Transcript
Speaker: that you have to get your hands dirty. You can't do a start -up with a corporate mindset. When people tell me that I can't do something, I will do whatever it takes to prove them down. Life may not compensate you. One is your learning and one is your learning. Fundamentally, each has always been good. I'm your host, Akshay Dutt, and you're listening to Spotlight, a podcast in which I speak to disruptive start -up founders
Speaker: Hi I am Neeraj Ranjan Raut and I am the founder and CEO of Fiverr. It is estimated that we send and receive more than 300 billion emails per day. That's a mind -boggling 40 emails per person alive today. Undoubtedly, email is the most powerful application of the 21st century.
Speaker: Given that email is such a core way to communicate and work, it is fairly surprising that the core email platform is pretty much unchanged for decades. Looking at these limitations of email and realizing the potential value that can be unlocked by adding more features to email is what inspired Neeraj Ranjan Rao to start Hiver. Hiver is a platform built on top of email for business to make use of email to get more things done.
Speaker: and make their team more productive. Listen to this fascinating conversation of Neeraj with Akshay Tath about building a global SaaS product from India. So Neeraj, where did you grow up? Where are you from? Absolutely. So I grew up in parts in Jharkhand and West Bengal. I've lived in both parts of the country. But yeah, primarily in Jharkhand and my
Speaker: My family and my parents are from that part of the country. What kind of family? Was it like a service class or business? OK. So my family is primarily service class, but my father had a small business side, which was basically a shop selling auto parts, et cetera. So a typical small town middle class family is where I come from. And I grew up.
Speaker: there and studied in a school in that town and that is where I was till my 10th grade and then I moved to Calcutta to do my plus two and then I ended up at IIT Kharagpur. Why Calcutta? Why the move for better schooling? Better schooling, right? So it's a small town and if your intention was to get into a good engineering school further on, you'd be better off going to... that was the thesis.
Speaker: And being a fairly decent student, I ended up getting admitted in a good college in Kolkata for my first two years. And so I ended up moving there. You were staying alone, like in a hostel? I was in a hostel. How was that? At a pretty young age to leave your family? Absolutely. But before that, one interesting anecdote that you'll find interesting. I'm from a fairly small town in Jharkhand. And absolutely no one knew about that town until very recently.
Speaker: when Netflix did a series on that town, around that town. Is it accurate? Is that really like a hub? It's actually a hub, right? There's so many stories. But the town of Hasler's
Speaker: I mean, I would always have to refer to other places, larger towns around it when I told people, but I no longer have to do that.
Speaker: I don't know. Like, you know, people who are like into hacking, you know, like your old friends, you know, I don't do anyone, but I know I think I'm one degree of separation away from such people. And also I've been out of that place for quite some time. I visit, you know, occasionally probably once in 18 months or so.
Speaker: But I have friends there, so I know what's going on. So I knew about this for much longer before this actually came out. But you were never keen to make a quick buck. I don't know if that is what I'm trying to do now. No, nothing of that. So how was the whole experience of living alone then? You know, two years school, then another four years in IIT.
Speaker: Yeah, so I think the experience in Kolkata, you know, during my first two was a bit difficult because, you know, first I'm fairly young, I was probably 15 years old and away from home, you know, and getting used to hostel food, which was not very nice. And also being at the constant pressure of having to do well in studies so that you can end up in a good college. I mean, that is how, you know, political story is. And so, you know, fairly difficult environment.
Speaker: struggling with business, it is like having good nutritious food and with pressure to manage to get into a good school. So I think all that combined to make those two years a bit difficult, but after we got into IIT, I think it got a lot better. I mean, you'd still struggle with the hostile situation, but that insecurity or uncertainty about your career goes away. And then you have peers who are very, very interesting and you are basically with birds of the same feather.
Speaker: which makes your life so much more fun and interesting. So that is how I put it. So it really bothered for my past 12, but after I got into IIT, it became really fun and really interesting. Were you a hustler in IIT? No, I was not a regular state hardworking student either. I mean, I did basically well, but I was not one of the really studious kind, but nor I was a hustler. I think I spent a lot of time
Speaker: learning stuff, reading stuff and doing stuff outside of the purview of what was a part of my course. But again, not very deeply involved with college politics and hostel life, etc. So I was kind of midway between those two.
