How Thapos CEO Srini Siddireddy grew Thapos to $6M revenue and 125 customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is shirny shitaretti he is the founder ceo marketer and architect of athappo so sports management platform shrini are you ready to take us to the top yes nathan okay tell us about the company what do you guys do and what's the revenue model how do you make money okay so we provide a complete platform uh for youth sports organizations including everybody in the organization so we make money through a subscription model and also uh we take a cut from the transactions um that happens on the platform plus we are few other revenue models we are working on which is a marketplace where we want to connect all the sports organizations uh and its members to the service providers like uh uniform providers and um background checks and stuff like that june you mean sports teams you mean like the local kind of kitty league soccer team with 12 students or 12 people on it and you know 20 parents yeah so basically sports teams can use our platform as well but earlier we supported them directly now we are kind of moving away so now we are focusing entirely on the sports organizations that is a local sports club our sports league our academy or some kind of association or rec department or any any any organization that conducts uh organized supporting i see so what's the average one of these organizations pay you per month or per year to use your technology so we have um so we're sas models so um the monthly it depends uh we have three plans um what's the average though so average is i would say the subscription is around 500 okay per year and what do i get for that if i start paying you that today so you will get access to our entire platform so you can manage your registered player registrations you can collect your online payments then you can make teams you can make schedules and you will get your website built just out of the platform automatically and then your all your players are your customers that is your parents players and anybody they can access the website they can download the mobile app everything is included it's all in one solution interesting shiny when do you launch the company what year so my last company uh was i forgot the year so that is somewhere around 2007. so um so yeah we tried to knock out that priceless we thought okay craigslist it's uh uh we can beat it so the process we knocked out ourselves because it's not easy to beat craigslist so when did you launch the company so we did our own thing around 2004 2004 okay very good now have you bootstrapped the company or raised capital oh you mean you're talking about my last company no no i'm talking about yeah i'm talking about thoppos when did you launch zappos okay sorry how was we launched in um 2014 2014 okay and have you raised capital or are bootstrapped mostly well hold on either you've raised a dollar or you haven't raised a dollar so have you raised friends and family a small round okay um we're still a startup we're still a going startup small company so when you say friends and family meaning like a hundred grand or how much yeah we raised uh okay 250 and this is just your friends your family people close to you that's great and you launched 2014 so four years later how many sports organizations are now using you how many customers uh we have about uh um 125 sports organizations right now so that includes around maybe more than a thousand teams and i don't know how many athletes so so on average more than 2 000 active users actually accessing the platform in somewhere or other okay so can i take 125 times 500 bucks a year you guys are doing about five grand a month right now in terms of run rate or 60 grand a year oh yeah about that yes okay and where were you about a year ago so um so we all our revenue started almost a year back um so before that we have very negligible revenue because we are mostly uh focusing on building the platform uh and also we still we don't have a full uh full-fledged sales person in house so um so that's the next step but srini how do you support so how do you support yourself over four years with you you're now just doing about five grand a month in revenue you haven't raised a ton of money i mean how do you pay the bills okay um so initially i was working i was doing part-time um so it's almost three years now i was doing full-time and um luckily i have some savings and also my wife works so uh that's happy got it what's the team size today how many people um so uh most of all the development team is in india so we we kept our costs very low uh that that's how i kept it going otherwise i wouldn't be clear um so uh also my cousin in india he he operates the india team so he helps to organize and manage to get things from there uh also like like we're like a family business we're very different from a regular company where it's not a traditional business where uh everybody's an employee and everybody's taking a market level itself not like that so all my uh you know there are some of them most of them are employees but they're most they're also like partners where they're not taking a market level salary they're contributing and they're taking some sacrifice yesterday yeah so the question is how many full-time employees do you have so in india i like that we have top of india uh so we have um okay so i mean but just be clear i mean again these people are they basically have to be working for free if you're out of your 250 000 in funding because you're only doing five grand a month i mean how they can only work for free for so long right yeah so it's not that they're working for free but they're working on the minimum on a minimum wage well i mean just to do the math right if i take 5200 in terms of what you're making per month right now right and i divide by 20 people that's 200 a month [Music] um per person yeah so basically like right so it's so we have that funding we rised um last year and we're still using part of that and also we have some revenues uh so combined everything we're able to uh turn the lights on so so i mean how do you drive like substantial growth here how do you go from five grand a month to 50 grand a month okay so now so our problem is uh we do we have we haven't focused our sales until now so now our platform is stabilized and our users started getting happier uh so now we're going to focus on sales also i'm going to hire a full-time sales person uh so um so the the idea is to focus on sales and i established the full sales process and why do you want a higher sales person i mean most people if they're doing less than a million bucks an arr the founder is the one selling and until the founder can prove that they can sell how can you expect someone else you hire to come in and figure out how to sell okay so when i say higher it's not that i'm going to completely outsource it or completely hand it over so i'll be part of that sales process but the problem right now is i have involved in too many areas so i'm not able to focus on sales and now i have to focus on the development i focus on the customer support uh because the team in india they they just do the development and all everything else i have to take care of it so that's why i couldn't be able to focus on the sales so that's what is uh keeping us down until now in terms of sales yeah but don't you i mean i don't mean to push you here but don't you have to make time to sell i mean you're the founder you have to make time to sell before you can hire someone else to come in and try and figure out how to sell right true yeah i agree so i i agree definitely i have to make time that's right that's what i'm going to do but also at the same time you have to keep your product right ready and available under right so can be usable and also whatever is the existing customers you don't want to lose them you want to support them you want to make sure you're supporting them so you have to take care of them right so then of course bring in new sales that's that's how i think yeah but can the team in india do that where you're paying them nothing i mean you're the most viable use of your time right now is driving sale in my opinion is driving sales correct i agree so that's where i should be focusing but uh unfortunately again my team yes they can do up to some extent but uh they're not there yet where they can talk to the customers directly and understand which turn today so um chuan we have uh since our early customers uh most of them i talk to them directly and so we have very low chance hello maybe less than ten percent ten percent per month yeah not for one per year okay 10 logo churn per year that's great and then um and then again whether it's you or the sales person you hire how are you going to go get a thousand more customers what's the what's the plan yeah so the plan is not just one it's a multi-uh channel based uh so basically we're going to use seo both organic and paid so we already we are we right now we uh we do get a lot of traffic through search engines so and we're going to optimize that uh then we're going to do some paid uh campaigns on top of that then we're going to utilize some social...