How Sendzilla Reached $38K MRR and 120 Customers While Staying Bootstrapped and Profitable (Interview with CEO Saurav Gupta)

Introduction and Background

Nathan Latka

00:00Folks. My guest today is Saurav 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 taken all those learnings to launch Sendzilla, a bootstrapped profitable leader in the outreach automation space. Saurav, are you ready to take us to the top?

Saurav Gupta

00:18>> Let's go.

LinkedIn Automation Niche and Product Overview

Nathan Latka

00:19All right. What niche are you serving or is there a platform you're focused on?

Saurav Gupta

00:22>> Yeah. So we focus on LinkedIn, 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.

Customer Growth: From 80 to 120

Nathan Latka

00:42And last time we spoke back in oh gosh, July or August of last year, you had just broken 80 customers. How many are you at today?

Saurav Gupta

00:52>> We're about 120.

Nathan Latka

00:53120. Where'd the customer growth come from? How'd you get more customers?

Sales Motion and Outbound Strategy

Saurav Gupta

00:58>> 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 outbound sales motion just on LinkedIn. We started, 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

01:21>> and a lot of people are doing email outreach. So most of our customers have come from just cold LinkedIn outreach to a strictly defined set of

Close Rate and New Customer Acquisition

Nathan Latka

01:33You told me your ratio last time was you needed to set about fifty, five zero meetings to get five new customers. Is that still what it's about a 10% close rate? Is that still the close rate you see today?

Saurav Gupta

01:43>> Yeah. Slightly higher about 12, but yeah, like, we haven't seen much improvement in that area yet.

Nathan Latka

01:49Okay. So to close the 40 new customers that you got over the past four months, had to do about 400, four fifty phone calls or demos.

Saurav Gupta

01:56>> Yeah, I mean, it's been relatively

02:00>> 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 to put in place a better qualification, you know, criteria like now we know what kind of people close right now. Have a much more strictly defined ICP. So 2022 is going to be all

02:26>> about like doing less but getting more out of it, right? Like 10% close rate I'm sure can be improved. Ideally want to be anywhere between 20 to 30, which is the, you know, like 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.

Monthly Revenue and ARPU Breakdown

Nathan Latka

02:47And what is revenue today? Monthly revenue?

Saurav Gupta

02:50>> It's about 38 k.

Nathan Latka

02:5238,000. Now, where's the extra juice coming from? Because you told me that customers pay on average $150 a month. Right?

Saurav Gupta

03:00>> Yeah. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

03:00So if we multiply $150 a month times 120 customers, that's just $18,000 a month in revenue, but you're getting $20,000 more from somewhere else.

Land and Expand: Biggest Customer

Saurav Gupta

03:09>> Yeah. So we have some customers who have expanded significantly. So we definitely have a land and expand type motion. 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?

Nathan Latka

03:27Is that your biggest customer?

Saurav Gupta

03:29>> Yeah. That's the biggest customer.

Nathan Latka

03:30What do they pay per month?

Saurav Gupta

03:32>> So their total ACV, the total ARR for MRR for us is about 11 ks.

Nathan Latka

03:36So, yeah, that's a big chunk of your business then.

Saurav Gupta

03:40>> Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nathan Latka

03:42It's definitely, you know, something of a risk as well.

Saurav Gupta

03:46>> So we are looking at getting more lookalike customers like them using them as a case study and going more into that enterprises motion of 100 ks ACV plus deals.

Nathan Latka

03:58Oh, what's going on there YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this, you love watching these interviews with SaaS founders. But imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time. Well, we've done this. We've built it into the beautiful interface inside of Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you connect

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06:22interview.

Saurav Gupta

06:23>> As well as trying to go more mid market as well. So we're now maturing more as a company where we're trying to figure out like a) how do you expand existing accounts? Like we're hiring a customer success representative right now, building out a customer success function, as well as, you know, building out a proper senior leadership inside the sales team.

Profitability and Monthly Expenses

Nathan Latka

06:43When we talked back in August, you were doing $25,000 a month in revenue. You told me your total expenses are about $15,000 a month. So you're profiting $10,000 per month. Do you still have profits today? Are you or are you reinvesting more aggressively?

Saurav Gupta

06:56>> Still profitable. We were spending about 20,000 now monthly and less just profit.

Nathan Latka

07:05Yep. Well, 20,000 minus the 38,000 of top line revenue, you're still profiting about $18,000 something like that.

Team Size and Sales Quota

Saurav Gupta

07:12>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

07:12Where are you making investments? You mentioned a new hire. What's the total team size today full time?

Saurav Gupta

07:18>> Yeah. So we basically had to let a couple of salespeople go because they were not sort of hitting quota.

Nathan Latka

07:25What was quota?

Saurav Gupta

07:27>> So, we wanted something very simple, like they were just not performing at all. We just wanted 1x of their salary, right? We had not set a crazy quota like

07:35>> a five Which would have been what?

Nathan Latka

07:37What would 1x be?

Saurav Gupta

07:39>> One x is about like a thousand dollars in new MRR every month.

Nathan Latka

07:44Got it. So about a $150,000 in new ARR closed per year.

Saurav Gupta

07:48>> Yeah. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

07:49And they and they weren't hitting that?

Investing in SEO and Content Marketing

Saurav Gupta

07:52>> No. They weren't getting there. 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 realized is that with outbound, it's like a treadmill, right? Like you have to do a

08:15>> certain amount of activity every day to get to the same number of meetings, qualified meetings versus if you can do good 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. Course, takes What is the total

Nathan Latka

08:36team size today?