Speaker: Okay. And the job at Metagraphics, that was like a campus placement? Actually, that was before my campus placement. That is where I did my, you know, you know, pre -placement, not pre -placement, but my internship, two months internship, right? And I ended up, you know, getting an offer there. So I've never attended an interview. So, you know, that was my first job. And, you know, that is something that I like to mention that, you know,
Speaker: Incidentally, I never attended a job interview. So hopefully I'll give you some experience of an interview today. So this stuff I do quite a bit. I've been over compensated on that front by having to pitch to, you know, right, right, right, right. So nature has had its revenge. Okay. Okay. So what were you doing at mentor?
Speaker: So I was, you know, so basically mentor is a company that makes tools or products that helps people who design chips, free chips, right? So it's basically like, you know, computer aided design chips for tools for people to build chips. Right. And I was in the emulation division, which is, you know, basically software that helps you confirm that your designs meet standards and, you know, do what they're expected to do. Right. So, so essentially what it entails is, you know, you are building compilers, which
Speaker: translate one kind of description to another kind of description and make sure that everything matches. So, you know, hardcore technical work, I was writing code in C++ primarily for four, five years, very, very strongly, you know, delineated from the work that you do in web and mobile, you know, moving to web and mobile from there was a fairly strong, big jump for me, but very interesting work, technically, and then, and metographics, you know, the culture, the people was outstanding, right? I've taken away a lot.
Speaker: from what I observed and experienced at Metagraphics into how, you know, I have built the current company. So, like, you know, what happened in like 2007 when you kind of jumped ship? Yeah, I think, you know, I, you know, I, after, so the first three years of Metagraphics was amazing. And I think I met so many good people and did good work, but probably around three and a half years or so, I started to get restless.
Speaker: and try to figure out what is it that I should be doing next, which is interesting and kind of uses every bit of my potential and every bit of the skill that I have. And that was the idea. And the few ideas that I considered was going ahead and doing a PhD maybe, or going ahead and starting a company and seeing how that turns out.
Speaker: And I think I gravitated towards doing a company because it was very interesting, very challenging. It was very open -ended. I mean, if you do a PhD or you do a master's, you have kind of visibility into how your life is going to look like 20 years down the line. I mean, you have a rough amount of visibility. But I like the fact that with being an entrepreneur, it was extremely open -ended.
Speaker: And you could basically decide what you're going to be in the next 15, 20 years. So I think that is what drew me towards that direction as against other things. Did you have like role models, like, you know, Nayan Murthy or something? Even now, people are so flawed. That is extremely dangerous to have role models. I find it very hard to have role models even now. It's extremely difficult for me.
Speaker: Okay. So you like quit and started on your own. You had co -founders. Tell me about that journey of actually launching the company that you launched then. Yeah. So my co -founder was Monish was my, you know, my best mate from IIT Kharagpur and also my colleague at Mentor Graphics. So we had worked for quite a few years, knew each other very, very well. And we're very good friends and we are still very good friends and
Speaker: And we ended up, uh, and then it was like, you know, if I'm starting a company, you know, basically, of course, or if he's starting a company out, of course, go ahead and join him. Right. And so we kind of worked together and said that let's do something. Right. And then we left our jobs within a week of, you know, each other. So I left on the fourth of May, he left on the 11th of May and we started up. Right. So, so I always had a co -founder, right. And my current co -founder, Nitesh, uh, joined us within one week of one month of, you know, are having left our,
Speaker: previous jobs. He joined us right out of college. He was also at IIT Kharagpur at that time. And then we became the three people team who continued building the first business that we had over the next few years. What was the business that you thought you will do? So we thought, we actually thought a lot and did quite a few things over a period of around 15 months after we left. So the first thing that we tried to build
Speaker: was back in 2007, a local search app like Zomato, where you could quickly look for things around you on mobile phones, but then GPRS connections at that time, as we called it at that time, were extremely unreliable and expensive, and very few people had that. So we started with that idea in mind, and then within three, four months, we realized that there were two problems. One, data was difficult, expensive, and unavailable.
Speaker: Second was that we did not have stores. And if you wanted to get apps into people's phones, you have to go through these gatekeepers who are basically the Airtels and Vodafone. And that is where we thought that we do not want to get into that problem. We want to build stuff and don't want to grapple with the problem of having to go through people. After that, we tried one more thing. We tried a very interesting product.
Speaker: which was like a drop cam that you have right now in the US. So it was a camera that you could very easily deploy at your home and monitor using a website. We did that for a few months. We had some initial success. But then a period of probably 15 months or so, we started with a very small amount of personal cash, started to run out. And at the same time, Facebook apps started to come up. It was that 2008 was when Facebook apps were coming up.
