SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Ep 365: From Consultant to $300k SaaS with Amit Kotharie of Tallyfy
25 Jul 2016
Chapter 1: What inspired Amit Kothari to start Tallyfy?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per talk. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark.
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Okay, Top Tribe, this week's winner of the 100 bucks is Daniel Al-Soudini. He's based overseas. He's an employee at a current company and can't wait to break free.
Chapter 2: How did Tallyfy secure initial funding and grants?
For your chance to win 100 bucks, Top Tribe, simply subscribe to the podcast now and then text the word Nathan to 33444 to prove that you did it. Again, text the word Nathan to 33444 to prove that you did it. I give away 100 bucks every Monday. This is episode 365. Coming up tomorrow morning, you'll hear from Kendall Antonelli.
Her cheese shop does over a million dollars annually, but has a low EBITDA. Why? Top of tribe. Good morning. Good morning.
Chapter 3: What was Tallyfy's revenue growth in its early years?
Good morning. Our guest today is Amit Kothari. He spent a decade in London at the cutting edge of collaboration technologies for businesses. His clients were the world's largest companies, law firms, and government entities.
After seeing many adoption and other failures in collaboration tools and methods at companies, he realized that the disruption of this industry depended on combining unstructured conversations with structured processes. Work people, people do every day. The result of all of this was Talify, which we're going to talk about. Amit, are you ready to take us to the top? Sure, yeah.
Chapter 4: How does Tallyfy's pricing model work for customers?
Would you like me to describe Talify? Yeah, so tell us more about what Talify is and how you make money. Absolutely.
Well, Talify is an app on the cloud, and basically you sign up to it, and the way we make money is that we charge per user per month, 49 bucks per user per month, and it helps people automate paperwork, right? So you might not realize this, but 30% of the average day is spent doing routine processes.
And I'm talking about stuff where you fill a form out, you email it to someone, you wait for the reply, they haven't replied, you have to follow up, you follow up again, and so on and so forth. It's this painful, massive, huge pain of approvals and paperwork and so on. We kind of break anything down into a checklist.
And I mean, give us a sense of kind of when you started and the size you're currently at. So what year did you launch in?
Chapter 5: What challenges did Amit face while building his team?
Well, it was something about two years ago. We got a grant from the government of Chile. So we spent eight months in Santiago, Chile. That was equity free. That was $40,000. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to try something out. They don't ask for anything. They just give you money. And so check it out. And then we came back to London.
Chapter 6: How does Amit maintain work-life balance with his co-founder?
So that was in 2014, right? Right, right. That was that.
And then we got another grant from the U.S. in this case, from St. Louis, a program called Arch Grants. It's one of the only grant programs in the U.S. You get 50K. Again, equity-free, no questions asked. So in a way, we kind of got this far through grants.
Chapter 7: What are the critical factors for scaling a SaaS business?
And now we're in the U.S. I'm in Silicon Valley right now. We won 500 startups, which is an accelerator in Silicon Valley. And things are kind of going nuts.
And we... Let me quantify that for me. What was first year revenue in the business in 2014?
In the first year, 2014, there was no revenue because we were building products. Okay. Second year, last year, we filed 300K in revenue. And so far, this year, we've totaled something like 600K.
Chapter 8: What lessons does Amit share for aspiring entrepreneurs?
So since inception, we've totaled 600K or so. Well, hold on.
I want to make sure the number is right. 2014 was no revenue. 2015, you did 300K. And 2016, so far to date, this year, you've done 600K? No, that's total. So 300K this year. Got it. So you've already passed. You've already equaled this far in 2016 what you did in all of 2015. Yeah. Okay. And how many paying customers do you have? Again, let's just say as of June 2016. Okay.
Well, we're measuring it in several hundreds. The problem is that the price point is different amongst all of them. So it's hard to figure out how many they're paying. And there's users in our system who are guest users, who are free. So I'd say we have thousands of users.
How many paid customers, or how many people, I don't care how much they're paying you, but how much have they given you a credit card?
Something like 100 to 200 or so are the paying customers that we have.
And on average, what are they paying you per month? The average cost is something like $39 per user per month.
Okay. The variation is very high between that because enterprises pay a lot more.
Well, that's what I wanted to average. So if I average across all the customers, it's about $40?
Yeah, it's about that.
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