SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1301 He Helps Pepsi Get Distribution in India, $7m+ in ARR, 100% yoy Growth
15 Feb 2019
Chapter 1: What is the background of Lalit and his company Bizom?
Formal education sometimes does not have value in real life. Launched BizOn back in 2012 and got one of his friends to basically give him seed money, but it was non-dilutive because it was a customer paying. That's the best kind of money, I think, right?
Chapter 2: How did Lalit secure initial funding for Bizom?
So 10K upfront to get going. Now they have a team of 150 people in India. Again, helping retailers like Coca-Cola help their salespeople basically go in, get accounts, land accounts, expand accounts, and drive product adoption for whatever products they're working with. Again, mainly in India, healthy growth doing about call it 80% year over year growth or 8% month over month growth.
They're doing about 600 grand today. per month in revenue. That's up from 350 grand just a year ago in July of 2017. They've got 307 customers that pay an average of 2K per month for the product. Churn is super, super low. Annual expansion on accounts is over 140, 150%.
Willing to spend up to 120 grand to acquire 10K in new MR. So healthy economics, 4 million raised, burned about 200 grand last year. 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.
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.
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Chapter 3: What growth metrics is Bizom currently achieving?
My guest today is Alit Bize. He's an enterprise mobility veteran. and with 17 years of experience building over 150 different products. He invented hybrid mobile programming and has a patent in visual merchandising using image recognition.
His six plus years of Salesforce automation experience with FMCG market leaders has resulted in BISM being at the forefront of digital sales transformation in India, helping over 250 enterprises achieve data-driven transformation via automation and analytics. Lalit, are you ready to take us to the top?
Let's go for it.
All right. Tell us quickly about the company and then jump into your revenue model. How do you make money?
Right. So Bizom is the name of the flagship product. Bizom stands for Business on the Move. It's a mobile-first cloud solution aimed towards consumer product good companies to digitalize their sales force, their distributors, and their retailers, especially in emerging markets.
In simpler terms, it is a bunch of workflows in the sales processes on their distributions that we digitalize and provide ROI to businesses in terms of efficiency, improving manpower efficiency or improving channel performance or improving product placements, especially targeted towards India and other emerging markets and for consumer product goods companies, which is like FMCG companies, fashion companies and so on.
And what do you price around? Is it a pure play SaaS model, volume, GMV, what?
It's a pure play SaaS model. So it's a pay-per-use per month and paid in annual or quarterly cycles, yeah.
Okay, and walk me through, just give us a, I want to get more of your backstory here, but what's an average customer paying you per month, would you say?
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Chapter 4: How does Bizom's SaaS model work and what do customers pay?
Where is most that growth come from? New customers or expanding current ones?
So actually, they're both parts of it. For the longest period of time, we were just focusing on new customers, to be brutally honest, because that's where we saw the growth was. Somewhere last year, we realized there is a lot of potential to be gained from existing customers as well. Existing customers were growing organically, not as fast as the new customers were growing.
Somewhere last year, we put focus on what we call as farming, customer success, so to say. That meant we now have currently have two growth engines. So suddenly, how, so my, you know, my
board asked me the question saying you know okay great that you're growing at seven eight percent month on month how can you grow at twelve percent month on month so the answer to that was essentially look i have there is a lot of contact potential in my existing accounts which i'm not uh good news for us was though was the churn was less than uh less than uh one percent at any given point in time what is what is churn today
It's about, so last month it was a zero churn, but on average over a year, it's somewhere on 1.3% or something. So I'm talking about logo churn.
Just to be clear, that's gross logo churn or net logo churn?
It's a... gross logo churn. Net logos will always keep on increasing. I mean, at this point last year, we would have what, I don't know, less than 150 odd accounts.
Now, do you know the revenue side of this? So what's net revenue retention annually?
So the corresponding MRR churn, again, gross MRR churn is somewhere around 0.39%, which is essentially, we are okay with the gross logo churns, as long as that is from the lowest end of the MRR.
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Chapter 5: What challenges does Bizom address for companies like PepsiCo?
We are always, I mean, so, month after month, we...
look at what is the maximum net burn that we can afford to have and we try to stay within that which is essentially to use the funds that we have recently raised looking at market expansion point of view so if you want to be cash flow positive we can be today if we reduce some of the expansion efforts that we want to do but in the current projections we say somewhere around you know
July, August 2019, we want to be back again.
Very good. All right, Lalit, let's wrap up here with the famous five. Quick answers here. Number one, what's the last business book that you read?
It's called Sapiens. I don't know whether it's considered a business book. What's it called?
Sapiens. Sapiens. Yeah. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying right now?
I studied Mark Benioff for the longest period of time. Yeah, that's possibly the last one that I followed.
If someone offered you today something equivalent to 3 or 4x your ARR, would you sell?
3 or 4x ARR? I don't think so, no.
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