Speaker: And we quickly picked up that skill and we started getting some consulting projects. The US businesses outsourcing to India. Yeah, absolutely. Yes. I know businesses, you know, individuals, because, you know, when something like this picks up, you know, anyone who has $2 ,000 in their pocket in the US thinks that they can build an app and get reached overnight, right? And they probably did not get reached out of that, but we did.
Speaker: And we started that and that picked up very fast. And we first picked up Facebook apps, then we picked up iOS apps because iOS apps came probably an year down the line. So we kept picking these things up pretty fast. And we built a team of close to 30 people over the next one and a half years or so. And we were making decent amount of money. How were you getting business? Like you had a BDE person or you were yourself doing sales?
Speaker: It was all inbound, right? I mean, I have been a big proponent of inbound ever since, right? So we did some SEO, we wrote some content, we built a website. I ran a small AdWords campaign where we spent probably a few thousand dollars a month and we managed to get enough. So scaling that got very hard later on, but we could get enough traction out of inbound and references in the beginning.
Speaker: And so then what happened? Like you scaled it up, you had a 30 member team. What kind of revenue are you doing? We are doing a few cross annually, which was, we were making, you know, I mean, and, and after paying everyone off, you know, because it was not very expensive to run that operation. We're making a fair bit of money. And, you know, I got restless again. I thought that I did not sign up to be a founder to build a services company because it was not creative enough and we're not doing interesting stuff.
Speaker: And also scaling that was very, very hard. You know, we could get to where we could get to, but then, uh, you know, maintaining this constant stream of, uh, new customers, uh, hiring, running the operations of services. This was, you know, of course, it's interesting to a lot of people, extremely draining for me. And, uh, I wanted to do something creative and I had a lot of ideas on what to, uh, build. Right. So then, you know, one point the dish and I got together and we said that, you know, we don't want to run this anymore.
Speaker: And we said that we'll start, we'll go ahead and do a product. So we quit and we started this new company in 2012. So what was the, what was the journey of the new company? Like what, when you quit, did you have a thought in mind on what you want to do? Yeah. So I have, we are fairly clear, right? I mean, this was based on a problem that both Nitesh and I had faced, which were around email, right? I mean, we had faced tons of problems around email collaboration and email productivity everywhere we went.
Speaker: And I had some direct experience of the kind of confusion that not handling email well leads to in a work environment from my experience at Metrographic. And we had some ideas. What exactly like you saw as the problem? Exactly. So my specific problem that I had experience which we tried to build on was around managing knowledge and information. So we had this very frequent problem at our work where
Speaker: you know we would have deep technical conversations on email where you know you would ask a problem someone would offer a solution you would have a thread with 25 -30 emails over a large period of time right and then the problem would get solved and six months down the line someone would ask the same question again and then you would be rummaging through people's inboxes trying to find that attachment someone might have left etc etc right and fundamentally the insight was that email inboxes are silos
Speaker: But they contain information that is relevant to a larger context than my own personal context. And how do I take that information out of inboxes and make it available and useful for everyone else? So that was the basic premise. And that is where we started. So that is where we built the first iteration of our product in 2011. So what was the first product? What did it look like in the sense that? I'll tell you exactly how it looked. It was very simple. So we built it for G Suite.
Speaker: And how it worked was that, you know, you have, let's say you're looking at an email, right? And on the right side, where you have information about that contact, you'd have a button that said, send to Brexit. We are called Brexit at that point of time, which is another interesting story. But so, and if you clicked on send to Brexit, you know, that our product would basically, you know, extract all the information from that email site.
Speaker: and would put it into a centralized knowledge base, right? And then you could continue conversation after that on the email, you know, you could continue it over the next one month and we would keep automatically refreshing and you know, keeping the content on the knowledge base.
Speaker: you know, up to date, right? And then you could have access control saying that, you know, people, these people can have access to these conversations and they could go into the knowledge base and access and find information, etc. It's a very, very useful thing. It was like, like, I have questions on this, like, it was what, like a text based thing, the knowledge based, it would capture all the text or also the attachments and screenshots. It would pick everything, everything that was a part of the email that would just pull that and put it.
Speaker: How did Gmail give this permission? Was it part of like standard, like they were opening it up to anybody? So there are two parts of the problem, right? One is access to the emails and that is all available through IMAP or their OAuth -based API. So all of that was available. I mean, a lot of that has changed over the years. It has become much easier to do it now.
