How Orgzit CEO Nitin Verma grew Orgzit to $6.4M revenue and 21 customers in 2024.

just got done editing this interview you guys are gonna love it before I do that though I want you to know that I'm going to be in the comments for the next 30 minutes or so answering your questions if there's additional questions you want me to ask the CEO next time I interview them leave them below or if you're just loving the data points I get CEOs to share click the thumbs up button below that's your way of telling me you're loving this stuff and I'll get you more of it additionally again I'll be in the comments answering any questions you have all right for 30 minutes enjoy the interview hello everyone my guest today is Newton Verma he is the founder and CEO of a company called or Gazette which is helping people build customized software fast without coding he's done business strategy an execution professional with 15 plus years of experience delivering high growth products for SMBs and large enterprises got an MS from Virginia Tech MBA from INSEAD BTech it from Delhi College of Engineering along with many other accolades all right you ready to get to the top meetin absolutely all right let's go so tell us you know no code is obviously a fast growing kind of trend are you playing in that space and if so what exactly are you selling to customers absolutely so we are one of the many no code topic providers that have sort of mushroomed up in the last 5-10 years so augs it is I'm in the position of it slightly differently from some of the other players which are out there in the market and our core value proposition is that we are trying to help businesses which the mostly focusing on small and medium businesses who have limited access to customized technology like sales within ACP because those are very enterprise and generally very difficult to implement and very expensive so we want to give them a platform to completely build a customized software solution without writing any code ok and then it can also integrate with other third party software's and sort of become a overall ERP and a CRM system going forward and when she launched the company over here so we started the first line of code was sort of written as a side project actually so I was running a prior business to this so so my co-founder who my brother we started coding in 2016 and we launched the website then we went live in 2017 April ok how much money did you guys spend building that MVP before your first dollar revenue do you remember well it's about a hundred thousand dollars ok and what you spend them on actually actually we've been spending so that was more opportunity cuz it was not really money spent it was just opportunity cost of start working elsewhere I see okay so 2070 2016 code 2017 first our revenue now today how much revenue are you doing per month so so we're sub $100,000 in annual recurring revenue we are doing about a few thousand dollars and we have limited in the way so when we started off we were focusing on the really small businesses now we started focusing more the midsize businesses like 50 200 500 people initially we thought it launched it as a do-it-yourself product and that was a big mistake that we learned that the kind of customers that we'll be chasing but not really ready for do-it-yourself kind of products so how many customers do you have today so overall you're so 50 plus customers at the moment we have 21 light-pink customers okay and what do they pay on average per month so they think that's about two hundred and seventy-five dollars a month okay got it got it so we can kind of back in you're doing about call it fifty five hundred dollars per month and monthly recurring revenue that's right now I want to go back to this you said you two things that was interesting one you got you know customers here fairly quick first year and then also you said that it was a mistake who you're going after earlier so explain to me how you got your first couple of customers and when you realize that was a mistake to have them right so when we launched opted in the whole idea was to launch it as a sort of a DIY platform so people can come and build their own software without writing any code so we so there were the mistake was the platform was not ready in banja because the minute requires a lot of more than the technology it also requires a lot of customer support articles support in terms of how you go on both the customers of the entire journey of onboarding your customer so the other challenge was so one thing is not coding the other thing is understanding what business requirements you need to code for and lower of the customers in those less than 50 people category they don't know what business processes they need to basically manage the business of operations and they are never able to define the business operations very very articulately and so because if you can't define business processes articulately there's no way you can go and build an application on a local chopper so the challenge was that they didn't even have the sort of the consulting so there was a little bit of consultation which was required which you which we would not get to do yeah and so that's why we felt that you can't consult on a tuner dollar a month plan that's not enough revenue to consult on absolutely how many people on the team today so we are 2-pounder than three people so we have three developers who are working with us now okay so okay got it so and are there full-time engineers or consultants there okay so how are you covering costs here did you just you and your mother save up some money and you're kind paying costs out of your own savings so part of partly that and partly my brother sort of works as a part-time CTO and I work as a part-time contacting with world bank okay so you guys so basically the five grand you make each