SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
India based SaaS HR grows $8k to $20k/mo last 12 months
21 Mar 2023
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Guys, Engage.Work is your full suite HR tool, especially if you're based in India. Surendra is growing quickly, $8,000 a month in revenue a year ago, now $20,000 a month in revenue. He's been very capital efficient, just $100,000 in a pre-seed round raised where he sold 20% to two angels.
His team is 44 today, 15 engineers, five quota carrying sales reps as they look to scale to be your, again, full applicant tracking system, payroll management, the full lifecycle of your employees. He'll help you manage it. Hey folks, my guest today is Surendra Varma. He's an HR professional with 20 years of experience in the field.
He's worked extensively in HR policy design, automation, strategic HR, business partnering, and all sorts of roles. He's now building mgage.work. That's the URL. It's a smart virtual HR management platform. All right, Surendra, you ready to take us to the top?
Oh, yes. Just nothing. Thanks.
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Chapter 2: What is Engage.Work and how does it simplify HR management?
So you have 113 customers paying something more like $150 per month or $1,300 per year. Right.
Okay.
That makes sense.
Chapter 3: How did Surendra Varma grow his revenue from $8,000 to $20,000 per month?
So if you're at $20,000 a month today in revenue, where were you exactly one year ago? Do you remember?
So we were almost 8,000 USD per month, 12 months back.
That's great. So where's the growth coming from today? You told us about your first customer. How are you getting customers today? What's your growth channel?
So our GPM is primarily focused in terms of talking to founders. And we have an inbound. So we do a lot of content marketing. We publish a lot of knowledge articles around the HR challenges faced by startups founders in MSME.
Chapter 4: What is the structure of Surendra's team and how does it support growth?
And that's how we primarily try to kind of give a lot of insight about how HR needs to get managed. So a lot of LinkedIn marketing, a lot of email campaigns. We reach out to a lot of founders.
What's your favorite LinkedIn tool for LinkedIn marketing?
So it's a sales navigator. Primarily to reach out to the right people.
Yeah, that makes sense. And how many folks are full-time today on your team?
So we are close to 44 people team.
44 people. Okay, wow. And are you only servicing? I know with remote.com, they actually have legal entities in every country. And then they're there and they employ a record. But that's a lot of work. Are you only working with companies that are hiring employees in India? Or can someone use you if they're hiring and paying employees and Canada and London and all over the world?
Right. So we have customer base. So primarily it is focused on India, but we do have a couple of customers. I would say 3% of our customers having an office in multiple geographies or multiple countries. And what's your model?
Are you the EIR, the employer of record?
Yeah, so we, it's like, so if you understand PEO, which is professional employer organization market, right? So we kind of give you the platform and we also give you a virtual HR manager who's going to kind of ensure that your entire HR gets managed by that particular dedicated virtual HR manager. Of course, everything happens on the platform.
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Chapter 5: What challenges has Surendra faced in scaling his business?
Yeah, that's a good one. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?
I follow Steve Jobs.
Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building Engage?
Favorite online tool that I like is there's a product called HiBob, which I follow. And there's something called Bambi, Bambi HR in US.
Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?
I am sure that I have at least seven hours sleep.
Okay, that's good. In situation, married, single kids?
I'm married and I have two daughters.
Two kids.
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