SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1706 The Early Days: How He Got His First 8 Customers
26 Mar 2020
Chapter 1: How did Deepak start his entrepreneurial journey?
He would have jumped into the startup game earlier. Several months ago in 2017, he did, launching his company, Adya.io, which again, helps you manage and secure your SaaS applications, save time, reduce errors, really secure all this data to save costs at the same time. They currently have about eight customers paying 100 bucks per month, so 800 bucks per month in revenue.
It's too early to talk about unit economics They've raised about 250 grand in terms of funding thus far, hoping to raise additional capital later on once they hit about 15 grand in monthly recurring revenue. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Deepak Balakrishnan. He has 20 years of experience in product and marketing roles at storage, application, and networking companies.
He's served in leadership positions at Druva, Riverbed, Sun, AOL, and Netscape, where he launched several products. Deepak has an MBA from UC Berkeley and an MS in computer science from Cornell University. Today, running his new company, Adia.io, which we'll talk about today. Deepak, are you ready to take us to the top?
Yes, I am. Thank you, Nathan.
All right. Very good. Thanks for joining me. Tell me about Adia.
What's the company do and how do you make money? Sure. So RDA helps enterprises manage and secure their applications in the cloud. Essentially, as companies are moving all of their applications to cloud applications like G Suite, Slack, Office 365, and the like, they're finding out that these are very difficult to manage. IT teams are now strapped because they've learned 15 new applications.
They forget what they've paid for, who's using it, how much they're spending, and they save money. And most of all, data is now spreading across all of these applications, and they're losing track of it. So we help them control this SaaS crawl. That's what we do. And what's the pricing look like? Is it a pure play SaaS model? Yes, it is a pure play SaaS model.
So just like every other SaaS application, we are on a per user base. So we charge around $2 to $3 depending on the package that you buy per user per month.
Okay, two to three per user per month. Now, are you bottoms up? Are you selling to the user first and then they're selling to the company or you go top-down company and then to each employee?
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Chapter 2: What does Adya.io do and how does it generate revenue?
So I was in the U.S. for 20 years and I moved back to India about a couple of years ago. I wanted to do something on my own once I did that. And second is that my last job was I was selling backup, backup into the cloud. And we were quite successful at that, at the most recent company, Dhruva. I was running product management for them. Which company was that?
The company is called Dhruva, D-R-U-V-A. And we were selling backup from your laptops and your servers into the cloud. I mean, there are big players who do this EMC, Rubrik, OECP and the like. But more and more, I heard from my customers and my prospects then that backup is great. I mean, that's needed.
But more than that, I just need to get control of what's moving to the cloud, just from a management and security perspective. So that got me thinking that there was an open problem here, especially for the mid-market who cannot afford the big tools. And there was an open need there that I wanted to address. So that's what got me into this. Got it. And so what year was that? When did you launch?
So we launched, so that was initially about 2016. By the time we figured out what we were doing, it was 2017. We literally launched about four, five months ago now.
Oh, wow. Good. I love stories like, you know, I always get people on the show that are doing 30, 40, 50, 100 million in AR. I'm going, yeah, this is fun, but it's boring. It's way more fun at the, you know, right when birth just happened, right? Yes, yes.
And it's exciting and scary at the same time. Yeah.
Of course. Now, let me ask you a question. Have you bootstrapped this today kind of with your own money or have you raised capital?
So bootstrapped with some angel and friends and family. We haven't raised from any VCs yet.
So how much total raised from kind of friends, family, angels? About 250. About 250,000? Okay. And would you say that's mostly kind of your friends, family, India or is it stateside or what's the geographical breakdown?
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