How Recruiterflow CEO Manan Shah grew Recruiterflow to $24.1M revenue and 120 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is manon shah he's a co-founder and ceo of a company called recruiter flow which is the second startup the second staff startup his first test company retention.ai had raised a million dollars and was acquired by in shorts he's a huge believer in bootstrap sas companies man you ready to take us to the top i am all right when did you sell retention.ai uh it was earlier called beta glide and it was started in mid 2013. okay but when did you sell it uh and i sold it uh in 2016 mid 2016. okay and what what happened because when i go there now it's dead there's nothing there oh yeah so uh we we we originally started as a mobile app testing platform this is back in 2013 so in india android uh was the talk of the tunnel it was just about picking up um and developers were struggling to uh test their apps uh while we were doing that we realized that hey uh you know it's hard to make money uh in developer products so we pivoted uh and with pretty much the same tech stack we became the first company uh to uh give developers an ability to track uninstalls right so the uh you know in a country like india in fact most of the southeast asia uninstalls was a huge problem because uh the phones did not have enough memory uh hardware problems and uh uh you know network problems so uh users would uninstall the phone uninstall the app and uh um you know marketers needed to know that and uh that's where we tapped into the marketing budget and uh to be able to do this we had uh we built a massive infrastructure of about just about real-time data analytics uh on userfront um and we grew to grow that company to about 18 people uh and about hundred thousand dollars in arr but we couldn't see going beyond that like we couldn't see going beyond a few million dollars so was it a flash sale to in shorts basically they paid you like 100 grand for it um yeah i mean it was more of an higher uh plus ip acquisition from in shorts uh it wasn't uh much for business but okay so no cash but you guys got good jobs and they got the ip uh there was a little bit of cash involved for us as well as uh uh you know our investors okay very good and that retention ai it sounds like you've gotten some distribution there you were active at least you claimed you were active on at least 12.5 million devices uh in shorts powered by a big private equity firm so m as part of their mo um did you jump directly into recruiter flow right after you sold that company no i i worked at in short for about 14 months uh and at in shorts uh that's where the idea of recruiter flow came in so at insurance i was looking after the growth and one of the problems that we had was we each functional had had to do recruiting for their own team so um i ended up recruiting a lot of product managers and marketing guys and design guys uh and it was just hard and i i came from a sales background i was an engineer who did sales for the very first time at the time of retention not ai so i was used to uh great tools like uh you know senbloom or piper so this was our main sales stack and i pretty much did the same thing that i did with sales prospecting uh outreach calling and getting the candidates in um and i realized that there is nothing uh for like this for recruiters and that's where we built uh you know a pipe drive plus send bloom for recruiters so more like outreach.io plus salesforce for recruiters very very cool okay and are you pure sas pure sense yes okay so give me a general sense i have a lot of different customer codes but on average what's the company gonna pay you per year for your technology uh about seven to eight seven to ten thousand dollars that's our average ticket size okay so call like 800 bucks a month something like that yeah and what do they get for that engage them in sequences uh being able to track all of those conversations track all of those relationships collaborate with each other and finally make placements with their clients very cool and do you upsell against anything else or is it all feature-based upselling uh right now we don't i we just i just don't think that this is the right time to do a lot of feature-based upselling we are trying to tap into the larger um clients right now so you know so what do you price against though is it seed-based pricing or usage based pricing if it's not feature-based uh it's seed-based completely separate so no no even usage value you know if you get at least 20 prospects this much if you get 2000 prospects it's this much um not not based on that so there is a seat base and then there are two tiers that uh you know that if you want this set of features you pay this much and uh there is a smaller set of features you pay uh the other amount well then that's that's feature-based upselling then um yeah kind of you want to say that well i mean that's what you just said there's one feature set that's bigger there's one that's smaller they pay more for the bigger feature set that's feature-based upselling oh okay i thought that you know we would provide some special kind of features uh no no no no no i'm not talking professional services no so you upsell against seats and a larger feature set that's right when did you launch the company what year uh we launched in november 2017. okay 2017 and then do you remember how you got your first five customers um yes very much so our first customer's first customer was this three people recruiting agency based out of new york they're still with us um and they found out about us uh in one of the quora uh you know posts that i had written um and our other three customers came from referral from another customer who also found us on quora that he referred you know immediately referred to uh more customers to us uh and our final customer came from uh you know one of our personal friends okay so cora was a good channel for you early on yes that's great so first five customers came there how many customers are you serving now today um we are doing about uh 120 customers now okay and those are all kind of active recurring customers not one-off kind of projects uh yes uh most of them so we have some single-seaters who you know do recruiting for three months and then go away but uh yeah but that's like one two percent of total customers that's good so 120 customers paying caught 800 bucks a month that puts you you know just north about a million bucks in a r is that accurate um no so this is the you know the 8 000 is the data for last three months that's what we have done but earlier we used to sell a lot uh to much much smaller customers so right now we do about uh about four hundred thousand dollars okay so four hundred thousand dollars annually what's your goal to hit by the end of the year i'm sorry i i lost you though yeah yeah what's your goal to hit what do you want to hit by the end of the year if you're at 400k ar today uh we are targeting 750k but i'm not sure if uh um you know uh how we are going to grow there we are trying to figure out a few uh growth channels over there and where if you're at 400 you know call it 35 grand a month today where were you exactly a year ago do you remember um uh about a year ago we were at about eight thousand thousand dollars so good night nice nice growth obviously small numbers but still good growth and have you done this bootstrapped or did you decide to raise capital uh no completely bootstrapped i love that so well obviously you had to put some of your own capital static code in the beginning would you spend all in on your mvp before your first dollar of revenue i don't know maybe about 50 000 rupees which is about i don't know a thousand dollars okay okay so pretty cheap yeah yeah i mean we we are all engineers ourselves so it's just we are still a team of three going to six uh in a couple of months but still our team and cash or positive say are you burning capital or drive growth uh no we are you know we don't have extra capital so our cash flow positive well you could be you know making up a loss by putting in more of your own money oh no okay so casual positive but basically break even you're reinvesting everything pretty much yeah and what about churn you know because you're in sash turns critical uh your action your whole last product was around sharon what's your turn on this new product we we experience a very low amount of churn majority of the churn comes from very seasonal customers right so they're recruiting for a quarter and they are not um and stuff like that or they just go out of the business completely which is uh you know because we are one of the more expensive products in the market right now um that doesn't really happen because these customers tend to choose the cheaper options in the market okay so when you look at annual revenue trend over the past year gross what would you put it at uh i don't have the exact number um to say but in terms of uh logo churn i can say it's probably about three or four percent annually okay again very small number very young um do you have expansion revenue so do you have expansion that of the historical core that more than makes up for the four percent loss oh yes yes i mean...