How Sendzilla CEO Saurav Gupta grew to $456K revenue and 120 customers in 2022.

hey folks my guest today is rav gupta he's an electrical engineer by training but he found his way into the world of startups pretty early on started an ai company focused on automated video surveillance that crashed and burned but he's taking all those learnings to launch send zilla a bootstrapped profitable leader in the outreach automation space so rob are you ready to get to the top let's go all right what niche are you serving or is there a platform you're focused on yeah so we focus on linkedin um and we help salespeople digital marketing agencies solopreneurs get more out of linkedin right get leads out of linkedin on autopilot so we help them automate outreach to their target audience on linkedin and just get leads on autopilot and last time we spoke back in gosh july uh july or august of last year you had just broken 80 customers how many are you at today uh we're about 120 120 where where'd the customer growth come from how did you get more customers so yeah as i said it's been more of the same we're using our own tool to sell our own tool still in the same uh outbound sales motion just on linkedin um we start we added a little bit of email outbound as well but that hasn't really worked so far because it sort of reinforced the thesis that we had that you know like email outreach is just getting harder and harder like emails go to spam all the time and a lot of people are doing email outreach so um most of our customers have come from just a cold linkedin outreach um to us a strictly defined set of you told me your ratio last time was you needed to set about 50 50 meetings to get five new customers is that still what it's about a 10 closer is that still the close rate you see today yeah slightly higher about 12 but yeah like we haven't seen much improvement in that area yet okay so to close the 40 new customers that you got over the past four months you had to do about 400 450 phone calls or demos yeah i mean it's been pretty uh it's been it's been relatively untargeted so i'm sure i mean there's something that we're looking to improve like we've definitely invested in like a bunch of things like just meeting call recording tools making sure that everything is being recorded but now we're sort of trying to see whether uh to put in place a better qualification you know criteria like now we know what kind of people close right now we have a much more strictly defined icp so 2022 is is gonna be all about like doing less but getting more out of it right like ten percent closer i'm sure can be improved we ideally want to be anywhere between 20 to 30 which is the you know like a 25 close rate is good we want to be there so we've taken all the learnings of what kind of customer has closed and we're now applying it to you know get better meetings essentially and what is revenue today monthly revenue uh it's about 38k 38 000. now where's the extra juice coming from because you told me that customers pay on average 150 bucks a month right yeah yeah so if we multiply 150 bucks a month times 120 customers that's just 18 000 bucks a month in revenue but you're getting 20 000 bucks more from somewhere else yeah yeah yeah so we have some customers who have expanded uh significantly so we definitely have a land and expand type motion so that average has gone up because as i said we charge based on number of linkedin accounts right so for example we have one customer that has even like 400 linkedin accounts on the platform right is that your biggest customer yeah that's the biggest customer what do they pay per month um so their total acv their total ar for uh mrr for us is about 11k so yeah that's a big chunk of your business yeah yeah it's it's definitely you know something of a risk as well so we are looking at uh getting more look-alike customers like them using them as a case study and going more into that enterprises motion of 100 800k acv plus deals oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this 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told me your total expenses are about fifteen thousand bucks a month so you're profiting ten thousand dollars per month do you still have profits today are you or are you reinvesting more aggressively um still profitable um we would expand spending about 20 000 now monthly and less just profit yep well 20 000 minus the 38 000 of top line revenue you're still profiting about 18 000 something like that yeah where are you making investments you mentioned a new hire or what's the total team size today full time um yeah so we uh basically had to let a couple of sales people go because they were not uh sort of hitting coda um so we wanted something very simple like we they were just not performing at all we just wanted one x of their salary right we had not set a crazy quota like what would have been what would have been what what would one x be uh one x is about like a thousand uh dollars a new mri every month got it so about 150 000 in new ar closed per year yeah yeah and they and they weren't hitting that no they weren't getting there um so we basically had to like there were other people who were doing it within the same team with the same process so i think it was more of a fit problem rather than a process problem so we had to let a couple of people go but now we are investing more into marketing right because what we've realized is that with outbound it's like a treadmill right like you have to do a certain amount of activity every day to get to the same number of meetings like qualified meetings versus if you can do um good uh work around seo around creating good content around just creating more of a brand on social and stuff like that then i mean it's less of a you know like the content lives on for longer and you keep getting traffic of course it takes what is the total size today uh total after this new hire we are around so three in sales um three in marketing and uh like four engineers total now so total of ten and then yeah so you added three new engineers over the past couple of months um and you decreased set your sales team by one it's or two because they were underperforming but you mentioned also you've dearest your sales process i believe right because you pay a very low base of 800 per month and then they can earn 10 