Engineering Hires and Team Composition

Saurav Gupta

08:38>> Total after this new hire, are around three in sales, three in marketing and like four engineers total now. So total of 10.

Nathan Latka

08:50So you added three new engineers over the past couple of months and you decrease your sales team by one or two because they were underperforming. But you mentioned also you've de risked 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?

Commission Structure Changes

Saurav Gupta

09:11>> We capped it to one year. So we're now paying out like the one year, right? Because we thought like, if it's forever, then it's not fair, right? Because that forever should be attributed more to the hard work that the engineering team and the support team are doing, not just the sales team. So we capped it to one year.

Customer Success and Sales Process Evolution

Nathan Latka

09:29Yep. Yep. Okay, that makes sense. Any other changes like that that you've made?

Saurav Gupta

09:34>> Process changes. Yes. So, our AEs were our salespeople were completely full cycle. SDR, motion plus doing demos like an AE, doing discovery and stuff, and then like doing account management like they were responsible for everything. So it was probably 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, the CSM

10:01>> 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.

Nathan Latka

10:09Very cool. And you mentioned investing in SEO. Are you doing this yourself? Are you hiring a firm or agency to work with?

Saurav Gupta

10:15>> A couple of agencies, actually.

Nathan Latka

10:17Which agency is the best that you're working with?

Saurav Gupta

10:21>> We have this guy called 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.

Nathan Latka

10:33Very cool. Very cool. Alright. So Content Handy, you're an engineer yourself. You said you hired three other engineers. Where'd you find the three new engineers?

Saurav Gupta

10:40>> I have a network here in India. Like, I went to a very good engineering school here in India called IIT. We've definitely got some Not very good.

Nathan Latka

10:50That's like the best. There's many graduates of that school that are now running billion dollar SaaS companies.

Saurav Gupta

10:57>> Yeah, I mean, I've got big shoes to fill for sure. So definitely. Yeah. So we basically had a bit of network. Some came from that others. Just advertise on local job portals like LinkedIn, like, like there's one in India is coming up called HiRec. So we got some good engineers out of that.

Nathan Latka

11:14Saurav, how do you make sure LinkedIn doesn't shut you down tomorrow is what you're doing legal?

Saurav Gupta

11:18>> So, yeah, that's a good question. 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 US Supreme Court and they basically referred the decision back to the lower court. So what LinkedIn claims is that doing this 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

11:47>> user's data and they can do what they see fit with it. So that's the contention there. So it's still sort

11:56>> of sub judice in that sense. So, I mean, of course, LinkedIn doesn't like us and 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 web scraping will always be something that is questionable.

12:16>> It's just the nature of the game, and it's just something we've chosen to do for now.

Famous Five: Books, Tools, and Lessons Learned

Nathan Latka

12:21Alright. Saurav, on that note, let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, favorite business book.

Saurav Gupta

12:27>> I said last time is the Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance still, still is.

Nathan Latka

12:31Alright. Has your favorite CEO changed — still Girish from Freshworks?

Saurav Gupta

12:35>> No. Actually, I've been studying some other CEOs. I loved Zeb. You you're a fan of Zeb. Think I saw a lot of it in your emails. He's taken a super crowded market and done something very impressive with it. So Zeb is someone I'm following right now.

Nathan Latka

12:47Zeb Evans at ClickUp. Yep. He'll be speaking at Founderconf in March in July and in New York City. Actually, we're getting 250 SaaS founders together with more than $5,000,000 in revenue. It's going to be a special event. Number three, Saurav, what's your favorite online tool for building Sendzilla?

Saurav Gupta

13:03>> Chargebee is pretty good, as I said. Yeah. It's pretty sort of makes it very easy for me to work consistent.

13:08>> Out You're consistent.

Nathan Latka

13:09Number four, how many hours of sleep do get every night?

Saurav Gupta

13:12>> Pretty good. Seven to eight.

Nathan Latka

13:15Okay.

13:16And did you have a birthday? Are you 29 now or still 28?

Saurav Gupta

13:18>> I am 29. I had my birthday on in October, October 12. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

13:22Happy late birthday. And are you still not married? No kids?

Saurav Gupta

13:26>> Not married. New girlfriend. So, yeah.

Nathan Latka

13:29New girlfriend, new age, new sales reps here, new man in 2022,

Saurav Gupta

13:36>> New beard as well.

Nathan Latka

13:38Shoes. New beard. I

Saurav Gupta

13:40>> love that.

Nathan Latka

13:41All right. Rap, take us home here. What's something you wish you knew when you were 20?

Saurav Gupta

13:46>> Like one of the things that now I'm thinking of like 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 2 to $3,000,000 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

14:11>> space, not just about building 2 to $3,000,000 business. You can even be like, look at what Guillaume has done at Lemlist, right? Totally crowded space, 2,003 competitors, but he built an amazing business out of it, right? Like with no capital raise, just pure creativity. So the answer like what I would say is just believe in yourself and believe in your creativity, you're going to get there.

Nathan Latka

14:30Guys, sendzilla.com based out of India. Saurav 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 1x their salary as he figures out the sales motion and looks to scale using creativity, not capital. Saurav, thanks

14:54for taking us to the top.

Saurav Gupta

14:56>> Thank you, man. Always great to be here.

Nathan Latka

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