SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1218 This Browser Notification Company Just Hit 400 Customers, $600k ARR
24 Nov 2018
Chapter 1: What is the browser notification system and how does it work?
subscription is the way forward.
Chapter 2: How did the company achieve $54,000 per month in revenue?
He's doing $54,000 per month in pure play SaaS revenue from 400 customers paying north of a hundred bucks per month for his browser notification system that he's created. They got a team of 32 people based mostly in India economics, negative 3% net negative monthly revenue churn, which is obviously super healthy lifetime value north of 13 months and $3,000 payback period, less than nine months.
Chapter 3: What is the customer base size and pricing model for the service?
They're growing quickly and he's doing it bootstrapped, which I love. This is the Top Entrepreneurs Podcast, where founders share how they started their companies and got filthy rich or crash and burn. Each episode features revenue numbers, customer counts, and other insider information that creates business news headlines. We went from a couple hundred thousand dollars to 2.7 million.
I had no money when I started the company.
Chapter 4: When was the company launched and what is its backstory?
It was $160 million, which is the size of many IPOs. We're a bit strapped. We have like 22,000 customers. With over 5 million downloads in a very short amount of time, major outlets like Inc.
Chapter 5: What previous experience does the founder have in the telecom sector?
are calling us the fastest growing business show on iTunes. I'm your host, Nathan Latka, and here's today's episode. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Vivek Kendalwal. He is a two-time founder with experience of building MarTech products. He's got experience of working across telecom, education, and MarTech, building products that have touched over 100 million users.
He's passionate about how mobile and web are shaping the future. And on the sidelines, he loves cycling and catching up with his favorite podcasts. Vivek, are you ready to take us to the top? Sure. All right. Good. Tell us about your current company, Datability, and you've got a product, I believe. Let's jump into that. What do you guys do and how do you make money?
Chapter 6: How is customer churn managed in the subscription model?
All right. We run a product called Izuto, which is a browser notification platform for retailers and publishers. Classic SaaS product where retailers use Izuto to push notifications to their users for retargeting, engagement, retention, right? And they pay us on a monthly basis for usage.
And so like on average, what's the customer paying you per month, would you say?
Our typical customer or retailer would be paying us anywhere between $150 to $200 as of now.
Okay. And what controls how much money they're paying you? Is it number of notifications sent, number of website hits? What is it?
Right. So our pricing is based on their growth metric, which is the number of subscribers who have opted in to receive notifications. Yeah.
Okay.
Okay. And are these the things when you go to like a retailer site, it'll have a little pop up across the top that says, Hey, like allow us to ping you when a new product comes out or something like that.
Yeah.
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Chapter 7: What strategies are used for customer acquisition and growth?
Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Absolutely. Yes.
Okay, great. So, so again, these customers paying anywhere between 150 and 200 bucks a month and they're paying based on how many subscribers opt in. Give me more of the backstory here. So when did you launch the company?
We started off almost two years, two months back. We started in March 16. Okay, 2016. A year and two months, two years, two months, yeah.
And you have a history kind of in working across many different product lines. Give me a sense of what the products were that you said you drove over 100 million users on and why jump directly into MarTech?
So prior to this, we used to work on products which were dealing with telecom operators. We used to work with almost all the leading operators in India, which includes Vodafone, Airtel, and so on and so forth.
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Chapter 8: What is the expected lifetime value of customers for this service?
We are building mobile products which are delivered over either SMS, USSD, voice, or mobile web. We go as back as 2010-11 right now.
uh we built a company for almost about six years uh seven years in fact right uh we had built solutions around ed around edtech uh and then we had done we had basically uh fled the same platform and turned into an ad tech platform as well right uh there we sort of i mean because we worked with almost all the large operators in india we covered close to about at a point that we were covering almost about
350 odd million users across all the operators.
Yeah, but what does that mean? I don't understand. So you worked all these platforms. What were you delivering for them?
We were helping these operators monetize their subscriber base. Yeah. So all the operators enjoy access to a certain amount of inventory across their user base. And this inventory exists in multiple formats. This inventory exists on voice calls, on SMS, on USSD. We were helping operators, these operators, monetize this inventory using our platform.
You mean like literally someone in India would open up their messages that people have texted them and one of the messages would be an advertisement that you monetized for the network?
Yes. For instance, you made a phone call to a friend. You got the call. You got a balance alert or SMS. And that balance alert was then appended with a small text ad. What do you mean a balance alert? Sorry, your prepaid balance, your mobile top-up time.
So I'm calling you in India. You're one of my friends. In the middle of a phone call, I get an ad? Yes.
Now, after the phone call ends, you are informed that you have X many minutes left in your talk time. And by the way, here is an ad for you.
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