How PushEngage CEO Ravi Trivedi grew PushEngage to $330K revenue and 376 customers in 2025.

hello everybody my guest today is ravi trevetti he's the founder of a company called push engage before that he built coupon rani a leading coupon site in india before that he was principal at southeast interactive technology funds an early stage vc fund in raleigh north carolina post his mba from duke he worked as equity research analyst with bank of america and started his career as a software engineer at hewlett-packard before he went on to do consulting and sales at hp he co-authored the book web security web services security and participated in creating web service standards he completed his mba from duke a business and has a master's in computer science from the indian institute of science in bangalore ravi are you ready to take us to the top yeah i'm ready all right tell us about push engage what's the uh what's the company do and how do you make money sure so we are a platform for browser push notification and we enable you to do both personalized and automated notifications and helping e-commerce companies content sites grow their traffic through push notifications which are a new channel for engagement and your revenue stream if pure sas that's correct we do not do at this moment any ad revenue that's great unlike say other players what do companies pay on average per month for this uh so right now our school is around hundred dollars um and when did you launch the company what year uh so we launched in 2016 january although we launched like did like a soft launch in december 2015 but uh technically i would say january 2016 is when we started you know pushing it and how many customers have you scaled to today so uh as of last month we have around 376 paying customers very specific yeah i mean i got i know you are going to ask the numbers i'm a wall street guy i'm going to give you all the numbers which i want to share offline that's great so yes so 376 custom uh around 100 so it's around 37 500 actually um mrr on error of around 450k and where were you a year ago um i would say one third of that so they've grown almost uh three times or somewhere between 10 to 12 percent month and month and where are you i mean walk me through how you're getting all these customers where are you signing them up you know that's a great question so actually we are based out of bangalore although we are headquartered in the united states but uh ten percent of my business is in india and ninety percent outside so it's all organic it's all word of mouth it's all inbound okay so those are like easy answers right like that's not very specific it doesn't help my audience right so like tell me a real story like how do you how do you get customers specifically if you want to do organic tell me the keywords right if you want to tell me something else tell me that no absolutely so i i would say uh we focused uh a bit on content uh so we think or i would say a bit of at least 20 to 30 percent of our customers come through the content that you write for example we would do a case study we recently did one study comparing how abandoned card campaign would work in email versus abandoned cart and backward now there have been people who have talked about it but we have kind of first time put the data together and we have said that if you used abandoned cart as the e-commerce vendor you would get almost five times bigger reach now some of those data you know a little studies that we have done i felt have done well so that's one example the other is the powered by pushing gauge for example that's a huge one that's something that we see that really helps us get traction in fact i've been open about our acquisition standards and i've done a i've done a couple of talks on that and there's a slideshare which talks about how we get our customers but we got around zero to contract got it very good all right and have you bootstrapped the company or raised that's great and and any any plans to raise capital or no so at this time we are open to uh we think this space is going to be big so we may be open to but we'll be doing opportunities but i'll [Music] and what's the team size today how many folks so we are around 14 people 14 people all in bangalore are spread out yeah all in bangalore although we have a few partners i mean i've not counted the partners in them there are two partners working out of denmark where we have deep relationships and we do operate a push engagement denmark so even with that team kind of spread out i mean are you are you operating a break even today or are you burning capital i know we are breaking we are very much possible congrats that's a great place to be talk to me about churn what's your turn today and how do you keep it low yeah so churn is something that is a concern of ours i think we are around five percent and uh that's something that i think we've been working on uh i think in terms of having much better i guess inside sales or a customer success team so again i think we're in the early stages of this journey i have never been a sas entrepreneur although i've sat and i'm now trying to build more processes more touch points with the customer so that somebody comes online and uses our product they are satisfied and then we reach them and speak to at least all of them who paid us and you know so do a better job and then the reason we have seen we do churn is more around they're probably not being able to figure out some of the good use cases or and so that's something which i think is another control but that's something are you driving any customer growth from direct paid spend or no yes we do a small amount like how much like how small maybe maybe save a few thousand dollars low thousand dollars per month yes and how many new customers will you get like what's your cac there uh actually the cac actually we have is very low i don't want to talk about it i think there is one ratio out there ltv to pack our ratio is uh more than six or seven in one time ratio what's your ltv it's around 13 to 1400 okay 1300 bucks so i mean i can basically take 1300 divided by six and say your cac is about 200 300 bucks yes okay got it and that's all going kind of just into ad spend yeah i add plus i've included my marketing folks and sales folks in there okay it's all in and 200 bucks companies are spending 100 bucks a month with you so payback period there's about two months that's great are you selling annual plans up front or they pay monthly so we do mostly monthly but then around thanksgiving black friday we do sell a lot of annuals so we do have annual plan i would say maybe 10 to 15 people tend to take that and then somewhere around those annual sale days there's a lot more that's great very good well congrats on the growth let's uh wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book zero to one number two is there a ceo you're following or studying right now uh none but i love ryan freshkin from ceo sorry seomoz i love his transparency yes smart guy number three what building tool do you uh use sorry what building so we use stripe for our payment and how many hours of sleep to get every night oh seven and what's your situation what's your situation married single kids yeah so i'm married i have a son who's 11 years and he keeps me young with him we compete on that a lot of stuff i'm learning from you and how old are you i am around 44 now i started pretty late that's good that's not late yeah but i want to make a point which is that i did my journey the other way a lot of people be an entrepreneur then do angel investing then here we see so i was a vc who said you know what enough with it i want to be in the trenches and then when i came back i've been doing a bit of angel i've done seven deals but primarily i've been an entrepreneur so i wanted to build from scratch so that's what my passion is last question what do you wish you knew when you were 20 i i would say i wish i started early i actually spent a lot of time thinking that i need to know more on finance i need to know more on marketing and technology and spend so many years learning a lot of those stuff but now i just feel that maybe i should have started guys there you have it start earlier from rob again ceo push engage launch couple years ago personalized browser notifications robbie launched company back in 2016. now 376 customers paying 100 bucks per month so doing 37 000 per month up from about 12 000 per month just a year ago their breakeven and bootstrap team of 14 in bangalore 5 logo term per month he's trying to get that down spending about 200 bucks to get a new 100 a month customer so two month payback period lifetime value on those folks about 1300 bucks so six to one kind of ratio there healthy ratio robbie thanks for taking us to the top yeah thank you so much and i must say that my net expansion churn is i mean we are on a negative expansion chance see yes yes that's good i'm glad you stuck that in