How Reviewia Reached $3K Revenue and 5 Paying Customers in 2023 (Interview with CEO Arijit Bose)

Intro and Company Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Guys, reviewiareviewia.com is a site for candidates to leave feedback on the interviews they've done at companies. He's hoping if he builds enough reviews, the companies will then come on and pay a b two b fee. He's got five of them paying $50 a month right now, so $250 a month in revenue as they scale this. 950 total reviews on the site. He pays the bills right now with a consulting business. So this is this beautiful agency

00:21plus SaaS model that we like, and we see it a lot. We'll see what Arijit does next. Hey, folks. My guest today is Arijit Bose. He is a serial entrepreneur in the HR and HR tech space with nine years of experience running startups, a total of nineteen years professional experience with his first ten years in transformation, business consulting, and business development roles. Now he's building reviewia.co, a candidate experience in recruitment analytics SaaS. Arijit, you ready to

What Customers Pay For: Candidate Experience

Nathan Latka

00:44take us to the top? Yep. Alright. This is a tough space. Tell me what customers are paying you for. Give me a customer case study.

Arijit Bose

00:52>> So candidate experience is kind of an area which is untapped. Until now, you know, the way we are going to market, nobody has gone to market like that when it comes to giving insights into what causes a bad candidate experience and how big a problem that is. It is kind of a problem which has been under the carpet for a long time. And now basically we are giving the platform to candidates at one end to voice

01:19>> their concerns, to voice their experience, and translating it into a very useful manner for employers to get some actionable insights into what would it take for them to improve their candidate experience, and for that matter, improve some of the key recruitment metrics because candidates

Nathan Latka

01:37And so, Arijit, what are customers paying on average to use this technology per month?

Pricing and Customer Count

Arijit Bose

01:40>> On an average? Okay. So that's about $600 annual subscription as of now.

Nathan Latka

01:46Annual subscription. Okay. And about how many customers do you have today?

Arijit Bose

01:50>> We in total, on the b to b side, we have 20 customers out of which five are paying customers. So we have some customers on trial as well.

Nathan Latka

01:58So five customers paying $50 a month or 600 a year. That means you're doing about, what is it? $250 per month right now in revenue?

Arijit Bose

02:05>> That is correct.

Nathan Latka

02:06And where were you exactly one year ago? Zero?

Revenue History and First Customer Timeline

Arijit Bose

02:09>> We were zero. Yeah. In fact, we started making revenues about six months back.

Nathan Latka

02:13Interesting. Okay. So you launched your pricing. It sounds like your first customer in sometime in January or February 2023.

Arijit Bose

02:20>> Actually, a little earlier, about November is

02:22when we

02:23>> launched, and then it had a cycle, of course.

Nathan Latka

02:25How long were you writing code and building a platform before your first customer? How many months?

Arijit Bose

02:30>> So we have a b to b side as well. You know, we got the MVP going about two years back, and we collected more and more reviews from the candidates. And once we had some initial data points going is when we went to market on the employer side to offer them these insights.

Nathan Latka

02:49Okay. So in twenty twenty twenty one, you launch a a review site, a candidate collection review, like Glassdoor almost. Right? Correct. Correct. And what's that website?

Arijit Bose

02:58>> Like Glassdoor, but that's called reviewia.co. And Glassdoor is focused on employee experience essentially, and we are a a pure candidate experience platform.

Nathan Latka

03:08Okay. Just to be clear, when I go to reviewia.co Yeah.

03:17Search review I mean, search reviews by company. I mean, this is what? Glassdoor. Search reviews by company name.

Arijit Bose

03:22>> Yes. But the reviews are by candidates and not by employees. That's the fundamental difference between Glassdoor and us.

Nathan Latka

03:30I see. I see. Okay. That makes sense. Got it. Okay. Got it. So so you launched this site two years ago. How many reviews have you collected since launch?

Reviews Collected and Growth Challenges

Arijit Bose

03:39>> Close to 950 as of now as we speak.

