SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1663 Why He Thinks Push Notifications Are Future with $35k in MRR, 376 Customers
12 Feb 2020
Chapter 1: What is Push Engage and how did it start?
Push Engage launched a couple of years ago. Personalized browser notifications. Robbie launched the company back in 2016. Now 376 customers paying a hundred bucks per month. So doing $37,000 per month up from about $12,000 per month just a year ago. Their break even and bootstrap team of 14 in Bangalore. 5% logo term per month. He's trying to get that down.
Chapter 2: How has Push Engage grown since its launch?
Spending about 200 bucks to get a new $100 a month customer. So two month payback period. Lifetime value on those folks about 1300 bucks. So six to one kind of ratio there. Hello, everybody. My guest today is Ravi Trivedi. He's the founder of a company called Push Engage. Before that, he built Coupon Rani, a leading coupon site in India.
Before that, he was principal at Southeast Interactive Technology Funds, an early stage VC fund in Raleigh, North Carolina. Post his MBA from Duke, he worked as equity research analyst with Bank of America and started his career as a software engineer at Hewlett Packard before he went on to do consulting and sales at HP.
He co-authored the book Web Services Security and participated in creating web service standards. He completed his MBA from Duke, a business, and has a master's in computer science from the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. Ravi, are you ready to take us to the top? Yeah, I'm ready. All right, tell us about PushEngage. What's the company do and how do you make money?
Sure, so we are a platform for browser push notification and we enable you to do both personalized and automated notifications and helping e-commerce companies, content sites, grow their traffic through push notifications, which are a new channel for engagement.
And your revenue stream, it's pure SaaS?
That's correct. We do not do at this moment any ad revenue.
That's great.
Unlike, say, other players.
What do companies pay on average per month for this?
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Chapter 3: What is the business model of Push Engage?
Like how, how do you, how do you get customers specifically? If you want to do organic, tell me the keywords, right? If you want to tell me something else, tell me that.
Absolutely. So I would say we focus a bit on content. So we think or I would say a bit of at least 20 to 30 percent of our customers come through the content that we write. For example, we would do a case study. We recently did one study. comparing how Abandoned Cart campaign would work in email versus Abandoned Cart in WebCorp.
Now, there have been people who have talked about it, but we have kind of first time put the data together and we have said that if you use Abandoned Cart as the e-commerce vendor, you would get almost five times bigger reach. Some of those data studies that we have done, I felt have done well. So that's one example. The other is a powered by pushing gauge, for example. That's a huge one.
That's something that we see that really helps us get traction. In fact, I've been hoping about more acquisition standards and I've done a couple of talks on that. And there's a slide share which talks about how we get our customers where we got about zero to 100.
Got it, very good. All right, and have you bootstrapped the company or raised? We are bootstrapped. Bootstrapped. That's great. And any plans to raise capital or no?
So at this time, we are open to. We think this space is going to be big. So we may be open to, but we'll be doing opportunistically, is what I'll say. So we could maybe raise now or maybe later.
And what's the team size today? How many folks? So we are around 14 people. 14 people all in Bangalore or spread out?
Yeah, all in Bangalore, although we have a few partners. I mean, I'm not counting the partners in them. There are two partners working out of Denmark where we have deep relationships and we do operate a push and gate in Denmark.
So even with that team kind of spread out, I mean, are you operating a breakeven today or are you burning capital?
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Chapter 4: How does Push Engage acquire its customers?
Let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite business book?
Zero to one.
Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying right now?
None, but I love Ryan Feshkin from SEMR. I love his transparency.
Smart guy. Number three, what billing tool do you use?
Sorry, what billing tool? We use Stripe for our payment.
And how many hours of sleep do you get every night?
Seven.
And what's your situation? Married, single, kids?
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