SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1553 This $10k MRR Search Tool Helps Increase Your Website Conversions
25 Oct 2019
Chapter 1: What is Airim and how does it improve website conversions?
Launched it, Arium, back about, call it, in 2017, so just about a year ago. Personalized self-service on websites. Essentially like a mini Google for your website so that website visitors can more quickly find information they want, which increases your conversion rates. Today, they're doing about 10 grand per month in revenue, up from four or five grand a month just a year ago.
They've raised just 20,000 bucks on a convertible note, 42 customers, paying an average 250 bucks per month. Team of six people based in Bangalore. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Sujoy Chaudhary. He's the co-founder and CEO of Arum. It was founded in April 2017.
Arum is a virtual system that reduces the huge time and effort users spend in trying to find relevant information for them while exploring a website or a web app. Currently, it's used two million times a day in websites of businesses of all sizes across four continents. Sujoy, are you ready to take us to the top?
Chapter 2: What revenue growth has Airim experienced since its launch?
Yeah. All right. So you said you've listened to the show, right? Yeah. Yeah. So you know what I'm going to ask, right? Yeah, I do have some fair idea. Okay. Well, let's have some fun. Tell us about the company. What do you do? How do you make money? Sure. So we at ARM started when we kind of noticed that a lot of companies are taking into inbound sales.
And when you move into an inbound sales model, you have to present a lot of information to the customers. So companies spend a lot of time creating marketing collateral, presenting so much information and arranging them in the right ways on the website. But that's like...
process what happens is when when a customer comes on a website they want to find the relevant information as quickly as possible but uh in the current ways people had to spend a lot of time figuring out information and so an average visitor spends about like seven times uh on a website before deciding to even sign up for a trial so we wanted to reduce that to as low number as possible maybe three or four so we thought that we could create something in which we can provide relevant information to people in the
as quick as possible time.
Chapter 3: How does Airim's virtual assistant function for users?
So there's where we created this ARAM widget. And we started experimenting with some of the websites within our network. And then we gradually figured out that we were delivering a lot of value to the companies in increasing their conversions and in also Reducing the time taken by the companies to deliver value in the quickest.
So what are people like if I hit a website that has you installed, what would I what might an average website impression like search for where you add a lot of value? Like maybe maybe I type in like what's pricing or something like that. Is that what you mean? Yeah, things like that. So let's say you have a website where you sell insurances.
So a lot of people come and look for the right people for policies for themselves and the right terms and conditions within the policies. So they want to know what's the most relevant thing for them. Interesting. And you're essentially scraping all of the texts, all of the content off a website and then indexing. You're basically a personalized Google for each website. Yeah, that's correct.
So we have started with knowledge bases only, and we eventually want to move to escaping entire websites. That's great. What do people pay for your tool on average per month? So we have plans of like $49, $199, $799 per month, but the average lies somewhere between $250 to $300. Okay, $250 a month. And when did you launch the company? What year? 2017, last year. Okay, last year. Good.
So over the past year, how many customers have you scaled to? So we have about 40, yeah, 42 paid customers right now. One, four?
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Chapter 4: What strategies did Airim use to acquire its initial customers?
Four, two. Oh, four, two. Okay, 42 paying customers. That's great. That's very specific. You did your research, huh? I have a dashboard that keeps monitoring these numbers all the time. Which dashboard do you use? What company? So we use Redash. We basically write queries in SQL and create dashboards to monitor all of them. We also use heap. Yeah, they're both smart.
Okay, sorry, sorry, back to the data here. So 42 customers paying 250 bucks a month on average, you're doing about $10,000 per month right now in revenue. Yeah, that's great. And then a year ago, so November 2017, just a couple months after your launch, what were you doing in November 2017? Oh, actually, we were just two people in November 2017, and now we are six.
So at that time, we had five mid-market and enterprise customers in our kitty. So about $1,300 a month, huh? It was way higher than that. We had an enterprise customer who was paying a lot more. So how much were you doing per month back a year ago? So we actually scaled to about like 30K a month that time. Then we... Three zero? Yeah. Okay, so Sujoy, be transparent here.
I know it sucks, but like what happened? You were doing 30 grand a month. Now you're doing only 10 grand a month. So what happened was we were doing a lot of services. And in services, we ended up not working on our product, but rather than that, we were like, hey,
adding a lot of things which we were not supposed to do in the first place so we kind of ended that contract and went back into uh just focusing on the product rather than uh like so just be clear that thirty thousand dollars that you just told me was that that sounds like that was like a project fee not actually true recurring sas revenue yeah that's correct okay what was just your true recurring sas revenue a year ago
That was around between 4,000 to 5,000. Got it. Yeah, so you've more than doubled that. Yeah. Yeah, that's great. By the way, that's very normal for early founders. You're trying to figure out ways to make cash, so you do some side projects, some professional services, and then the trick is to slowly say no to those over time so you can double down and keep building the software product. Exactly.
That's great. What's churned today? Uh, the churn, uh, so we have lost only two customers so far out of 42. So it's close to 5%. Yup. 5% local term per month, even a small sample size. That's okay. Uh, how do you bootstrap the company or raised? Yeah. So we just got a convertible note and that's about like a $20,000. That's it. Okay. So $20,000 convertible note. Yeah. Okay. That's great.
And then what are you paying? I mean, how are you getting new customers? How'd you get 42 customers? So earlier we were doing outbound sales. We were reaching out to people in our network. Gradually we started doing inbound marketing and for that we started experimenting with the right channels.
So we started posting on a few forums, started taking feedback from potential customers, started doing a lot of interviews and subsequently some people got very excited and then they started using it. Now we have seen that we are getting a lot of reference from the initial set of customers. we started out with helped us to a good extent.
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