Speaker: But theoretically, it was all possible. And on the front end, we had to show the button, et cetera. So all of that was possible through a browser extension. So you don't need Google's permissions for that. You could build a browser extension even now, which renders. We have so many companies with browser extensions now. So you could build a browser extension to the front end and have API, official Google APIs to do the bad thing. So it's all possible. There are questions around whether people would be able to or happy to give access to their emails. But that was a different question altogether.
Speaker: Okay, so like that I assume it was probably not so much of privacy consciousness at that time and people would have... Actually it was the other way round. No, actually it was the other way round. You hear more noise about privacy at this point of time, right? But people are much more relaxed about privacy at this point of time. And when we started, you know, the primary apprehension that we faced from so many people
Speaker: Would people be open to giving access to emails? And this is a question that we have to constantly counter. I think you hear a lot more noise about it right now, but people are a lot more likely to disagree about that thing at this point.
Speaker: Now we are used to clicking on accept. And how was this funded? Like, did you charge from day one and were you making money from there or did you get investors? Yeah. So we ended up raising a small round very, very quickly. Right. So, you know, we had, we had been entrepreneurs for some time and, you know, we had connections and the idea was fundamentally good.
Speaker: Nitesh and I were a very good technical team. Both of us could build stuff quickly. She could build a POC, show it to people, get some early adopters to give us feedback. And we could convince enough people to raise, we ended up raising around $175 ,000 or a crore from Citrix, the technology company who used to run and accelerate at that point of time. They put in some money.
Speaker: And I knew Vijay Shekhar Sharma of PTM. At that time, it was 1 .97. There was no PTM at that point of time. And he put in some money. And I also had some of my friends put in some money. So it ended up becoming a one crore kind of round. And it was enough for us to get started. And then we bootstrapped from there for a very long period of time. And how much were you charging for this? It must have been a per user license. Yeah, there's a huge, there's a large interesting story around that.
Speaker: a very small price of $1 per user. And from there right now we sell at a price of around $30 per seat. So that journey is another interesting journey that we have seen. Tell me about that. This is a pretty massive scale up like 30X. It happened over a period of time but what is more interesting is what I learned about how to price.
Speaker: Pricing low is a huge problem because it might make it easier for you to sell or it might look like it has become easier for you to sell. It leads to lots of problems. One is you attract the kind of customers who do not expect much from you and then you don't deliver much and then it's a downward spiral from there. It constantly runs to the ground. Whereas if you price it probably a bit higher
Speaker: then you are comfortable with in the vicinity of other products that do similar things. What happens is that you have to fight harder to sell, but then that makes you better as a sales man, that makes you better as a product and that gets you more demanding customers onto the platform, which again, works as an upwards priority to make your product better. So as a general rule, the worst thing that a company can do is price low. Unless that's a core part of the strategy to undercut someone.
Speaker: But generally, it's a horrible idea to rise to, because that basically runs everything to the ground. So how are you selling this? Was it, again, inbound? Or did you like? Yeah, we have always been inbound. Even now, when we have decent bit of revenue, we are 99 % inbound. So it was inbound, right? And we leveraged everything. We, of course, again, went and did a CO. We wrote content. We went and listed on the Google Chrome Store and the Google G Suite Marketplace, et cetera, right?
Speaker: We started getting a trickle of revenue pretty quickly in a few months. And this would all have been global, like US companies? Yeah, it is still global. It has always been global for us. And 99 % of our revenue has always been global. And so tell me about the evolution then. So how did that revenue grow? How did the product grow?
Speaker: So we are pretty restless with the product. We are kind of still looking for the right thing to build. And what we learned was that knowledge management is not a problem that most companies in the world bother about. People bother about core business function like sales or customer service or marketing, et cetera. And knowledge management is kind of this ancillary problem that probably very large companies think about.
Speaker: probably the Infosys in the repros of the world or maybe the McKinsey's of the world but others usually do not think about that and so we generally the thought process was that you want to build this you know this company with this really popular fast -moving product and do not want to get into enterprise sales where we have to sell to very very large companies so we thought how we can change this entire approach so that it becomes more fitted
Speaker: small and medium sized companies that will just try the product and buy it and we don't have to go and pitch and try to sell. How many years in was this happening? 2013 or so. And we are still probably four people waiting, making enough money to pay for our salaries.
Speaker: What we did then was that we thought that let's move into a direction where it makes it extremely easy for people to manage their day -to -day problems, not knowledge management. And what we built from there was that you have labels in Gmail, and we built something called Gmail Shared Labels. We are the first company to build it. Now there are probably five, seven companies that have it. And what that does is that you have a label in your email that says, new job application.
