How Plobal Apps CEO Atul Poharker grew Plobal Apps to $3.9M revenue and 260 customers in 2025.

hello everybody my guest today is he is the founder and ceo of global.ai in 2016 he realized that even though mobile apps were the default future the technology was limited to just the bigger players that's when ploble was born he and his team built a platform for developing mobile apps and setting up the mobile commerce success journey for businesses without compromising on any tech abilities okay atul are you ready to take us to the top yep all right so what does the company do and is it a pure play sas model uh yes so it's a pure place sas model um essentially when we started out we were just an app building company uh over a period of time what we've realized uh the bigger problem that businesses have is not building the mobile app but actually what happens next right so how to actually drive installs how to drive engagement and essentially scale revenues right so what we've done is we built a platform which actually builds your app in as less as five minutes and then we've built tools and automation which helps you through the entire mobile commerce journey in terms of getting installs sending out push notifications and then optimizing revenues so is that like a dumb marketer like me instead of bugging my development team i can go drag and drop together my own app and use you to push it out right so that's the phase one and you just call your customers dumb marketers uh no so the whole idea is that uh they are not they're non-tech people right so yeah that's a better way that's a better way to say it non-non-tech people and what do they pay you on average per month for this uh so we start anywhere from ninety nine dollars going up to twelve ninety nine dollars okay what would you say in averages like a hundred bucks a month uh around two hundred and ten dollars a month that's hard very specific when did you found the company what year uh 2016 2016. okay yeah got it and what i mean so what have you scaled to today how many customers so we've got around 260 customers two six zero paid customers yeah that's great i mean so i can multiply that times the 210 you just gave me you're doing about fifty four thousand bucks a month fifty four thousand but yeah that's the best side you'll be assassinated congrats and what's growth rate look like so a year ago today what were you at uh we were doing around i think nine thousand dollars in mrr oh great well obviously growth is easy going from you know a dollar to five dollars but still everyone has to start at zero and you have some healthy growth where are you getting all these customers how are you signing them up uh so we basically are the top rated app on the shopify app store um which is so we integrate with shopify they are our largest partners uh so majority of our customers come directly from the shopify app store and then we've got a lot of inbound channels or we rank number one on google for shopify mobile app we've got a healthy amount of quora and content marketing going on so most of the growth has been purely inbound is shopify going to acquire you oh hopefully let's see have you have you raced capital or bootstrapped uh so we've raised our friends and family to actually build the product since it's an intense product uh it's actually like shopify for mobile apps right so the development team has to be quite substantial for this so how much have you raised total oh we raised around 500k okay so not not a ton but enough to get you guys going what's it what's the team size look like today we are not 24 people and where's everyone based oh we are based out of india all of us we have an inside sales team i'll tell you what you know what i i am starting to fall in love with india and i've never been to india because i'm meeting so many founders from india who are just crushing it and they're friendlier than people in the united states they're usually smarter they move quicker what's happening in india uh so i think one thing is that sas has really picked up very well in india right a lot of people have actually figured out how to solve sas and b2b uh also you just get a ton of great talent at very affordable costs in india rates that's why a lot of companies are moving their tech centers to india yeah i mean let's call that what it is it's cheap labor that's really freaking smart yeah exactly yeah and uh uh it's uh something that i think we've been building world-class products out of india which people do not realize right like we will be using a ton of products based out of india without having to clue about it first year what what do you pay if you're gonna hire a developer today what would you from india what would you pay them first year in dollars yeah uh around a thousand dollars a month wow that's amazing and that's like that's like a junior kind of talent level or they're pretty good level i would say junior would be around 500 a month and senior would be what two grand a month uh two to three grand a month yeah that's still that's i mean that's obviously still really great that's great so so you've raised 500 grand you've got 210 customers 54 grand a month up from nine grand a year ago are you casual positive today oh yes your cash flow second that's great so you've been property since april that's great are you looking at raising another round of capital or no uh no we've been uh so we've not raised capital we built uh various capital just to build the product after that we've been funding ourselves majorly and you want to want to stay bootstrapped no need to raise capital scale faster uh so i think we are generating enough cash flows to actually drive growth so i don't think at this stage we need the capital to actually boost growth that's great uh of the 54 grand you're making each month i mean do you mind asking how much that goes right to the bottom line are you talking like 10 grand 20 grand around 20 grand that's amazing that's really great and so where when you choose to then reinvest that i mean what does that just kind of sit in the bank to create a cushion for you what do you do with it right so the initial months we created a safety net so we needed some amount of salaries to be there in case some things go wrong uh what we're focusing now is we are looking at paid channels to figure out if that can boost growth for us interesting that's great now building a sas company obviously churn is critical what's your turn today right we were around 5.5 that's a revenue churn or a logo churn that's your which one per month or per year one month okay perm okay got it so call it maybe 60 65 per year um right what is it is it about the same amount in terms of revenue churn yeah around five percent in terms of revenue chart okay so about 60 so that's pretty high how do you get that down right so we've actually been uh moving up market so what we realized is uh when we started we are selling apps at 29 and we are selling to businesses which are just starting out over a period of time we've actually been now working with uh businesses who understand the importance of a mobile app and can actually have an entire team working on it right so one of the metrics that we track is how much sales have happened through our mobile apps and we've crossed over 10 million dollars in sales just from the platform total or per month total do you take a cut of that uh no we don't you should no i'm just kidding i don't know who knows sas model is probably better and people will probably hate you if you ask for a percentage um what do you so to get a new customer that's paying you call 200 or 210 bucks per month what are you spending on customer acquisition fully weighted we are actually not spending on anything our seo channels have been not there before we even launched the product so we've been uh we get a like 50 of our traffic comes from the shopify app store 40 percent comes from our seo keywords and then 10 comes from quora and other activities um quora you mean organic posts on quora or paid yes organic posts how many people on your team are dedicated to like the seo the content marketing quora et cetera so we have a marketing team of two people right now okay take care of everything so really two people are driving your customer growth two full-time salaries yeah that's great that's good um let me see i mean any any plans to experiment with more pa direct kind of paid spend for acquisition or no yes we actually just hired someone to look at paid marketing and figure out how paid channels would work another thing that we want to focus on is figure out if influencers and social media could actually play a big role in this and how would you see that happening uh so majority of our customers are e-commerce merchants right and they're super active on instagram so we want to kind of do this brand building activity where we share about success stories about our customers the kind of features that we are building and just tell more about the company yeah you want like if someone wants to be like kim kardashian have their own komoji app you want them to use you to build their komoji thing and we want everyone to use our platform to build their ads yeah well my butt cannot compete with kim kardashian so i'm not going to build the application but maybe somebody else can okay i love this what a cool story very good let's uh let's wrap up your tool with the famous five number one what's your favorite business...