How ReadyWhen CEO Sachin Bhalla grew ReadyWhen to $497.3K revenue and 700 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is sachin bala he's the co-founder and chief marketing officer at ready win with over 15 years experience in the marketing advertising industry has worked on account iconic brands like apple routers campbell's visa and others before moving into the tech sector this is when he joined an automotive scale-up that grew over 800 employees in just three years and was ultimately acquired by a fortune 1000 us-based company now again cmo at ready when they're on day one such are you ready to take to the top absolutely thank you for having me you worded that very carefully in your bio can you not share what that automotive startup was that you were with no 100 um it's it was called trade rev trade rep interesting okay and i imagine there's like a big iron out there you don't want to stick around for a while so um you know trade rep was an amazing opportunity i was there as uh uh within the first 50 employees i was uh you know we were working there and we helped grow that company really quickly and then when we got acquired we went into a corporate culture you know carr the company that bought us you know there was at that time close to about 15 000 employees of part of car so they asked me to run international marketing in 2019 and i enjoyed it but what i really missed was that startup culture you know with trade rev you were building there was a hustle you were nimble you were agile and i really was looking to get back into it and more importantly i actually learned a lot during my trade rev days uh business modeling strategy sales operations and at some point uh i wanted to take a bet on myself and so my partner and and the founder of ready when jesse bade he had an idea late in 2019 he's been a a trusted bc notary for over 15 plus years he's also he was also the president of the bc notary uh no republic uh society out there and so when he came to me with this idea of ready when i was instantly intrigued because i did my competitive research there wasn't anything really like that and we always say and if there was he would have been using it um but also my parents passed away both of them my mom went first my dad went second and it was really hard and when i had to become the executor of the state you know um it was difficult and i wanted to make things easier for people when they had to deal with you know the worst of times and so who who is paying you for this is it is it like children nervous about managing their you know parents estates when they pass so we we kind of we have three client bases i would say um and three three avenues that we kind of describe as our core clients one is we have you know people like uh i would say early adopters who want to become proactive planners so that their information is all in one place so for instance my wife uh you know she doesn't know where all the information really lies so i want to be better prepared and make her part of my team and create that accessibility which ready one allows so she now knows where all that information lives and she doesn't need to go to it often she doesn't need to go to it at all actually but it's there and she has the p and i and her both have peace of mind that there's a second two section uh uh parents so aging parents so now that uh you know my wife her parents are aging we're actually doing their ready one account for them and putting it in there and the third is the professionals so we're going through uh b to b to c channels to drive that volume because i'll just name their title professional title uh notaries financial planners legal professionals and then we're also working with tier a corporate uh clients uh insurance companies life insurance companies providing this service as a value-add and also in some cases as a revenue driver to help build their businesses up as well and such and what are i'm sure you have a wide range but on average what are these customers paying you per month per year to use the technology so right now we charge fifty dollars per year five dollars per month or of right now we're offering five hundred dollars for a lifetime membership okay and and what's the thinking behind that obviously when you offer a lifetime membership plan it decreases your ability to drive expansion revenue over time maybe investors don't like that but also it creates a little bit of lock-in 100 and uh for us as a startup we you know getting that additional revenue right now is critical so we're thinking that right now we might do this 500 just to get a sense of what customers actually are more uh what what their appetite is for a doc for a service like this there's not a lot of services like ours out there and we know people hesitate when it comes to thinking and acting upon you know their passing so what actually resonates and we're figuring that out slow slowly but fast over the past two years and you know the price point is one of those things as a startup as you know uh they they fluctuate and they change quite often so right now we're doing it just to drive some additional revenue into the system that's done yeah so moving forward when did you guys launch the business when was the start date yep so we officially launched uh ready went as a beta in november 2020 um and then we launched our mvp in uh spring of 2021 and we've been constantly iterating over the course of this year so you've had this year sort of build up a customer base how many customers are you serving now today so just about a week ago we hit actually over a thousand customers uh which was uh fantastic we're getting great feedback but more importantly we've had over uh had over close to over 1200 we call them items entered into ready when that could be information or documentation across the thousand customers correct interest and out of that out of that more than 70 are paying customers got it so 700 are paying customers right got it so can i take 700 times five bucks a month to get your revenue uh well yeah some are some are doing the 50 some did the 500 but uh yeah it's a it's a it's a cross around the 50 in the 500. yeah you blend those together you're about 4 000 bucks a month in revenue about a 50 000 a year run rate right now correct something like that okay interesting and a year ago nothing right no not at all and did you guys bootstrap or do you guys decide to raise so we've been we did do a raise to help us uh fund the project um you know we've done two friends and family raises so far the last raise that we did um was really focused on strategic parts sorry what year sachin and how much yeah so uh first year the first in 2020 we raised close to uh over a little over a hundred thousand to help us build the prototype and carry us through for a few months and then later this year uh sorry in 2021 we raised close to a million dollars through strategic partners with professionals so legal and financial partners interesting okay so your pre-seat around and your seed round now you mentioned you were there early now did you you know are you effectively the co-founder but now you're a cmo or how did you guys split equity early on you just put it down the middle or what no we didn't split it down the middle uh jesse our partner um and the founder he actually had the idea so we've been working with him i've been there since literally day one i came up with the name and everything so uh and the branding so uh the cmo title was just given because uh effectively the branding and ux fell in my lap he took on the ceo title um just because he's run a few more businesses than i have and uh together we are doing that so in terms of equity we split it in a very fair way um and we're constantly like working it out as we consider options and other partners who come into the mix when most people are raising their seed rounds say you're selling between 10 and 20 percent of the business is that about what you guys did correct okay got it so a million on like six or seven or eight pre something like that right yeah interesting um any plans to raise additional capital 100 yeah yeah yeah definitely next year um in 2022 around well we're going to start the the vc tours in january and then uh you know the goal is to have some funding in place by may how are you you're you're a marketing guy so let me ask you guys what's your cat to get a new five dollar a month customer pardon say that again what's your customer acquisition cost to get a new five dollar a month customer yeah um sorry hold on for one second the noise is fine we can just keep going yeah hold on i just got something shelley shelley yeah can you just uh stop for a second i'm just on an interview sorry go ahead so what's your cact what do you charge to get a new five what do you pay to get a new five dollar a month customer well right now actually we're not charging a lot we're doing a lot of social um and most of our volume right now is coming through uh the b2b to see uh uh path so we're not really creating a lot of cost per acquisition how many partners like a notary have driven at least one customer so right now we're working on around 20 notaries those are your partners they've driven most to your customers tonight correct how do you get them to pick...