How Kovai Scaled to $10M ARR as a Bootstrapped Multiproduct SaaS Company (Interview with CEO Saravana Kumar)

Introduction and Company Overview

Saravana Kumar

00:00Good evening, everybody. It's always a difficult session after lunch. I hope Dan Martel and James has warmed you up to for the for this session. So I think, you know, like when Nathan Latka asked me about doing a doing a session on SaaS Open, like, you know, you looked at multiple options like a growth hacks and SaaS metrics and this and that, And there's enough content now on the market to learn all those things. So I

00:30thought, you know, what can I share from my personal experience? Like, we've been in the business for over ten years, so I learned quite a lot in terms of how to scale the business from zero to 10,000,000 plus. And I just thought I'll just share more of my experiences building and scaling this business. So my name is Saravana Kumar, and I'm a Founder of a company called kovai.co. So this is a quick, very high level recap

00:59of the company. So the company was started back in 2011. I just, you know, I was doing consulting for ten plus years, and I found a gap in the market, and I started as a solo founder and then slowly scaled it to first from one employee to five employees to 20 employees, 50, and then now today we are about two fifty plus people in the organization.

Revenue and Growth Trajectory

Saravana Kumar

01:27So we are over $10,000,000 ARR, but that's slightly old number. So it's a 2020, 2021 number. So we are about that's a publicly disclosed data. So we're also a multiproduct company like that's I'm going to touch base on like why we are a multiproduct company and what made those decisions to go into a multiproduct company. And the mission for us is when people ask you like you are bootstrapped, what are you trying to achieve and the

01:57objective for us is to build a $100,000,000 run rate business by 2030 like sooner if possible. So just want to go one slide forward. So this is a kind of the growth trajectory like how we have grown since 2011. So it's not like a hockey stick growth, but it's organic growth of constant predictable growth over the last ten years. So until 2019, it was like a steady growth, and that is when we kind of made a

Shift to a VC-Style Growth Model Since 2019

Saravana Kumar

02:33decision like what can we do to scale bigger. A lot of things changed since 2019. Until 2019, we were only like a 50 people organization. If you wanted to put the number per head count, number per employee, it would have significantly higher when you compare 2019 data. But today, we operate more like VC funded business model. So we invest pretty much everything and then we are ramping up everything towards growth. So let me go back. Okay.

03:04So today,

03:07my talk is going to be like more on the personal level, like as a CEO, like being grown up this company for ten years, like what are the things you have learned? And you know like I just bucketed it into three different items. Things you know like at a personal level, as an individual what are the things I do and of course as a team like with my direct reports and how do I handle them and

Personal Productivity: Calendar and Time Management

Saravana Kumar

03:30what are the things I practice on a day to day basis and at a company level, what are the things we do. So let me start with personal thing. I think one of the key things as you grow as a CEO is when you have like two fifty people, like one thing that becomes super critical is how do you manage your time. So in my case, I try to keep it as simple as possible and my

03:58calendar is pretty much free. I keep everything in like a 1.1 if you this is how my calendar looks, this is a typical week. My entire week is the first one point five days. Know like I got the management meetings on the day one and then some items on the day Tuesday and after that you know like it's all about just ongoing activities and you keep it try to try to keep it as free as possible.

Morning Routine and Deep Work Habits

Saravana Kumar

04:31So I think that the other important thing is you know like what I learned is everybody got an optimal time right. I'm a typical like early morning person so I wake up at 04:30 in the morning and then first three hours is a completely kind of an I brought it more like a non negotiable. So I do only like a really high performing activities like you don't check your emails, you don't check your Slack or Teams

04:55or whatever you are using. That time is purely like you do things what you wanted to accomplish on that day. So a lot of times what happens is within that three hours, by 07:30 in the morning, my day is pretty much over. You accomplished what you wanted to do on that day because after that, once you reach the office around 09:00, you really can't control too much on how your day progresses. So this is something the

05:21habit I build up right from the day one because the initial days, since it's a bootstrap company and you know the initial days I built the product myself and I was working for Fidelity Investment. Some of you from US know the company. So my day is like in the morning I build a product, I go to work, and that continued for a year and that became more like a habit. And the second day,

