How Putler CEO Nirav Mehta grew to $118.8K revenue and 220 customers in 2019.

hello everyone my guest today is nirav mehta he is called the entrepreneur geek he launches india's first e magazine scale to web agency lost it all switched to building products went from zero to six figures quickly for multiple software product businesses and wants to contribute to millions of people you're off are you ready to take us to the top yes i am okay so you're currently building a putler p-u-t-l-e-r.com a sensible e-commerce analytics platform for everyone tell us what the company does specifically and how do you guys make money so we build an e-commerce analytics engine which aggregates from more than 17 data sources so we bring together paypal stripe shopify woocommerce everything in one place you know uh we aggregate multiple currencies multiple accounts we aggregate google analytics so once all this data is in one place people actually get a holistic and accurate view of their business and we also help them with taking better decisions so people use our tool make more money and we have a monthly billing model on that okay so let me just be clear is this kind of like a it's a drag-and-drop dashboard kind of thing like grow or clip folio no it's more like bear matrix which is uh ready made so we have pre-built dashboards we wanted to keep it very simple for most users so it's pre-built dashboards but biometrics chart google profit well they're all more focused on sas businesses whereas we do primarily e-commerce but we also do sas interesting okay how many customers would you say do you have that are actual sas customers so as a sas we have about 220 customers oh great and what do they do they all connect their stripe account and you give them analytics yeah so we have all sorts of uh payment gateways right so people can extract people connect paypal people connect google people connect woocommerce etsy shopify a whole lot okay so then help me understand your revenue model you said it's sas so what's a company going to pay you on average for access to your technology right so we have monthly flat payments from 29 dollars to 249 dollars so 29 79 249 and these are the three plans that we have and what is the average like 30 34 bucks the most popular is uh 79 but not average with the average yeah yeah so the rp is around 45. 45. okay very good and then um and then what's the difference in the price plans number of dashboards number of api calls or what so we have some feature distinctions like you know the rfm um the recency frequency and monetary value analysis that is in a higher plan because you know that's a lot more valuable to people but we have limitation on the number of accounts that you can connect and the number of orders that you have we don't do like uh tax canada for pricing which is like you know the more money that you make we charge you higher we have a flat pricing based on the number of orders primarily i see okay very good and put this on a timeline for me when don't you guys launch so we have a long story to cut it short we started as a desktop product way back in 2011. i built it to scratch my own niche because there was no tool that actually told me you know uh my sales for the day um so i wanted this for your e-magazine this is for our products business so i have a string of products businesses i have a string of successes and failures actually i started in 1998 in 1999 we started with india's first electronic magazine then converted that into a web agency that went down so we started products businesses and when i started product businesses i wanted to know how much i'm making so i looked at you know all the tools but didn't find anything actually which actually understood multiple currencies um so we built something and then we just released it to free for free to our customers now the people who are using our other products people liked it and then we made it paid product and so hold on what year did you make it a paid product so we had a desktop uh product butler was a desktop product earlier and now we converted it okay yeah what year what year though did you did you get your first customer 2011 okay and then how many customers have you scaled to today so um so we had like plenty of customers on the desktop and then once we switched to web we kind of lost a few and then we actually began afresh so it's august 2017 is when we launched a new website may 2018 is when we actually stopped all desktop customers and we went all sas yep so the question is how many customers have they scaled to today on the new platform on the new platform that's for 220. oh well about 220 oh good so you said 200 of them are sas so the majority are sas yeah i mean actually like i said we migrated everybody to sas so people who were using what i was saying is how many sas companies are using you you said earlier to about 200 companies uh okay so sas company so no i wouldn't have an exact uh number on that because we don't distinguish based on whether you're a sas company or you an e-commerce company we allow you to just integrate everything we have sas matrix as one of the dashboards so well do you know i mean do you know when you look at the metrics how many people have customers signing up that are paying on a monthly recurring basis yeah so if we look at the recurring kind of transactions for people i what we are seeing is most of the people have some or the other kind of recurring model so even if they were like pure e-commerce they are transitioning into some sort of recurring products as well okay that makes sense this kind of fits well right because you know you have uh like classic e-commerce as well as recurring products covered in the same yep now walk me through capitalization have you bootstrapped the company or raised it's a bootstrap company so we had other businesses and we basically funded this business from the you know revenue profits from the others okay but you're all in on this now right you're not doing like seven different things i am okay so why why not why not shut all the other stuff down and go all in on this make it a million dollar company i'm sure we could do that as well but i love to you know uh solve different challenges and you know we have a great team in place um how many people are on the team so we have five people on partner business okay and they're all they're all based in mumbai yes and then tell me more about economics here on the customer so you have 220 customers what's your churn look like [Music] the churn on customer account is about 1.69 uh per month okay 1.6 logo churn per month um that's great and then and then walk me through so your first uh let's see your you have 220 customers today your first 10 customers how did you get them was it really just customers that were on the desktop that you forced over exactly yeah exactly it's just people just migrated and how did you get your first 10 on the desktop version uh so that was like we had these