Nathan Latka

03:43Okay. That's not I mean, that's not enough over two years to have, like, a critical mass. Why don't you have, you know, a million reviews collected?

Arijit Bose

03:49>> See, we are a bootstrapped business. We haven't raised any

Nathan Latka

03:52Yeah. But who cares? Mean, there's plenty of bootstrapped founders that have big numbers.

Arijit Bose

03:56>> Mhmm. We don't as of now because it's a new category. You know, we are a category creator. Adoption, obviously, will take time. And the fact that people don't know enough about reviewia is what is coming in the way of

Nathan Latka

04:09But that's your job is to get them to know about it. Right? How are you getting attention? How are you signing up customers? How are you getting new reviews from candidates?

Arijit Bose

04:16>> So we run, you some contests from time to time. These are small ticket contests across Instagram, across LinkedIn. We also do a lot of organic content building so that our scores on Google actually come up to be high when it comes to relevant searches for reviews, for tools which are relevant for candidate persona. So, yeah, so the growth has been slow because we have limited funds to basically scale at this point

Nathan Latka

04:45in time. Yeah. But Arijit, sorry. I just it drives me crazy when people say we're not bigger because we didn't raise enough money. There are plenty of Bootstrap founders that use their creativity to win. Let me give an example. You're clearly spending a lot of energy optimizing for the keyword resume templates. It's in your footer. You have a whole landing page for it. But when I go search free resume templates in Google, you're choosing a very

05:05competitive keyword where others are just crushing you. I mean, Grammarly, resume.io, resumenerd.com, Canva, Zeti, Indeed. I mean, why go after a keyword that you know is really hard to win? Why not come up with a more creative keyword that you know just your candidates are looking for?

Arijit Bose

05:24>> Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Okay. Yeah. So we have a learning curve, and, you know, I'm I'm happy to get educated. You know, our

Nathan Latka

05:31experience No. No. No. I don't have the answers. I'm asking why you made the decision.

Arijit Bose

05:37>> Resume templates is something which caters to the persona of of users that we want come on our website because, typically, these are people who are looking for jobs. They're interviewing. They would want to know about companies. They want to post reviews. And this is something which will be relevant for them as a tool to kind of get them to visit our website.

Nathan Latka

05:55But how do they find it?

Arijit Bose

05:59>> Yeah. So that's the game. Right? That's the SEO game that we're trying to, you know, find the answers to.

Nathan Latka

06:04Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders. But imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time. Well, we've done this. We've built it into the beautiful interface inside of Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you connect

06:27your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time. You can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna

SEO Strategy and Keyword Choices

Nathan Latka

06:51get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation. Private equity firm is different. If you're gonna do a minority sale, that's different. And if you sell the whole business, that's a different valuation. You can see all those when I hover over here. Right? So the teal is what a VC would pay. Yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright. Now what's cool about this is this is

07:13not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder share with us on the show. So traction, 1,200,000 seed round, 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna see companies that have sold the whole business. Well, here are a bunch that have been acquired, the valuation and the multiple. Maybe you're

07:39going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down, what they raised, what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold. There's never been a larger dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. Alright. We're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second. But if

08:01you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link. This link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. Or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products, click on get your valuation here, and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl. Again, all that valuation data live right inside the platform. I hope to see you there. Alright. Let's jump back into the

08:27interview. But but that's that's where I'm trying to uncover your unique advantage. Do you have some unique advantage where you know how to outrank these bigger competitors?

Arijit Bose

08:37>> Not on the resume templates because that's like a nice to have offering. That's not the core offering of our website. The core offering is candidate experience review. And, you know, again, candidate experience is also a keyword where we are not scoring very high, but eventually we would want to. And that's why we are generating enough content around hiring and candidate on the blog section. So on you know, every week, we post at least one blog to

09:03>> generate sufficient relevant content, which is organic.

Nathan Latka

09:05But how why why do you why have you made the decision that you as a small startup are gonna put out more blog content than Wonderlic, Career Plug, Workable, and Zavvy, and Indeed, and Glassdoor who rank for the words candidate experience review. Aren't you picking a board game that you know from the start you cannot win? I mean, how are you gonna build an army of content writers put out more content than these folks?

