How Vshsolutions CEO Hrishikesh Kale grew Vshsolutions to $1.1M revenue and 600 customers in 2023.

hello everyone my guest today is rishikesh kali he has uh grown his company vsh solutions and started by launching many successful software software applications and businesses alongside them which grow his other businesses as well throughout his life he's focused on exploring new technologies and creating meaningful and enjoyable products with uh with them now most of his time via vsh solutions is concentrated on working with companies to continue exploring this passion the company has email tracking scheduling and automatic follow-up all right rishikesh ready to take us to the top uh yeah i'm ready very good all right so vsh solutions what's the company do and how do you make money uh so basically we are based in india we are based in india and we have a team of developers so we started this company with a our passion for building uh softwares uh we wanted to build a product which will help other people to make their lives better so right now we are we have some of our own products and we partner with other co-founders we partner with other founders to bring their vision to the life so one of our recent products that we built is a mail tag it's an email tracking tool it's a tool basically to help the sales people and it allows them to track the email to schedule the emails at a particular time and uh whichever uh if they want to set up an automatic uh follow-up for the emails that they have seen to get a better and better uh uh feedback from the uh people they are trying to communicate and rishikesh are you i mean describe to me how you would work with this mailtag company do you actually own a part of the company or they just pay you as a consultant uh i own a part of a company i'm a co-founder and a ceo offer made that and you said i'm the security operator uh uh cto oh cto very good and how many people are on the team how many when did you launch the product and how many people are on the team today so we launched a first version of a mail tag in uh august 2017 it's been almost more than 14 months now we have a team of a uh eight people with us uh working on this product uh most of my team is split between uh uh pune india and phoenix arizona okay india and uh and phoenix very good and where is the um i mean how did you come up well first off it looks like you have a lot of products listed is mail tag your most successful is it doing the most revenue so we've built few products in the past so we've been uh doing this for last uh 10 to 12 years we built few of our product uh first of uh my company's first initial few products were related to the seo was helping seo um engineers to uh analyze uh the progress with their whatever site they're trying to do the seo with it was a much popular product it had around 100 000 users uh it was a chrome exchange and basically and it had around 100 000 user it got acquired by one of the companies which was uh uh the product was supplementary to them uh uh they uh acquired the product then we move on to our next adventure it was a then shopping for zen shopping it was a universal checkout uh wallet and we built that product we raised some funding it was in 2013. so we started working with that product 2013 to 2016. we built that product we were featured on an apple uh rishikesh sorry i just because i want to focus on the one company that right that you own right now that's that's doing the best so of the companies you own right now or that you've built right now which one's doing the most revenue so maytag is the product that uh we are working with right now uh the rest of our product zen shopping was acquired in 2016 by shop.co so now we are concentrating on maytag okay very good and and walk me through so launch 2017 you said team of eight today between india and phoenix what do people kind of pay on average per month for mail tag so mail tag is basically it's it's it's uh it has a multiple uh plans that you can buy so mostly it's in the yearly or monthly subscription which uh cost you around uh monthly it cost you around five to seven dollars and it cost around um yearly it costs around 66 okay that's great and have you guys bootstrapped the company or raised capital uh we bootstrapped it with the seed capital we put our own uh capital around 250k and um now we are almost reached we have more than 600 paying customers and we have reached we will be soon reaching our revenue uh annual recurring revenue of a 100k okay so yeah right now 600 customers paying five bucks per month means you're doing about three thousand dollars per month is that accurate oh well we have a different plan so with a different functionality so we are doing around right now we are doing around uh 4 500 per month 4 500 bucks per month and um and where's most the growth coming from how are you getting new customers so we uh we are completely organic and then most of a part of our customers is coming from the referral or the mouth come out publicity people are writing blogs about us um a lot of youtubers are including our product within their uh channel as a um to demonstrate how it can help a user to increase their sale or it how it is sales people so that has been our source of uh acquiring people or acquiring user and we did some digital marketing too so fully weighted you're fully weighted cac to get a seven dollar a month customer what do you spend to get that customer uh to be honest uh we aren't much better we are so compared to what we have spent on marketing or digital marketing it's almost zero and most of our customers are organic so we don't uh if we are running a digital ad campaign then so nowadays so we tried running a few digital ad campaign in the past but that that's uh that's been not much uh efficient and it doesn't justify the seven dollar per month cost to acquire the user because the conversion through the different sort of characters so good but the mouth-to-mouth publicity is really good and uh it almost allows us to acquire a user for a few seconds yeah what what are you so so obviously user acquisition is healthy there it sounds like you're not doing a ton of paid spend what about churn what's churn per month so churn is around 1.5 percent right now we are trying to reduce it further 1.5 sorry 1.5 percent logo churn per month yeah 1.5 and um revenue churn was around 3 we have uh we we've been able to reduce it to uh around 2.7 percent we want to further reduce it we've been doing some changes so we recently launched a version 3 which has some nice improvement over the previous versions and that that's showing us much better rate in a growth in terms of that showing much better response in terms of growth and in terms of a uh in a youtube channel yeah how do you but like so i mean how do you grow the company faster i mean there are six of you guys and i think alex edson i'm looking at your team page he's the one in in phoenix and he's your co-founder i mean if you know you guys have been successful in the past with companies so you know this isn't growing as fast as maybe other companies you've built it's a very competitive space there's a lot of tools that basically are free i mean how do you grow a million dollar company in the space so right now we are uh in between raising of funds uh we we've been raising the next round of fund and then our plan is to uh uh build more functionality to product we are basically a sales tool so we will be uh doing um we will be building a product around the sales sales tools and we are planning we have a roadmap of some of the features that aren't there in existing tools and then we will be uh we are planning to send someone a spell uh some on a cell so that we could grow the product how much are you looking to raise right now so right now it's not um so we are not disclosing the terms because right now it's been uh right now it's uh it's uh in a discussion so uh valuation being some part of a valuation yeah like how do you i mean how do you value a company like this it's doing i mean it's doing basically no revenue i mean it's doing five grand even in the 250k that you guys already put in you haven't got back out of the company yet so valuation is based on a number of installs that we have and the number of users that we have right now so that's that's our source of evaluation well yeah but if you're not making any revenue from that it's not there's no value and value is what makes valuation right so like how do you when you go and have conversations with investors look part of the reason i'm asking this is like you know alex has told me that he's focused on a new company called socialcode.io so like he's checked out and i'm trying to figure out i mean did you essentially did you buy him out and now you're running the whole you have 100 equity so right right now it's right now we are uh planning to uh raise more funds and then we will be uh uh we are planning to build uh further uh features yeah but i don't understand i mean i know alex is moving on to a different company because he's told me it's called social code io social media management for sas companies so how are we going to go out and raise more capital when the founder...