other products business and we just told them this is something that we've launched and it's free and they just tried it they liked it and then they were asking okay add this feature or that feature and then they said we'll pay for it and that's how we got the first few paying customers and then today what is your full weighted cack what do you have to pay to get a new 45 a month customer so i don't have like exactly i mean we don't spend a lot on marketing today uh it's purely inbound so the cac would be about 80 i guess and how do you calculate that where's the 80 come from so it is basically the salaries for marketing people and some of the other expenses that we do so essentially any expense that is on uh marketing that's what i'm taking now that's smart good yeah so 80 cac means you have about a two month payback period at a 45 rpoo um you bootstrap the company five people today you're currently have 220 customers paying 45 bucks a month you're doing about nine ten grand a month in sales yeah that's um that's yeah about nine thousand eight hundred nine ten thousand is what we have okay and where were you exactly a year ago um i think last year we were about three or four thousand mrr oh good so you've you almost doubled your every year and again al it's all just kind of inbound organic it's inborn organic right yeah and are you walk your team of five are you the main like are you the developer or the one of your teammates developing yeah so i love development i call myself an entrepreneur geek but i do not like you know i mean i i would love to do some development when we're doing something new like basic research and all but then the team takes care of it i just basically tell them what we should do so i work more like a product manager come you know kind of marketing guy yep now if someone offered to buy putler let's say for let's say you're doing about 100 grand a year right now if someone offered you 300 grand to buy it would you sell no no it's too too early i mean we have a long run way to go well you've been working on it since 2007. yeah but i still think we have a long way to go well but anybody could say that so my real question here is how do you make build verse buy decisions you have seven other ideas you're working on if you sell this one you can then double down and focus on the other and have a bunch of cash to put in all the other ideas right i already have other businesses that are doing much better than butler so so again why not sell it because i see a great potential here and the kind of traction that we've seen in the last year um i think uh even like some big guys who are using other platforms they're moving to butler the reaction from customers is really strong and who are people moving from people are moving from all platforms like you know get control shutdown so we had people moving from get control people have been moving from chat mogul why are they moving from chart mogul when they turn over and you say why'd you why'd you switch what do they say they get more accurate analytics here why is your analytic why are your analytics more accurate they both are just tying into stripe no uh so we not only just do stripe we also tap into their ecommerce platform we actually tie into multiple payment gateways and we have a smart deduping system that can actually understand if two transactions are duplicates and we deduce that if something is referred on a payment gateway but it's not yet marked as refunded on the e-commerce side we take care of that so there are lots of smarts i mean when i think about it we've actually taken on a pretty hard problem uh so why are you growing though i mean the thing i struggle with the guy like you is like you're clearly smart you're doing a ton of things but then you look at a company like bear metrics or chart mogul and they're doing a million you know they're doing you know in 90 grand a month right and the question is why and the reason is that's all they're doing like they have a team and that's all they're doing and so a guy like you is always going to just kind of let it grow however fast it kind of naturally grows and be happy with it because you have seven other other things going on i mean you could take your tech you currently have now and with someone else but more resources behind it and if it was their their only thing they were focused on you could scale this tech much bigger but you're not so the question is why right because um see just like any other tech entrepreneur i will get the platform to a level and then scale it but it's already there people are already switching from charmocal you're already a better product so the question now is eyeballs how do you get more distribution exactly so i mean that is what we're going to look at this year so we're looking at partnerships we've already started working with some people and this year we're going to have you know a lot more partnership going on a lot more visibility into the market and then we should start seeing some more results oh we'll see we'll see all right very good let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book ah so plenty of them um i can't tell you one but i think recently thought of thinking clearly by ralph and uh another one that i liked from one of our customers actually james kramko is work less make more uh that first one was what the art of what they are thinking clearly the art of thinking clearly very good number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh none in particular but a lot of different people so like i love to follow people in similar name one i can't name one but so uh it could be anybody starting from jason frye to darmisha neil patel jason's a good one number three how many uh what's your favorite online tool for building your company butler besides your own uh that would be google google analytics number four how many hours of sleep to get every night if i look at my tracker it's about six hours for the last month but it's getting to seven hours now that's good and what's your situation married single kids married with two kids two kids and how old are you i am 39 39 last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew huh better marketing get better at marketing earlier on again sitting on some products here that could be big winners but again they're just great tech products now they now need distribution and sales currently he has about 220 people using putler it's an analytics dashboard that ties into a lot of different payment processing dashboards whether it's stripe or other e-commerce transaction tools uh doing about 10 grand a month in sales up from four grand a month just a year ago so good growth but again he's been working on this since back in 2011 bootstrap which is nice with a team of five in mumbai 1.6 logo churn per month eighty dollar cac so they're getting paid back in about two months which is healthy you have rooting for you man thanks for taking us to the top thank you