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 in something that you own the majority of well that's a good point uh nathan we all already have a couple of discussions on this uh right now again our prime focus is focus on the business impact part of it make sure that maximum number of people start using give a give them give customers a quality product which uh we are committing the greater service that's what we are focused on at this point of time and give me a general sense of like what a cookie is worth right so if you bring in one extra cookie and your parent company monetizes it how how much can they monetize one cookie the lifetime value of a cookie data is ten dollars but then expiration of 150 data is also three months it can only survive for three months but then market value of one cookie data is ten dollars uh that's a lifetime value of one okay so so last month how many kind of active cookies did you guys have you have 68 million collected today but how many active just last month okay so so we are doing close to six uh um close to six lakhs cookie data every day so last month we collected close to eighteen uh million uh data eighteen to twenty million cookie data okay again but you said they go three months so i would need last month plus the prior two months to get total activated cookies last month we're talking about the last month right my question my question to you is last month how many valuable cookies do you have in your system you defined valuable as they have a lifetime value of three months so my question is last month how many active cookies did you have not 18 million that you added how many active did you have total okay so that data is something which i don't have it uh right now what's a range you knew the 18 million cookie number i assume you have some range of the prior two months uh good question nathan now i don't have the data right now uh at this point i won't be able to answer that you've already given two data points 68 million total and 18 million cookies added last month i don't understand how all of a sudden now you don't have other cookie data points [Music] well i haven't gotten to the numbers of it right now the focus was different so we did not get into that point the data point at all well you've already robbie you've already shared those data points you said 68 million total cookies collected and 18 million collected last month great so nathan we need to there's a separate team which works on it with in terms of uh mapping of cookie data which is relevant which is not that's a different uh uh no different work altogether we haven't started the work on on that particular thing right now okay so all you know is that last month you added 18 million cookies totaling 68 million you've added to date over the past six months and you believe that you know that means active over last month in other words ones you could actually monetize was somewhere between 18 million and call it 60 million okay so if you have eight i mean is it is it accurate math if you have 18 million cookies that you added last month your parent company thinks they can make 10 sorry your parent company thinks that you make 10 per cookie you added so like 18 million dollars just from last month's cookies well again the expiration of it is very very important you need to understand cookie data is mostly uh collected to understand behavior of of a user so we are all our parent company already is a data company which has tons of tons of data so so cookie data will add another dimension to it make sure that whenever they are actually you know helping their clients out in terms of ad placement the key data will help them in relevancy yeah robby the question was you told me a cookie was worth ten dollars over its lifetime which is three months so if you added 18 million cookies last month i'm asking you does your parent company believe they can make 18 million dollars from that eight sorry 180 million basically 18 million times 10. well again this is something which my parent company can only answer i only have some some inputs from them about this i'm just sharing that information with you it might be might not be relevant well robbie this is basic math you already said ten dollars i'm just taking two numbers you gave me and multiplying so is ten dollars not accurate it's the three month life cycle not accurate is 18 million cookies added last month not accurate it's correct nathan you need to understand that lifetime value of the quicker is ten dollars that is correct but then the expiration of one cookie data is three months so you if you are talking about uh there might be concurrent user or a user which is coming back again again on on a website so cookie data which i am holding last last month might be a previous month's user cookie data as well so this cookie data keeps on refreshing so the current value of what what what can be done or what can be made out of this cookie data cannot be evaluated as uh as simple as a simple math okay but the 18 million you collected last month are all unique right yes that is unique see again if user is coming back again if the user laughs it's uh ravi sorry this is not a complicated question if a user comes to you five times last month do you count that as one cookie added or five cookies added in last one month it's one cookie addict okay so then the 18 million number you gave me of the cookies added you added last month are all unique cookies meaning they are worth ten dollars i'm using your words ten dollars lifetime value and the left value is three months ten dollars times 18 million cookies is 180 million dollars that is that is all i'm asking you so what you were telling me is that your parent company based off numbers they've given you values the 18 million cookies you brought in last month at about 180 million dollars that is correct in terms of simply a simple math you can you can definitely say that yes okay again i'm a little i'm confused how they're actually monetizing that because if that was true you should be a billionaire well in simplest terms see again we haven't worked on the ad platform currently we are only working on building or collecting cookie data yeah robbie that's fine i you've repeated that over and over i understand what you're saying you also said that they are monetized at ten dollars per cookie so if that's again that's 180 million just in terms of revenue dollar value from cookies added you added last month put that on a run rate let's say you do 18 million every month new cookies new unique cookies per month for the next 12 months you do the math it's over a billion dollars in revenue if that was all true if everything you're telling me was totally true you'd be a multi-billionaire absolutely nathan it's the point here is i can't speak on behalf of my parents you already did you said ten dollars i'm you see robbie i'm only using numbers you've given me okay yeah that's correct nathan i'm just talking about what exactly the market is right at this point i won't be able to speak on behalf of my parent company but however this this is how the value of evaluated across the world yeah i guess my question is you now have this unique talent right you've invented this mousetrap in true push to get cookie data and if you're creating so much enterprise value it just makes no sense to me why you wouldn't go out raise five hundred thousand dollars your of your like from investors you know and build this yourself what this tells me is either either you just have a risk profile maybe you have 20 000 kids and a mortgage you have to pay off in something where you just need a paycheck or this enterprise value is actually not accurate it's actually not worth 180 million dollars and it's why you're building this inside of a company as essentially a salaried outside consultant well there are a lot of assumptions which might come in nathan but then things will become practical if something is concrete which is being worked around right now it's just working on on this particular tool and trying to have as many as users on board and start using the r application what's your next big uh what's the next big target in terms of number of number of clients using you guys uh by end of this year we're looking for close to 5000 or 6000 active users using our application and how do you define active they installed the javascript code and sent at least like one notification per month uh well we're looking at 100 million notifications a day is what we are targeting here well yeah but that could be on one customer right my question is again how do you define an active customer you said you want six thousand actively using you my question is again what does active mean are they using our code and probably they they should be using the replication to send notifications again a customer sending a notification something which is not in our control so what we are looking at with all our users onboarded we want uh uh every all the customers in combined start uh sending 100 million notifications a day that's what we are targeting okay you already said on your website it says i'm reading this now right now true push has over 700 clients and more than 100 million notifications are being sent every month you just told me your next goal is 100 million so what is accurate are you already sending 100 million notifications per month or are you trying to reach 100 million per month 100 million for per day is what we have what i'm talking about got anything got it so you're past 100 million per month the next big target is 100 million per day across 6 000 and clients think you can do that by the end of this year yes we can achieve that that's great very cool all right let's wrap up here robbie with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book uh well i'm not much of a book reader uh my my co-founder is great we'll skip that then none number two is there a ceo you're following or studying somebody is there a ceo that you're following or studying uh a bit of uh neil patel at this point of time number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company um well can you repeat that again please i'm sorry what's your favorite online tool for building your company uh well product hunt is something which is definitely helped us out number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night close to eight to nine hours and how old are you i'm 31. and what's your situation married single kiddos [Music] okay um last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew three years old i'm sorry yeah what's something you wish you knew when you were 20. probably you could have started a little more a little early in terms of entrepreneurship i could have done that before guys start earlier true push launched on product hunt in january 2019 got 25 000 website hits converted 700 to customer to signups and 250 to actually active users of their technology which again helps you send website push notifications on both again mobile and websites they're now growing uh they've raised about 500 000 from their parent company to grow this business seven people on the team to date uh launched first line of code in 2018. ravi thanks for taking us to the top uh thanks nathan thanks for bringing us up and help allowing us to talk in this platform