SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1255 How This 27 Year Old Went from $0 to $70k in MRR in 6 months
31 Dec 2018
Chapter 1: How did Udit Goenka start his entrepreneurial journey?
Wishes you knew more about offline marketing. Launched GoPBN in 2017. Now over 3,000, late 2017. Now over 3,000 people using it, paying about 23 bucks a month, doing 70 grand per month in sales. 1.2% gross logo churn per month. $2 CAC on a very small targeted niche audience on Facebook. Obviously healthy payback period.
Got a 24 month LTV, which comes out to about 450 bucks with a team of 25 people based in India. Again, capitalizing on a niche or sub-niche of the SEO niche. All right. Very good. 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 of hundred thousand dollars to 2.7 million.
I had no money when I started the company.
Chapter 2: What strategies led to the launch of GoPBN in 2017?
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. 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 Udit Goenka.
He is based out of India and is a self-taught entrepreneur who started the online marketing journey at the age of 17. Coming from a business family, entrepreneurship was rooted in his blood. And at the age of 18, he launched his first WordPress security plugin that did six figures at after which he launched PowerUp Hosting in 2012, which is now an ISP and a seven-figure business.
During his journey as CEO, he's a sole growth hacker, marketer, and the company responsible for all customers. His name got popular in the SEO industry as the BPN guy, which led him to launch GoPPN, the very first kind in its space, and does over 70 grand per month in revenue right now. So we're going to dive in today.
Chapter 3: What revenue model does GoPBN use to achieve $70,000 MRR?
Udit, are you ready to take us to the top?
Yeah, for sure. I'm very excited.
Good. So what exactly is doing $70,000 per month in revenue?
Okay, so it comes from two different vortices of our business. One is where we are providing the link building services for building up those PBNs. And the second comes from the hosting aspects, because the PBN hosting involves a very different kind of unique hosting, which is spread across like different, which is connected to different parts of the world.
Okay, so what's the URL of a company doing the majority of the 70 grand in revenue?
That's gopbn.com, gopbn.com.
Okay, very good. So this is doing, how much is it doing? Is it doing the full 70,000?
Yeah, it's currently doing 70K per month right now. And it's been growing at approximately around like 10% MRR on monthly basis.
Okay, so walk me through some other of these metrics here. How many customers are you serving today?
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Chapter 4: How many customers does GoPBN currently serve?
What's your largest customer pay you per month?
So one of our largest customer right now, he's paying approximately around eight grand a month to us.
Oh, wow. So almost more than 10% of your revenue.
Yeah, exactly.
Okay, very good. And what about churn? What's your churn today?
We have a churn rate of approximately around 1.2% per month.
That's gross logo churn per month? Yeah. Okay. And then so keep going for the economics here. What do you assume lifetime value is?
The lifetime value of our customer, what we assume based on our metrics, comes down to approximately around $450 to $500 approximately.
And walk me through how you're getting that number.
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Chapter 5: What is the customer acquisition cost for GoPBN?
Where were you 12 months ago in June of 2017?
So we launched our application last year in April. Got it. Yeah. And it was under development for almost a year and a half until then. So everything has happened in a matter of like a year.
So you had no revenue a year ago?
Yeah, not with GoPBM because it was a brand new project that we were working on.
Got it. How did you get 3,000 customers so fast then?
Okay, so one of our biggest strengths is SEO, Facebook ads, and the growth hacking itself. And since I had been working at an agency as well, I've been helping out a lot of other customers as well. So we know the nitty gritty. And at the same time, I hold a good... The first company, Power of Posting, has approximately around 11,000 customers right now.
So out of those 11,000 customers, approximately around 6,500 customers are already SEO customers that we have. So it wasn't too difficult for us to go out and reach out to the market. Apart from that, like I said, we went very aggressive with Facebook ads and SEO, which got us a lot of customers.
Okay, so that ties us back into CAC. What are you paying to acquire a customer?
Approximately around, for FB ads right now, we are paying $2 to acquire one customer.
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Chapter 6: What is the churn rate for GoPBN and how does it affect growth?
So currently on Facebook ads, we are spending a gross of like $500 approximately for Gopeven because we have acquired customers. And since the number of, again, the number of customers are very limited in this particular niche. Got it. Yeah.
So your CAC is low, but the problem is there's not a lot of those customers.
Exactly. But the customers that we acquire, the cancellation rates are very low.
Oh, yeah. You said 1.2% gross logo churn per month. So you said you're spending a lot on kind of ads. $500 a month isn't that much considering your revenue. Where else are you spending money?
