How Emitrr Reached $3.6M Revenue with 1,000 Customers (Interview with CEO Anmol Oberoi)

Introduction and Emitrr Overview

Nathan Latka

0:00Hey folks, my guest today is Anol O'Buri. He's the co-founder and CEO of Emitter, which he started in twenty nineteen with his co-founder. He's an active SaaS voice on LinkedIn, loves giving candid takes out product market fit, an ex-Wingify alumni, which we love. The software is a smart receptionist and customer engagement platform for local businesses focused in the healthcare niche specifically. All right, Anmoul, you ready to take us to the top?

Anmol Oberoi

0:23Absolutely, Nathan. Excited to be here.

Why Healthcare and Unique Qualifications

Nathan Latka

0:24All right. AI we know is hot, but why are you uniquely qualified to build in healthcare? Do you were you an ex doctor or something?

Anmol Oberoi

0:33I wish I was an ex-doctor, but I'm not, I think I'm not qualified enough to be a doctor. But to be perfectly honest, I think why we feel, we are, you know, I think why we will do a great job in healthcare is simply because of the time we've spent in the industry, right? Today we've, we work with about a thousand plus customers. 90 % of those are in healthcare. And over the course of the last five years, there's enough that we've learned from the healthcare businesses by staying very, very close to customers. And that's why we feel that now we have enough knowledge to sort of, you know, build better solutions for healthcare businesses.

Monthly Recurring Revenue and Funding Efficiency

Nathan Latka

1:11I wanna get more into the backstory and how you grew so quickly, but before we do that, are you comfortable sharing monthly recurring revenue from last month?

Anmol Oberoi

1:19Absolutely, are close to about, so monthly we are at about $300,000.

Nathan Latka

1:24Okay, so about three point six million annualized. That's exciting. Now have you have you raised like a billion dollars to do that or are you bootstrapped or what?

Anmol Oberoi

1:27Yeah, absolutely. So interestingly, we've raised just $3.9 million to date. And we've spent just $2.8 to get to $3.6. So we are fairly capital efficient that way.

Nathan Latka

1:45So what does that mean? You still have half a million dollars in the bank?

Anmol Oberoi

1:48We still have 1.2 million in

Company Origins and Early Pivots

Nathan Latka

1:51That's great. All right, let's get the backstory here. So you launched the business, I believe, in twenty nineteen. Is that right?

Anmol Oberoi

1:56We started in late 2019, which is early 2020, but we went through multiple pivots and iterations. But this product was launched in 2022.

Nathan Latka

2:07Okay. Is it fair to say though the first line of code at the company on your first idea was written in twenty nineteen? Okay. And then you said you didn't launch the current iteration until twenty twenty two, is that right? So how'd you support yourself in between? What was the initial idea and what didn't work? Why'd you shut it down?

Anmol Oberoi

2:13That is correct, yes. That is correct. We started with a very different product, had nothing to do with health care, had nothing to do with what we do today. We started, if you remember back in 2019, 2020, Alexa and Google Home were a big thing. Everybody was wanting to get their hands on an Alexa or a Google Home. We were trying to commercialize or commoditize, basically monetize Alexa and Google Home. We were saying that, hey, doctors could allow patients to book appointments through Alexa. You basically tell Alexa, hey, can you book me an appointment with Dr. Nathan, right? That, of course, did not take off, took us about one and a half years, but luckily we were able to get a lot of revenue. We were able to take that to about $100,000 in ARR. And then we went through another pivot with another product, with our learnings with that product. And that again was about a year and a half journey. And that's finally when we came to the current version of the product by interviewing customers.

Landing the First $100K Enterprise Customer

Nathan Latka

3:16Financially, how'd you support yourself during those tough years early on? Did you raise external money like in twenty nineteen?

