SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1454 How This Intercom, Drift Competitor Is Winning in India
18 Jul 2019
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
My new book is out on Audible, How to Be a Capitalist Without Any Capital. You can grab it right now. Here's what a user, Thomas Lornaviticus, said. Latke is the real deal. Five stars. Hey, Nathan, I just listened to your podcast with JLD. You killed it. I saw your book earlier last week and thought, meh, I'll wait when Kindle costs $1.99 or whatever, as I have over 150 books to catch up with.
But then I sensed that this book may have something I need right now. I bought it for full price, but didn't really start reading it. Then talking with JLD, you mentioned that the strategies may not work if you wait. And that's so true. I read it. I'm feeling pumped to devour it even more. Thank you for sharing it all and kicking ass.
Guys, all of you that listen to the podcast, you were the reason I wrote the book. SaaS CEOs, founders, entrepreneurs, go grab it today at capitalistbook.com. Especially if you like audio, go grab the audible version right now. Again, capitalistbook.com. Guys, he's competing in a very hot space, has a sector focus that's very specific.
Launched the company in 2016, again, for really messaging, conversational marketing for commerce companies, celebrities, both on websites and also their Facebook pages. They've got nine people right now, scaling up to 10 here shortly with their first sales hire, all based in Bangalore, currently serving about 18 enterprise customers, which make up the majority, two thirds of their revenue.
They're doing about 80 grand per month right now. That's up from about 50 grand per month about a year ago. So healthy growth, 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. My guest today is Gaurav Singh. He's the founder and CEO of a company called Verloop.io, a conversational sales and marketing automation platform. He started coding when he was 11 and has built two businesses before. One of them was acquired while the other one was unsuccessful. Gaurav, are you ready to take us to the top?
Yes, let's start. All right. Tell me about Verloop.io. What's the company doing? How do you make money? So Verloop is a conversational marketing automation company. So we help businesses, both enterprise and SaaS, convert more people when they land on their website. So essentially, when people come on your website, they have a bunch of questions to ask.
But usually, I mean, providing a human support is too hard and expensive. So Verloop automates a lot of FAQs, which people want to answer, I mean, ask questions. Then help companies do lead generation, lead qualification, etc. So essentially help them generate more MQLs. So this is what we do and this is paid for. So we charge money. What if you'll pay on average per month?
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Chapter 2: What is Verloop.io and how does it operate?
Are you doing any one-time professional services stuff now or just focused on pure play SaaS? No, there is no one-time professional services, but we do help the companies in the bigger accounts with a part of their engineers being helped by our engineers in terms of tech integrations, but we don't take up one-time dev. Got it.
Chapter 3: How does Verloop.io generate revenue?
So it's kind of more like a setup fee. Right. Okay, very good. And tell me more about the team. What are you guys at today in terms of team size? We are nine people. The first sales guy is joining on 1st of May. So we'll be 10 people then. Oh, congrats. And where's everybody based? Bangalore. Everybody? Yes. Oh, that's great. And bootstrapped or have you raised capital? We raised $300,000. Okay.
And was that from like a local kind of accelerator or where'd that money come from? Yeah, it was from a local accelerator, Growth Story. Okay, good. Oh yeah, good company there. And then walk me through, I mean, churn is obviously critical in this space. What's your churn? Uh, so last year we lost two paying customers. That's it. Okay.
So you don't really, I mean, you're working on the small sample size cause you only have 18 paying customers. You lost two. So, I mean, people could argue you have 10% kind of annual churn. I mean, how do you look at it on such a small sample size? Uh, so I mean, out of the two, one was for a reason beyond our control, but yeah, when we did lose, because at that moment when we lost them, the
Tech was not there yet. We were still building up the products, but now we have improved a lot. So in the last eight or 10 months, we haven't lost anyone. 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 gotta give me a great discount. Make me a great offer. He said, Nathan, okay, fine.
If your folks sign up and try today, we'll give them 10% off all plans. 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. Someone that signs up for you that pays you 45, 50, 60 grand per year.
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Chapter 4: What competitive advantages does Verloop.io have over Intercom and Drift?
I see. Okay, good. And you're in the clear there? Facebook's not planning to shut your app off or anything like that? So far, no. Plus, I don't think that's going to happen. We have been, I mean, very closely tied. I mean, talking to their team, we are one of their preferred vendors. So it looks good so far. That's great. So what do you want to do with the company?
