How Process Street CEO Vinay Patankar grew Process Street to $15M revenue and 500 customers in 2024.

this is the top where i interview entrepreneurs who are number one are number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base you'll learn how much revenue they're making what their marketing funnel looks like and how many customers they have i'm now at twenty thousand dollars per talk five and six million he's helped on global domination we just broke our 100 000 unit soul mark and i'm your host nathan latka this is episode 706 coming up tomorrow morning i talked to manny where the government gives him power to let non-accredited investors invest i asked him i said manny are you in with the government why did you get the first rights to do this you beat out all the big guys you beat indiegogo kickstarter everyone else why you well tune in tomorrow to learn about learn about this new way that you can invest in any company hello everyone my guest this morning is vinay patankar he's the ceo of process street the simplest way to manage your team's recurring processes and workflows you can easily set up new clients onboard employees and manage content publishing with his tool he also co-hosts the podcast business systems explored where he goes deep dives into business systems with industry experts if you see how other entrepreneurs structure their sales recruitment marketing engineering teams check out business systems explored all right renee are you ready to take us to the top yeah i'm ready let's do it all right good so tell us we got a little taste of what process street is but how would you describe it and how do you make money uh yeah so we're a tool that helps companies build and manage workflows and processes uh we're a sas product we make money by charging a monthly or yearly subscription to the product based on the number of users you have on it um and so yeah like the kind of vision for the product is to make workflow really easy and when you think of what workflow is it's kind of two two main parts one is coordinating tasks so who needs to do what when um and then the second is like coordinating data um because a lot of the time who needs to do what when depends on some type of data along the way so there's been a lot of tools that have uh and there's a lot of incumbents that have built workflow products you know all the big it companies you can think of oracle microsoft ibm all have kind of incumbent solutions um but they've all come at it from a very enterprisey textbook how you kind of design a business process and we're basically trying to come from it from a very user and intuitive perspective so it's kind of like if you've never gone and studied business if you don't have an mba if you've never drawn a flow diagram before if you don't know what bpmn is it doesn't matter like it's just intuitively oh things need to get done in disorder and this person needs to do this and when and this is what i need to do now right um so just kind of taking it taking workflow and consumerizing it essentially and what is the average customer paying you per month uh we don't really we don't really publish that but uh hold on your what do we know about your price points on your website 12 yeah yeah price points on our website we have we have between you know single user receipts all the way up to hundreds of employees in the company um and then you know you can see our pricing on the website which is currently 15 user a month yeah so i want we only have 15 minutes so i want to avoid the conversation of having to like break down every single cohort i'd rather just talk about averages so i mean are we talking the average customer's paying you 100 bucks a month or two bucks a month or 10 000 bucks a month what's a range yeah it's it's it's probably it's four figures a year would be like in that range of four figures a year so between like kind of two and five thousand a year got it got it that's helpful good so between two and five thousand per year and do you do you make them sign annual plans or do you have a a monthly product uh so we have both options for pricing we give you discounts and incentives for going on annual uh we even do two-year contracts as well on some of the bigger deals uh just to get that cash up front so yeah we incentivize annual basically okay got it per year got it and then what is the give us some more of the backstory here so what are your launch company in autumn what year did you launch the company in um so we we launched the company in 2013 uh pretty much as a side project but we raised our seed round one and a half years ago and so now so that's kind of really when we actually built the proper engineering team and took it out of a prototype into a into into a proper product um now we're 21 people in the company okay so that would have been that seed round would have been late 2015 early 2016. you're now 21 people how much total have you raised uh 1.3 okay got it so was that round that you just did re i guess about a year and a half ago is that a priced round or was it a convertible note debt comparable night okay basically yeah it's like the safe right the yc safe basically yeah did you go through yc or one of those accelerators yeah we went through angel pad got it and what was that are they what are they doing like five percent for a hundred grand or something like that uh i believe angelpad has changed it many times over their cohorts but when we did it was like six for 55 so six percent for 55k yep got it and how are you so going back to this product space first off this space is like super fragmented and people i've interviewed many ceos in the space and anytime they try and tell me their technology is a differentiator i just call because i think the person that's going to win this space is the ones that are better at distribution yeah so like first off let's talk about the elephant trello right you could argue it's in the space just had a massive exit you didn't have other companies like depauls right which is doing very very well you have smartsheet which is kind of old and ugly but they're killing it in the google chrome store with over five million users then you have smaller ones that are embedded in like gmail like yana do that are doing like 30 grand per month so how do you beat all these guys yeah it's a good it's a good question um the distribution is definitely key finding a scalable repeatable sales process and then getting like your price point right is important as well but i think that in this market it's not necessarily about being the market leader um like you said it's very fragmented um even in the incumbent space there's 300 plus companies that don't include any of those products that you just mentioned right um and so there's kind of two there's there's kind of two big parts of us you need to basically take that market which is like a giant 13.5 billion dollar market um sharepoint's the biggest product in that market um and then there's the kind of emerging smb market mid-sized companies market where it's like a lot of these people are moving off excel essentially excel and word right and then they're moving on to something like trello and base camp or whatever um and so i don't think that you need to beat the companies i think that you just need to be able to grab a large enough share of both the the incumbent enterprises that are moving off and then the kind of new emerging so let me let me change my question what distribution are you going to go try and own i mean why is somebody gonna find you and not find sharepoint yeah i mean we've currently been focusing on on seo um we're probably we're very strong in it i think um relative to our competitors like we definitely destroy sharepoint um and so that's been imagined that's been great uh just in terms of in terms of ranking for the keywords that we're targeting um and and uh that's that's been a really cost effective strategy for us but i believe as we scale we'll continue to go after less efficient channels um as long as they're still profitable right someone might be listening going wait what do you mean seo is costly what does that cost you so i basically have a team of a marketing team right so i have a team of riders and um marketers that help with distribution and so it's pretty much like a flat cost for the team um you know we have some some products or whatever that we use and it's and so it's relatively cheap because basically my lead volume of seo increases every month from the same same spend right um so now our blog probably gets around 200 000 visits a month um you know and that's grown you know kind of doubled each year and the spend has pretty much been the same um throughout that whole time and so i think that's a great channel i don't know how big it will scale you know if we want to hit 100 million in revenue but you know it's definitely not going to be the only channel that we're using but at this point it's very cost effective as a channel when you look at kind of its cost effectiveness i assume you know that because you look at that cohort of kind of traffic and you kind of divide total new signups per month from the blog by your total spend or whatever what is it the revenue they generate yeah yeah what's it costing you to acquire a new customer just through your seo cohort currently yeah um it's about 150 uh right now and that's really cheap um you...