SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How UseTopic Bootstrapped to $20k in MRR in 12 Months
01 Feb 2021
Chapter 1: How did Nikhil Aitharaju bootstrap his SaaS business?
So what does that mean? You've got about 200 customers that on average pay $100 a month, something like that? That's correct. And where were you exactly a year ago? Do you remember?
It's your dollars.
Oh, you were pre-revenue in 2020. That's correct.
So exactly before COVID started, that's when we got our first customer and then the flight lead effect kicked in.
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And you'll get interviews three weeks earlier from founders, thinkers, and people I find interesting. Like Eric Wan, 18 months before he took Zoom public.
We've got to grow faster. Minimum is 100% over the past several years.
Or bootstrap founders like Vivek of QuestionPro. When I started the company, it was not cool to raise. Or Looker CEO Frank Bean before Google acquired his company for $2.6 billion.
We want to see a real pervasive data culture, and then the rest flows behind that.
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Chapter 2: How does UseTopic's pricing model work?
It's around 5%, 5% to 7% monthly. And yeah, that's because I think last year we were doing a bunch of random things. We also launched OpenAI GPT-3 integration. That really got us a lot of customers, but then people realized that we're not going to be generating content for you, like an entire long-form content. So they churned. So I think...
Right now we're trying to figure out our ideal customer and then sort of zero in on that.
And who do you think your ideal customer is going to be?
Agencies or content teams are going to be our ideal customers.
And is there a path to charge more than $100 per month? I mean, can you go up to $500 a month, $1,000 per month?
Yeah, there is a path. We are going to be experimenting with that. We're going to be launching some full-time products to see if we can unlock that potential. But there is a path. We got to see if it's going to work out or not.
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Chapter 3: What strategies did Nikhil use to gain his first customers?
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I mean, and you're working with some folks here. So I'm super close in San Antonio with the Scaleworks crew, which obviously, you know, Filestack and Qualr, it sounds like pretty well. What made, like you have Filestack's homepage, a screenshot of their clicks going from, you know, call it maxes of 200 a day to maxes of, you know, 1100 clicks per day using your tool.
What was the critical turning point for them that enabled you to help them get more free clicks from Google over such a short period of time?
Yeah, so that's a good question. So when we exited the company in 2018, Filestack actually bought us out. And we were looking to work on new ideas. We were helping them with SEO.
Wait, sorry, who bought you out? Filestack. Oh, interesting. Wait, what company did you sell? Tint. Oh, you were on the Tint team. That's correct. Yeah. I feel like I've, I've been, what's your, what's your co-founder's name on tent? Uh, Tim Taku. Yeah. And then he went and traveled Asia forever, right? Yep. Got it. Do you, was that an okay relationship or are you guys like hate each other?
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Chapter 4: How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected customer acquisition?
Oh yeah. Great relationship. Uh, we still take advice and, uh, you know, if this doesn't work out, we're going to figure out some other ideas together in the future.
Okay. Now, now it's, now I understand why so many of your customers that you're featuring are from, from the scale works portfolio companies.
Yep. I think we want to utilize every relationship that we got to figure out if we have product market fit. So yeah, that's what we did.
Let me ask you another question because you have a beautiful pricing page and you've identified a very clear utility value that you're upselling against, which is number of content briefs. How did you decide that that is the right thing to upsell against versus number of writers or number of keywords suggested or things like that?
Yeah, that's a good question. So For the number of briefs, it's partly to be extremely transparent based on the competitive landscape and what they're doing. So we are pretty new to this industry. So we looked at other competitors in the space who were kind of offering similar solutions. And we sort of based off our pricing based on that.
And then we realized that a lot of marketing teams, unless you're a big content team, you don't have a lot of writers in-house. And they wouldn't be willing to pay more for those seats, unlike sales organizations where you have to pay per seat. So number of seats is not going to be a big lever. So that wasn't the case.
I think briefs, it's easy to kind of peg the value because if you're spending $100 on content or $200 on every single content, if you can optimize it or do a better job researching, it's only $10. So it's only like 5% of what you're spending on every piece. So it's easy to justify the value. So that's why we use that briefs as a lever.
And how do you so let's say I was using this, do you help me find writers to then actually execute typing against the keywords you recommend in the content brief? Or do I have to bring that person and have them like a full time on my staff?
You have to have that person. We don't we're not a marketplace.
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Chapter 5: What is the current monthly recurring revenue (MRR) for UseTopic?
So how does GPT three integrate with, with a used topic?
So right now, GPT-3, for people who don't know, it's OpenAI's AI model that's able to generate text, make predictions, able to generate text based on inputs that you give to the model. So we are actually using GPT-3 in production to generate titles and descriptions. Oftentimes, people have issues with coming up with these titles and descriptions that are close to the search intent.
So we're helping people generate them. And eventually, we will be incorporating them. As you're writing content, as you want to take some of your ideas and turn them into sentences, we're going to be incorporating GPT-3 into that process. So GPT-3 is really good at taking your ideas and turning them into sentences. So you want to leverage that technology as you're writing the content.
Love it. All right, Nikhil, let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, favorite business book.
The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham.
Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying right now?
I'm following a CTO, co-founder Jason Cohen from WP Engine. Great guy.
Smart bear before that. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building your business?
I love Figma. I love Notion. I think Notion's great.
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