Speaker: And you drop that label on an email and that email gets shared with your team. And they also see the labels in the job application. Now, if I want someone in my team to take care of that email, I could add another label called task with this. And then this gets notified and you can start working on the task. So it was a very simple label based method of managing your workflow around customer service.
Speaker: Anywhere, you know, email is a fairly important part of it. Any, any kind of stakeholder interaction could be very nice with that. Absolutely. Where you have a team of people handling statistical event as partners. The key thing is that you should have an inflow of email from somewhere else and you should have a team of people who are managing it. And if that fits the use case, it was a good solution.
Speaker: which is a pretty global thing like I mean any company with more than 30 -40 headcount will have a need for something like this so that was the idea we built it and we you know we it took off well we started by when did you launch it yeah we did not take too long to build it you know we built it fairly quickly so we launched it and we're still four four five people team right and we launched it
Speaker: And then it took off, right? And then we had a few hundred customers. We started making decent bit of money and we started doing the team slowly. But then 90 % of the effort of the team was going into making this set of customers happy, you know, building more features for them, etc.
Speaker: So we continue to do it, but we started to see a trend. So all of this was bootstrapped, you know, we are continuing bootstrapped through this period of time. And similar pricing, like one, two dollars, couple of dollars. We moved to six, seven dollars by this time. Okay. To slightly higher five, seven, five to seven dollars at this point. And so like a 30 member company would pay you like 30 into seven dollars per month. Take care. Take care. And you know, but what we noticed was that a lot of
Speaker: what people were doing with this was managing shared email addresses. And by that, I would mean that the emails would be coming into an email address next support at our company dot com, or check your company dot com, right? And then the emails would fan out and you'd want to manage it, manage the emails. And if you want to do that with the label based system, it was first of all, a huge amount of effort to set it up, right? It was a very open ended system where you could set it up in any ways you could make mistakes, right?
Speaker: And since it was so open -ended, we could not build reporting, we could not build automations, everything was difficult. So 2015, we had this idea that let's turn it into another product where it's customized to handle this problem. And then we can probably, since we are solving an important critical problem in a nice way, we can probably move to a higher pricing and also build a lot of stuff around it, which delivers more value. You can probably automate a lot better. You can have much better, deeper reporting, et cetera.
Speaker: And then we started to build it and we had the idea to build this in 2015 early 2015. But then since we had existing, you know, hundreds of customers paying us a fair bit of money and a very small team of six, seven people at that time.
Speaker: It took us some time to actually go ahead and release what we built next, which actually came in the end of 2016. What you wanted to build next was a tool to manage shared email account, like support ID or a jobs, careers ID. Which is what we have right now. If you go to, you know, hyper, right? So, so that is what we wanted to build and fairly technical, technically complex project.
Speaker: Uh, to build it reliably on top of email. Right. And what did you build exactly? Like if you can just describe that, like, so like, say I have a careers at my company domain .com. So how did your product help? Okay. So this is the same product that you'll see now if you go ahead and try it out, but let me just quickly describe it to you. Right. So, you know, let's say you have a team of 10 people who manage your career site or company .com. Right.
Speaker: You go ahead and plug Hyber with careers at your company .com. And now what happens is that everyone from your team who manages careers starts to see a section called careers in their Gmail on the left pane where they have inbox, et cetera, et cetera. Under that, they see careers. And if you click on careers, you see some buckets called unassigned, assigned to someone, et cetera, et cetera. Now what happens is that as soon as an email comes in, it is visible in the career section to all 10 people immediately.
Speaker: Then you go ahead and quickly open the email. Anyone from your team goes in, opens the email, right? If they can take care of it, they could send a reply from their own address. So you could send an email from Alitetat to the person who sent the email.
Speaker: Everyone else gets a copy of that email in their inbox within the next 10 seconds. And what about the sender? Will he get the ID from Aditya or will he get it from careers? So you can control that. You can make it Aditya. And that is why people love our product because in most selfless products, it makes it impersonal by forcing it to apply from careers. So it carries on absolutely as a personal communication. And everyone else gets a copy.
Speaker: Now, suppose you don't want to take care of the email, right? You could assign it to someone. Suppose Aditya is not there next day and someone else needs to further reply, then that is also possible. Absolutely, absolutely. So, everyone gets a copy of the email, you go to all email section, all email section for the shared inbox and you can see every email that is going on, right? So, second thing that you could do is that, you know, suppose you don't want to take care of it, you can assign, you want to assign it to someone, right? So, on the right pane, you see the list of all users in your account and you go ahead and assign it to someone.
