How Zastrin CEO Mahesh Murthy grew Zastrin to $1.5M revenue and 200 customers in 2023.

hello everyone my guest today is mahesh murthy he's a software engineer and entrepreneur who's currently down the blockchain rabbit hole he's worked in various industries such as travel and sports and started his company zastran last year to teach tech developers blockchain programming through real world projects love's is family food and travel mahesh are you ready to take it to the top uh yeah all right so how does the company work and how does ashton make money um so we have a couple of different models one is we have a subscription model so anyone can come and uh subscribe and then um work through the courses all of them are self-guided courses and what the paper month for that on average um 20 okay and what's churn like i imagine a lot of them only stay for a month or two and then when they're done with the course they leave um i would say three or four months because um i'm still building out the courses the content so there's enough to keep them engaged for three or four months okay so that would be what like like 10 churn each month something like that yeah okay and what's the other revenue model the um other model is um you can buy the courses for good um and once you buy it you have it for for the lifetime okay when did you launch the company what year um last uh march mark okay so call it 2018 and what do we scale to today in terms of total customers um a few thousand i would say okay we're talking like two thousand uh well thousand and odd i would say okay so we'll say a thousand then to be conservative and and are most these people if you break down your revenue based on revenue that people buy the license outright versus pay monthly what's the split would you say oh um i would say more like eighty percent outrightly buy it versus twenty percent subscription okay so it's not really a sas product um the reason is um i introduced the sas model only three months ago um it was before that it was more um just by the course for a lifetime okay so how many are on the sas model today like 200 yeah about approximately there yeah interesting why did you decide to make that pivot um well so some of the customers are a little more price sensitive because my buy the course outright is a little more expensive so and it's a bigger commitment for some people and i'm a new brand i'm still building out my um the brand and the people are still not aware of the product so this was a good way to like give them an entry and say um here why don't you try it out look at all the courses it's just 20 bucks a month and then from then on you can you can see if you want it you can commit to it to a subscription model or switch and buy out rightly so that you get all the updates forever yeah so this is like code academy or team tree house but for blockchain correct yeah interesting okay so so call it 200 people paying 20 bucks a month you're doing about four grand a month right now in revenue yeah it goes up up and down um on a good month yes i do um the crypto it also depends on like surprisingly on the crypto market why is that surprising if it gets hot more people sign up if it doesn't they churn but the thing is it's developers it's not like um traders are you know come on but developers given a speculation all the time i guarantee you developers were more excited about bitcoin and blockchain about a year ago than they are right now they're more excited today no no they were more excited when bitcoin was 19 000 than they are today now they're not speculators but they still can't give in i mean they're going to give into the hype a little bit they will give into the hype a little bit but uh i did not expect that it was going to like impact that much i see honestly i see okay what's your team size today how many people um i'm one and then i hire contractors for a lot of the other work anywhere from like video production uh video editing and stuff and then there's a whole bunch of tasks which i need to get done i hire contract have you bootstrapped the company or raised uh so far it's been bootstrapped that's great congratulations um where are you spending most the money is it on like the video contractors actually creating the courses um to be honest the um did you ask money or time where are you spending most of the money yeah the revenue um the most of the money is on the infrastructure like video production and the whole things around it and hosting and a teeny bit on marketing most of the marketing is organic so um i would say most of the expenses are around video production yeah so tell me more about how you got these 200 customers you say it's organic but i mean that's it doesn't just happen magically what kind of pieces of content did you create that are attracting all these new students yeah so uh when i started out i started blogging on on medium of like ethereum that's where i started and i was breaking it down and people started really liking it i even published a few uh course um tutorials on medium and those are quite popular and half of the traffic comes from my medium posts got it okay very good so half of the traffic comes from there how many new new students are you signing up per month right now what's growth look like um i would say a hundred or so and are you doing my history are you doing this full-time or just a side project um i would say mostly full-time i'm like slowly uh winding down my um other job i was at what else were you doing was that like a full-time thing or what yeah it was i am was a i'm a cto at a a sports startup called next-gen golf we run golf tournaments yeah so you should be building like you should be building like a blockchain based sports betting program or something like huh like i like like what is it augur uh yeah i should probably build on top of auger that would be uh they'll be nice but uh maybe someday tell me more about what are your thoughts on block one block one do you have you heard of them no you haven't heard of block one they it was they've raised the most in terms of an ico ever in history it's like four billion dollars oh block one the uh the eos yeah eos yeah okay um to be honest i'm not a big fan of eos why um one is um for me the reason i got into blockchain was the whole decentralized aspect of it um i don't consider eos to be like a fully decentralized platform um there are what 32 validators and there's like colluding going on there's like uh the project seems like it's in a mess and it doesn't it doesn't give me a good vibe about the project from the technical point of view that's the biggest reason it just feels like a centralized entity so that that doesn't really excite much do you think the four billion that they raised will pass through government measures or do you think they'll end up getting prosecuted via some like legal stuff in the u.s um they probably will get some scrutiny and someone is going to definitely look at it and i don't i don't know i don't know too much the legal details and what the regulations are going to be but uh they're just not going to like go away without any um someone is going to look into them yeah which block which blockchain are you most bullish on in terms of how the technology works um ethereum because that's that's where i got started to be honest and uh i really like the community like the people working on it there's still a lot of challenges but i would say ethereum is the first one um which i'm very bullish on very good all right let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book um zero to one number two is there a ceo you're following or studying [Music] ceo um elon musk number four what's your favorite online or number three what's your favorite online tool online tool let's just say twitter i use it in a very different way very yeah number four how many hours i sleep to get every night um six to seven dan what's your situation married single kids um married with one kid seven month old oh wow congratulations and how how are you i'm 35 35 last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew um guys learn how to sell easier coming from mahashi slowly winding down his full-time job to scale his uh side project zastrun which is essentially helping people learn ethereum kind of like how you learn how to code with you know team treehouse or uh or code academy he's again doing that for blockchain and decentralized platforms like ethereum currently has 200 students paying 20 bucks a month for the platform so about four grand a month in revenue uh just himself building it based up there in massachusetts 10 logo turn per month bootstrapped obviously operating at breakeven hiring contractors to build out the courses when he needs them thanks for taking us to the top thank you