SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Linkedin Automation Tool Bootstrapped to $25k/mo From Parents Basement, Big Profits
13 Sep 2021
Chapter 1: How did the LinkedIn automation tool start from a basement?
I started writing the code back in May of last year, but we made our first dollar in September and we've grown since then to 25K.
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Hey folks, my guest today is Saurav Gupta. He's a tech guy at heart turned sales enthusiast now building Senzilla.
Chapter 2: What outreach strategies are being utilized for sales on LinkedIn?
It's his second startup in the AI space. He's tried once before when he started an AI company doing CCTV video analytics. It failed big time, but he learned a bunch of things that he applies to make Senzilla a bootstrap profitable leader in the outreach automation space. Saurav, are you ready to take us to the top? Let's go. All right. What kind of outreach are we talking about?
It's the typical outreach on those typical outreach channels like LinkedIn, email, calling, that kind of stuff. But we started with LinkedIn because we feel, especially given the pandemic, social selling has really become more mainstream. A lot of salespeople are now getting meetings just off of posting on LinkedIn. So, you know, it's become this kind of, it's come of age, right?
And that's what we're trying to productize in a sense, you know, like getting meetings, getting sales meetings off of LinkedIn. So we just help salespeople, you run sequences on LinkedIn instead of email, right? Because the average response rate to a cold LinkedIn DM is something like 15%, while the average response rate to a cold email is something like 2%.
So a lot of salespeople are now shifting to LinkedIn as their major channel. This makes sense. How many customers do you have today? About 80. 80. Okay, great. And help me understand pricing. What are they paying per month? So roughly, so our list price is something like $149 per month. Yeah. So, but that is dependent on number of seats, number of LinkedIn accounts that they have.
So does that mean you've passed about $11,000 in monthly recurring revenue? Higher, we're about 25K. 25,000. Wow. Okay. This is incredible. When did you launch the business? I am a programmer myself. I started writing the code back in May of last year, but we made our first dollar in September and we've grown since then to 25K. Got it. What did you finish December 2020 with?
How much revenue did you do then? I think we were between 5 to 10K, something like 7 or 8K. There's nice growth here. How did you get these first 80 customers? Where did you find them? It's funny. We used our own tool to sell our own tool. I mean, nothing else, right? I was hoping you would say that. If you didn't say that, I would have grilled you hard. So I'm glad you're eating your own coffee.
No, of course. I mean, we're a very small company, so we don't really have budget for QA. So the best way for me to make sure the product is robust is to just let my sales people go crazy with it, right? Like we've got five people and they use this exclusively as their lead gen method and it helps us improve our product as well. So we're just really killing like two birds with one stone, right?
Like making the product better as well as getting revenue, right? So it's the best way to sort of grow. You said there's five of you today. How many engineers? Engineers is just me. But we've got five salespeople. So I'm handling most of the tech right now. But we have some salespeople now. And how do you incentivize them? Do you have them do a number of demos per week?
Or how do you drive them forward?
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Chapter 3: How many customers does Senzilla currently have?
What do you use to do that? Um, right now we're pretty, uh, sort of, um, broken in terms of process. So we do have a pipe drive installation, but we don't really use it that much. We track it, uh, just on Google sheets and, you know, one of my head reps, she basically just, uh, prepares a sheet for me at the end of every month. And then I just look at it.
Chapter 4: What pricing model does Senzilla use for its services?
I think, um, give me one second. Yeah, so if I remember correctly, we got NetNet around 50 meetings as a team. You know, we did about 50 meetings as a team and we converted about, I think it was just five new customers. So that was the rough idea. But let me just find the sheet if I can find it again. No, that's great. That's what I wanted to understand. Now, are these customers sticking around?
Have you had any churn? Yeah, churn has been a problem because we're still pretty early. We're still figuring out who the perfect customer is for us. So we have had about 8% monthly revenue churn. Customer churn, I think the customers who don't stick around are the people who just buy one seat.
They're just trying out LinkedIn Outreach as a channel and then either they find success with it or they don't. And yeah, that's the problem. So we're trying to go after, since it's more of a sales led motion, we're trying to go after more of enterprise sales teams, lead gen agencies, companies who are using outreach or sales flow and they want to get more serious about LinkedIn as a channel.