Speaker: in which case they are notified that you have been assigned an email, they could quickly jump to the email and reply to the email. And everyone stayed in sync. And then we go beyond and do lots of interesting things. So suppose you start to reply to the email and someone from your team also starts to reply to the email, they see that you are replying to the email so that you don't say send. So this is kind of the core. And then there is a lot more. You can automate stuff saying that if an email comes in at this period of time, it should automatically be assigned to someone.
Speaker: Or if an email comes from this customer, if it is not responded to or resolved in the next three hours, someone should be notified. So that's the automation piece. And there is a reporting piece where you could go in and analyze how many emails you have been getting, how you have been doing in responding to those, which people in your team need help. You could go back and look at data historically, et cetera. So that's the reporting. So very comprehensive products to help you manage all of this very, very well.
Speaker: Do you also use AI in it? Like, you know, where say I don't have a very set, strong defined rule, but a vaguely worded rule that if it is an escalation by a customer, then it should come to me directly, something like that. Like, you know, we are on it actually. So we just built a machine learning team and you'll probably see something come out by the end of the year.
Speaker: So, 16 and you build this, what was your pricing around that time then? Again, 16 and you do not have all of this, right? So, automation piece was not there, the reporting piece was not there, right? So, 2017 beginning, we launched this and this launched at a price of 8 to 10 dollars per seat.
Speaker: And then we went from there. And you have to pay for that additional seat of the common email ID also, or only for the seat of the. Okay. Okay. So in all the plans that we have, you can have unlimited number of that common email address. You know, we don't charge for that because you know that, you know, if you add more common addresses, you'll basically end up adding more people, right? So which will mean that we'll pay us for those uses. So yeah.
Speaker: And, uh, so this could also be used for like sales management. Like if you want to build a pipeline of leads and, uh, put them at different stages and kind of see your, uh, pipeline, like which clients are okay. Sure. It can be possible, but you know, we don't get into that, you know, because customer service or customer interaction management and CRM happened to be very different problems work. So right.
Speaker: So you could hack it with this, but we don't recommend that. And then the product is not going in that direction. If you want to handle that, we'll handle that with a different product that is focusing on. Yeah, that would also need a lot of outbound functionality. Outbound and the way you manage your workflow in a CRM is very different, very, very different compared to how you manage it here. So it's a different problem altogether.
Speaker: And so how is the pricing evolved now, like from that 2016, a $10 to today? So that we have our primary plan is at $24 per seat right now, you know, which is sell, you know, 50, 60 % off and we sell it, you know, fairly often also at a higher price of $37. So, you know, 24 and 37 is where we sell most of, but the entry point is, you know, $12 at this point of time.
Speaker: You can interact well. But then $12 plan is only available to five people. If you are more than five people, you'll have to move $24. You don't have an option of not. And $24 is annual. So if you pay monthly, it is $29. What is the difference between $24 and $37 plan? There is a huge amount of business. So $37 has, so $24 has the reporting module, which is very limited. It's just the conversation reporting. It does not give you user level, lots of other kinds of reporting.
Speaker: And the $37 plan has the full reporting suite. It has export schedule, export, et cetera. It also has more advanced automation. So it has time -based automations that if it is not resolved, in this time, you have to report to this people. You can run customer satisfaction reviews in the $37 plan. You can do round -robin assignments that automatically keep assigning emails to this set of people. So $37 plan has been built to have the highest amount of value.
Speaker: Uh, and, and we are getting, uh, you know, much more comfortable selling that fan as a primary plan. So why did you raise the VC round? Like, did you need funds or, uh, was it for like investing in more, uh, growth or what was the reason? So basically 2018, you know, sometime we know leadership and I had the feeling that we have hit product market with the large market. So you can hit the product market with this small market very easily.
Speaker: But 2018, with the new product, which you see now, the kind of feedback that we're getting, the kind of customers that we're getting, the way the numbers were moving, we saw that we have hit a good product market fit. And if we want to realize the opportunity that we have in front of us, in terms of the kind of product that we build and the number of customers that we want to have, it's going to cost capital. It cannot be done free of cost. Just the product is going to require user model effort. And the marketing is going to be expensive, et cetera.
