How Remindax CEO Sadaqat Ghafoor grew to $1.2M revenue and 1.5K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is the an entrepreneur by nature who loves to explore new possibilities by solving everyday problems this approach has helped him create new businesses he loves traveling to new countries and places but in the meantime he is building his company remind acts.com sadaqat are you ready to take us to the top i'm ready all right so tell us about the company what's the company doing how do you make money uh basically remindex is an it's an expiration date reminder service so it helps users and companies to track all types of dates expiration dates due dates event dates and they are notified by email and sms alerts before any event or the date is about to occur okay and is it a sas platform it's a sas platform it's cloud-based and uh it is uh basically uh uh for the people uh basically it is it helps to the so what are people paying on average per month for this uh average customer is paying about 40 to 50 dollars per month and we have about uh at the moment we have about 1 500 customers okay so you're doing about 60 thousand dollars a month yeah and what were you doing exactly a year ago how much per month uh it was uh half of this okay so about 30 000. yeah that's great and when did you launch when was your one uh the service was launched in 2014 initially and it was a free service back then and uh it was uh in 2017 uh we started the paid model how did you support how did you put yourself between 2014 and 2017 with no revenue actually i have multiple streams of income i have multiple businesses this is one of them so it it was launched as a free service as i mentioned earlier so uh i was not dependent on this business basically so i was supporting myself for my other streams of income now is this your biggest revenue stream today i can say it's about 30 of uh total of uh what we are making today i see very good okay so all your businesses together are making about 180 000 bucks a month yes you can say that that's great okay and how many ideas are you working on right now besides this one uh at the moment it is one but we have i have one another uh it's in the pipeline but uh i'm managing my time to uh work on that as well but i hope it will take some time to uh execute okay so on this company or my next um how are you getting new customers like how did you get your first 100 customers uh it's totally uh basically all our customers all the traffic is coming through search search engine what's the number one sir what's the number one search term people use to find you it's uh like expiration date expiration date reminder this is the main the search term which we are getting more traffic expiration date reminder yeah so we are focusing on uh um mostly on seo uh for uh google and uh the main stream of uh the main source of customers are through search only okay and so expiration date reminder i see you ranked number one and then slack is below you um along with a couple others how many new signups do you get per month from the search term uh approximately 90 percent of our customers are coming through in google search so from this keyword yeah from this keyword okay so ninety percent of new and how many new users are you signing up per month uh per month you can say about uh uh it's at 15 to 20 users per day and uh you can say it is about uh per month of 400 600 yeah yeah um and how many of those will convert to paid uh we can say about 10 10 to 15 okay that's good so you're so you're kind of converting anywhere between getting 40 to 60 new customers per month yes what do you know you have to get a new sign up to do in the first kind of session to increase the likelihood that they convert uh basically it depends upon the traffic uh i believe if we have more traffic if we have more traffic we'll convert more customers so wait wait hold on hold on hold on why is the amount of traffic you get gonna be the driver behind how many of your trialers convert to paid isn't it shouldn't be a usage metric like if they do x y and z in your tool they're more likely to pay basically the the figures we have seen over the time is whoever signs up for our service for our free service they end up paying become a paying user uh within a month so uh but we believe that the more or ten percent of them do yeah the more signups we have so the more conversions we have that's what we do okay so but but what if you instead of saying how do you add to the top of the funnel what if you said how do i increase my conversion rate from 10 to 20 so what if you have the same traffic but you want to double your revenue what what i'm saying is what usage metrics do you know you have to get a new trial or to use to increase likelihood that they convert uh i think we we have some new future suggestions by our customers that if if we have these kinds of features if we have this kind of flexibility and then i hope we can increase our conversion rate by adding new features what is the currently currently the most used feature uh currently most used feature is uh the the scheduling of uh the the any expiration date for the documents which is expiring soon so it generates the email alerts this feature is mostly used plus we have recently added uh the uh storage uh means like you can upload scan documents and attach it with any expirations so so this is this is like the same way people used to put fridge in like the the company refrigerator with an expiration date on it people can essentially say hey sign this document the next seven days otherwise it expires and we lose the deal yeah it's some kind it works sometimes somehow like that and you're not only this expiration reminder to