commissions forever are you still using that model uh we capped it to one year so we're now paying out like the one year right because you thought like if it's forever then it's not fair right because that forever should be attributed more to the you know hard work that the engineering team and the support team are doing not just the sales team so we capped it to one year yep yep okay that makes sense any other changes like that that you've made um process changes yes so our aes were our sales people were completely full cycle sdr motion plus doing demos like an ae doing discovery and stuff uh and then like doing account management like they were responsible for everything so uh it's it was a proper full cycle model we realized too much you know like too much to ask anyone to do so we are bringing in like an account manager a customer success manager like after the first dollar is earned um the csm will take over and make sure that that book of business expands by x percent every year right so we are making that change as well very cool and you mentioned investing in seo are you doing this yourself are you hiring a firmer agency to work with a couple of agencies actually which agency or is the best that you're working with uh we have this guy called uh asif from content handy they recently launched they used to work with other companies in similar spaces as ours so they've got some good experience there so that's who we're working with very cool very cool all right so content handy um your engineer yourself you said you hired three other engineers where did you find the three new engineers um i have a network here uh in india like i went to a very good engineering school here in india called iit so we've definitely got something very good that's like the best there's some there's many graduates of that school that are now running billion dollar sas companies yeah i mean i've got big shoes to fill for sure uh so definitely yeah so we basically had a little bit of network so some game from that others we just advertise on local job portals like linkedin like um like there's one in india that's coming up called so we got some good engineers out of that stop how do you make sure linkedin doesn't shut you down tomorrow is what you're doing legal so yeah that's a good question uh with legal linkedin had this court case with another automation company and they did lose that in the texas supreme court texas high court but it went to the u.s supreme court and they basically referred the decision back to the lower court so what linkedin claims is that doing this isn't is a is a violation of the cfaa the computer fraud and abuse act while the courts have ruled that it's not right it's the user's data and they can you know do what they see fit with it so that's the contention there so it's still under sort of um you know it's still sort of subjudice in that sense so i mean of course linkedin doesn't like us and they they try to put different kinds of restrictions technically to make sure that the users are not able to automate but i think the larger point here is that um web scraping will always be something that is you know uh that is questionable like it's just the nature of the game and this is just something we've chosen to do for now all right so rob on that let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite business book um i said last time is the zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance still uh still is i haven't all right is your favorite ceo stuart girish from freshworks no actually i've been studying some other ceos i loved zeb uh you you're a fan of zeb i think i saw a lot of it in your emails uh he's taken a super crowded market and done something very impressive with it so someone i'm following right now zeb evans at click up yep he'll be speaking at founder conf in march angel jalan uh in new york city actually we're getting 250 sas founders together with more than five million bucks in revenue it's going to be a special event uh number three strav what's your favorite online tool for building zenzilla um as the charge b is pretty good as i said yeah it's pretty uh sort of makes it very easy for me you're consistent you're consistent number four how many hours you sleep to eat every night pretty good seven to eight no okay did you have a birthday are you 29 now are still 28 i am 29 i had my birthday on in october october 12th yeah happy late birthday and are you still not married no kids uh not married uh new girlfriend so yeah new girlfriend new age new sales reps here a new man in 2022 huh yeah a new beard as well new shield i love that all right wrap take us home here what's something you wish you knew when you were 20 um like one of the things that now i'm thinking of like it's it's good to uh it's good to take a long view as well right like i said last time that you know even if it's a crowded space you can still build uh two to three million dollar business and that's fine that's great but i think sometimes you just have to get like creativity will trump capital a lot of times right like if you get really creative then even if it's a super crowded space it's not just about building two three million dollar business you can even be like look at what game has done at lem list right totally crowded space two thousand three thousand competitors but he built a amazing business out of it right like with no capital it's just pure creativity so the answer like what i would say is just believe in yourself and believe in your creativity you're gonna get there guys sendzilla.com based out of india surah launched back in 2020 now doing 38 000 a month in revenue scaling nicely completely bootstrapped 120 customers they're also profitable 18 000 a month going to the bottom line added 40 customers over the past four months team at 10 now four engineers three sales reps with a quota equal right now to one x their salary as he figures out the sales motion and looks to scale using creativity not capital sirov thanks for taking us to the top thank you man always great to be here 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 2 p.m 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 if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive i am on 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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