SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How to Set Up Profit Sharing Plan from $2m+ Bootstrapper
17 Jun 2022
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Don't name the customer, obviously, but what's the largest customer pay you per year?
Six figures per year.
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 of these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. Hey folks, my guest today is Akshat Chaudhry.
He's the founder and CEO of BlogVault, Malcare, and WP Remote. These services allow over 20,000 customers to build and manage high-performance websites with ease. Akshat, you ready to take us to the top?
Yes, absolutely. Thank you for having me.
You bet. So 20,000 users, that's a ton of customers. Are you playing like in the WordPress extension ecosystem or some marketplace?
Yes, we do. We are a part of the WordPress ecosystem. So we are a software as a service and not a plugin per se.
I see. I see. So which of these tools is the biggest? BlogVault, Malcare, and WP Remote? Which one has the most users?
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Chapter 2: What services does BlogVault provide to its customers?
What you do is you protect your business, your business website. And BlogVault lets you back up the website. Malke lets you secure the website.
Interesting.
WP Remote is our agency offering, where if you're running an agency and you have hundreds of websites and you use WP Remote to manage a large number of websites, and that includes backup security and more.
I see. Okay. So it's all about website security. How many websites have installed one of these three tools?
Hundreds of thousands.
Your website says 400,000. Is that accurate?
Yes. It would be even higher than that. I think that number has to be updated.
Have you passed them half a million, 500,000?
We don't actually actively track it. Okay. Yeah. There's a lot of funny numbers there also. There are paying customers. There are free customers.
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Chapter 3: How does BlogVault ensure website security?
What would the math be so that I could back into what my profit sharing might be for last year?
So it would be tens of thousands of dollars would be...
Well, no, but I'm trying to get the math equation so that other founders listening can set up their own profit sharing plans.
So it depends on many factors, frankly. We give up almost 20% of our profit as part of the profit share. But it, again, depends on how you want to structure it.
All 36 employees participate?
Yes. You have to finish a year to participate.
I see. So you have to be with you for at least a year. So there's 20% of total company profits available for profit sharing across 35... It's higher than that.
Yeah, it's higher than that. Yeah, but it is.
So what I'm still trying to back into is, let's say someone listening right now is saying, okay, I want to copy Akshay and do 20% of my profits for profit sharing. My team is also about 30 people. How would they decide... What's the math equation to multiply that 20% by so that that senior engineer who's been there for five years could calculate how much they'd make?
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Chapter 4: What is the significance of a profit-sharing plan for employees?
Why don't you just save me the time and name one or two keywords?
So there are so many like the- Okay, don't give me your best one.
Give me like your third or fourth best one.
I'm just thinking about it. We would rank for all sorts of stuff. Random stuff like how do you configure a WP config file? We have a long range of this thing and you would be surprised by the number of search volume we get because of it. So those are also there are so many factors over there. And which doesn't show up.
Chapter 5: How is the profit-sharing program structured at BlogVault?
In fact, if you had asked me on day one, whether that keyword will rank and give me so much traffic, I would have been like crazy. We ended up writing that article or with being oblivious to the potential.
Interesting. Okay, that makes a ton of sense. So SEO now who do you have someone in house running your SEO? Yes, we do. I see. How did you find that person for people listening that want to hire their own SEO in-house person?
We posted the jobs in different forums and we got very lucky. I think this person came through one of the local forums in India.
What was that forum called?
Local job forums in India. I believe it was Indeed.com. So I'm not sure. Like we posted it in a bunch of places and we got lucky. Like finding good talent is, you have to get lucky.
Yeah. What's his name or her name?
So it's Bhuvish. He's excellent, but he's no longer, actually his left blog was just this month, just 15 days ago.
So you have to replace him now.
Yeah. We have to replace him now.
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Chapter 6: What factors influence the profit share calculation for employees?
No. So if it's the good thing is once you let people know that you're not looking for to sell, then, They know. They don't, they know that.
So no one's, no one's actually made, no one's actually made you an offer.
No one said, and we have not entertained it at all. So we have shut it all right off the bat.
What would you, what would you value the business at today?
I don't know. We are very conservative. So maybe, maybe say four to five X revenue is what would value.
So what, like 20, 30 million bucks, something like that? I mean, if WordPress comes along and offers 30 million all cash upfront, don't you have to sell? I mean, it's a perfect partnership.
No, we don't. Like I mentioned, money is not a factor. It has nothing to do with money.
WordPress is your perfect partner. If you're trying to help small business owners and manage their websites, why wouldn't you sell to someone like WordPress?
They're the biggest competitor. So I would be like, I'm here to kick their ass.
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Chapter 7: How does BlogVault incentivize employee retention?
BlogVault, Malcare, WP Remote. We'll see what happens next. Akshat, thanks for taking us to the top.
Thank you so much for having me again.