How Topic CEO Nikhil Aitharaju grew Topic to $5M revenue and 200 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is nikhil othoraju he's an entrepreneur who started a multi-million dollar sas business in college using seo and content marketing after successfully selling the company in 2018 he's now working on a new product help others achieve similar marketing success for their business it's called use topic.com nikhil you ready to take to the top yep i'm all set to go all right so what's the business do how are you making money yeah so we are sad subscription business uh our product is uh use topic so we uh our seo content tool that helps brands write high quality comprehensive content optimized research we do that in two ways we have a research component that automates the research involved in creating an effective outline and b we give a real-time feedback on the draft as your writer is writing the content uh and we do make money by uh selling our sas subscription it starts fifty dollars a month five zero a month fifty yeah that's correct that's great and when did you launch the business uh in late 2019 2019 okay and how many customers are you serving today uh 200 200 great right and and did where did you where did you i mean tell me the story 200 customers is not easy where'd you get the first it's a lot of things that didn't scale so a lot of we went to events we actually offered to do free work for some of our contacts who work in the seo content department and that's how we initially got our first 10 customers so it's a combination of events uh and offering value uh to those initial set of customers and how are you getting customers today obviously there's no events uh happening yeah that's a good question right now i think uh we've been uh focusing a lot on a product so there's a lot of word of mouth that's working out for us uh we're also experimenting with some uh free tools on our product that's getting us some traffic and uh yeah a lot of forums posting about ourselves on different forums is actually getting that traffic right now what forms bring you the most traffic uh honestly we haven't measured but there are a couple of uh slack groups like traffic think tank and demand curve a couple of these key slack groups where marketing folks hang out so we have gotten some initial set of customers through those groups but then after that the word of mouth trickled in combined with some google sem so that's what led to this current uh number and what's mrr today uh 21. 21 000 a month that's correct got it so what does that mean you've got about 200 customers or that on average pay hundred bucks a month something like that that's correct that's great and where were you exactly a year ago do you remember it's your dollars oh your pre-revenue in 29 2020. that's great so okay exactly before clovis started that's when we got our first customer and then that's what the fl and then the flight beat effect kicked in got it um okay and have you bootstrapped the business or raised uh boot trip any plans to raise nope why is that it was a quick no i think um uh primarily because we see uh ourselves making good amount of i mean decent lifestyle uh and raising money leasing money is means you have to go for the in the spring of the fences and i'm not sure yet if we can uh do that with our uh current positioning so we will wait until uh you know we have a clear position to clear uh you know idea going forward but for now i think we we want to bootstrap it as much as possible and how who's we how many people are on the team uh just me and my co-founder two of you that's great so you're splitting 21 000 bucks a month every month that's not a bad deal it's not a bad deal so yeah that's why we want to continue doing this and uh chugging along i think you guys spent a million a million with two people uh not with two but maybe a couple of them on the team but yeah did you guys split it 50 50 uh no right now we're investing back in uh the growth um i mean i think oh equity yes correct 50. got it but you okay so you're reinvesting everything back in growth though that's great and what what are what are some of those growth metrics today how are you getting customers now besides the like think tanks and slack groups yeah uh so i think sem is something that google sem google ads is something that we're investing money in we're actually trying to kick off our content program uh content is going to be a long term play but we at least want to leave the you know lay the seeds right now so the seas right now and see what happens in a year but uh i think those are two channels that we're investing money in uh i think yeah that's pretty much where we're investing currently we're looking into other channels uh to uh create the predictable revenue flow uh we don't have that yet to be honest how much are you spending per month on google ads around three grand 3k and so you probably have some idea of what it costs you to get a new hundred dollar a month customer it's terrible it's it's right now we're paying 500 per customer on google ads and uh yeah it's not a great channel at the moment why do you say it's terrible uh uh terrible because of the way we've implemented it uh we haven't really optimized it or been watching it uh really well closely so we've been bidding on keywords that were not really bad and that resulted in that high cost so we're looking at optimizing it but then i think i need to look into other channels than google ads because google ads can only get you x number of customers so we need to look at other channels that are more i mean facebook or instagram or other channels and now once you get these customers are they sticking what's your churn look like trends pretty high right now it's around five percent five seven percent monthly um and uh yeah that's because i think last year uh we were doing a bunch of random things um we also launched uh open ais we gpt3 integration uh that really got us a lot of customers but then people realized that we're not going to be generating content for you like an entire long form content so they churned um so i think right now we're trying to figure out our ideal customer and then sort of zero in on that and who do you think your ideal customer is going to be agencies or content teams are going to be ideal customers and is there investing in seo is there a path to charge more than a hundred dollars per month i mean can you go up to you know 500 a month a thousand per month yeah there is a path we are going to be experimenting with that we're going to be launching some bolt-on