SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Bootstrapper hits $1m Revenue, Now wants to Raise $3m on $70m, but why?
31 Jul 2022
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Okay, got it.
Chapter 2: What is the revenue model of the guest's company?
So you're doing about $1,500 per month, or $20,000 per year, across 50 customers. I mean, so can we take 50 customers times 1500, you're doing about $80,000 a month in revenue right now?
Yeah, slightly more than that.
You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
Chapter 3: How does the software assist in technical hiring?
We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, CAC, valuation, or other metrics, the easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool. It's like a big Excel sheet for all of these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. Hey folks, my guest today is Abhishek Kaushik.
He's a programmer, CEO, sales, marketing. He wears all the hats at his bootstrap company, which is now north of a million dollars in AR in just 20 months on their way to 5 million by 2025 is what he says. He loves talking about first principles, internalization, psychology, hiring at early stage, and he's doing this all at wecreateproblems.com. Abhishek, you ready to take us to the top?
Yeah, sure.
Chapter 4: What challenges did the guest face in acquiring their first customers?
All right. So just to be clear, are you like a recruiting agency or are you selling software to help people recruit software people?
We are SaaS. So we help technical hiring managers and recruiters use our software to sort of create talent pool, screen name business polling test, review them face-to-face, and in one click, onboard them to the companies.
So it's really an applicant tracking system.
Not, not, it's not a need is, uh, we are coding test first and we are coding test and code pair tool first. And, uh, uh, you know, candidate sourcing and onboarding happens to integrations.
Okay. So you are, you help people run engineering tests to engineering candidates to see if they're a good fit.
Right.
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Chapter 5: How has the company grown since its launch?
Right. Okay. And this is great. Okay. So that makes sense.
Chapter 6: What strategies does the guest use to find new customers?
So what are, what are companies on average paying you per month to use your technology?
Uh, Roughly, currently, we have 50-plus customers for all our paid customers. And largely, we cater to enterprise because we are an enterprise software. So we have roughly seven large enterprises as our customer today.
Okay, so you have your seven first customers today?
Yeah, they are our large enterprises.
How many customers do you have today that are paying you? That's my question.
50-plus, roughly 50-plus. Yeah, five years ago.
Oh, wow. Okay, this is great. And then I guess put this on, give me the backstory here. What year did you launch the business?
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Chapter 7: What is the guest's plan for raising capital?
So launching a business happened in 2019. We basically launched our product. when we acquired first customer paying us $5,000, you know, as an MRR, that was an MRR. And we started, you know, as a very simple, you know, use case. It was just to assess their internal engineers, you know, on different technical skills. And that's what we drew.
The second customer came from the first customer because we got a reference. And third customer came from the second customer because we got a referral. So for, uh, you know, first five, six customer came where a customer referred and that's how we, um, started, um, our increase in our customer base.
And then we, uh, we decided to start expanding on our marketing, um, you know, and our sales effort.
Chapter 8: What are the reasons for seeking a $3 million investment?
So pretty much.
So you started at $500 a month, a couple of years ago, what are customers paying you per month today?
So when we started roughly one and a half years back, when we launched our product in 2019, it was $5,000 MRR, not $500. So it was $5,000 MRR. And from there, currently our average contract value is roughly $20,000. Per month or per year? It's annual contract value, which is per year.
Okay. Got it. So you're doing about $1,500 per month, uh, or $20,000 per year, uh, across 50 customers. I mean, so can we take 50 customers times 1500? You're doing about $80,000 a month in revenue right now.
Yeah, slightly more than that.
Okay. So you're north of a million dollar run rate. And if you're at $85,000 a month today in revenue, where were you exactly a year ago? Do you remember?
A year ago, we were roughly 250K, which was our error.
Okay. 200,000. That's great. So where did most of the growth come from? Explain to me how you're finding new customers.
So it came from enterprises. Most of our growth came from referrals from one enterprise to another enterprise and Because enterprise, we landed in spandered. So majority of our revenue, you know, the 3X jump that you see came from enterprise selling. All the rest of the customers are very small ticket sizes. So we're still trying to figure out our ICP.
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