SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Software Procurement SaaS Hits $1m, 50+ Customers. Can they beat Vendr?
16 Mar 2022
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
So can I take 10 times $40,000 ACV? I mean, you guys are doing about 400,000 bucks a year in revenue right now. Roughly around, roughly around the same. 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 Ayush Kumar.
He's a software engineer by heart with a deep passion for building products for developers all around the world.
Chapter 2: What is OpsLift and how does it simplify cloud management?
He's now building OpsLift.com, which simplifies operational complexities for cloud management. Ayush, are you ready to take us to the top? Yep, absolutely. Hey, thanks, Nathan, for inviting me to a podcast. Wonderful to be here. What does cloud management mean? Is that like keeping my AWS spend low or setting up my servers in the most operationally efficient way? Or what's it mean?
Yeah, I think cloud management in general to me really means around that given that more and more organizations in current days are like really, you know, running every piece of their workload upon the cloud, right? So as and when basically the organization kind of like really hits a certain size and scale, right? The cloud footprint like really grows like on a massive levels per se.
There are like hundreds of machines being running and in fact, thousands in some cases, right? There are like huge amounts of data that is kind of being stored, etc, etc.
So the overall, I would say, requirement of managing this entire infrastructure and keeping it stable and also at the same point in time, ensuring that all of your applications are running at the lowest amount of cost being possible also, right? So all that requires a huge amount of time and effort for engineers on a day-to-day basis, right?
And that's where I would say the complexity part of the management of the cloud operations really comes about, where engineers in today's state really find it time-consuming and hard to really solve the problems around managing this entire cloud infrastructure at scale. So that's something that we do. And so help me understand how you price this.
What are customers paying on average per month to use your technology? Yeah, I think we typically sell into the category of the customers which are who are spending above, I would say, in the bracket of, I would say, $2 to $10 million annually on the cloud, right? So our price point usually ranges somewhere between $20,000 to $100,000 annually. Sorry, $20,000 to $100,000? Yeah.
And what would you say a sweet spot is? Like is 40 or 50,000 bucks a year appropriate or is that too low? I think our sweet spot typically should range around, I would say 30 to 40K per month. Sorry. And is it a flat fee or do you only get paid if they save money on their cloud spend? No, I think it's a mix of both.
I think ours is a usage-based pricing wherein, you know, the more and more basically customers, you know, use our platform to like really analyze more and more resources. So our pricing is majorly focused around the resource-based pricing, right? Measured by what? So you say utility, what kind of utility? How do you measure it?
So our utility measurement criteria typically revolves around the two factors. First is basically how much of the, I would say, savings potential are we able to really generate for the customers, right? So I think, let's say, if you say that we're able to generate like 100,000 per month, right? So that's one criteria that we generate.
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Chapter 3: How does OpsLift price its services for customers?
Do you remember? I think a year ago, we were somewhere, I think, in the lower brackets of $16,000 to $20,000. Somewhere, I think, around that. Yeah. So nice growth, congratulate, and maybe doubling year over year, which is nice. What's the plan moving forward? You just raised this capital. What are you going to spend it on? More R&D hires? More R&D, definitely.
I think, you know, and our target is to basically kind of see that how, you know, we can basically quickly, you know, scale up our basically revenues and even like achieve more, I would say, growth in terms of our revenues, right? And of course, I think R&D is a primary focus at this point in time to kind of like really nail down upon the product, right?
uh uh like and the features kind of like which are like really working well for the customers like even more investing in that etc etc and discovering the newer problems things like that but i think yeah more or less aren't doing it and i use a lot of first-time sas founders or even second third time have a lot of trouble signing enterprise deals right out of the gate you've got 10 customers paying an average 40 grand a year how did you convince them that it was worth spending 40 grand a year on your brand new startup
I think our customer obsession has kind of like really led us to do so, right? I think one of the things that differentiates us basically, I think strongly with respect to our competitors, you know, in the market is that we do anything and everything that basically that our customers, especially when like when we are at this stage, right?
That I think our inability to say no to a customer's demand is basically like given us basically a very favorable like advantage that the things that basically our competitors weren't willing to kind of like offer to our customers
customers you know in terms of a product feature service etc right i think we said yes to almost everything and i think that's where uh you know we have been able to kind of like really convince most of the people that it's worth kind of like doing business with us because uh uh we uh could basically go up to like solving customers problem to the levels that i think we couldn't have like really imagined like so far right so i think that's that's i would say the primary thing that we have been able to kind of like really help like do so that's why customers like really love us for that reason i
Very cool. Let's wrap up here with the famous five I use. Number one, favorite business book. I would say no, I would say favorite business book, the hard thing about hard things. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? No, not really.
I think that at this point in time, yeah, I do not idolize anybody, but yeah, there are like a number of people whom I could idolize, but I couldn't name any specific. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building OpsLift? Online, sorry, online tool for what? It's just your favorite online tool. One you use a lot.
I think favorite online tool at this point in time for me would be Twitter. I would say, you know, that's where I spend most of my time on. Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night? Hours of sleep. I think I, at this point in time, five or six, maybe. Yeah. That's okay. Not bad. And what's your situation? Married, single kids. I am single right now. Okay. No kids.
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