products to see if you can you know unlock that potential but uh there is a path we've got to see if it's going to work out or not yeah i mean and you're working with with some folks here so i'm super close in san antonio with the the scale works crew uh which obviously no you know file stack and qual it sounds like pretty well um what made like you have file stacks home page on a screenshot of their clicks going from you know call it maxes of 200 a day to max's of you know eleven hundred clicks per day using your tool uh what was the critical turning point for them that enable you to get help them get more free clicks from google over such a short period of time yeah so that's a good question so when we were when we exited the company in 2018 filestack actually bought us out and uh we were looking to work on new ideas we were helping them with um seo wait sorry who who bought you out filestack oh interesting wait what come with you sell uh tint oh of course oh you were on the tints team that's craig yeah i feel like i've entered i've entered what's your what's your co-founder's name on tint uh tim taco yeah and then he went and traveled to asia forever right yep do you was that an okay relationship or you guys like hate each other oh yeah great relationship uh we still take advice and uh you know if this doesn't work how we're gonna figure out some other ideas together in the future okay now now it's now i understand why so many of your customers that you're featuring are from from the scale works portfolio companies yep uh i think we we want to uh utilize every relationship that we got to figure out if we are we have product market fit so yeah so that's what we did let me ask you another question because you have a beautiful pricing page uh and you've identified a very clear utility value that you're upselling against which is number of content briefs how did you decide that that is the right thing to upsell against versus number of writers or number of keywords suggested or things like that yeah that's a good question uh so for the the number of briefs partly to be extremely transparent based on the competitive landscape and what they're doing so we are pretty new to this industry so we looked at other competitors in the space who were kind of offering similar solutions and we sort of based off our pricing based on that and then we realized that a lot of marketing teams unless you're a big content team you don't have a lot of riders in-house and they wouldn't be willing to pay more for those seats unlike sales organizations where you have to pay proceed so number of seats is not going to be a big lever so that wasn't the case i think briefs it's easy to kind of peg the value because if you're spending hundred dollars on a content or 200 on every single content if you can optimize it or do a better job you know researching uh it's only ten dollars uh so it's only like five percent of what you're spending on every piece so it's easy to justify the value so that's why we uh you know use that briefs as a lever and how do you so let's say i was using this do you help me find writers to then actually execute typing against the keywords you recommend in the content brief or do i have to bring that person and have them like a full time on my staff uh you have to have that person we don't we're not a marketplace yeah interesting i mean because that's i imagine that's a big friction point for people that want to use you right they have to go hire a writer that's correct that's why we stop uh we don't work with a lot of startups or initial like we're actually looking to kickstart their content program because they have this problem of finding advisors uh usually the teams that we work with already have like established workflows and uh they already have relationship with writers that's great got it cool well what anything i should have asked about that i haven't do we haven't chatted about uh i think that's pretty much it yeah awesome i mean maybe maybe you can ask about like gpd3 like open ai's if you're have you incorporated any of that in the platform yep uh yeah you can ask me that question how so yeah so how does gbt3 integrate with with uh used topic so right now uh gpd3 uh for people who don't know it's openai's ai model that's able to generate text uh make predictions um able to generate text uh based on inputs that you give uh to the model so we are actually using gpd3 in production to generate titles and descriptions um oftentimes people have issues with coming up with these titles and descriptions that are you know that are close to the search intent so we're helping people generate them and eventually we will be incorporating them uh as you're writing content as you want to take some of your ideas in 2011 sentences we're going to be incorporating gb3 into that process so it's going to do a uh it's gb2 is really good at taking your ideas and turning them into sentences so you want to leverage that um technology as you're writing the content love it all right nikhil let's wrap up with the famous five number one favorite business book uh the intelligent investor by benjamin graham number two is there a ceo you're following or studying right now uh i'm following a cto co-founder jason cohen from wp engine great questions i love the smart smart bear before that number three what's your favorite online tool for building your business um i love figma i love notion i think notion's great number four how many hours of sleep to get every night six to seven working on that right now and what's your situation married single kids married before the cloven pit so that's good any kids uh no kids all right how old are you uh 31 31 last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20 [Music] uh be lean uh don't get squared away by your initial growth and start over hiring i try to keep it lean always yeah always boot trap guys he sold his first company tint now building used topic makes it easier for you to come up with ideas to write about so you can dominate the seo game he's got 100 sorry 200 customers paying on average 100 bucks a month doing 21 000 bucks in mrr right now or about a quarter million in ar as they look to scale just two people which we love he thinks they can hit a million dollar run rate with a very small team they're completely bootstrapped as they continue to scale nikhil thanks for taking us to the top thanks nathan one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 p.m central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want 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