How Tagove CEO Laduram Vishnoi grew Tagove to $780K revenue and 1.3K customers in 2017.

hello everyone my guest today is laruram vishnoy he is the ceo of tagovi he which is a which is a a interactive chat tool which we'll dive in here into a second but he loves to research in artificial intelligence machine learning chat bots nlp and neuro science ladaram are you ready to take us to the top yeah hi okay tell us about to govi what does the company do and what's your revenue model how do you make money okay so takovi is a live chat software uh with video chat remote core browsing and chatbot within customer websites and in their mobile apps so their customer they can talk with like video call and even the like agent can take over customer screen via our remote core browsing tools and help them in real time and what's your and what's the business model do people pay you monthly is it sas it's a sas subscription model um pay per month per agents as well okay what's the average kind of uh customer pay you per month would you say so 50 dollar per agent per month uh is is like average cost and per by by per customer is like 150 okay so it's usually three three seats per sign up yes yes that's correct yeah that's great and how many agents do you have now today using the platform so we have around 1300 agents oh great and can i multiply the 300 times 50 to get around the monthly recurring revenue you're doing about 65 000 a month that's correct yes that's great when did you launch the company so we launched in april okay so great this is amazing so you're brand new you've gone from nothing to 65 000 in mrr in a year this is fantastic tell me how you did it okay okay so uh after we launch it we heavily focus on digital marketing so seo content marketings and also like a lot of social medias and posting guests for guest content on like big uh big magazines as well so we focus like heavily on uh the digital marketing and we reach it here what was your most successful guest blog post which blog okay so we posted a lot of on forbes and uh forbes yes so forbes bring uh quite decent traffic to us interesting and how did you get the guest blog article on there are you a writer or you worked with a guest writer okay so i was running my software development company before this company and in that company like i was already related to forbes as well and from that um i had already had a network and we we took it from there that's amazing and have you bootstrapped the company or have you raised capital okay so we've been to 500 startups uh in last october and we raised like 150 000 from them after demo day of 500 startup we raised 200 000 and uh i just put my personal money like around 400 000 in the company you put your own money in yeah okay so 150 from 500 startups plus 200 000 after demo day that's 350 plus 400 000 yourself so about 750 000 into the company that's correct yeah okay now everyone's gonna be wondering nathan who is this rich guy you're having on the show where did you get all that money to put in the company so i earned that money from my previous company that i already told you like i was running my software development company and i i got the money from that company okay got it that's helpful and and is that company still running or you shut it down no we shut it down because tagovai started taking off yes that's correct how many people today are at to govi uh we are total 23 people 23 and where are you guys all based okay so uh we are four kai san francisco um we have two guys in london office and rest in our india office so san fran london and india team of 23 total yep that's great and uh again launched back in 2016. how did you get your first 10 customers so uh basically all online we we never reach out to the customer customer always come to us and um when we launched our beta program in first month we got like around 400 signups so that was where from all social media seo all seo content marketing and seo so we listed top on google for like multiple keywords for what keywords what keyword was your best so so co-browsing co-browsing software co-browsing yes co-browsing what does co-browsing have to do with your product okay so co-browsing is isn't like let's say um you talking with a customer uh on live chat and customer will say that okay i'm having problem here can you help me out agent don't know like what the hell you talk about yeah so agent can take over customer screen with one click of buttons so that's like remote screen but within the browser oh i see this you're actually if i search co-browsing right now into google you show up for me in the number four spot and the title is co-browsing software with live chat and video chat that's correct yes interesting so this is this drove you a lot of your first early customers yes that's correct yeah interesting um do you have an seo background how did you know how to write this article to get that placement on google yeah so um when i was running my software development company uh i was like i was managing like around 200 clients um through their marketings and their seo and their contents and everything i was managing for those those clients so i had a background um as a as a tech guy i had background on that side i see that makes good sense what are you um tell me more about the unit economics on these customers so what's your churn so um initially last year was higher around 15 to 20 percent than monthly or annually that was monthly okay 15 to 20 logo churn per month yes okay so that was yeah so that was really high uh because uh software unstabilities and um there was like a lot of customers asking they they have like specific requirements and something like that then we reduce down uh so if we talk about this month we have a zero turn last month around uh two for two point something percent or something like so we reduce down now that's right and we're recording here at the end of november 2017 if you're listening to this later now give us a sense of growth uh back in december of 2016 what were you doing in that month do you remember uh yes mainly heavily focused on product actually well sorry what were you doing in terms of revenue in december 2016 uh around 10 000. 10 000 per month and now today you said you're at 65 000 right that's correct yeah so what's the plan are you going to keep bootstrapping this you're going to go out and raise more capital what do you want to do so we uh for now we are keep bootstrapping whatever we're doing it we like heavily focus on it probably we're going to raise sometime next year like april may uh we'll be planning to raise a big round probably next year how much do you want to raise ideally probably like three four million somewhere three to four million and what valuation are you going to aim for you think so our last last race was on five million evolution and probably next will be 10 12 million that 5 million valuation that was the 200 000 you raised after 500. that's correct so they put in 200 000 bucks on a 5 million and was that a cap on a note or a true equity evaluation that's not okay that was a note so five million dollar cap so now you're going to raise next year so sometime 2018 you want to raise three to four million and what valuation sorry did you say you wanted to get somewhere 10 to 12. okay so you want to sell like three well do like 20 to 40 percent of your company something like that that's good yeah interesting what do you think you need to do to to get that valuation like what is what are you gonna do over the next six months to you know get bigger okay so two things um in the revenue-wise we heavily focus on growth and we wanted to uh take like sixty five thousand to hundred and twenty hundred and thirty thousand that was the the first revenue side so we and the second side we are heavily focused on ai and machine learning and uh chatbot as well so we adding that feature in our product as well so that will like increase our revenue to the next level as well so you think that that's what's going to take you from your current rate up to about 130 grand yeah easily let me ask you a question if somebody came in today and said you know we love the business we'll offer you three million dollars to buy the whole thing would you sell so uh offered last month uh was 12 million and we declined 12 million who was it from so there was few bankers from new york and there was like private uh equity farm nobody likes the bankers from new york do they nobody likes these just kidding by the way a lot of these pe guys pay me a lot of money to get deals so i can't say that i'm not a fan of pe i have to say that i love pe right but sometimes they're like they're in excel sheets the whole time they don't understand the market all the time yeah yeah so so that was that was the thing so we were thinking that is is really early for us for now um that's why uh we declined offer we would really want to go to like at least 100 million in fewer times but a lot of room i have to get in your head for a second because there are people listening right now going i hope nathan pushes him here because if i got a 12 million dollar check for a company that was only doing 700 grand...