Anmol Oberoi

3:22We did raise this very small round of less than $100,000. But as I told you, with the first product itself, even without product market fit. So you asked me a very interesting question. It the first line of code written in 2019. We actually did not write a single line of code without getting a customer. As luck may have it, we got a first customer who was willing to pay us $100,000 to build skills on top of Alexa. for their healthcare business, which was a very large healthcare chain here in the US. So that's what of got us going and we hired our first employee. So we had $100,000 to sort of get us surviving, get us going from there.

Nathan Latka

4:01So wait, how old are you in twenty nineteen?

Anmol Oberoi

4:05I'll have to figure out. Okay, so I was about 28.

Nathan Latka

4:08You're telling me you just wrote the f you didn't even write lines of code. You're twenty eight years old and you land a hundred thousand dollar enterprise client on day one, is that right?

Anmol Oberoi

4:16That is correct. And we told them that, it was more of a service plus product. But yes, we knew this because of our experience at Wingify. We were like, hey, we will not write code without knowing if somebody is willing to pay us. These are things that you, that's the sort of benefit of working at startups. But yes, we never sort of wrote a single line of code till we got our first customer.

Nathan Latka

4:40How did you get the customer to agree to pay a hundred thousand dollars without being able to show them a demo or anything?

Anmol Oberoi

4:46Absolutely. we did have enough to show. So to give you an example, on Alexa and Google Home, we were able to build skills, I mean, without getting into specifics of technical details. You could build skills without writing a line of code, right? So we built skills on top of Alexa and Google Home, sent them those recordings, and on call, we played like a live recording, right? And without the product, to answer your question with regards to how did we sort of get them to pay us $100,000 without a UI. we did have mock-ups of UI and UX, which we showed to them, That this is how this will work. And that's essentially how they agreed. We, of course, did not get all of the 100,000 in one tranche, right? We got that over the course of months. The first $15,000 came in. We had our first resource. And then the money started coming in as we kept hitting milestones of the product.

Supporting the Business Through Early Pivots

Nathan Latka

5:37So from twenty nineteen to twenty twenty two, what I'm hearing you say is you had a hundred thousand dollars paid from your first customer and you also had a hundred thousand dollars pre seed round. So you had about two hundred thousand dollars to work with, is that right?

Anmol Oberoi

5:48That is correct. then of course, when the first product, is the Alexa product, we realized did not have product market fit, we switched and we launched another product, which was a product to sort of help automate missed calls. With that, we got our other bigger customer who paid us about $32,000, right? Which still happens to be our customer, even till late. So that's how we had enough cash flow to survive.

Nathan Latka

6:11Mm-hmm. Okay, and that thirty two thousand dollar per year customer was landed in twenty twenty one or twenty twenty two? Twenty twenty. Okay, and this is a voice tool. Now, did you totally kill that voice tool or did you sort of morph it into emitter today?

Anmol Oberoi

6:172021. Yeah, so we completely killed the Alexa product, which got us about $100,000. Then we launched this voice plus SMS missed calls product, which essentially would help reach out to patients whose calls you would miss. But that also did not achieve product market fit. But that's what we morphed into our current version of the product. And that's what got us.

Nathan Latka

6:45Okay. So take me into the current product, right? What are you selling here and how'd you get the first you have a you know you have a thousand paying customers today, how'd you get the first a hundred?

Current Product and First 200 Customers

Anmol Oberoi

6:55Yeah, the first 200, to be perfectly honest, I think that's where the learning comes from. You want to stay in the market and things will work out. We knew one product that had started to work very well for us was the text communication product. So customers would use us. Yes, no, not this one. So if you go to communication, yeah, business texting. That's our very first product that hit product market fit.

Nathan Latka

7:12This one?

Anmol Oberoi

7:23customers would use us to sort of send out text messages and receive text messages. Basically, what they were trying to do is they were trying to get away from phone calls and find an alternative way to communicate with patients, right? This started to hit product market fit. It's so happened that when we launched this product, right, as a, so I'll give you maybe long story short. When customers would miss a call, we would send out a text message to patients saying, hey, sorry, I missed your call. And we saw a behavior that patients actually started texting and having conversations on SMS. So we said that, if this is such a strong signal, why do we do this only on missed calls? Why don't we allow customers to use this regardless to communicate with patients through text? When this hit product market fit, a very big texting player called Zipwhip actually got acquired by Twilio for about $850 million. And all of their customers actually started looking for an alternative because Trillium decided to shut down. And that's how we sort of, you know, basically, you know, went past about a hundred plus customers because many of Zipfib's customers started moving to us. And then of course we realized that we could build a lot.