Speaker: So we very consciously thought that we should go ahead and race. And then we had been in the ecosystem for quite some time. So it happened pretty spontaneously that people reached out to us at the same time. And then we ended up. OK. So I guess the current trend of remote working makes tools like this very critical. I mean, when you're not sitting next to each other to assign work, then something like this becomes very important.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely. I think it has always been important. And from the perspective of managing customer service, even if you are sitting in the same office, I mean, it's extremely difficult to manage customer service if you don't have a tool that helps you do that. So again, I think there might be some kind of undercurrent because of the current remote work scenario. But I think it is something that has always been fairly important.
Speaker: Okay. So what is, uh, the, uh, like, you know, what is the base of maximum base of users? Like how many organizations use Gmail and what percentage of them are you currently at? Oh, we are at a very small percentage of that. We are at around. So I'll tell you. So, uh, the number of businesses using Gmail is five to 6 billion based on last data that there is, I think in 2018 or 19, I would say five to 6 billion is a fair estimate. Right.
Speaker: And number of people in those in that five, six million bucket is 80, 90 million. So roughly probably 10 seats per user is what G Suite's average is. Of course, there are some very, very large companies also. So about five to six million is what apparently is the correct number of businesses using G Suite. And we have what? 1 ,700, 1 ,800 customers. So we are a speck of dust.
Speaker: Right, right, right. It's a huge, huge, huge market. Very large. So do you foresee delinking from Gmail and, you know, like right now, this itself is a large enough market for you to not think of that? It's a larger market to build a company with a few hundred million dollars. So I don't see us delinking at this point of time because it's better to invest our energies in going deeper into this ecosystem, you know, building more stuff for the people who are already buying
Speaker: rather than getting into a completely different problem by trying to solve for Outlook, et cetera, et cetera. So I think next 18 months, we are going to completely focus on this way. We are not going to talk. So tell me your own customer service playbook for Hiverr. I saw a lot of rave reviews about Hiverr's customer service, and I want to understand how you make that so successful. So it's a part of how our product works, and we have used our own product
Speaker: And I don't think we can survive without using highway the way we do if you have to do customer service like we do. Right. And the core component of this is that everyone talks to customers other than marketing, which is, you know, kind of involves gets involved only when there is a marketing activity. The entire L1 support team, which is the front facing customer support team.
Speaker: The entire product team, the entire engineering team and the entire design team, everyone talks to customers first hand. And that is possible only through, you know, through, you know, even someone who's like a full stack developer would get assigned some customer service base to respond to. Yeah, it's a very formulated process. It's of course, the L1 team, which is the front, you know, the front facing team will try to resolve every email and they'll end up resolving 60 % of issues or, you know, questions etc.
Speaker: But the rest 40 % that get escalated. It's not like the L1 support person keeps it with them. It's not like Aksai keeps it with them and tell someone on Slack that you solve this problem and I'll communicate to the customer. The entire communication is handed over to the engineer who is solving it. So what that leads to is that there is a lot of customer empathy within the company. Everyone understands that a customer's problem is my problem. And there is a lot of customer understanding also in terms of what is important to a customer and what is not important to a customer.
Speaker: I think that is key, right? I mean, any company needs to take customers interaction beyond your customer support team and make more people stakeholder in that. And when that happens, it's also very demanding because now I'm expecting a full stack engineers from anywhere in India to talk to someone in the US and talk in the right language, the right dictionary etc. But if you can pull that off, that can be very, very rewarding for everyone.
Speaker: Okay. How did you build this team? Like, you know, you have a remote team. So, you know, which means that you need a very high on ownership kind of worker. How did you go about building this? I think it happened over time. I think, you know, one great part is that the early people that we had were very good and the leaders that you had are very, very good. Right. And that is kind of, you know,
Speaker: I need this in my philosophy on the kind of people to hire. So of course there are lots of factors. There is a lot of trust in the company. There is a lot of openness. We make sure that everyone has to answer every question that they're asked. I mean, if me or a leader gets asked a certain question, they cannot say that, you know, we don't want to answer this question because, you know, I mean, who are you to ask this question? And I think once you have a huge amount of openness and trust, a lot of things get sorted out.
Speaker: There's no, I think, I don't think there's a magic ingredient. It's just the way it was built over the years. Okay. So you have like a very largest fair kind of a leadership style or like, do you get involved a lot in decision -making or like? Until, you know, both me and with this, I will let people run things usually the way they run. I think it's more important to have confidence in people and
Speaker: It's fine if they make mistakes. There's no mistake. The only disagreement. Because you never know who is making a mistake. So you never know beforehand. So I do not see anything as a potential mistake. I see things primarily as disagreements. And you have to sometimes let it pan out and figure out how it went.
