How Truepush CEO Ravi Vaka grew Truepush to $614K revenue and 25K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is ravi vodka he's currently the co-founder and head of customer outreach and success at true push he oversees customer outreach success customer service and the qa team they're aiming to exceed the highest standards in delivering his clients with a lifetime experience and planning to add new subset to the existing market segmentation and increasing the products reach is what keeps him busy today true push is playing in the push notification space for both websites and mobile robbie you ready to take us to the top uh huh thanks nathan for having me on this show you bet so are you guys a pure sas company yes we are okay so help us understand uh understand what you guys do and how customers are paying what are they paying on average per month uh we are free to free forever push notifications company for websites and mobile so anyone who is looking for any high traffic website or a mobile application looking for push notifications can just plug and play our software and and they have a customized dash they have a dashboard where they can send the send push notification and measure the performance of each campaign okay and what a customers pay on average per month for this it's a free forever push notifications yeah people that pay though after they move to a paid plan if you look at your paying customers on average what are the paid people paying per month uh-huh that's again no it's a free forever push notifications company okay how do you make money ravi okay so we monetize cookie data so with this free push notifications uh the cookie data which is collected we monetize the data we also are add company our parent companies that's where we collect all the cookie data and then monetize it and send contextual ads to our app platforms okay so how many impressions are you delivering monthly at this point uh well ad platform hasn't been built right now it is currently in uh current in currently work in progress right now our only focus is to as many as many as customers using push notifications well just be clear you have no customers you have free users so how many free users are using the tool right now uh it's close to 2100 uh free users right now and how did you get those free users where'd you find them so so it's uh basically when it's which started in the month of jan uh this year uh our first hunt uh for all these users free users happened on product hunt so once we uh opened uh true push on product hunt we started trending on that day and uh ended up on number three that's where our first initial customers uh got signed up we we eventually closed around 700 signups on that particular day itself it was 9th jan 2019 and after that most of the most of our presence we made sure that our presence is on on various e-discovery platforms and a lot of seo work went behind the on the website so that's where most of our customers come in okay so you got a thousand upvotes the day that you launched on product hunt which was january 9th of this year from those 1000 upvotes how many hits came to the website that resulted in 700 signups wise we we closed it on 50 50k monthly active users that month in the month of january that resulted in close to 700 plus signups that that particular day and the next subsequent day as well what i'm trying to quantify ravi is the success of the product launch so for the product launch on january 9th and maybe one day after january 10th how many hits came to the website and how many of those people did you convert to a sign up but close to twenty thousand twenty five thousand people came onto the website and uh eventually that uh ended up around seven hundred sign ups most of that happened on ninth and tenth of january okay and uh that's great now of those sign signups how do you measure first off how do you measure activation and how many of the 700 actually activated okay so we always have have this healthy conversion rate of 30 30 to 35 percent a month on one so in the month of january it took some time for people to convert but then on an average it's 30 to 35 percent of conversion we have that means activation has been people signing up and then integrating our code onto the website so literally it's of the 700 35 of them will install a javascript code on their website in the first 30 days yes okay so that would be about 210 of the 700 signups install the javascript code now what does what do those installs mean from you from a business perspective related back to how many cookies you can capture so cookies wise we have collected close to 68 million cookies right now so if you are talking about business impact uh right now we have collected 60 of 8 million cookie data out of the 2100 websites who are currently using us okay so 68 million cookies and like what does that mean is that individual people you've essentially cookied 68 million individual impressions across the 2100 websites that are active uh well so whomsoever is using our platform will send push notifications so i'm talking about uh of users of my clients as well of my customers as well so let's say if uh i have two push dot com is accessed by you you and you you click on uh you know allow notifications your cookie data is also with me okay what you do is launch the company when you write the first line of code i'm sorry when did you guys write the first line of code uh it was last year in the month of uh october uh around november november 25th i guess the product was available uh and we started testing among our friends and how much total did you guys invest in the mvp before you had your first activation but the numbers uh something is backed by our is done by our parent company uh it's only salaries which we are talking about otherwise the rest of it is most of the mark there's no marketing budget we don't well ravi obviously i'm talking about salaries that's the biggest expense early on so the question is again how much how much in salaries or how much total spend did you have to put up before you had your first activation uh spend wise it's something which i don't want to talk right now it's a very small team it's a very lean team are we talking like 10 grand for the mvp or 100 grand or a million it would be 10 grand for an mvp okay and you see the team is small today how many are on the team uh we are close to seven people and two people support us from outside they are like uh interns who are supporting us so seven folks full time two interns and is the company bootstrapped or raised and if the parent companies put in money i would consider that obviously funded by the parent company okay so so again let's consider the parent company a vc right how much total have you guys raised to date well see again uh the catch here is we are talking about cookie data all that need is cookie data we are only are funded by parent company in terms of salary again how much when someone goes and raises from vc obviously they spend a lot of that money on salary so i don't understand how that's relevant the question is how much money essentially is the parent company invested in the company to get this off the ground uh so it's it's close to a million uh less than a half or half a million amount of money which they are spending us spending on us right now so at this point of time we have enough money and we are not looking to raise any money nathan that's the point so that's why we haven't gone into this valuation game at all well you don't have to raise money because you have a parent company subsidizing everything um do you guys own any meaningful equity in the company or does the parent company basically own 90 or 80 of it the majority majority of it is owned by the parent cup yes i mean why are you doing this you're taking all the risk right the downside you mean basically you're going to say well they give us 500 grand to get going but you could go raise that yourself and take 100 of the company and build this yourself why take build this inside of a parent company initially this all these discussions happened initially with the parent company so we were hired by the parent company and asked to build this product independently so right now uh we don't have anything the um yeah you you have you're correct in terms of uh the risk factor but then uh at any given point after we will get in terms of we will get to talking about uh about the about the substantial percentage which we have in the company but at this point of time our only our only intention is to to focus on the business impact part of it well of course that's what your parent company wants to hear because if every up every piece every minute you put in that drives one extra output of upside they own you get you mean they own the majority of the company you're essentially a salaried worker all right i don't even know like co-founders not even the right word right because you have no i mean there's very little upside oh well see we're bringing the product from the start of the whole point is we started this company you you're right in terms of we are salaried workers are not but then we are building it independently outside the company yeah but who cares you're still a pay you're like a paid external consultant i guess my guess my question is by the way i don't think it's a bad thing what i'm pushing you on and the question i have is if you're going to take this risk anyway why not risk...