How Sulekha CEO Satya Prabhakar grew Sulekha to $58.8M revenue and 130 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is satya prabhakar he's an indian american entrepreneur engineer writer and the founder of soleca india's leading tech ai platform for expert services offering sme service providers the best mobile sas medium to grow their business through matched process prospects and market intelligence satya are you ready to take us to the top yes i am thank you for your time and pay interest you bet so just to be clear from a business model perspective is this a marketplace business model or is there a sas component as well well uh at this point uh till now it is a marketplace business model where our experts have released expert services these are services service providers who offer high value services where there's a lot of user engagement in terms of which service provider that they choose for providing the service so for these things at this point sulekha is a is a is a marketplace model so what we are is that we are for these sms so that they can get uh the right kind of consumers not just from the suleika platform but also from outside of silica platform from various search engines and other local services marketplaces and you list all kinds of things on your website finding ways to rit to finding you know jobs to finding rentals all kinds of stuff take us back to when you launched the business what was the first sector you targeted see initially when we launched the business in 2007 and the primarily in india and uh we have a lot we have a strong presence among indians living outside of india also which are the non-resident indians so initially when we started the service it was primarily a classified kind of a service so uh which people were primarily so as we evolved over the last about 10 years from the time what we have done is we have focused on services as the main stay of the platform where consumers are looking for service providers and service providers are looking for motivated buyers which are consumers on this side and there is a lot of lot of friction between the trying to match these two things because the service providers don't have the credibility of the brand like big banks and they need an independent platform to attest to their credibility and and their reputation and take more providing themselves give me the timeline here what year did you launch the company in we launched the company in 2007 in india 2007. okay and then if we fast forward to today over the past 30 days how many people successfully found a service provider through your platform right so we have close to uh you know about seven to eight million people who use the service every month 78 million people who use a service every month for the registered users and what does that mean no right a registered a registered nurse unless a registered user is less interesting than someone who actually got matched successfully with a service provider so so how many people actually got matches the ones who are matched successfully to service providers per month would be around the uh about 600 000 to about 800 000 okay and when you facilitate a match between someone looking for a service provider and a service provider how does soleca make money so what we offer to service providers our revenue comes from the service providers for the consumers it is free to use so when the service providers subscribe to the suleika soleika services based upon the city and the and the category in which the service providers are we estimate uh what is the number of service matched and verified service requests that they get and there is a cost that the ai algorithm of the platform estimates for that city category based upon the value of the service based upon supply demand and then says that in this period of time we were able to service we will be able to serve you so many match service requests and these match service requests are valued per service request so much and the system automatically comes up and say this is what you need to pay for a three month period or a six month period so there is accountability on part of the sulekha to these service providers in terms of what is the matched value that they would get from the platform and so on average was a service provider paying you per month if you're actively bringing them matches yeah correct and that one uh actually nathan varies from anywhere between hundred dollars to about two thousand five hundred dollars a month and it just causes a number of matches on the number of matches and also on the value on the service the proper for example let me give you a small example if you are looking if you are looking at a painting contractor you know the value of match service request can be two to three dollars but if you're looking for a uh at a large event organizer the value of that thing can be anywhere between fifteen to twenty dollars yeah so it varies based upon the value of the service and have you raised capital to grow the business or you bootstrapped uh we have risk behavior we have raised capital uh to to grow the business yes we have how much have you raised today uh till date we have raised about 40 million dollars four zero yeah that's that's great and and so when you go out and have conversations with the the markets right the vc markets the equity markets about valuation of the company are you able to tell a story to get a sas multiple which are usually higher than a traditional marketplace multiple see the thing is you know as we are moving forward there are two ways in which the core matchmaking platform is expanding one is in the sas marketing model whereby whereby service smes come to us and say that per month i'll pay you so much and for that we are providing marketing services for them to reach out to consumers across other platforms so that is not based upon the core marketplace model that we have the second one actually nathan that we're doing is there are certain services and this is the exciting part of the business is that there are certain services where the consumer and the service provider need not be located in the same city or the same locality of the city right for example if you are a business consultant for opening actually restaurants and you can be located in the north of india and i can be located in the south of india and yet you can provide me the service right so what kobe has done is it made it possible and it made it feasible for people to know that they can get services done from instructors from consultants from lawyers advocates from anywhere across the country that is the second uh yeah which we are we are expanding and if you if you take me back to your first year in business in 2007 do you remember how much revenue you did that first year oh in the first year we would have done about uh hundred two hundred thousand thousand thousand dollars how did that feel that must have felt great back then yes it is it is you know because see the thing uh nathan by india is an exciting country is the last large internet market that is available in the world so everybody is coming to india everybody is investing in india but when you go back to 2007 uh people the access to internet was very expensive and very low in the sense you were very fortunate if we had 512 kbps access right it's not the 30 mbps access we have right now and people used to pay through their nose for that so from that onwards uh being here you know it's it's very difficult to gain acceptance for the business model it's very difficult and expensive to get consumers uh so it was a very hard slot into at least in the initial period in india only now then now past from 2007 handsets that the whole market has exploded in india and uh that is since when everything has become more exciting do you remember a million dollars in revenue uh we passed a million dollars in revenue in uh maybe uh in uh 2018 maybe around that time 20 20 2010 2011. and then take us forward to last year yeah because uh nathan we are still a private company and we are not disclosing revenue yet for this one so you have to excuse me on that regard that regard that's fine so you break a million dollars in revenue though in in 2010 right some of the challenges with scaling a model like this is making sure that both sides of the marketplace stay actively engaged so can you spend some time talking about each side how many individual consumers are putting a request to the platform each month and how many service providers are waiting for like a request to hit them every month so we have in this quarter we would have the number of live service providers who we have served who have paid us money and served would be in the in between forty thousand to fifty thousand from across india right and the number of consumers who are coming to get get them uh pre-koved it was about 1.1 to 1.3 million per month because of kovid people are not going out doing stuff it has come down to about seven six hundred to eight eight hundred thousand but we are expecting in the next three months for it to go back up to about one and a half million per month again how did you handle covet in terms of your cash position were you trying to raise capital and did code hurt your valuation at all or no well we don't know if it is if it has hurt or evaluation i am sure it has because uh see the thing uh nathan that happened is that in the month of march of 20 2020 right just in a matter of one month our our actually sales have dropped eighty percent eight zero because the service sector sme was the worst affected sector in the whole space because of the lockdown they just can't go and do any...