Zipwhip Shutdown and Competitor Displacement

Nathan Latka

8:32Is that because right when you saw that acquisition happen, you anticipated people would search in Google for alternatives and you launched a compare page against Zip Whip?

Anmol Oberoi

8:41That is correct. We didn't know that people will search for an alternative. So if you see the first one itself is Zipwhip, right? ⁓ We did not know that Zipwhip was shutting down, but yes, because we had the right product and ⁓ as luck may have it, Zipwhip shut down. So we started launching a campaign and yes, we got a lot of customers through Zipwhip.

Nathan Latka

8:59Is this the fastest way to go after your competitors is a compare page like this? And then when people go into Chat Chapity and search zip whip alternative, do you show up?

Anmol Oberoi

9:08We do show up, but it is the fastest. And I would say it is the fastest, but I won't say it is probably the best way to grow. I don't know if it'll show up in yours, but yeah, this is a litmus test. Let's move it.

Nathan Latka

9:21Pressure's on. Let's go.

Anmol Oberoi

9:24Ashes on my marketing team.

Nathan Latka

9:26All right. And it also could be because I'm based in the US. Maybe you're targeting specific geos. ⁓ so okay. You are targeting okay. So you don't come up here. I guess so is is how how what do you have to change about your strategy to show here? And is this an important distribution channel for you or no?

Anmol Oberoi

9:34We are talking. Yes. I'll tell you when I said the litmus test is on, we are not showing up there. It's good because ZipWhip shut down two years back. So customers don't search for it anymore. It's something that we've stopped targeting. in 2022, just to give you some sense of this, in 2022, we went past 200 customers just with ZipWhip shutting down. So that was what worked out. then through customers, we learned more and more and decided, hey, we will focus only and only on health.

Revenue Growth Timeline 2024 to 2026

Nathan Latka

10:11So give me the revenue story there. You're doing three point six million of ARR today. Where were you one year ago in twenty twenty five?

Anmol Oberoi

10:18In 2025, we were close to, I would say, about $2 million. And yeah, mean, closed early 2025. We were at about $2 million. We started 2025 there. And then,

Nathan Latka

10:30Let's do let's do December's. Let's do December. So December of twenty twenty four, you were at around two million ARR. And then December of twenty twenty five, a year later.

Anmol Oberoi

10:35That is good. Yeah, a little later, sorry, December 2024, I'm wrong with these numbers, December 2024, we were at about $1.7 million in ARR. December of 2025, we were at about $3 million and now we're at about $3.6 million.

Nathan Latka

10:55I see. And then did you pass the million ARR mark in twenty twenty two or twenty twenty three?

Anmol Oberoi

11:002023.

Nathan Latka

11:02Okay, mil okay. So really those first two hundred customers and the zip whip acquisition shutting down, that's how you got your first million of ARR.

Anmol Oberoi

11:08That is correct, yes.

Current Growth Channels and Outbound SDR

Nathan Latka

11:10Interesting. Okay. And and how are you growing today? You're at thousand customers. How many did you add last month? And how do you, you know, double your customer base going forward?

Anmol Oberoi

11:18Yeah, last month was, of course, a standard month for us. ⁓ We added about 30, 35 customers. ⁓ But right now, how we are growing is pretty organically. We've cut down our ad spends and decided that we will continue to grow efficiently. ⁓ So most of our customer acquisition is happening through, of course, LLMs ⁓ and a lot of content, word of mouth, and referrals. ⁓ Outbound is something that we've just added. We've just added a cold calling channel, and that's also working well. Just last month, we booked about 42 calls just through our Outbound SDR outreach.

