Sendzillarevenue

Introduction hey folks my guest today is sarah gupta he's a tech guy at heart turn sales enthusiast now building sendzilla it's his second startup in the ai space he's tried once before when he started an ai company doing cctv video analytics it failed big time but he learned a bunch of things that he applies to make senzula a bootstrapped profitable leader in the outreach automation space syrah are you ready to take to the top let's go all right what kind of outreach are we talking about um it's the uh outreach on those typical you know outreach channels like linkedin email you know uh calling that kind of stuff but we started with linkedin because we feel you know especially given the pandemic um social selling has really uh taken you know like become more mainstream um a lot of sales people are now getting meetings just off of posting on linkedin so you know it's become this kind of it's come of age right and that's what we're trying to um productize in a sense you know like getting meetings getting sales meetings off of linkedin so we just help sales people um run sequences on linkedin instead of email right because the average response rate to a gold linkedin dm is something like 15 while the average response to a cold email is something like two percent so a lot of sales people are now shifting to linkedin as their major channel this makes sense how many customers do you Currently serving 80 customers have today um about eighty eight zero okay great and help me understand pricing what are they paying per month um so roughly so our list price is something like 149 per month um yeah so but that is dependent on number of seats number of lincoln accounts that they have so does that mean you you've passed about eleven thousand dollars in monthly recurring revenue Monthly recurring revenue um higher we're about 25k 25 000. wow okay this is incredible when did you launch the business uh we start i i am a programmer myself i started writing the code uh back in uh may of last year but we made our first dollar in september um and we have grown since then to 25k got it what did you finish december 2020 with what how much revenue did you do then i think we were between 5 to 10k something like 7 or 8k there's nice growth here how did you get these first 80 customers where'd you find them that's funny uh we used our own tool to sell our own tool i mean nothing else right no of course i mean we we're a very small company so we don't really have budget for qa so the best way for it for me to uh you know make sure the product is robust is to just let my sales people go crazy with it right like you've got five people and they use this exclusively as their legion method and it helps us improve our product as well so we're just really killing like two birds with one stone right like making the product better as well as getting revenue right so it's it's the best way to sort of grow you say there's five of you today how many engineers um engineers is just me uh but we've got five sales people so i'm handling most of the tech right now but you know like we have some sales people now and how do you incentivize them like do you how do you have them do like a number of dumb amount of demos per week or what do you how do you drive them forward yeah yeah so we um so we don't really have a quota for meetings booked because other if the if we do that then they tend to fill that with you know random meetings right that doesn't really work i think so we have full cycle of sales people right now it's not really a sdr a split they're still too young so we have just identified people who are good at you know just talking on linkedin it's essentially like chatting and then then who are good at doing the demos so it's the same person who's doing both right and we basically give them a percentage of the mrr that they bring how much um about i mean it varies but it's roughly between five to ten percent and so if they bring 150 a month account you'll pay them 15 that first month and ongoing or just the first month no ongoing uh till the client stays with us so it could go on forever yeah yeah yeah we don't really time box it yeah okay got it so how much total expenses did you have last month paying out your sales reps um net i think i'll have to do the conversion from rupees to dollars uh we ended up paying something like uh i think it was 7k net net how many rupees ah so roughly like five lakhs five lakh rupees so that's like 500 000 rupees yeah yeah so about 67 7 000 uh united states dollars and that's what your sales people made in terms of all their commissions yeah yeah exactly all right that's all those commissions or is that is that no no that's not just commissions that's like base plus commission so they're not just on a commission structure they have a salary too and this is just the incentive on top of the salary the salary is something like 50 000 rupees per month which comes out to about hundred dollars a month okay got it so 800 per month and they're making a little bit more on top of that um based off the commissions where are you hiring these reps um so we uh hired mostly from linkedin again i mean we just posted a job on linkedin and india sas is now sort of starting to grow you know like there's some unicorns here and they they train the people well and we are lucky enough to you know find some of those people that they didn't like freshwater unicorn here um charge b recently became one so we're very lucky to have those