How Vwo CEO Sparsh Gupta grew Vwo to $64M revenue and 5K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest this morning is Pross Chopra he is the founder and CEO of a wing a fight Indian based fast growing software company that makes globally admired technology products like visual website optimizer and push crew with the background in computational biology machine learning in online marketing along with web technologies profs started the company in 2009 and has been twice featured in the Forbes list in 2014 the Forbes India 30 under 30 list followed by 2016 top promising young leaders and game changers under the age of 30 in Asia he believes in customer obsession innovation and experimentation along with failure and data-driven decisions process are you ready to take us to the top Thank You Newton thank you for the great intro you bet okay so tell us about wing a5 what do you do and how to make money sure so we have two products like you said one is visual that's an optimize a VW and the other one is push screw so the W is a AV testing and conversion optimization platform so primarily meant for e-commerce b2b and travel industry to optimize and increase a conversion rate in fact when we started in 2010 we when the one of the first ones to to make maybe testing really simple and from there on it has evolved to add a lot more capabilities and the second one push through is of their push notifications platform that we started about two years back and again it's one of the pioneers in this growing market and and yes so so you can say that we are into marketing technology space the two of these products that are complementary to each other and which one of them is larger for you in terms of revenue VW Vida ok so let's focus on VW vwr then when did you launch that company 2010 so yeah it was 2009 it was beta so launched and paid in 2010 and from there on it's just grown for us and have you bootstrap the company later of your race Kaprow yes would start we have any funding okay got it so you bootstrap the company and what's team size today about 200 ok 200 folks now so tell me more about the customers you have a customer story you can tell me and really dive into how they use you sure so I'll talk about are typically e-commerce customers so it can be any commerce firm but typically we work with mid-sized businesses so not very small e-commerce claims like a one-person ecommerce shop will not be very good fit with but anything on the midsize or enterprise side we work well with them so how they use our product is they use it across different stages of conversion optimization so for example they'll use our product first you analyze user behavior so we have clicked maps heat maps session recording service to really give insights to our customers on what's happening on the websites why people are leaving their checkout pages why they are not converting what products they are liking what's they are not liking so consider it like a user focused analytics capability and from there they analyze the user behavior and then use our second capability which is more of a planner and prioritization capability so they derive hypotheses from all the raw data on users so by hypothesis I mean typically conversion on landing pages and websites happen because there is social proof people are convinced of the benefit the price is right and they are not confused and so on and so forth so that means that if the conversion is not as much as you'd like some of the things on your pages are failing so we help them really think through what's not right on the pages and then prioritize it because obviously you know you can improve anything that you want but what do you improve first is a matter of this impact versus effort analysis and for all this for all this stuff they're doing on the platform what are people paying you on average I mean are you very much in the enterprise space or Smid markets model you see you mid market so what do you pay on average per month so you can think of it as something like maybe 300 to $500 per month the variant is the sweet spot where we playing that it's a very very much mid market that makes a lot of sense and and now with this kind of product I mean I think this is a pretty competitive space - you have like Optimizely Google Website up you know optimizer things like that what's your churn rate today so we don't talk about 200 but I joined rate is higher in this market it's hired is that why I was talking about it cuz it's bad no because it's very competitive and it's one of the metrics that we are definitely very much focused on and yeah we'd like to really get a very good grip on it before we you know the talk about it because right now this what is high churn though you said this space generally has high enemy what is high churn monthly I mean if you consider from an EP testing perspective or from an optimization perspective I mean I'll the way I look at it low churn is like products as products like CRM Salesforce you know that runs someone's workflow that approximate numbers when you give me enough so are you talking three percent per month in the CRM space is is is good I mean tell me about your space what do you consider bad or good what is churn on average so I mean you can talk about anything say about 3% as a batch and at least that's how I look at things in terms of monthly logo churn yes okay so and right now you guys churn more than that and you're working to get it below that is that what you're saying yeah it depends on the size enterprises we hardly have shown but how many we have a spectrum of custom for small businesses definitely more than that yeah well logo churn is irrespective of customer size revenue Turnersville measure of that so you're just you're gross logo churn monthly you're saying it sounds like it's higher than 3% your word even in logo logo China depends on what planned people are on yeah but that's why you have revenue churn because it actually takes into account our poos and it gives more credit to large more paying customers that's why there's two different engine it matters what type of the customer it is yes sure what I mean you can split it down by cohort but what I'm saying is the reason people measure revenue churn is exactly for that reason it's to give credit to customers that pay you more money yeah yeah so I mean you see typical churn which is small businesses all have a higher cohort churn rate both in a and retention basis than larger companies I mean that's a that's a given but what I'm hearing you say is you feel like the optimization space notoriously has high churn and you're trying to figure out how to get a grasp on that right now right so straight so why are people churning I mean two reasons one of the reasons for that is that it's not as well-defined as processes many of the processes so for CRM for support there is teams out there that own and drive the product but for optimization it's a growing industry so you typically would have a marketer hold on multiple hats so if a marketer at a small business is doing email marketing SEO Adwords and also maybe testing it's not that person's main responsibility so it hasn't gone into the workflow for many businesses yet but for businesses who have dedicated resources and teams for optimization in a/b testing for them the churn is degree low and where is that yeah and what have you kind of grown the company to today over the past seven years in terms of total customers using you you say 4,500 on your website is that still accurate yeah about 5,000 for video and a thousand purpose crew okay that's about again we're just talking about the your vwi right now it's about 5,000 and that's not users right those are actual paying customers yes okay and what are you growing at you over here would you say we're growing about the double-digit every year okay in terms of revenue yes okay that's great I mean I can basically take 5,000 customers times and just take your minimum right of 300 bucks a month that you said earlier I mean you guys are doing well north of 1.5 million bucks a month is that accurate yeah I mean we talk about revenue so we're doing about 18 mil about hitting mean oh yeah yeah so yes that's 1.5 million a month times 12 is it gives you the 18 and use of you about doubled year over year so if I go back to December 2016 you were doing about what 750 grand a month we've not doubled a minutes between say you know double digits so we again don't talk about double digits I thought you said doubled yes okay got it so so you're when you say double digits I mean you're saying higher than 10% but lower than 100% yes okay and why don't you talk more specifically about that why do you let that range be so big because we're working on new products we are working on our marketing strategy so there's a number of things that are in flux when it comes to how we need to evolve so we have a that's true for everybody but people still people still submit data in 5000 for growth rates right so i mean i mean i won't i won't try and give you pin you down on an exact number but can we JSA generally you're gone between 20 and 40 percent annually is that fair yeah you can see there okay I mean is that accurate or I don't want to say something inaccurate I would say that to you yeah I'm trying I'm happy to not talk more about that but I won't understand I'm trying to get your head understand why is it is it have you been flat because churn is that what the issue is you're actually not growing that much at all...