Nathan Latka

11:55How many team members are on your outbound SDR team? So how many how many how many outreaches do they have to do to get forty two booked calls?

Anmol Oberoi

11:58Just two. We, I may not have that number on the top of my head, but every day we've set a goal for them to at least make 100 to 150 calls every day.

Nathan Latka

12:14Wow, do they use tennis technology for that? Power dialers or it's one by one?

Anmol Oberoi

12:18It's power dialers, not one by one, because the connect ratio also is low. You make like 150 calls, you'll probably end up talking only to six to seven.

Nathan Latka

12:25Yeah, yeah. What power dial do you power dialer do you use?

Anmol Oberoi

12:29Views forum.

Nathan Latka

12:31O R U Interesting. Do you like it?

Anmol Oberoi

12:33That's correct. We love it compared to the others for sure. I'm sure there is area to improve, but it's better than most of the others we've used.

Nathan Latka

12:42Okay. So you're doing outbound, you're not spending anything on paid, is that right?

Paid Ads Strategy and Spend Levels

Anmol Oberoi

12:47We are spending, but at peak we were spending almost $200,000 a month. that's like, yeah. But that's like now down to, it's much lower. It's much below $50,000.

Nathan Latka

13:00Okay, it's still significant though. What are you spending fifty thousand dollars a month on? What keywords?

Anmol Oberoi

13:05I mean, I've completely gotten out of marketing, so don't have exact keywords, but it's all bottom of the funnel, right? People searching for very specific problem related software. To give you an example, healthcare businesses searching for HIPAA compliant texting software, right? So those are the type of keywords that we run.

Nathan Latka

13:09Okay. Yeah, and I don't you know, AHREFs is not always accurate, but according to AHREFs, these are the kinds of ⁓ landing pages you're running traffic to. ⁓ easy texting, Nextiva, et cetera. Does this look right?

Anmol Oberoi

13:30Yeah. That is correct. So it's bottom of the file. ⁓ We sort of categorize it into three, right? Brand, competition, and category. This is competition, which you're seeing, then categories like HIPAA compliant text.

Nathan Latka

13:45I see. And then a lot of your a lot of your ⁓ traffic today is obviously going directly here through your blog. And one of your top blog posts is driving the majority of your website traffic is Athena login for providers. But this doesn't seem like it would drive you real customers. Is that sort of bad traffic for you?

Anmol Oberoi

14:00It wouldn't be bad traffic. It's an experiment. ⁓ We know that this is our audience. Athena has an EMR in healthcare space, right? What we're trying to do is we're trying to see if we can get these people at the top of the funnel to start to know about us. And if we make a call because they've heard of us or there's a brand recall, there's a chance that they might be willing to come on a demo.

Nathan Latka

14:21Interesting. Interesting. Very cool. Okay, very cool. So to sum r round out the story here, ⁓ first line of code twenty nineteen, you're now at three point six million of ARR. You said you've raised three point nine. I only got the pre seed in twenty twenty. When were the other rounds and how much were they for?

Anmol Oberoi

14:38So there was a round of pre-seed, the one that you see in 2020, I'm assuming that's, are you seeing a $3.5 million or?

Nathan Latka

14:46No, no, yeah. No, you tell me, how much was your precede in twenty twenty?

Team Size, Engineers, and Remote Structure

Anmol Oberoi

14:49So we raised two rounds, one of about 495k and then one round of about $3.4 million. So the $3.4 million was early 2022.

Nathan Latka

14:59Okay, got it. So ⁓ three point four million like seed round in twenty twenty two. That was the heyday. Everyone was getting crazy valuations. Did you raise at a crazy valuation?

Anmol Oberoi

15:10⁓ It wasn't a crazy valuation. wish but I wish it was but like I'm glad I'd not raise that crazy valuation

Nathan Latka

15:18Are you comfortable sharing? Was it like a four X multiple, a 10X multiple, a 30X multiple on ARR?

Anmol Oberoi

15:24Nathan, I wish I could share but unfortunately I'm not allowed to share as per the terms.