downstream effects like these people get trained and they know how to sell to the us and we come in and we say okay this is a new product you'll get more opportunity for growth we're still at an early stage and you know like it makes sense to join us so we mostly find them via linkedin or via my own network inside of the india sas community they're not at an office they're near you we don't have an office uh it's all india but we don't have an officer very cool okay so this makes a lot of sense um this is what your funnel looks like so so break it down for me last month how many like cold outreaches did they do and how many total meetings did they get right let me just pull up the numbers because i um right now we're pretty uh sort of broken in terms of process so we do have a pipe drive installation but we don't really use it that much we track it uh just on google sheets and you know one of my headrests she basically just uh prepares a sheet for me at the end of every month and then i just look at it i i think um give me one second yeah so if i remember correctly we got net net around 50 meetings as a team you know we did about 50 meetings on the team and we converted about i think it was just five new customers so that was the rough idea but let me just find the sheet if i can find it again no that's great that's what i wanted to understand now are these customers sticking around have you had any churn yeah yeah turn has been a problem because um like we're still figuring we're still pretty early we're still figuring out who the you know perfect customer is for us so we have had about eight percent monthly revenue churn um customer churn uh i think the customers who don't stick around are the people who just buy one seed they're just trying out linkedin outreach as a channel and then you know either they find success with it or they don't and yeah that's the that's the problem so we're trying to go after since it's a more of a sales led motion we're trying to go after more of like enterprise sales teams lead gen agencies you know like companies who are using outreach or services and they want to get more serious about linkedin as a channel then we go to them and say that hey you know why don't you use us for the linkedin automation part continue using outreach or sales law for the rest of the things like you know email outreach or calling so that's the pitch that we're trying to own now and now we've got a good pipeline of those kinds of companies who have the budget Profits to speak today yeah yeah profitable yep so how much did you make last month total um so we so our expenses are fairly less like we're just on top of 25k um we spend something like 10 to 15k net net you know in terms of cloud cost plus salaries plus something the rest just stays in the bank you know um i i'm not taking anything out right now it's just stays in the bank um doing nothing so i need to find out better uses of that but we're just trying to sort of get on our feet if that makes sense you know just have a healthy cushion mentally and then i'll do something with it like i have not figured out what i will do but yeah like this what is the healthy mental cushion every founder has a different amount you know cushion they want to build up yeah so if i have to put a number to it we've got something like 120k in the bank right now um which is which now i feel is fairly healthy you know what am i going to do in india with 120k i can do a lot of things but you know in that sense i don't have like high living costs right and i'm single and everything so it's just uh that's what your total living expenses are monthly they're in india um it's badly anything like uh right now i'm at my parents house it's roughly like 50 000 rupees per month 800 i can live a decent life on this wow so so are you you're living at your parents house are you in the basement right now no it's actually a multi-story house that they have they got it for cheap back when real estate in india was super cheap back in 1995 so yeah i have my own room and everything it's uh where are your parents you probably are like making more than them almost what do your parents think of you making money from their basement they charge you rent no no no they're pretty nice people um they are big i mean my mom is like she doesn't believe it's real right a lot of times these parents don't know like i was like are you doing something illegal you can tell me no no i'm just having software but yeah i mean it's funny because they never they don't they don't understand these concepts right like you can create software and set it online to people for doing a particular thing and make money off of it but now people are becoming more and more aware with more stories around you know like consumer unicorns in india like sas unicorn so it's gaining more mainstream acceptance in that sense mm-hmm yeah they think you're a drug dealer or something right yeah the classes don't help yeah yeah yeah okay that's very cool interesting um what else what's next for you guys Bootstrapped any new products coming up do you think you'll fundraise or stay bootstrapped um we're not gonna fundraise for now so what i'm really excited about is making it more multi-channel um right now it's mostly linkedin but we want to go after email um calls sms like just make it like a full suite of automation um for any sales person to come in and just you know run a whole campaign so basically become create a product like zoom info plus outreach