month in revenue is enough to pay for your three full-time engineers and you and your brother don't take a salary right now because you have other jobs that's right okay when you're gonna cut the safety nets man you got a cut you got to quit the jobs and go on on this so we are about to do that right now so we are we're just launching so basically I mean we started off as a the started off as a weekends and nights project and now we are down to one day a week because we have saved up enough money to sort of scale up and so the idea is to hit a product market fit and so as soon as we are hitting about 100,000 so we actually doing the fundraise right now to Gay's about half a million to maybe a million dollars to take us to the next level so let's say your raise half a million today what valuation are you hoping to raise it on so we we don't want to dilute more than fifteen to twenty percent okay got it so if you raise five hundred granny or sewing 10% of a company you're basically saying you're aiming for 4.5 million of our pre-money valuation something like that that's right okay which would be I mean obviously when you do the math throat if your AR that is a obviously a massive multiple why why so two things there one why take the dilution at all and then two even with a great multiple you know does it make you nervous growing into a 4.5 million dollar valuation not at all so so in terms of in terms of how we have sort of navigated the last couple of years and the kind of customers who are stuck on with us and then we see a lot of expansion revenue we see a lot of stickiness in the product we quantify that for me so can you tell me the story of a customer that started paying you a hundred bucks and now they're paying you I don't know whatever how much more they are praying sure absolutely so we're working with one of the one of the divisions of Amazon in dia amazon.com so it's a business called pry on business solutions they started working with us in about a year and a half two years ago and it started off as a small TOC for about 10 users and now it's expanded to about hundred 20 uses and we are doing so we started with less than I think $500 sorry we started with less than $100 a month approximately it was just a small POC and now it's expanded to about $1,200 a month okay and how many accounts like that have you know 10x - over the past twelve months three okay three folks and what are you so help us understand that because it's it's rare for a company this young to have this kind of expansion revenue so what are you upselling against is it just number of seats no so it's number it's just not just number of seats so opposite can be used by multiple Department even large enterprise or a growing business so the idea is to build multiple workforce we started with one work now and now we have expand to five work clothes in this particular case did you give me a real example for a workflow is what does that mean so what new is up example one in this particular case is like this is new merchants onboarding so whenever a new merchant is getting on board it on Amazon platform so they're about three hundred three hundred thousand merchants who get on board and they have to be served in maintain so they come up with new business requirements or like new business requirements for let's say doing catalog and services new business requirement for meeting compliances so there is a team of merchants support there's a team of mature support agents who are basically supporting these merchants over different campaigns and these campaigns have very different workflows are you are you like zapier where they can connect anything or you have like four or five predefined workflows you've built that they can plug and play with so we are not like here we are like more like a table or kissflow or be more like QuickBase so that means you basically have these against seven things lead management invoicing order management customer support tickets expense tracking and project wise profit and loss as kind of systems that people use you for so those are just sample of workplace that people uses for but so they can also use it uses for pretty much everything anything else that they can imagine so it's like a it's essentially a virtualized database and you can come and build your own virtualized database and you can come and build your own approval workflow systems or logs it okay makes sense so you can use it play expense management you can use it for C Adam - at the moment sixty percent of our customers use some sort of CRM system okay I'm what percent of customers use more than one product or more than workflow well pretty much everybody hundred percent okay so everyone is using you know three or four of these things okay when you quantify this across your entire customer base you just told the story about Amazon affiliate in in your area that upgraded from a hundred to twelve hundred dollars per month when you add up the whole company what is gross revenue churn annually and then add back expansion revenue also those numbers are very difficult to give us but it just because maybe sort of pivoted initially we were focusing one lot on the smaller businesses where the churn was pretty much hundred percent and we sort of decided to let them go so in 2019 we did that in January 2019 and at that time our total revenue was less than thousand dollars now it's about fifty five hundred dollars a month okay I just answered a question of sojourn too early for me to give you those numbers right now let me just pray specifically gave me an expansion story though so I don't believe that you don't necessarily know those numbers you just told me about an expansion revenue story going from 100 to 1200 which would be a thousand percent expansion on that one coat on that one customer yeah sure I mean if you want to I mean calculate