Nathan Latka

15:28Okay. Are you we don't know your revenue that year though. So if you gave it as a multiplier, we wouldn't actually know the dollar valuation. Are you comfortable sharing like a range of the multiple, like ten X to thirty X kind of thing?

Anmol Oberoi

15:39⁓ Yeah, at that point in time, yes, it was about 30x.

Nathan Latka

15:44Thirty. Okay. I would say that I would say that's pretty high up. Maybe not crazy, but it's still up there.

Anmol Oberoi

15:50It's still up there, but we've sort of lived up to it and gone way past that, right? If you see from a revenue standpoint, if you look at the valuation, now it's much, much less.

Seed Round Valuation and Fundraising History

Nathan Latka

15:59Yeah. Just to be clear though, ⁓ so if you if you're doing half a million bucks of revenue in twenty twenty, right, times a thirty X multiple, that's like a fifteen million valuation. Today you're at three point six million. So you've got to get above a five X multiple to sort of be in the money. Have you experimented? Like are you planning to raise another round or potentially exit the business?

Anmol Oberoi

16:16No, none of those. mean, if we end up raising, if we're not proactively looking to raise, ⁓ yes, if we end up raising, ⁓ we should easily get more than a 5x, but we're not looking to exit the business.

Nathan Latka

16:29D ⁓ are you default alive, meaning you're profitable today?

Anmol Oberoi

16:33Yeah, we're just about reaching profitability.

Nathan Latka

16:36Okay, so close to break even, which is great. Okay, tell let's wrap up here talking about your future product roadmap here. Everyone is trying to b build vertical AI technologies, right? So what kinds of things are you building and what would we expect your website to look like in a a year from now?

Anmol Oberoi

16:50Yeah, that's a good question because our website does not depict what we do in health care. ⁓ But maybe to tell you instead of getting into specifics, ⁓ there are three parts to a health care office. There's front desk, there's front office, middle office, back office. Today, we are very heavy on front office operations with and without AI and a little bit of middle office. The way we are thinking about the product is that we'll go from front right through to back office. and automate as much as possible with or without AI. So that's how we think about ⁓ going more vertical.

Profitability and Future Roadmap

Nathan Latka

17:26Why isn't your website like using language and showing visuals that are deep in healthcare? Like right now, if I landed, I would think it's like a generic testing tool, which means I'm less likely to convert if I'm in healthcare, which is your target audience.

Anmol Oberoi

17:39Right. Yeah, that's a good question, which is why I said that it's a good question that what a website would look in a year. But there's no excuse to it. It's just priorities. You end up prioritizing revenue over everything else.

Nathan Latka

17:51Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. How many ⁓ folks are full time today?

Anmol Oberoi

17:5445.

Nathan Latka

17:56And and how many are engineers?

Anmol Oberoi

17:5818.

Nathan Latka

18:00eighteen. Have you done I mean, do you are the are they all based in San Francisco with you? Are they global? Are you guys remote?

Anmol Oberoi

18:06We are fully remote. Some of us are here, and most of it is internationally in India.

Nathan Latka

18:12I see. Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore, which one? That's I've heard great things about all those, all those areas in in India. Okay, so eighteen engineers. ⁓ how much are on marketing and sales?

Anmol Oberoi

18:15All of them. We are fully remote in India. I think marketing is about eight to nine folks. Sales, including SDR, is about 10 people. And then there's support, recruitment. Those are the other functions.

Nathan Latka

18:35What are the nine people on marketing doing? That's a big chunk of your team. Is it like SEO work, paid ads?

Anmol Oberoi

18:40SEO, paid ads, we're launching new initiatives. The nine became, so the 45 is a very recent thing. Up until three months back, we were just about 36, 37 folks.

Nathan Latka

18:50Mm. Mm-hmm. Interesting. Interesting. Well, this is a heck of a heck of a story here. Anything you want to make sure we cover before we wrap?

