How Testcollab CEO Shriti Grover grew to $116.4K revenue and 60 customers in 2020.

hello everyone my guest today is sri grover she started her journey in 19 2006 as a data entry operator within two years she got promoted a project manager and she's a big believer in self-learning on her way from data entry operator to ceo of test collab she learned various skills and considers herself a jack of all trade again now helping in the quality assurance management software space with our company test collab strategy you're ready to take us to the top yeah sure okay so what does the company do and are you guys pure play sas yes so basically tesco lab is a quality assurance software which is used by other companies all over the world for their quality assurance needs so basically it's like a project management system but it's focused on quality assurance and testing and what do companies pay on average per month or per year to use this so our plan starts from 25 per user and if you have more than like 50 users then we charge 10 a month per user okay so like on average what's a company pay for 10 20 users 100 bucks a month something like that yeah so for like 10 users you'll pay 200 a month i'm just curious what your what your sweet spot is if you look at your current customer base on average what do they pay per month not per seat but the company all together yeah around 120 about 120 okay so what is that like five seats yeah four or five when did you when did you launch the company um just a sec i don't remember all this so maybe like uh seven eight years back okay so call it maybe 2012 something like that yeah 2011 i think okay and how long did it take you to get your first customer a month okay so did you have to spend a bunch of money on your mvp in order to get the first customer or no so basically before this we were a software service company so so we've been in business since 2003 so we had an experience of five six years before we launched tesco lab so we had our own programmers so we used them what was what was the company before tesco lab it was called giga promoters and it was a service company okay so you went from service kind of agency to sas company yeah actually we launched two three products in between like we launched an invoicing software called invoice dude which was free for using for anyone then we launched few of the webmaster script kind of thing then we launched tescola very interesting now did you so again i guess my question is how much did you have to spend on engineering and development before you got your first dollar of revenue maybe like six seven thousand or ten thousand dollars okay so no i mean not a ton no all right and then how many customers are you serving today uh we have like five or six hundred users are those paying customers or free users no the paid customers are around uh 200 100 200 and 4 500 are the free users because we launched free plans last year so many of the people are using that okay so of the 200 that are paid paying 120 a month you're doing about 24 000 a month right now on revenue is that right no no no so basically what i told you is 120 is an average what a company is paying to us so some of the companies who are like have more than 50 users are paying 10 a month so currently our revenue is 7 000 us dollars a month okay so across 200 customers that means they're paying on average something more like you know like fifty dollars a month something like that i took advantage yesterday so it's like it was like 120 dollars but we we sold an unlimited license too like when we launched so there are companies who have like 3 400 customers but they paid a one-time fees for that time why would you why would you do that why would you pay a one-time fee for something then you have to support them the rest of their life you make no money on them so at that time our money was to just get the people to use the software so we sold an unlimited license for like 10 000 at that time and we charged them 1800 a year for like a service fee but at that time that model suited right that was the trend then the trend kind of changed that everyone was just even for the self-hosted solutions so that was self-hosted all right okay so today how many customers are actually paying you monthly today around 60 to 70 paid okay 60 to 70 paid okay got that's helpful and so if you're doing seven thousand dollars a month today what were you doing a year ago do you remember so um we have a growth of 70 70 percent this year after we launched the free plans and we moved to canada because we started doing a lot of things with the company so you're doing about four thousand dollars a month a year ago and now you're doing about seven thousand yeah why aren't you growing faster i mean your companies are small i mean you want to be doubling tripling quadrupling you every year yeah see uh i am most more of a lifestyle entrepreneur so as long as i'm able to travel and companies doing good and i'm satisfied with it i don't push a lot of work in it so if i feel like working then i work so i'm following team ferris is principal or four hour work week actually by the way there's nothing wrong with that right but you can still i mean the richer you are the more you can travel to interesting places the more the more you can explore potentially right the more you can spend to literally get on a boat and go further distances yeah but the thing is i believe life is short what if i spent like 10 years of my life to be a billionaire and maybe i die after two years later currently i'm not you know not traveling right now because i don't have the money i'm not trying to go right no i'm not in mood for it so so work life balance kind of thing yeah there's something wrong with that everyone has their own balance so uh what does your team look like today how many folks so we have a team of five and it's plus me and my husband he's the one who started this company the giga promoters company he was the one who launched the company and he is the cto and he's the programmer are you guys bootstrapped or have you raised capital no we are bootstrapped so how are you supporting five people when you're making seven thousand dollars a month that's barely enough to pay one salary much less five so we have a team back in india and before that uh we only had two people back in india and we had other products too from which we were getting revenue so we were providing you know kind of custom services on the side and like like four months back even though we are bootstrapped we got funding from canadian government so it's not um sorry how much did you raise fifty thousand dollars was that shred financing it's like a government-based program where you don't have to pay this back it's like something they want to have their entrepreneurs it's a grant yeah yeah okay so that that helps you cover kind of expenses so i mean are