05:48your work and don't try to do things you don't like. This is kind of counterintuitive, but, you know, like, when you are at the early stages as a founder, like, you tend to imitate people. Right? Like, you tend to you see somebody who's super active on social media and you try to try to be that person. You know, you are, you know, like, you you see somebody very good in in speaking in conferences. But, you know,

06:12like, we need to understand, like, not everybody is same. Right? You have you have your strengths and you have your weaknesses. Don't try to do things which you are not comfortable with. For example, you know, I stopped tweeting, like, five years ago. I don't do I don't get into Twitter anymore, like because it's not my cup of tea. And same talking in conferences, not for everybody, but if you see like somebody is doing and you try

Delegating and Focusing on Quality Over Quantity

Saravana Kumar

06:34to do it, the problem is when you're trying to do something which is not your regular, where your core strength is, it tend to take five to 10 times more of your energy and you might be losing more. You'd rather like do things which you are good at.

06:52And the third point is, you know, like actively working on things, you know, you need to stop working on things on taking tasks. What I mean by that is, you know, like you should your thinking should always be if something comes along, it should be more of who can I delegate to rather than how am I going to do it? So once you touch something, at that scale when you have like 200 plus people, once you

07:18start doing things of your own, it's not the most efficient way you can operate because it won't stop just at that level. You do something and then the follow-up comes and it goes on and on. Always think about how you delegate it and how can you pass it on to people when you have a lot of people on board. And the final point is you tend to do at scale, you tend to do quality is more

07:47important than quantity. If you can achieve like two or three really good items in a given week, that's a much more productive week than firefighting with a lot of things throughout the week. There's a difference between being busy and being productive, right? You want to be more productive rather than being busy. If you keep engaging too much on your emails and too much on Teams and at the end of the day, you will feel like and

08:11also meetings is another killer. You do a lot of things, at the end of the day, you'll feel like you're too busy, but probably you don't have achieved anything. So you'd rather focus more on being productive and doing things which will yield you the right things. When it comes to team, the next I'm going to move, whatever I explained so far is more on the personal level and the next thing is more on how do you

Managing Teams and Difficult Conversations

Saravana Kumar

08:38manage their teams. And the first very important thing I want to convey is, as a founder, there will always be difficult conversations, right? Either your key resource is leaving or somebody is not performing well or the team, a specific team is not performing at max.

08:59Whenever this is a difficult situation comes in, it's better to engage and try to solve the problem as soon as possible but the normal tendency is you tend to not to talk about it. You won't give the feedback what's required for the person to perform at a higher level. That only hurts that person and also the problem won't magically go away. It's going to come back and hurt you, it's better to avoid it. And the second

09:25thing when it comes to the team is you're more like a driving instructor or you can take any analogy where you are like a coach. Your objective is to make that person as productive as possible and as soon as possible because the tendency otherwise is you try to jump on and keep doing things again and again and eventually you can't come out of that loop, but rather you invest

Building Hierarchy and Coaching Direct Reports

Saravana Kumar

09:52your time, you make sure you can train that person, you can come out of it and that's the only way you can scale it over a long period of time. And don't build a flat structure because what typically happens is when you're in the early stages, like 10 people, 20 people, etc, you try to build a flat structure. Everybody reports to you and it's fine, but once you start scaling, once you reach 25, 5,100 people, that

10:19is not going to help you. You'll have more reporting lines and you sometimes even struggle with you got two people, you need to promote one person which you can't do it, you keep promoting all of them at the same level and it's not going to go away. So you try to just to build a don't build a flat structure and try to build a hierarchy as quickly as possible. And also like in terms of direct reports

10:48you need to try to keep it at a reasonable level six to seven is ideal number. Anything above that it's not manageable because you need to invest your time on them. It's not just lot

11:04of investment to build a team, so you try to keep that to a minimal level as much as possible. So this is a sample chart like we try to do that at every level so that you you try to build up the hierarchy as soon as possible. And at the company level, like some of the things I wanted to share at the company level, So why we are a multi product company? There are a few reasons

Why Kovai Became a Multiproduct Company

Saravana Kumar

11:31why we are a multi product company. So we were a single product for like five, six years and I'm coming more from a technical background like I spent a lot of time building the initial team. I invested my time and we had really got a hardcore team we built up in the five, six years time. And being an engineer, at some point they're going to get bored, right? Because only so much you can do in a

