How Referralyogi CEO Gandhi Gopinath grew Referralyogi to $108.9K revenue and 125 customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is gandhi gopinath he is has a background in supply chain management in b2b e-commerce pre-previously served as cto at hub woo a leading source to pay platform provider he managed their entire tech platform and has built sas products for a long time started his career at i2 technologies of pioneering supply chain management got a master's from ohio state and a bachelor's from iit madras all right gandhi you ready to take us to the top yes sir all right so your company today is called referral yogi what does the company do and how do you make money yeah so refrigerator we are online reputation management startup so we are a sas company and we have built a platform mainly targeted towards local businesses uh so local businesses are mostly not very tech savvy and so they need a way to uh to adapt to the way uh you know google searches are done and businesses are getting discovered largely by what's called local searches on google so we give them a way to you know put themselves out there in the best possible manner get them get their customers to review them improve their local search engine rankings uh give them base and widgets for them to advertise their social proof on their websites uh just engage with their existing customers to uh to know their customer experience so we give them a whole variety of tools that typically have been built for like you know large brands and so on so we bring it to the little guy yeah that's very cool so what are people paying on average per month for this um so we have three pricing plans like what's the average though average is about seventy dollars per location per month so our key metric for growth and usage is the number of locations in which uh uh you know our software is actually being used we don't care for the number of users we do care about the number of locations okay users per location so 70 it's kind of average and so how many locations are you are using you today uh it's about 125 and growing okay and are they focused anywhere you know houston india i know you've spent a lot of time in both places yeah for now we uh uh you know we wanted to do an initial uh proof of getting product market traction so we are focused on the india market for now but we are looking to uh aggressively expand in the u.s so for now all our customers are in india 125 locations paying 70 bucks a month so you're doing about 8 700 bucks a month right now in revenue not quite not quite and that's there is a reason for that so uh if you're if you're a customer who has like one or two location you pretty much pay the list price but we do have a couple of very large deals uh which are you know multi-location leads like 1500 locations and so on um so wait hold on hold on you said you only have 125 locations so you could how can you have big deals for 100 locations uh yeah so we have one which is like about 70 80 locations and we have a few smaller ones we just close another 100 we have not yet put it out on our website but we just close another 100 locations so gandhi how much how much how much mrr did you do last month uh we are doing about uh 2 500 mrr per month okay 2500 bucks and where were you a year ago or were you pre-revenue at that point we were pre-revenue at that point so all our growth has been in the last three months literally we we were uh targeting a different segment before we did a complete pivot and we were pre-revenue before the pivot and things have taken off quite well when did you launch the company uh about uh 18 months ago okay so that would have been i guess 2018 right yeah okay so what so you've now what's your background are you developer did you build out the platform um i used to do engineering but not much anymore so i do a lot of the design of the platform a lot of the writing of the requirements and specifications and use cases and guiding the team uh but i do have a couple of engineers who work for me who actually do the engineering but of course i stay pretty hands-on with the whole technology side of things because that's given me background got it okay very good now have you bootstrapped or raised capital so far bootstrap any plans to raise um yes uh but we are quite careful about it we wanted to make sure that we hit adequate product market traction before we went ahead and raised capital so we are talking to a few angels right now uh now that we feel that we have where we are at that position but yes but we're not i mean we are right now more focused on customer revenue than getting money from uh people but uh definitely we are starting to pursue the angel party and what's the team size uh we have about six people all based in india uh pretty much yeah all basically which part uh we are in chennai southern part of india is that is that i mean i hear like folks in bangladesh and mumbai they're building amazing technology teams in those locations is there a lot of tech talent where you are as well absolutely absolutely in fact chennai is uh i mean if you've heard of companies like freshdesk and chargebee and so on those are all chennai-based companies so chennai is uh is is huge when it comes to the sas sas market lots of talent lot of experiences zoho has has a huge presence in chennai as well so there's a huge talent pool to tap into and we just had probably one of the biggest sas conferences in india called sas boomi that was held in chennai just a little over three weeks ago sas s-a-a-s b-o-o-m-i it is the largest sas conference how uh the number of number of startups which attended was kind of limited because of the space so 800 applied and about 300 startups were part of the uh part of the group that were selected but uh yeah so the demand was like more than two or three times that's great yeah we had garish from from freshworks on back in episode 1409 i believe he's got an office there and he basically shared with me that they're potentially about to ipo uh which is great so uh there's a lot of stuff happening in india which is nice all right um let's let's move forward here so talk to me about how you're getting customers today how'd you get the first 10 locations signed up um it's it's basically uh elbow grease by the founder so basically and we still hunt down i mean we don't have a sales team just yet so me and my co-founder i have a co-founder as well who's a childhood friend of mine his name is sriram and uh so both of us pretty much are at this point we are still pretty much bringing home all the deals uh we are building up a sales and marketing pipeline as we speak as to how to kind of automate a lot of things we are doing but i don't foresee that uh you know us being hands off when it comes to sales uh anytime soon so uh i mean customers are coming through you know personal networks or you know you know outbound prospecting methods and we have found out a couple of methods that work very well and yeah so we still personally hunt down most of the deals yeah very good all right uh let's uh let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book uh jack welch straight from the gut straight from the gut good number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um elon musk number three what's your favorite online tool it's my favorite online tool um i would say skype okay number four how many hours of sleep you get every night um somebody at home six okay and what's your situation married single kids married with kids how many two two okay very good and how old are you uh i'm 44 44. last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew i think this is probably the most common answer you will see i wish i had done this 20 years ago so just start earlier yeah absolutely yeah guys start earlier coming again from gandhi launches company referral yogi back in uh 2018 about 18 months ago now 125 locations paying him he's doing about 2500 bucks per month in revenue up from nothing a year ago he was obviously just launching he's bootstrapped the company with his team of six in india as he looks to scale again making it easier for you to get online referrals for your business especially these physical locations gandhi thank you for taking us to the top yeah thank you so much nathan it was a pleasure