has to sell a million dollars in arr first and then they can hire a salesperson did you follow the same advice uh we haven't reached a million dollars yet uh but yes uh i i i don't think i i didn't find it possible to scale further with just me selling uh so all i do have sales people although i am still doing the closing uh so i have sdr's uh who are who are setting up the meetings for me and i also have an account executive who's taking the deals forward although i am doing the closing still so two sdrs one ae plus u do all four of you have quota um still looking at figuring out what should be the good quotas we we are experimenting with quotas yes i see i see okay and what's the total team size today uh we are now 10 people how many engineers uh so four in four of us in sales for engineers and uh customer support and a general operations person i see and it sounds like again 15 customers a minimum of fifteen hundred dollars per month uh that means you're doing like between maybe twenty and thirty thousand dollars per month right now in revenue uh that's true that's true you're right and what does growth about 20 000 uh in revenue congratulations it's not it's not easy to get to did you do it bootstrapped or did you raise capital uh completely bootstrapped we love that we love that congratulations um and what does growth look like so exactly a year ago what was monthly revenue a year ago our monthly revenue was around 8 000 and it has actually our deals did get stuck uh in the last three to four months we had a lot of uh retail and uh food and beverages uh related uh companies which were in the pipeline late stage and and which all got stuck and are so we have kind of re-looked at our persona of people whom we should be targeting and started building the pipeline again but corona has impacted us yeah i can imagine our customer i mean so when you look at the impacts of uh of covid what would you say your your revenue churn is monthly okay so we have been lucky enough that our revenue journey actually we were uh able to maintain it at zero and that's because we were able to expand non-retail uh and non-food and beverage uh customers so our existing customer revenue exten expanded over the last three months by how much that so so we went down approximately uh i think so we turned around ten percent of our uh revenue and we expanded that much in the last three months congratulations yeah that that means net revenue retention is north of a hundred percent during a very tricky time of cova that's a good that's good good numbers thanks what back me into how you're getting new customers today what's that process look like uh so uh i've always been doing outbound uh sales and haven't uh really built the inbound engine yet so our primary uh outreach engine help happens to be either email or linkedin based uh getting to the right people with the right messaging um and then basically following through with the discovery call and then through uh with the demos and and closing um we have started to build the inbuilt uh inbound engine now so what do you spend in terms of cac to acquire a new two thousand dollar a month customer uh actually i mean i i would be lying if i told you i knew that i i have not been able to come up with that number what's your no one ever knows what these numbers are actually but a gut instinct helps you drive the business what does your gut tell you your attack is so my gut tells me that my cac is less than two thousand dollars and help me understand why how did you sort of think about that so i i mean there is a few costs so this was a rough thing which i back of the envelope if i have to do the calculation with respect to the amount of money we spent to spend upon the lead generation all the content we create for for this purpose for you know the middle of the funnel engagement of people uh to basically then all the uh money we spend on let's say sometimes a free trial right so it was a combination of all of these which gave me this kind of a number that makes sense to me any plans to raise capital or you want to stay bootstrapped uh no plans to make capital uh raise capital right now so we uh do think we are reasonably placed money is not the bottleneck right now gajan deep let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book uh i would say play bigger because i read that recently number two good answer you're honest number two is there a ceo you're following or studying oh i'm quite fascinated by how austin is building the lambda school these days so i'm closely following that yep uh i love austin love what he's building uh number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company uh i've been using asana quite a bit with my team and quite on it actually loving it number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night seven at least i try to do that so six to seven hours and what's your situation genji married single kids married with two kids okay and how old are you uh i am 42. last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew um it's okay to make mistakes and make more mistakes guys uh natio leeds is an lms tool for corporations uh especially the time of kobe a lot of usage they're doing about twenty thousand dollars a month in revenue right now across fifteen customer accounts that pay north of fifteen hundred dollars per month so very much an enterprise motion they've done this all bootstrapped which we love ten people on the team four engineers and four people thinking about sales guys indeed we're rooting for you thanks for taking us to the top thanks nathan thanks for the time