How Testcollab CEO Shriti Grover grew Testcollab 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...