SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
$10m revenue founder uses debt to get leverage in $22m Series B for help desk software
20 Jun 2022
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
okay do you think you can cross that this year 850 000 a month by december yeah yeah we should be You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, CAC, valuation, or other metrics, the easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool. It's like a big Excel sheet for all of these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. Hey folks, my guest today is Nitesh Nandy.
Chapter 2: What is Hybra and how does it serve its customers?
He's the CTO and co-founder of Hybra, a help desk built for Google Workspace. He has been driving the project and knowledge division at Hybra and has scaled the platform right from the first customer to thousands of customers who use the product now today. He's passionate about building products which are used and loved by people globally. Nitesh, are you ready to take us to the top?
Yes, let's get started.
All right, so tell me a little bit about Hiver. So when you say help desk for Google Workspace, maybe give an example of how a customer is using you today.
We have close to 1,700 businesses globally using the product.
And give me an example of one of them. How do they use you?
Typically, customer support teams would say there is a travel vacation rental company and they would be servicing their customers through an email channel where the customers write to them and they need to respond and resolve their queries. So, Hiver lets them set up that shared mailbox where they can
write to and they can respond to the customers and resolve their queries like a typical ticket management but built right out of gmail do you when i when i open up a hybrid on google workspace marketplace i see you've got 70 reviews you have over 270 000 downloads is this your main distribution channel
There are two distribution channels. We have the Google Marketplace as one of the channels. The other channel is a ProMap store. You can install Hiver as a browser extension and then proceed and use the product from there.
And how many signups are you getting per month from these two sources?
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Chapter 3: What are the main distribution channels for Hybra?
But yeah, primary focus is Google Ads for us.
And so how much do you have to spend to get a lead from Google?
We spend close to around $1,600 to get a customer from Google.
Okay, and is that just on Google Ads?
That is on Google Ads, right.
Okay, so regular Google Ads on Google Ads, and you spend $1,600 to get a $500 a month customer.
Yes.
Okay, so that's obviously good payback, right? That's a three month payback. Any other strategies you plan to use besides Google Ads?
We go heavy on content. So you would see that we produce a lot of content. We do a lot of blog posts, guest posting. That is also part of the strategy. A lot of organic traffic also comes in through all the blogs and the guest posting that we do.
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Chapter 4: How does Hybra ensure customer onboarding success?
He gave a great episode. He said back then you guys were just breaking, this is 2018, about a $1.5 million sort of run rate. If I look at your numbers today, 1,700 customers, we already talked about this, 800-ish thousand a month. I mean, it sounds like you guys can break sort of 10 million run rate this year.
When you go out and raise $22 million, you raise it from K1, which is a private equity firm. They're known for being pretty founder-friendly, meaning if you guys wanted to take secondary, you could. Did you guys take any secondary?
No, we didn't.
So all the $22 million went on the balance sheet.
Yeah, more or less.
Why did you make that decision? Why not try and ask for a secondary and get early liquidity for you and some early employees?
We had a very small secondary, but because the number was so small, it's literally negligible. So we wanted all the capital to go into the company.
And that was the primary. You mean like under a million dollars?
Yeah, that is true.
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Chapter 5: What pricing strategies does Hybra use for its services?
And why did that feel fair to you at the time? Obviously, today, markets are crashing, right? Public stocks are crashing, everything's crashing. So you closed at the perfect time.
See, one of the reasons why we liked talking to K1 and we thought they would add a lot of value when they come on board And especially the markets we were operating in, particularly we are based out of India, the complete team. So we thought that was a fair valuation and the type of team we are bringing on board, that that would be very helpful to help the business propel forward.
Yep. And how many folks today are on the team full-time?
We have close to around 120 folks at this point of time.
120, wow. And how many engineers?
Close to 45.
Now, Nitesh, have you been able to hire all those engineers in India?
More or less. We have a couple of folks who work from outside India, but most of them are from India.
Which city? Bangalore, Chennai, Brunei?
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