Six Months of Runway and Board Confrontation

Anmol Oberoi

18:58I think I tell everybody that one thing that stands out to me and sort of always keeps me going is at one point in time after raising capital, because all investors told us that, if you want to raise your next round, you've got to go crazy. You need to add $500,000 in five months, which is what we said, OK, we will do. And we added much more. And at one point in time, I call it bad decisions. So at one point in time, due to that, We were just at six months worth of money left in the bank. Today we are at break even. And I know that if we could sort of overcome that, then I know that we will get to $50, $100 million also.

Nathan Latka

19:40How did it feel as you were watching a bank account go down eventually to just six months of runway?

Anmol Oberoi

19:46You know, I'm the kind of guy, and so I was of course worried, but you know, I'm the kind of guy who at one point in time says that, like, okay, I'll stop worrying and stop caring. Now I took a plan to my board saying that, Hey, we have six months worth of money. I'm going to spend all of this and grow faster and, you know, see if we can raise another round. And at this point in time, this is 2020 post-2022 when things were slowing down. The board told me we're not approving this because you're putting the company through the ground. And I said, but you asked me to grow the company super fast. I'm going to double down more and grow faster. Right. So, so that's sort of the approach that I took to the board. And then everybody said, no, we have to pull back and sort of figure out ways. So, so yeah, it feels good to sort of have controlled everything else.

Nathan Latka

20:31Are you a poker are you a poker player?

Anmol Oberoi

20:34I'm not, but I wish I do want to learn how to play because that's how I sort of operate my life.

Nathan Latka

20:39Yeah, high risk tolerance. If you're dealt, if you're dealt, you know, six nine off suit, you're shoving all in pre flop. That's the equivalent of growing faster with six months of runaway left. Risk it all. That's awesome, and well. Well, listen, I appreciate you coming on. If people want to learn more about you online, where can they find you?

Anmol Oberoi

20:49Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think LinkedIn is the best place. I tend to write a lot on LinkedIn. So LinkedIn is the best place.

Nathan Latka

21:01All right, guys, there we have it. Admole launched first line of code in 2019, pre-seed of 495,000 in 2020, and then launched and pivoted really in 2021, getting his first customer on a new AI voice tool. This was a $32,000 customer back then. Ultimately rode that wave into a $3.4 million seed round in 2022 at a healthy 30x multiple and then used that money to break a million bucks of ARR in 2023, 1.7 million ARR in 2024. $3 million in December 2025. And now today, as of recording here in July of 2026, over a thousand customers did $300,000 of MRR last month. They've got $1.2 million in the bank and they're break approaching profitability. So they're default alive, which we love with the team of 45. They're going deep on AI tools for healthcare and health tech in general. We'll see what it looks like in a year. And Mul, thank you for taking us to the top.

Anmol Oberoi

21:52Thanks a lot Nathan, it was good talking to you.

Nathan Latka

21:55All right, guys, cut. And Maul, what'd you think, man? You have fun?

Anmol Oberoi

21:58Yep, absolutely. enjoyed all your questions. And I like the fact that you checked immediately online and you asked me questions, which most ⁓ hosts won't ask me, right? That, hey, why is your website not in line with healthcare? So I enjoyed my conversation.

Nathan Latka

22:11I I do people don't realize they go, Nathan, why do you do this show? And I go, Because I get to learn every day. I get to just be curious and ask founders how they're doing it and why they're doing it. ⁓ so I learned a bunch and it was great to have you on.

Anmol Oberoi

22:23Yep, absolutely. Thanks a lot for giving me the opportunity.

Nathan Latka

22:26You bet I'm actually I'll be in San Francisco next week. I'm gonna do a little founder dinner. If you're around, I'd love to get you an invite.

Anmol Oberoi

22:31⁓ As of right now, I'm in Vancouver. So I shuffle between Vancouver and San Francisco. My wife works in Vancouver, so I've come here. in September, yep, absolutely. Would love to join. Likewise, thank you.

Nathan Latka

22:40okay. Next time. All right, animal. Good to meet ya. See ya. Bye.