Speaker: So that is how the approach is. I mean, we, both Nitesh and I get deeply involved in lots of questions, lots of decision making, lots of technical discussions. But what we make sure is that people have the freedom to decide as they want to decide. And it's fine if they do not want to decide in the way that me and Nitesh want it to be decided. As long as they have a solid argument for what they want to do.
Speaker: It's fine. Okay. So what's your advice to founders building global SaaS products in terms of SaaS? Like, you know, both lead generation, inbound, outbound, whatever has worked for you, you know, what's like the playbook on what works, what doesn't work, where to spend money, where not to spend money? So I think the most important thing is to be clear on, you know, what you're trying to do and make that fit.
Speaker: with your product and your market. I mean, if you are building a product for SMBs, which should move very fast and it should be self self self assisted, etc. Then you have to work on inbound, you have to really scale that up. And outbound just not might make sense as a long term primary strategy. But as if you're doing large deal values, selling to IT departments, etc, etc.
Speaker: It might make more sense to, you know, go outbound different conferences, et cetera. So that, how do you scale up inbound? So let's say somebody building a product for SMBs, how do you scale that up? Like the inbound process? I mean, there are lots of details to it, but primarily it's, it's two things, right? It's content and it's, it's a lot of money poured into marketing, right? You know, it does not make sense to have romantic ideas that I'll just do a lot of content and I'll become a hundred million dollar company. It's not possible.
Speaker: Never done. Right. So, so you have to combine content, you know, uh, which is in a blog, seven hours, you know, thought leadership, brand building with money poured into, you know, such in marketing, uh, you know, brand building, et cetera, et cetera. It's a combination of those two things. There's no other way to do it. And what do you spend money on? Like one is of course, like Google AdWords would be one place where else do you spend money on? So it's primarily Google AdWords for most companies. Uh, you know, I will see that.
Speaker: other media takes up a much smaller part. But it's Google AdWords, it's you know, it's this marketplaces like Captera, G2. It's of course retargeting on Facebook, etc. It's linked in all of that take up a small part of the bank. But then Google AdWords is a large part of the bank. But again, we also do events conferences we used to do. And we'll get back to doing you know, Google Cloud conferences, G Suite,
Speaker: Conferences around customer service, et cetera, right? So all of that had to combine into the mix for it to work. Okay. And tell me about the name, the evolution of the name, like, you know, what was the reason behind calling it Grexit initially? So, you know, so Grex in Latin means flock, flock or herd, right? And, you know, we being whoever, we knew this, right? Not too many people do.
Speaker: because I knew this because you know long back there used to be a chat server called grex .org where you know before Yahoo chat people would go to chat and so I knew grex means lock and when we started I thought it's extremely cool to you know use that word for something that is basically collaborative community product right and so we called it grexit when we started
Speaker: And how did you think of Hywel? Like, again, like community is... Yeah, so I was thinking about names around, you know, community, right? So we like the word Hywel, and then we started thinking around that. So we thought that, you know, something around Hywel makes sense. At that time, we did not know that Hywel means winter entrance. It actually means winter entrance. So the domain Hywel .com is an extremely expensive domain.
Speaker: Okay, okay, okay. So what are you currently excited about? Currently, on the market presence front, right? I mean, the fact that we are a sub 2 ,000 customer company in a market that potentially has 5 billion plus companies. It is extremely exciting. How do I get to so many people? It is completely theoretically possible, statistically possible, right?
Speaker: And how do you solve this? Getting to so many customers quickly. You can, of course, take an infinite amount of time to get to them. But how do I get to them? Five to six years. That's extremely interesting. And how do I take care of marketing, sales, fundraising to make that happen? And the second is the promise of the product. What else can we do with the product that makes it more interesting? The fact that we are taking on really well -funded companies like you know, Zendesk and Fester, some of them are actually bidding on our keywords.
Speaker: on our brand name, which is actually exciting for us. And I think we can make a huge difference and impact if we keep building the product further because we think it's the most unique, most interesting, most intuitive approach to solving the problem. Are you looking at setting up offices globally or you want to remain in India and do like a pure online onboarding and stuff like that?
Speaker: So we'll hire people wherever we need to hire people. So we have a couple of people in the US. Our head of sales is in Canada. Our head of channel sales is in the US. Why did you hire them over there? