How Rankwatch CEO Vaibhav Kakkar grew Rankwatch to $14M revenue and 1.5K customers in 2024.

good morning everybody my guest this morning as web huff cacar he's the cocoa founder of a company called ranked watch with an idea of making internet marketing and intelligent process apart from being helping businesses succeed online and writing about internet marketing he's usually found digging deep into the beautiful world of search engine algorithms will of are you ready to take us to the top absolutely yeah okay so when people hear internet marketing they run the other way they're they're stopping this podcast interview right now why should they keep listening what do you do I makes a software it's you SAS software and I've been into SEO since 2004 and almost you know since the very early days I've built a company sold it and this is my second company right now okay so rank watch is a software platform and give us the lowdown what does it do it helps people do better SEO it gives you a lot of intelligence a lot of data helps you take better decisions on you know certain SEO parameters which you need to know to you know implement better SEO look at your competitors see what they are doing look at your own website track it properly and grow your organic traffic see organic traffic is the best traffic and we help you grow it more and more great and what do you tell me more about kind of how you price what's the average has to pay you per month so our average customer would pay us around 125 isch dollars although you know we do have some enterprise customers who pay us thousands of dollars like our biggest customer would be ten over $10,000 per month but yeah most most of our customers are small medium businesses okay we are a lot of agencies which use us and so how many total customers today do you work with we have over 1500 customers right now okay 1500 any kind of just gave us the ranges of you know some are big some are small some are SMB and it is it fair to say we'll have 1500 times 125 a month you guys are doing what about 180 grand a month hundred eighty seven we are approximately okay and what are you growing at year-over-year go back twelve months how much were you doing then um you agree at almost around thirty five forty percent here on the earth okay so um you didn't like a hundred forty grand a year ago yes and this year we are hopefully going to grow even more like I'm expecting forty five to fifty percent growth this year um maybe even more you know we are talking to a couple of really big agencies if those clients you know come on board it might be even hundred percent and when she wants the company 2013 2013 without where was your brain when you launched it were you just leaving a corporate job where you did you have to make this work what were you thinking when you launched so before that I used to run an agency it was called digital next and you know I started back in 2009 and in 2013 I sold that agency to err listed Swedish company and that's when you know I thought what next and SEO was the only thing so that agency was into services but you know I also deep down into search engine optimization and I really need the pain points so me along with my brother as my co-founder we thought okay now let's let's build some software which is a much better actually better I don't know make you know it takes a lot of effort and investment but it's like involves more using your mind and like you know building solutions yeah to problem who has more equity you or your brother we have we are equal partners equal your your a fair group of guys huh oh you have to be paired alright now what have you guys be trapped the company or have you raise money uh we have dropped the company so we did have money from our last exit which we have invested completely plus right now we are funded through our clients okay so by the way that's the best this is the best investors are your customers how much of your own money have you and your brother put in the company put in almost three hundred thousand dollars of our own money in the car okay and what's the team size today we are over thirty people right now and where's home base we have our base in India and we have some people in the US some couple of people so all the development happens in India support happens in India and we have people selling enterprise deals in the US Australia and UK got it so this u.s. sales team how many people are on that just one pose okay this one person got it now walk me through customer growth I mean getting to 1,500 customers is not easy how are you acquiring these customers um the sales team is mostly for enterprise customers but we focus a lot on the small and medium customers as well which is completely autopilot we do not so customers find us through online mediums maybe Google maybe you know some of our guest blog anything you know like all the marketing which we are doing and this come to our website in the sign up for a free trial so it's a 15 14-day free trial and during the free trial they have a look at our software then you know our customer happiness team gets in touch if required take them through the software or you know they might just sign up by themselves if they are very hands-on with the software or you know if they're a hands-on with technology plus we are also investing and focusing a lot on building the software to the next level like some of our customers have 50,000 plus clients so some of our competitors have 50,000 per strikes a one or two of your competitors SEM rush its revs Moz these are our competitors in the small/medium business category if Mars came to you and offered you a million bucks for the company do you sell nopes what's the price the price right now I don't know see you don't think about these things while you are you know focusing on growth like I get to office by 9:00 a.m. and I work till what maybe seven eight nine and that's that's all I like doing right now I don't know what I'll do if I sell this where did you serve the last company for he was sold over five million pounds okay five million pounds and what did that company view or we were into digital marketing it's still it still exists it's called digital next dot code or QK if you go check it out and you know B we were providing digital marketing services this was an agency yeah it was an agent okay got it all right back back to back to what you're doing today so rank watch so what is churn look like um so John is not very high it's in low single-digit churn but still is our logo churn per month 2 or 3 percent yeah around around that some some months are bad but mostly it stays around that ok why wasn't months bad C um lately you know is you business a lot of small agencies they all a lot of small customers perhaps would just not want to do a lot of SEO sometimes plus there was a point of time when we were you know focusing a lot on more development and you know we stopped perhaps taking good care of the customers of our customers but you know we quickly realize that yes something is not right and then you know we went back to our old ways of like you know making sure everyone is happening so so so what do you assume with with 3% longer term per month or somewhere around there what do you soon lifetime value is on these customers so what we have seen is the higher the bigger customers really staple long like we've had customers who are bears in five digits have and they've stayed for over three four years now it's only the smaller customers who perhaps would leave us because what happens is we really integrate deep into the processes of a company so if a company is if it is a big company and they're really using a software it really it gets very difficult for them to change move to another software so you know that's that's true for any anyone would say all the people who really use our software and pay us a lot they never turn everybody would say that so on average what do you su-mei new customers worth to you what's the lifetime value so um around 18 18 months is right now our LTV for a small customer beta bigger customers have a 27 months okay so when you take the ATO to a smaller one when you take 18 months times your hundred twenty-five dollar ARPU that's about twenty two hundred bucks in total lifetime value that's a no touch sale right oh yes that's no that's okay and then obviously your Enterprise one is growing your revenue much faster because it's bigger deals more sticky yep and become they might give them a demo like one on one for size demo to the 20 to the you know small customer it's required we try and avoid that but if someone asks for it we are more than happy to give them a you know life walkthrough of the software sure and what's your tak I know obviously it's different for enterprise first SMBs but what's on average were you paying to acquire customer um so we are being very less money we see because we are an SEO software we do great SEO so 70 80 % of our customers come through such they search about something in the internet which is related to us by quietly my aunt gave me a terma you rank really well for oh if you search for rank tracking software like there would be at least 10,000 keywords which we rank for yeah my give me like a name one or two the top ones so the terms so if you like one of the good terms is future of...