SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
He's spent $200k already, pre revenue, list of 3,000 users. How to convert them to paid?
05 Oct 2022
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Okay, so right now we haven't figured out pricing yet. So are you guys pre-revenue? Yeah, pre-revenue.
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.
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 these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. Hey, folks. My guest today is Fani Sama.
He's one of the founders of Bip.so. Prior to Bip, he founded RedBus.com, the world's largest online bus ticketing company with operations in six countries and sales of over a billion dollars. After exiting that company, he co-founded another one and worked for the government as a chief innovative officer there. for the government of Telangana, India.
He's also a young global leader, YGL at the World Economic Forum and has received the Fortune 40 Under 40 Award twice. He serves on the board of T-Works, India's largest hardware prototyping center. But again, today focused on Bipso, which is a workspace for build in public teams. Fani, you ready to take us to the top?
Yes, yes. Thanks, Nathan.
So what does workspace mean? What do you mean by that?
Okay, so it's a space. It's a document and task management tool.
I see. Okay, got it. So folks are in, is it for a specific team, engineers, marketers, or everybody?
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Chapter 2: What is Bipso and how does it function as a workspace?
So 100 workspaces were created just in September? Yes. Amazing. And how many total workspaces created to date?
So totally, we have about 3,000 workspaces. But I would say that we have a retention of about 10%. So out of this 100, we'd expect like 10 of them to be very active going forward.
How do you define very active?
So they shift all of their workspace from another to like a Notion or Google Docs onto BIP. So BIP becomes their primary source of truth.
How do you measure that? How do you know if someone is using it as their primary source? Is it number of documents moved over?
Yeah, number of documents, activity. And we also talk to customers because it's a small number. We don't have customers yet.
So there's no customers to talk to. But you're talking to users who are signing up. My question is, a lot of times people will think activation is tied to one metric. And then they learn, you know what, actually, our users are using us in a totally different way. Our activation metric should be this other thing.
So why do you believe your activation metric is number of documents moved over from Google Drive to BIP?
It's not the number of documents. We look at it as BIP becoming their primary place.
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Chapter 3: How does Fani Sama define the future of work?
So they create maybe one, two documents a week. And we also talk to such customers, I mean, such users who are creating that.
But someone could create one or two documents per week on BIP and still be creating 10 documents per week on Google Drive. How do you know if they've stopped using Google Drive or not?
Yeah, we talk to them. We talk to those users.
You've talked to all 3,000 workspaces.
No, no. Out of which maybe 300 is what we talk to because as we see that they're using repeatedly, that's where we engage with them.
Okay. But by repeated usage, what you mean is they're creating at least one document per week for many weeks. What is that metric?
Yeah.
Yeah.
One or two documents is what they create per week. And then we talk to such engaged users and we learn that this is their primary workspace now.
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Chapter 4: What challenges does Bipso face in pricing their product?
Yeah.
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Again, both plural founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash valuations. Well, what if you launch this though, and this most active customer says, I'm not willing to pay that.
then it's bad luck. Then we need to figure it out. Yeah, but that's what I'm saying.
It's like, why are you waiting? I just don't understand. Why are you waiting so long? You've already put $200,000 of your own money in this thing.
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Chapter 5: What strategies are being implemented to build demand for Bipso?
What's taking so long to figure out if people are willing to pay for it?
Yeah, I think, yeah, we need to try that out soon.
Yeah, I agree with you. I'm not asking you to agree with me. I'm just asking, what's the business reason that you haven't brought that pricing question up yet? There's a reason you haven't.
Yeah, so the reason is this. I mean, until now, we've only been building product. We're always falling short of bandwidth to build product. So it just needs bandwidth. I think it's the bandwidth problem.
Why do you have a bandwidth problem though? I mean, you're working on this full time, right?
Yeah, I and we are 10 of us working on this full time. But there are all these other features that we need to build. We need to get feature parity with, let's say, Notion, because our customers move from Notion and they ask these feature parity and etc. So we're spending a lot of time on the product.
How do you balance that? If you wait to launch pricing until you match Notion's product, you're never going to catch up because Notion has more engineers than you do.
Yeah, that's true. But at least the major features. I mean, I can't say we'll have all the features, but the major ones.
The closest comp to this is SmartSuite, right? I'm close with John and he said, Nathan, we can't launch until we have all the features that ClickUp has, which is kind of in the same space that you're in. Well, finally, he spent $1.5 million of his own money on the MVP. Right.
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Chapter 6: How is user adoption measured for Bipso's workspace?
I think, uh, no, I think we'll, we'll, we'll hurry up. Uh, we, we have to do that. Yeah.
So, okay, so you already have an inclination that you might price around the bug, basically a percent of the bounty. How does this user respond when you pitch that to them?
See, right now, basically most of our users are Web3 users and they pay using their own tokens.
Yeah, out of the treasury, right?
Their project tokens. And they're generous with those tokens because they mint their own tokens. So they're fine. to pay as a percentage of their tokens. But we have to think how do we convert the tokens into USD soon and at what value and things like that. So it is a little more involved thought process. And I think that's one of the reasons why we have not jammed into pricing yet.
Well, how do you deal with the volatility in crypto markets? I mean, everyone's treasuries today, if they're tied to fiat, they're way, way down, 80%, 90%. No one wants to give out bounties right now because it's extremely expensive. It's dilutive long-term in terms of the total token pool. So, I mean, is this just a thing where you don't have a real business until crypto takes off again?
Basically, when the token price goes down, we will peg our price on their USD. It's just that they have to pay more tokens to catch up with that pricing. And for us to de-risk ourselves from the volatility, we need to convert their tokens into USD quickly enough. But we need to figure out that whole thing before we jump into that side.
But these Vethri customers, because they're moving from Notion, they're also equally okay to pay a SaaS pricing. But they would love if it's a tokenized thing because there's utility for their token and things like that.
I understand. But back to my question, right? Let's say there's TokenX, right? A company that you're selling to is TokenX, right? And they've got a treasury with a thousand tokens in it, right? And they need an engineer to do some work and they need to pay that engineer for one hour. And that engineer charges $100 an hour. For $100, they used to be able to just give him two tokens as the bounty.
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