11:56product after some time. Otherwise, you'll be like all the core parts are over and it's more like you're building things, patching here and there and rewriting some stuff. So nothing exciting for the team. Know that's one reason why we thought we'll go to multi product because we assemble the team and then we start building new products because we know the strength of the team and they were able to do it. The second thing is you like

12:20you also need to understand your strengths and weaknesses. We are predominantly the team is based out of India. We got a team headquartered in UK. We have about 10 people in London but the remaining two forty to two fifty people are based out of India. So you need to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the team. It's harder to build a single product $100,000,000 business then it's fairly comparatively easy to build like a 20,000,030 million dollar

12:49businesses. That is also another reason why we went into multi product. We also have playbooks of scaling building products at that level, that gives a kind of it's one of the reasons why we went into multi product and

13:07into the company. And the second is frugality mindset like one of the examples I want to give you is still I approve lot of invoices. Okay, there are like it goes through workflow, the people put through everything but the final approval, the money that going out of the bank is actually like I control it. I won't control it in the sense like I have visibility. It's very important to have visibility like that keeps you you know

Frugality Mindset and Invoice Approval

Saravana Kumar

13:33like having

13:36a transparency of you know like knowing how much money is going where. It helps you to be in a be frugal and understanding. So recently I watched a master class from Richard Branson and he mentions exactly the same thing. Like he used to maintain that approving invoices, he recommends to keep it as long as possible. And the executive reporting is another big challenge, right? Like how do you know what your team are doing? You need to

Executive Reporting: The Two-Page Monthly Document

Saravana Kumar

14:05get some level of reporting. We tried various formats over the years and what's working great at the moment is at the beginning of each month, following month, our executive team need to give a document. It's two page document. It's precisely they need to cover it within two two or four pages. The first page is all about their personal achievements and what did they do that month. It's more about I rather than a V because when you

14:32have an executive team and when you have like thirty, forty people reporting to them it's easy to come and say like they did this, they did that and it's all more of a team update. So it's important that your executive team understands where they are spending their time and also it's good I personally write my own executive report, I tell the entire team what did I do last month, these are the bunch of activities I did,

14:58that helps understand everybody. So the executive reporting is basically a two page document. The first page is all about the personal thing and the second page is all about what did they achieve as a team and that helps significantly. And the final point I want to convey is risk register. I don't know like how many of you are aware of a risk register. As a company there'll always be bunch of risk dependency risk, right? Like being

Risk Register and Mitigating Business Dependencies

Saravana Kumar

15:21a Founder, there are always some five or 10 items that depend on you, without you it will fail. It's good to maintain a register so that at least the team knows what are the dependencies and if something happens what could be done. For example, the SVB case is a really good example. Like five, six years ago, we used to have banking in a single bank, which is registered on a risk register, because it's a big risk,

15:50and you start listing all those items what you think as a risk in your business and you try to address it over a period of time. So it's impossible to eliminate all the risk, but at least you know you can minimize and mitigate your risk if you document it correctly. So this is just a slide showing that the executive reporting, the personal level and then the team level. So just covered as I said, just covered as

16:19a CEO like how your days or weeks are structured, what do you do on a personal level, what do you do at the team level and what do you do at the company level. So these are our products. So we got four products in our company. So the first product, Wistow three sixty, is very specific. I don't think it will be appropriate for this audience, it's more of an enterprise integration space and the second product, Serverless

Product Portfolio Overview

Saravana Kumar

16:43three sixty, is more of a management monitoring tool for Microsoft Azure And Document three sixty Churn three sixty are the two products where we are focusing on. Document three sixty is a self-service knowledge base. You can think of like if you're taking a Stripe as an example, right, is for Stripe to have a old class documentation is very critical and they might be having 50 to 100 people working on that platform to produce a documentation. And

17:09with Document three sixty, we provide the platform so you don't need to focus on the platform itself and rather you can focus on content. So for example, AppTable, a lot of you know, like their documentation is running on Document three sixty because they have twenty, thirty people writing documentation and their challenges are completely different, right? So they need a workflow, they need to have some kind of

17:35a lot of analytics to understand how their platform is performing and also at millions of hits per day kind of a scalability. And Churn three sixty is a customer success product. Today everybody we are on subscription business, retention and churn are the two important things and we got a product which covers this part. I think that's all I have for today. I hope some of the tips I shared could be useful for you. Thank you. Thank

18:03you very much.