Then we go to them and say that, hey, why don't you use us for the LinkedIn automation part? continue using outreach or sales floor for the rest of the things like, you know, email outreach or calling. So that's the pitch that we're trying to hone now. And now we've got a good pipeline of those kinds of companies who have the budget. Are you profitable today? Yeah, profitable. Yeah.
So how much did you make last month total? Um, so we, so our expenses are fairly less, like we're just on top of 25 K. Um, we spend something like 10 to 15 K net net, you know, in the terms of cloud costs plus salaries plus something, the rest just stays in the bank, you know, um, I'm not taking anything out right now. It just stays in the bank, doing nothing.
So I need to find out better uses of that. But we're just trying to sort of get on our feet, if that makes sense. Just have a healthy cushion mentally, and then I'll do something with it. I've not figured out what I will do, but yeah, there's cash. What is the healthy mental cushion? Every founder has a different cushion they want to build up. Yeah.
So if I have to put a number to it, we've got something like 120K in the bank right now, which now I feel is fairly healthy. What am I going to do in India with 120K? I can do a lot of things, but in that sense, I don't have high living costs, right? And I'm single and everything. So it just- That's what your total living expenses are monthly there in India? Yeah.
Um, it's barely anything like, uh, right now I'm at my parents' house. It's roughly like 50,000 rupees per month, $800. I can live a decent life on this. Wow. So, so are you, you're living at your parents' house? Are you in the basement right now? No, it's actually a multi-story house that they have. They got it for cheap back when real estate in India was super cheap back in 1995.
So yeah, I have my own room and everything. You probably are like making more than them almost. What do your parents think about you making money from their basement? They charge you rent? No, no, no. They're pretty nice people. I mean, my mom is like, she doesn't believe it's real, right? A lot of times these parents don't know.
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Chapter 5: How did Senzilla acquire its first customers?
I was like, are you doing something illegal? You can tell me. I was like, no, no, I'm just selling software on the internet. But yeah, I mean, it's funny because they don't understand these concepts, right? Like you can create software and sell it online to people for doing a particular thing and make money off of it.
But now people are becoming more and more aware with more stories around consumer unicorns in India, like SaaS unicorns. So it's gaining more mainstream acceptance in that sense. Yeah. They think you're a drug dealer or something, right? Yeah. The glasses don't help. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That's very cool. Interesting. What else? What's next for you guys? Any new products coming up?
Do you think you'll fundraise or stay bootstrapped? Um, we're not going to fundraise for now. So what I'm really excited about is making it more multi-channel. Um, right now it's mostly LinkedIn, but we want to go after email, um, calls, SMS, like just make it like a full suite of automation, um, for any sales person to come in and just, you know, run a whole campaign.
So basically become create a product like zoom info plus outreach all in one. So you get the email data, you get the phone data, and then you have just everything in one place to, to run these campaigns. Yeah, so that's next. I'm now going after like with this money in the bank, now I'm going out and hiring engineers who can create the rest of those things with me. Invest more in marketing.
We've done zero marketing right now and it shows. Like we've got the best, like some of our customers tell me we've got the best product in the market that no one's ever heard of, which sucks, right? Like we've not done any marketing at all. So gonna invest more there. So yeah, just...
add more channels to this product and make it more full street where a salesperson can come in and just have like a email data that they that they need as well as you know like the sales engagement portion of it do you have to have like a paid linkedin account in order to use senzilla or can anyone listening right now with a free linkedin account use you guys Uh, anyone can use us.
Like I forgot to mention, like one of the coolest things about our product. And that's why a lot of people are shifting to us. It's got an AI module for writing highly personalized connection requests. So if I want to reach out to you, the AI and the tool. will automatically go into your profile and look at stuff.
It will figure out whether you've got certain recommendations, certain certifications, volunteer work, and it'll use that in a sentence. I will say something like, hey, Nathan, I was just looking at your profile and I saw that you've got this amazing recommendation from XYZ. By the way, I was connecting with founders like yourself. Would you be open to connecting?
So it looks like a real person wrote it while it's not. It's just the
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