Arijit Bose

09:28>> So I don't disagree that we can't win this. You know, while there are bigger players who might be gunning for the keyword, but, you know, the aspect which they don't really deliver on is the b two b side as well. Driving value on the employer side is also one side that we're investing on so that we get more and more employers to drive reviews for their candidates on the platform. So it is just not the organic

09:51>> keyword game, which obviously will take time. And obviously, we we don't have all the answers, like, you know, you know, the questions

Nathan Latka

09:57that What's your most successful attention getting strategy? Is it SEO? And if if so, what is the keyword that brings you the most traffic monthly?

Top Performing Keyword: In Hand Salary Calculator

Arijit Bose

10:07>> Most successful attention getting strategy, one of them is SEO. The relevant keyword which is doing really well is salary calculator in hand salary calculator.

Nathan Latka

10:18Okay. In what?

Arijit Bose

10:20>> In hand salary calculator, which is

Nathan Latka

10:22What is in hand? Paycheck.

Arijit Bose

10:24>> So this is a typical terminology that people use in India. It's basically your take home paycheck post production.

Nathan Latka

10:31Yeah. That see, that's more interesting because, like, I didn't even know that that was a keyword to compete on because I I'm not in your ICP, and I'm not an Indian. I don't even know that in hand salary calculator is a thing. So okay. So that's a keyword that, you know, if you rank well for that, that's gonna be good at attracting your customers. Correct. Correct. So that's Do you do you rank well for it?

Arijit Bose

10:49>> Yes. We were earlier on the first page for this on Google. Right now, we are ranking, I think, lower on the first page or maybe second page, top top two or three searches.

Nathan Latka

11:00Is this your number one customer acquisition strategy?

Arijit Bose

11:04>> No. It is not. The other is to drive, you know, incentivized contests from time to time to drive reviews because at the end of the day, what we want is not just the people to use the tools, but also engage in writing reviews. So we, you know, run focused contents contests at our target audience across LinkedIn, across Instagram, saying that, okay, you have interviewed, why don't you post a review? And we'll do a lucky draw at

11:30>> the end the month. And if you win, we offer you a voucher and stuff like that.

Nathan Latka

11:34I mean, but to to get big in the space or even just to generate profits and, you know, 5,000,000 revenue and a million profits, I mean, you've gotta have you've gotta have in the millions of reviews, not 925 over the past two years. So these contests aren't working at least in the numbers. I mean, would you agree with that statement? And if so, what are you testing?

Arijit Bose

11:51>> Yeah. So as I said, you know, that b two c is one strategy, b two b is the other, which is our monetizing strategy right now. And the customers that we are going after, they're large enterprises who will say, okay, I will come on your platform only when you have 1,000 reviews of my company. So we are targeting young organizations who have a struggle in attracting right kind of talent. They don't know how to build credibility.

B2B vs B2C Strategy and Monetization

Arijit Bose

12:14>> So we are saying, hey, come on our platform, use our platform to understand what your candidates are saying about you. So it's like the push that they give to their candidates to put in a review. Use that, in the form of analytics and insights and ensure because you're a founder, you're nimble, you know, you can nip it in the bud when there are issues which show up. It gives you greater credibility. Okay. And you get clear

12:36>> visibility of how you're doing as an employer when it comes to your recruitment processes. So that's the SaaS solution that we're selling right now. We've gone to market in the last six months, and that's the revenue generating channel or offering for us as of now.

Nathan Latka

12:51So total revenue though, again, monthly right now is about $203,100 bucks a month. Is that right? Yes. And what's the team size today? How many folks full time?

Arijit Bose

12:59>> It's just me and my business partner, which is also my wife.

Nathan Latka

13:03Ah, who owns more equity? You or her?

Arijit Bose

13:06>> Doesn't matter what is on paper. She's always gonna own more. Right?