So we are spending a lot of money on SEO. So currently we are spending approximately around $2,500 on SEO and approximately around $1,500 on content that we draft every month. So that's where majority of our funds go in. And apart from that, we also hold a lot of workshops locally. So we spend a lot of money on the workshops and we acquire a lot of customers through the workshops as well.
So where's that $1,500 you're spending on content? Where's that going? Are you paying someone on Fiverr or what?
No, we have an in-house team that we have built. So we are paying our team itself who are building up the contents.
Got it. How many team members?
Currently, we have a team size of 25.
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Chapter 7: What marketing strategies does Udit use to grow his customer base?
Yeah, we have completely bootstrapped the company.
That's great. So yeah, you have to be profitable. Otherwise, you go out of business. Good. So 25 people. Walk me through, how do you instruct your content team what to write about?
Okay, so whenever we hire any member, they go through an aggressive training phase of 10 days where we have a nicely programmed that we have designed. Let's say like the first day, they'll be going through the list of articles that I have written.
and i have drafted and along with a bunch of other articles from some of the top writers they go through it they get the feeling through it and then they start learning a bit about the seo and the importance of on-page seo and from there then they start writing some of the contents so usually it takes them at least a month to get print completely before they dive into it and they start writing content
I, like you guys, have never been able to find a project management tool that I love. You know, my blog writers like one thing, my developers like one thing, my designers like a different thing, and it's so difficult to get them all on the same page.
So when I had Roy Mann, the CEO of monday.com on the show, I was pleasantly surprised at what he told me regarding his traction and his growth, and I said, maybe I should try this thing. So we now use monday.com. I started with the magazine. We've launched the Latka magazine, solely dedicated to SaaS founders. It's the only magazine focused on SaaS.
And my content writers and my designers worked beautifully together on that project using monday.com for project management. I then said, well, let me give it a real test. Let me see if I can use this for sprints and product cycles with my developers using it as well. And so we did that for Git Latka on our last release. It worked like a charm.
Never before have I been able to find one tool that my developers, my designers and my writers and myself can use and be happy with. You know, for me, I do most of my work waiting on the boarding deck about to get on a plane. I have to be able to access this stuff on my mobile device and it works beautifully. We've been using it for several months now.
And I said, Roy, I'd love to introduce this to my audience, but you got to give me a great discount. Make me a great offer. He said, Nathan, OK, fine. If your folks sign up and try it today, we'll give them 10% off all plans.
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Chapter 8: What is Udit's vision for future ventures and company growth?
If they use this link, nathanlaca.com forward slash Monday. So you can go there, try it for free. And if you decide to start paying, you'll get 10% off. Again, that's nathanlaca.com forward slash Monday. That training course you put them through, do you sell that? Is that public? Can my listeners go buy it?
Uh, not as of now, but I'm actually looking to put it up because a couple of my contents that I have written have been, I've been going like viral and have been shared by like thousands of people, especially one of the articles that I wrote on SEO copywriting that gives a very sneaky techniques, uh, in terms of how people can really rank better and how they can name one of the techniques. Sorry.
Name one of the sneaky techniques.
Okay, so one of the techniques that I call it is the expanding technique. So what happens is let's say that we, let's take an example of recipe over here, right? I'm trying to bake a cake. So in this case, what people would do is they would just write, okay, just get this ingredient, get this ingredient, get this ingredient, and you're done, right?
But there is a much better way of defining that. Get this ingredient, mix it with this. You can get this ingredient from this place. So at that point of stage, you're giving more information to the user. And at the same time, you are capturing a lot of LSI keywords as well. So at that point of stage, what we do is there is a small hack that you can do. You can go to Google.
You can write in URL dot Quora dot com plus your keyword. When you do that, you will get a bunch of Quora questions. And now when you get the questions regarding your keywords, you can use that entire question inside your article because people are looking for answer for that. And that becomes your LSI keyword.
So that helps you to really rank for those keywords because those are the keywords that would actually rank for you and drive you most of the traffic and not the main keywords.
Yep. Interesting. Very interesting. How do you know that Quora is a large enough sample size to reflect the search patterns of the entire world on Google?
Okay. Quora is just one of them. So we look for various other platforms as well. For example, Growth Hackers is one of them. We get a lot of contents over there. We get to see what people are writing. Then at the same time, we also study our competitors using Ahrefs. So we see what's going on at that point of stage. And from there, we take things forward.
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