all in one where you get the email data you get the phone data and then you have just everything in one place to to run these campaigns um yeah so that's that's next um i'm now going after like with this money in the bank now i'm going out and hiring engineers who can you know create the rest of those things with me um invest more in marketing uh we've done zero marketing right now and it shows like we've got the best like some of our customers tell me we've got the best product in the market that no one's ever heard of which is which sucks right like like we've not done any marketing at all so gonna invest more there um so yeah just add more channels to this product and make it more full suite where a salesperson can come in and just have like a email data that they that they need as well as you know like the sales engagement portion of it um do you have to have like a paid linkedin account in order to use sendzilla or can anyone listening around with a free linkedin account use you guys uh anyone can use us like i forgot to mention like one of the coolest things about our product and that's why a lot of people are shifting to us it's got an ai module for writing highly personalized connection requests so like if i want to reach out to you the ai and the tool will automatically uh go into your profile and look at stuff like it will figure out whether you've got um certain recommendations certain certifications volunteer work and it will use that in a sentence i will say something like hey um hey nathan i was just looking at your profile and i saw that you've got this amazing recommendation from xyz by the way i was connecting with you know founders like yourself would you be open to connecting so it looks like a real person wrote it while it's not you know it's just the uh just the intelligence in the product that's one of the reasons people are shifting to us in a large way from all the competitors in the market like expanding duck soup and all of these because um they are seeing that the accept acceptance rates on our platforms are much higher like 40 on average because it looks like something a person would write you know when they go into um both of those examples you just say they're both i think bootstrapped and doing four to five million revenue they were on the show recently so it's interesting to see you guys compete with each other and we'll see who wins maybe you all win in the end right we'll we'll see what happens but cyril this has been great anything else you want to add before we wrap up with the famous five no no i think uh you've covered all the bases but yeah it's a really interesting space but i'm not gonna stay in that space i'm not gonna compete with them i i i my sites are set more on these women for an outreach of the world than the expanding ducks because i feel you know the world is moving towards more multi-channel prospects tune out you know stuff uh very easily so you have to hit them on multiple channels so that's where we're moving all right so famous five number one favorite book uh favorite book uh has to be zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance like it's not a business book but i really love like the way he thinks about quality number two is there a c eo you're following are studying um greece is pretty good fresh works yup number three what's your favorite online tool for building the business oh i love charge me man i mean everything like they made my life so much easier otherwise you know everything would have to be so custom on how to strike and number four how many hours of sleep to eat every night i did pretty good like seven to eight okay and situation married single kids uh single um 28 so yeah 28 years old no kiddos okay what's something you wish you knew eight years ago um i think i what what i would do is like just start and i mean no no i think i would say like you know invest more in learning about the market uh like ideas don't matter that much like even if it's this the idea that's done you know 10 000 times you can still be the ten thousand in one and do it in the right way because you know like even even today sales automation is such a crowded space but there's still a room to create like two three million dollar companies fairly easily because there's just so much demand for something like it like don't think about the competition just focus on the market and doing right by them guys senzil is doing seven thousand dollars a month back in december they're now doing twenty five thousand dollars per month for a three hundred thousand dollar runway for their linkedin automation tool very unique sales model one engineer with sorrowful owns the business bootstrap four sales reps that go and hunt on linkedin every day they close new sales they then make a 10 commission on all new sales and they make 800 a month in terms of base salary he's taking 10 000 a month to the bottom line so highly profitable 120 000 bucks in the bank right now folks this is how you build a sas company siroff thanks for taking us to the top no worries great to connect one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2pm central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathan lacka dot com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive i am on these shows but i do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we gotta push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that i appreciate your guys's support all right i'll be in the comments see ya