How Sendzilla CEO Saurav Gupta grew Sendzilla 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...