I mean, again, you're in a hot space. You're growing. You're taking a little chunk of the market share. You know you have the right product. You know it's the right time based on what everyone else is doing. I mean, how do you win? What's next?
so next of course for us is so we don't we don't plan to raise much of the money we want to keep growing at the same space I mean at a slightly faster rate than what we did last year but the idea being that focus on enterprises focus more on Southeast Asia Middle East and keep growing so one of the things we started doing is we started looking out for channel partners so we have already have a banking channel partner in place who has been selling us in Middle East so we are
About to close three deals with the banks in Medellin. So grow. I mean, wherever you cannot have your tech team, grow with the channel partners. And you have no interest in raising additional capital? I mean, we have been growing. I don't see a reason why we should. Would you let me invest $100,000 if I was able to help you with channel partnerships? Help me with channel partnerships.
Why do you need to invest money there? Because it's not worth my time to help you if I don't have equity? let's split revenues. No, that's not interesting to me. I want, if I'm going to put something in, I want part of the actual equity of the company. Revenues is easy. You just pay me a 30% cut. Then you don't, you forget about me. That's boring for me. There's no, there's no long-term upside.
Plus, why would you, plus, why would you want to cut into your revenues right now? You want to keep as much money as you can to grow the company. Let's talk after this call then. How many, how many founders do you have? Is it just you? It's just me. Okay. I am serious. Let's talk after the call. I mean, look, I love what I worry about is like your way.
I mean, I love betting on like the David to the Goliath, right? I mean, you know, you are definitely, I would say a David, but you also have a nice vision in terms of a niche that you're going after and the space that you're in, which I like. So that's good.
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Chapter 5: What is the target market for Verloop.io?
Your next hire is a salesperson. What do you think you'll be at by the end of this year in terms of revenue? So by end of this year, we are looking at about $3.2 million in revenues. And I mean, before you ask me why, I mean, how is that sudden jump coming from? So most of the- How is that sudden jump coming?
So most of the enterprise deals which we have been closing took about six to nine months for the sales time. And they have just started to kick in now. So we have closed a bunch of bigger customers like Musk in terms of the Musk global shipping. And there are a lot more customers.
So we are looking at 3.2 to 3.4 million in revenues, out of which 2.4 to 2.6 will come from enterprise and rest comes from SaaS. And what's it costing you to acquire these customers? What kickback are you paying your channel partners or the salespeople, etc. ? So channel partner gets about 2.5, sorry, 25%. Okay. And sales costs are about 10%. 25% of what lifetime recurring revenue? First year.
Just first year. Okay, good. So you've capped that. Awesome. All right, let's wrap up. This is good stuff. Let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite business book? The hard things about hard things. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying right now? Of course, David Cancel. Of course.
I always wonder, by the way, if those guys, like, are you an acquisition target for them or are you so similar they'll just look at you and go, you know what, we'll just beat them? I'm not looking to get acquired, but I mean... Oh, no, that wasn't my question. I'm curious about, from their perspective, would they view you as, eh, we'll just beat them or, oh, let's acquire them? So...
I'll give you the main differentiator. So in the countries like India, Indonesia, Southeast Asia, it's not English for itself. It's Hinglish. It's Hindi plus English. It's Malay plus English. Do you speak it? Hindi? Yeah. Or Hinglish? Hinglish. So Pepsi in India says, the tagline for Pepsi in India is your Dil Mange More, where more in Hindi means peacock.
So your heart wants peacock or your heart wants more of Pepsi. Say in English, say Nathan, you're the most attractive podcaster. Nathan, I don't know how to say it in English. That's probably because it's not true. All right, very good. So that's the main differentiator is you've got kind of language capabilities. These guys don't. So we have been building a lot of mixed language capabilities.
Our English capabilities are almost 88% accurate. So for the companies, I mean, for the mid-market companies who try to hit the bottom of the pyramid where internet has just reached, but education is not there yet, neither Drift nor Intercom can do anything. I mean, the English, the mixed language have to be there and that's how we beat them. Interesting.
All right, number three, besides your own, what's your favorite online tool for building your business? Most of the time it's Slack. Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night? Okay, and what's your situation? Married, single, you have kiddos? Single. No kids? No kids. All right, and how old are you? 27. 27. Last question. What do you wish your 20-year-old self knew?
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