How Woises CEO Ravikiran Annaswamy grew Woises to $24K revenue and 200 customers in 2018.

hello everybody my guest today is ravi anaswami he is the founder and ceo of innohabit technologies incubating various innovative products using analytics and deep learning currently he's focused on a company called voices which we'll focus on today ravi are you ready to take us to the top absolutely all right tell us about the company what's the company do and what's the revenue model how do you make money so voices is a product management tool so we help technology companies to build better products our target users are product managers who are focused on their end customers trying to find out their requirements and trying to build products so that's that's what we try to do we give them workflows we give them tools to make things easier and how they can work with their engineering teams it's a very tech workflow product and the revenue model is usually uh with smaller medium enterprises the technology companies it's a sas it's a sas pricing model yes it's a sales pricing model okay on a monthly monthly price per user sort of a pricing model and so on average what's the company pay you per month to use this so 10 to 40 dollars we have a range of things so differential pricing based on the functionality and features what they use okay so let's call it 10 bucks on the low end and when did you when robbie when did you launch the company what year so this is uh 2016 so it's two years now um so yeah and why build it i mean it sounds like you're doing a variety of different things why'd you build this and and how do you decide where to focus your time since you're doing so many things yeah so voices came out of our own business need so when i was a product manager at nokia my previous company where i used to work in my corporate life we saw that most of the product managers really did not have tool to get things done and i feel this is the same problem entrepreneurs also face when they go about building their products and that's where the whole thing started so we actually are our own main user so for most of our products we use voices so we experience our product every day because we are also the users of the product for other areas of our business so this is something which gartner also recognizes for two years now we are part of gartner's list of all the product management tools in the world so we appeared twice now uh they have not yet made the magic quadrant but we are one of the top 10 companies uh in that list and how many customers have you scaled to so this is in india we are in a stage that we are working with small and medium which are on 50 in india five zero probably five zero and uh globally we get a lot of sas based customers so these numbers vary between few hundred so around 200 to 250 customers okay so 200 customers paying 10 bucks a month is about 2 000 bucks a month in revenue is that accurate yes okay and and again so that's obviously a very small amount of revenue well why not like double down and focus on this or kill it and focus on the other thing like why do so many things at once so uh it's just as an entrepreneur i wanted to work on various ideas which that's the reason the company name was also in a habit we wanted to build various things and see how we built those products so that was sort of our excitement so voices was our first product we built as a sas product and like i said we are our own main users of that product so where was it a year you know by the way i totally understand why it was built you use it you needed it you scratch your own itch totally get it totally understand the product where were you a year ago in terms of revenue so so a year ago per month if you're doing 2000 today what were you doing a year ago so it was approximately less than half of it because we started off slow because we were getting some traction uh most of the traction has been in this year uh but we are hoping that we will get ma i mean we want to scale it up a little more in 2019 i think that's a scope uh because we haven't done much of marketing in the u.s market which is where probably most of our customers are so we will focus most on india and asia trying to see if we can get the customers we realize that many of these companies have their decision makers in u.s because that's where most of them yeah yeah i mean it's a fragmented space right i mean you've got monday raising tons of money for project management you've got base camp you've got older players like trello i mean how do you break out of the noise so those products are mainly looking at project management we are one of the few companies looking at the product manager little difference in terms of how we mainly focus on what requirements to look at how to prioritize how to build a product those things the ones you talked about basecamp and others are more about project management where they're looking at how the tasks get done we are looking at which tasks uh have you raised capital for the company are you bootstrapped bootstrapped and casual positive today or are you burning capital no we are cash flow positive so we are working fine with that okay so cash flow positive and but you're only doing two grand a month the team must be really small yeah it's it's a small team okay we don't have a large team for this product how many people wow so we uh because there are it's a sort of a consolidated team on this area we have three to four people working on a monthly basis but uh uh because it's like i said we have much multiple products so we have people who we cross use and everyone's in india everybody's in india okay very good do you know yet i mean so churn obviously on a sas company is critical what's your turn so uh we get a lot companies from various countries in europe and other places where they come inside try two three months and go out so we uh sort of see churn from those countries whenever they come in they go out very fast so two to three months is a trial period once they use for a couple of times and then they stop using so on a percentage basis which turn on a percentage basis we sort of see 15 go out on a monthly basis okay so that's a really really high churn i mean you want to be like sub two percent typically i mean how do you why is your turn so high how do you get it lower uh so the reason being most of these companies want to try uh product management workflows but their workflows are different from what typically the standard workflow so they need a lot of customization that's why we reach out to them to see if we can uh customize things for them so that then it becomes a little more b2b sale than a sale because there is no one standard workflow fits all so i think that's where the turn starts to happen for us so who's your biggest competitor who's doing the best in the space would you say so aha is the largest one i think aha is the biggest company and uh they they really target the large enterprises the licensing model is for the large enterprises uh but but we are mainly targeting on the small and medium enterprises okay but again why i guess what i'm asking is if is this something you want to scale or you just you're okay just using it for your own team because if you want to scale it you'd be going all in on figuring out how to get churn lower and drive more customers and these kinds of things so at this moment uh 2018 we didn't really push it very hard in terms of getting into the market but there is now a marketing plan in 2019 that we really want to scale it up in the u.s market because being in india we couldn't really do much in the u.s market we tried to work with channel partners we worked with atlas share user group and atlassian where we are on the marketplace we try to get various channels to reach out to these technology companies we got limited success but 2019 is where we want to put a lot more energy in opening up those channels and see if we can get the us market very good ravi let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book uh business book i really look at uh sort of a uh good to great so was one of the big thing i read and also i think uh uh the book on uh i'm not getting the name of it good to great is a good one number two is there a ceo you're following or studying so i usually uh look at steve jobs as an inspiration for all what he did i think that's something which i always know number three uh what's your favorite online tool for building your company besides your own so we use uh mainly uh let's say google applications most of the google applications on the south side so we are more of google users on that way number four how many hours of sleep to get every night four to five hours i think that's that's what i managed and what's your situation married single kids i'm married with a son old and how old are you i'm 45. okay robbie last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew what do you wish your 20 year old self knew yeah uh so i probably still didn't get it there's something coming okay what is something that you wish your 20 year old self knew okay uh the art of really listening to customers i think that is something...