SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
BillBooks Invoicing Tool Hits 5,000 Paying Customers, Bootstrapped
10 Aug 2020
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I can give you a range anywhere between 50 and 100,000, so it wouldn't go anywhere beyond that.
You have 50,000 people paying you $15 a month? That's right. You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka. Now, if you're hearing this, it means you're not currently on our subscriber feed. To subscribe, go to getlatka.com. When you subscribe, you won't hear ads like this one. You'll get the full interviews. Right now, you're only hearing partial interviews.
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Now look, I never want money to be the reason you can't listen to episodes. On the checkout page, you'll see an option to request free access. I grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Sagar Kogakar.
He started a digital agency at the age of 18 from Pune, India, and then launched Billbooks in 2011 with an aim to simplify invoicing with practical features and cost effective for freelancers and small businesses. All right, Kogakar, are you ready to take us to the top? Yeah, absolutely. Thanks. I got your first name and last name confused. It's Sagar. So, all right. Talk to us about Billbooks.
What does the company do and what's your revenue model?
So Billbooks has an aim basically to simplify invoicing because everyone, I started... freelancing and started my own company at the age of 19 in the year 2000. What I felt was in 2005 until 2005, 2006, we're all creating invoices with Excel sheets and Word and PowerPoint and stuff like that. It used to be a pain to send invoices to customers and then follow up for payments.
So I started looking for solutions online and that's when bill books came into my mind. There has to be an easy cloud solution to send invoices, book expenses, send estimates, and track them easily. So that's when Billbooks came into my mind in 2008, really. It took me about a couple years to get the way I wanted the product to be built.
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Chapter 2: What inspired the launch of BillBooks and its purpose?
Like who, name a couple. So there's FreshBooks, there's Zoho Invoice now, there's Invoice Era, there's quite a few out there. And everyone has a very strong content marketing strategy and an SEO strategy in place. So, The initial books you mentioned about the revenue model, the key was to keep it very economical and it was a pay-per-use model.
So we used to charge 50 cents per invoice sent when we launched back in 2011 instead of per user per month. You know, some freelancers paid us less than $2 because they used to send four invoices or two invoices a month.
What's the average customer pay today? You're now on a subscription model.
That's right. So our plans start from about $7.95 and they go on to about $29.95. It's still below the market price at the moment. And an average customer would spend anywhere between $15 and $20. I see.
Okay. So first customer was Simon back in the day. You scaled early on with SEO and content marketing. How are you adding customers today?
We're still doing the same. We're doing a lot of content marketing. Now we've launched a new version this year. In fact, early this year, the new subscription model was launched this year. And we've kind of changed our features. We are adding new features. So there's a lot going on in terms of product development and content marketing simultaneously.
So moving on, we're going to have a lot of social media. We're going to have handhold your new customers. We're getting fairly large number of new customers every day.
How many new are you getting every day?
Sorry?
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Chapter 3: How did the guest fund BillBooks before its official launch?
So it can't, you know, it wouldn't go anywhere beyond that.
you have 50,000 people paying you $15 a month. That's right. Oh, that's incredible. Okay. I mean, that would mean you're doing $750,000 a month in revenue or almost 12 million, $10 million annually.
No, no, no. So basically what happens is, um, initially remember when I told you that, uh, we had a poor paper invoice model, which was not a monthly billing. So that went on for about nine years. Right. So, uh, Quite a few did not migrate because they didn't want a monthly subscription billing. So they're still there.
Yeah, sorry. That's what I'm asking, though, is how many are on the monthly subscription plan?
On the monthly subscription plan would be probably anywhere between five and eight thousand. Yeah.
You guys hear me joke all the time that I am horrible at managing big teams. It was one of the things I struggled with at my first SaaS company, Heyo. And you also know that I'm getting more and more founders come on the show where their teams are almost completely remote. Well, here's the secret they don't tell you. A lot of these remote teams actually start by a founder with an idea
using freelancer talent, right? The tricky part is it's really hard to find quality freelancer talent. In fact, I wrote about this in my book. It's one of the sections people read and ping me about the most, but finding that talent is really difficult. So for example, when I wanted to come up with a new magazine cover, the design,
I had to figure out how to get designs done cheaply and quickly with talented people. And I used Fiverr to do that. I'm going, wow, I love if I could figure out a way to get a discount for my people to use Fiverr. And thankfully it's taken me a little bit of time, but I finally have gotten a discount. So here's the cool thing. If you wanna use Fiverr to find freelance
You can take five and check out Fiverr.com, F-I-V-E-R-R.com, and you'll get 10% off your first order by using my code TOP.
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Chapter 4: What is the current team structure at BillBooks?
That's TOP. It's super easy. So don't waste any more time and get the services you deserve by going to Fiverr.com and using the code TOP. Again, super proud to be able to do this.
Over the next several months, I'm going to tell you guys little stories of how I use freelance talent on Fiverr to do things like do web queries, parse information I need, database management, Excel sheet building, competitive intelligence on my competitors, all kinds of stuff. I'll download it to you over the next several months and document how I'm doing it.
But for now, get started at Fiverr.com and use code TOP for 10% off. So your whole thing is how do you move these 30, 40,000 that used to pay per invoice and get them on a subscription plan?
Exactly.
Got it. But still, this is a healthy business. I have 5,000 customers paying $15 a month on average. You're right near a million dollar run rate or about $75,080 a month in revenue.
Is that right? Yep.
That's great.
I really want to disclose this. So if you're able to edit this.
Oh, we don't edit shows. Sorry. I mean, you can just say you don't want to answer a question if you don't want to answer it. But I'm glad I asked because you just said you had 50,000 customers and it's not 50. You have 50,000 people who have paid you, but you've got about 5,000 that are on a paid subscription.
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Chapter 5: How did the first customer find and use BillBooks?
There are two ways, yeah. The first was the discounting part and the second was features because we came with incredibly new features in our 2.0. like multi-organization, multilingual, and there are quite a few differentiators even now, which Billbooks has against our competitors. So that's also one of the reasons.
Okay, but our revenue figure is accurate. You're doing about $75,000 a month in total revenue. Yes. With a five-person team. So you're highly profitable then.
Yes, and that's why we want to keep it that way.
That's great. By the way, congratulations. That's not easy. Thanks. Thanks, buddy. Did you do this all bootstrapped or did you choose to raise capital?
Yes. No, it is all bootstrapped. Yeah.
This is my favorite kind of story. Bootstrapped and profitable. That's great.
Yeah, we do not intend to raise money for bill books going forward. Hopefully, I mean, never say never, but we've got a very firm kind of goal structure, the product development structure that we have in place. And we kind of, we know that where we want to go in the next one or two years in terms of functionalities. And we want to stick right there.
We don't want to, you know, dilute anywhere else.
So when you say profitable, though, I mean, I mean, are we talking like $10,000 a month in profit or like 50,000 a month in profit?
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