a single person we can create a contact list you can add multiple people's in that loop so they all will be notified of those upcoming expirations interesting very interesting okay um so that keyword driving a lot of traffic now are you doing any paid experiments facebook ads google ads etc yeah we have we have uh tried this social media we tried facebook uh but we have more success on pay-per-click through google okay and adwords is doing good for us so what is your fully weighted customer acquisition cost right now uh at the moment we have somewhere between 15 to 40 dollars okay that is the customer execution cost and they're paying 40 a month so you're getting paid back in less than a month yes so why not put a million dollars into that channel uh actually it's a small company right now we have very limited resources so as we expand we have planning to hire uh more talent because we we are looking to expand further and we we need more customer support how many people today as of today we have a team of four okay and where's everyone based sorry where is everyone based uh it's mostly based in dubai okay and we are handling all the operations from here and are you bootstrapped or if you raise capital uh it's currently we are just bootstrapped that's great now are you putting more of your own money in every month to keep it afloat or are you operating a break even uh from past one year we have stopped putting any money into it and it's just doing good to uh handle its own expenses so it's profitable today yeah it's in the profit today as the owner how do you decide what money you take out of the business each month and what you keep in the business and the in the bank account uh right now there is only expense we have uh is the to pay to the team which is your ppc stuff and any software you pay for at any hosting yeah of course there's others only we have expenses uh that we are doing is uh we have hostings we have uh third party services which are working with us to run the whole system we have amazon aws and we have a bunch of other uh services which you are paying for yeah at the moment so so back to my question like i how much are you taking the bottom line every month are you talking 10 20 ebitda uh you can say around 20 we are taking out okay so 20 on 60 grand top line would be about 12 000 each month you're taking the bottom line my question is as as the owner do you just take that out as a dividend or do you leave it in the company how do you decide how to allocate your capital i i leave it i don't i leave it in the company basically as i told you i have multiple streams of income so i'm not dependent mostly on this business so i just wanted to grow as if their own and uh that's how it works that's great and uh what is your um what is your churn is obviously critical what's your turn today uh insurance about you can say five to eight percent okay that's eight percent logo turn annually yeah and um okay so i mean that's not that's not bad at all uh do you have a meaningful expansion revenue or no uh right now there is no uh such big plans for the expansion but we are focusing right now mostly on the customer service many of our customers they are very satisfied with our service because we have respond very quickly solving their problems and we have seen many of our customers are moving from our rival companies to our company because of our just because of our customer service that's great all right so uh let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book uh my favorite business book is uh uh can't say it's a business book but it's power of habit yeah which i believe the most number two is there a ceo you're following or studying i'm a big fan of richard branson the owner of sponge virgin group number three what billing provider or billing tool do you use uh we will use this uh for billing we use uh this invoicing software called uh it's called invoicexinvoice.com accentwise x invoice oh like e x e x invoice okay so you don't you don't use like stripe or recurly or charger phi oh no we are not uh using any of those okay number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night uh for five to six hours and which situation married single kids hey i'm married with two kids okay that's great and how old are you i'm 42 at the moment okay sorry cotton last question here what do you wish your 20 year old self knew uh so i i see myself like uh i'll be growing uh how am i working and my plans for the future uh i hope i'll be a better person well blah blah blah but what no no when you were 20 what's something you wish you knew oh uh i wish i i would i would have known how to run a company with multiple people because uh that time i started a number of companies but it was it wasn't very helpful and i failed many times and this is the biggest thing i should have known that time guys there you have it start a business build a team faster again launched his company or mindex back in 2014 now 1500 customers paying 40 bucks a month so 60 grand a month in revenue up from 30 grand a month in revenue just about a year ago they're getting 90 of their new users coming from the keyword expiration date reminder so in seo play they're adding 15 to 20 new users per day or 400 to 600 per uh month 10 convert to paid and again they help you put expiration dates on documents contracts things like that uh they're profitable to the tune of about twelve thousand grand of the bottom line every single month andy's bootstrapped which i love team of four in dubai eight percent logo churn annually uh spending about 40 bucks to get a new customer so one month payback as he looks to scale sadakot thank you for taking us to the top thank you for your time listen