the churn percentage so we have served about 57 58 customers and in the last one or four years no revenue charted see cuz in your perspective what you're basically telling me is Nathan we intentionally turned off lower value logos but the revenue associated as logos was less than even this expansion revenue from this one Amazon affiliate you serve so I'm asking about revenue that's why that's why I asked the question actually I'm asking our revenue churn it's about it's about thousand fifty hundred dollars I think God okay what does that mean so I mean in terms of ml are not in the other about thousand fifty hundred dollars in revenue churn that I mean that is what we have lost in the last two years it got it the total you don't you lose it every month that's in total what you've lost that's right yeah so okay so thousand term but you just again told me one story of a customer that you know expanded by a thousand over that same period so never burning retentions call it somewhere north of a hundred percent to this point because you have caught forty or fifty percent revenue turn but you have more than fifty percent expansion that's interesting when do you start really like tracking that hard cord you use any tools to do that so we've just started doing that last month so we started a citizen we started doing it on profit well about a month ago very good all right talk to me about CAC so what's it costing you to get a new $250 a month customer so it's anywhere about $1,000 to about twelve fifty dollars including so we don't do any paid marketing right now so primarily the cost of customer acquisition is through Legion so we have an account based marketing system right now and so we are spending about six hundred dollars a month for that which is generating about eight to ten leads and out of these eight to ten T is very able to convert one or sometimes two and and then there is a cost of customer support so normally we charge one small one-time onboarding fee so that takes care of part of the onboarding fee but primarily so the lead generation cause that is costing us and who's the first the sales you I'm doing I'm the only sales person yeah very cool all right so payback period you spend twelve out twelve fifty day 1250 gated a customer or that pays $200 a month payback period about five months or something like that is that right that's right okay very cool now you mentioned I will actually dimension this you are bootstrap today right we have booster club okay got it so bootstrap today and then how much capital are you burning every month that you and your weather after I got four from your savings so we don't we don't burn anything right now so all our salary so that's the benefit of being in India so although all the salaries that we're paying right now are taken care of by the revenue that we are making so you're breaking it so we are breakeven from that perspective but we don't take any money from so our opportunity cost is not before yeah yeah very good all right let's wrap up here Indian with the famous five number one favorite business book so it's not really a business book but I love reading Paul Graham's essays and I always fall back upon those so Paul Graham prompt I see number two is their CEO you're following or studying so I like Satya Nadella and there's a Cu in India called Sunil Bharti Mittal who's head of one of India's largest telcos so I like these two people number three what's your favorite online tool for building works it so it has to be hot jar so I love to sort of sneak up on my trial users and see how they're using the product because that gives me a lot of perspective in terms of what product features to be dual up and how they interacting with the product in the early stages one of the things I forgot to mention is like the first three months is the most crucial if a customer stays with us for three months then we have seen that there is a very little chance of them to churn up to three months yeah yeah Hajj are a very good tool for this sort of thing what activation metric are you seeing if you're spying kind of on them to see if they hit mean inviting more users into the system and assigning tasks to those new users yeah guys if you want to use Hajj or do the same thing in basically generates little videos for every customer that uses your website or generate a video that's showing you where they clicked how they scrolled to help you better improve your onboarding if you want to try Hajj or go to Nathan like accom forward slash hotshot alright number fourteen how many hours is he breaking every night so I got about six to seven hours pretty good in which situation married single kiddos I've been married for the last 11 years I'm 39 and I have two two little girls so very well you have three startups alright take us home here what he was your 20 year old self new I wish I knew software's gonna eat the world and I would not have gone in done civil engineering I would have focused on becoming a software engineer when I was 20 guys there you have it orgs it helping companies with their workflows they have one customer that expanded from 100 bucks month up to $1200 per month over the past 12 months alone they've just passed 550 500 dollars a month in a revenue bootstrap the company so far today hoping to raise about five hundred million dollars right now selling about ten percent of the company we'll see if they can make it happen team of five two founders their brothers and three full-time engineers neaten we're rootin for you thanks for taking us the top thank you very much thanks for having me [Music] these CEOs rarely give these kinds of interviews I hit them hard I get the data and I want to do it more so if you want to get more of his stuff make sure you subscribe up here and then additionally go check out one of my other CEO interviews right now