Nathan Latka

13:10Ah, very good. Smart. You must I bet you've been married a long time.

Arijit Bose

13:14>> Yes. Yes. So we we've been married for thirteen years. We've been dating five years before that. So eighteen years of partnership.

Nathan Latka

13:21There you go, folks. The secret to life. If you're a founder listening, you wanna stay married a long time, there you go. Spouse always is in control even if they own 1% less equity. That's how it works. Alright. Now you've bootstrapped, Arijit. Right? Okay. Very good. Any plans to raise or you wanna stay bootstrapping?

Team Size and Founding Partnership

Arijit Bose

13:36>> No. We are planning to raise now because what we've realized is we need some funds to basically, you know, generate more and more awareness on the b two c side, and we don't look to monetize it anytime soon. So there will be, you know, investments required.

Nathan Latka

13:52How are you supporting yourself right now? I mean, $250 a month for the past two years is not enough for you guys to put food on the table.

Bootstrapping and Consulting Business as Runway

Arijit Bose

13:57>> Absolutely not. So we run so the the reason we've kind of built this is because we've been in this business for nine years, and we run a consulting firm in the recruitment space, which kind of pays the bills and also is paying for this business as of now.

Nathan Latka

14:12I see. I see. Don't you have to kill the consulting business, but you have to make the software work?

Arijit Bose

14:18>> We don't really think that is important because, you know, what it allows us to do is it allows us to remain close to the candidate as well as the customer. So I think there's a lot of business context which is required, which is missing a lot of product entrepreneurs. So I don't think necessarily that's what it is. But yeah, obviously, once it kind of becomes more, you know, revenue generating, etcetera, then we gradually, you know, plan

14:43>> to transition more and more on this and then figure out ways to kind of, you know, manage the other business.

Nathan Latka

14:49Makes sense. Arijit, we're out of time. Let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite book?

Plans to Raise Funding

Arijit Bose

14:56>> Favorite book would be Atomic Habits.

Nathan Latka

14:58Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Arijit Bose

15:03>> I love Reed Hastings.

Nathan Latka

15:05Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building reviewia?

Arijit Bose

15:12>> I haven't built it, basically. I got it built by a friend.

Famous Five: Books, CEOs, and Habits

Nathan Latka

15:16Which is a tool that you use a lot. An online tool you use a lot as a CEO. Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?

Arijit Bose

15:24>> Eight hours.

Nathan Latka

15:25And we know you're married. Any kids?

Arijit Bose

15:27>> Yes. One daughter who's nine.

Nathan Latka

15:30That's great. Okay. And what's your how old are you?

Arijit Bose

15:33>> I'm about to turn 42 on the twenty seventh of this month.

Nathan Latka

15:37Happy early birthday.

15:38>> Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Arijit Bose

15:43>> That it's okay to make mistakes and learn from them. That's the only way to learn fast.

Nathan Latka

15:48Guys, reviewiareviewia.com is a site for candidates to leave feedback on the interviews they've done at companies. He's hoping if he builds enough reviews, the companies will then come on and pay a b to b fee. He's got five of them paying $50 a month right now, so $250 a month in revenue as they scale this. 950 total reviews on the site. He pays the bills right now with a consulting business. So this is this beautiful agency

16:10plus SaaS model that we like and we see it a lot. We'll see what Arijit does next. Arijit, thanks for taking us to the top.

Arijit Bose

16:16>> Thank you so much. Appreciate this airtime with you, Nathan.

Nathan Latka

16:19One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. We call it deal or bust. One founder comes on, three hungry buyers, they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards, their expenses, their revenue, ARPU, CAC, LTV, you name it, they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live. It is fun to watch every Thursday 1PM

16:44Central. Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM Central. Make sure you don't miss any of that, make sure you click the subscribe button below here on YouTube, the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live. I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a big fundraise,

17:07a big sale, a big profitability statement or something else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if you want to take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS founders. You want to get in there. We've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing. You can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying. Sign up

17:28for that at nathanlatka.com slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, but I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people.

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