you burning money today each month or are you cash flow positive we are positive oh you are casual positive yes okay where are you spending that mone the money you do spend how are you spending it to get new customers um we are working on the new version of testcollab right now so we we hired like three or four employees only four months back when we got the funding from the government so we are working on a fully revamped version of tesco lab right now so yeah i i assume that it would take like six to seven months to launch the new version did you add any customers last month yeah yes we we are adding more like five six customers every month so that's my question how did where did you get those five or six customers so uh since the company is pretty old so everyone who's looking for a test management software searches it on google and they land on our website and try specifically specifically what terms do they search test management software okay why doesn't like rainforest qa or sauce labs or one of these other kind of apps pop up how do you beat them because sauce lab is not a test management software um okay so you're you're getting traffic from the search term test management software yeah test case management software plus uh we advertise on few blogs which people uh search for when they are looking for a quality assurance software so yeah so it's expensive i mean i see you guys are kind of on the bottom of page one but you've got other companies like softwaretestinghelp.com guru 99 software material gurok above you but yeah you guys are there at the bottom of page one do you have an seo background how did you how did you rank for this so if you look at the first and the second links on those pages we are over there because we paid those progress okay guys so like what do you pay to get in the softwaretestinghelp.com article uh it's 180 a month 180. yeah so you be okay this is a very smart strategy is to go and look at blogs that rank high for terms that you want and then pay for placement how did you reach out walking through how that process worked how did you reach out uh we just emailed him that we want to get listed in this article and he said okay sure i'll put you over there and this is the amount you you have to pay every month and we agreed we tried google ads too but it didn't work for us that much yeah where by the way where are you okay so test collab is listed and the number four spot i mean i'm not do you actually get a lot of clicks from this article yes how like how many per month i'm not sure okay like hundreds or thousands hundreds hundreds okay interesting all right um very good so when you look at your fully weighted cac to get a new customer that's going to pay you 120 a month do you know what you pay all in sorry i don't understand do you know what it what you pay to get a new customer no i'm not really okay so then how do you know if your ad spend is profitable or not so we get a lot of customers from them and i know like i know that overall whatever we are paying these bloggers is profitable but how do you know that if you don't know your what your cac is relative to what your customers pay you per month [Music] because it's only 180 a month so it doesn't matter we are not paying a lot of bloggers only these two bloggers so it's not even worth calculating you know as long as we are getting people from them and even if they are not converting right now maybe they are on free plan or maybe so at least people know about us you know sometimes what happens is a company comes and they don't buy but the same company comes after six months or a year sometimes even three years they come and they buy so you don't have right now you're not doing any paid spend except 180 to two blogs 180 to this one and like four or five hundred dollars a year to the other one okay got it a year yes okay all right um that's good so it's kind of smart hyper-targeted cheap to the point where it's not even worth your time to calculate what kak is you just know it's working yeah all right do you know what your churn is yeah it's 1.7 per month or per year no cardio per year okay so you lose 1.7 of your total revenue per year yeah that's very very very low for this price point are you sure it's 1.7 annually and not monthly yes because we have a very good customer retention rate why is that first of all it's because of the niche because when someone kind of introduces their whole team like a team of 10 to this software they have to spend time and money to train them secondly they have their thousands of test cases in our software so it's very difficult to you know migrate thirdly most of our customers even though we are a small company really like our customer services like some people get to talk to me like if they want like they have my number if they want they can call me and they can ask me anything and we have a live chat support all around 24 hours so that is why people don't usually you know unsubscribe or deactivate their subscription okay very good strategy let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book um richard spell it it's not a rich dad poor dad so it's not a business book but i don't really read a lot of books but number two is there a ceo you're following are studying no number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company and number four how many hours of sleep to get every night eight nine ten twelve depends on the mood when i wake up that's good and you might be asking how old you are and uh you mentioned you were married any kiddos no okay last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew nothing uh because what i believe that you grow how you grow so if i change the course i would not be the best it's not about it's not about regrets it's just something you if you had a child and they were 20 today something you would tell them not really i think i knew everything i wanted to know at that time let me change the question for you because i understand where you're coming from you're one of these people it's very like energy centric you know don't change it i get that what i'm asking is if you had a child right now who's 20 years old what's something that you'd be telling them helpful motherly advice just believe in yourself don't agree with the hood guys believe in yourself there we have it testclab.com again software solution software management helps with quality assurance they are now serving uh call it uh 60 customers paying 120 a month doing seven grand a month in revenue up from four grand a month just about a year ago they've got five people on their team fifty thousand from the canadian government they are profitable turning at just two percent of their customers annually and strategy has built a lifestyle business that allows her to travel the world with her husband and enjoy life strategy thank you for taking us to the top thank you bye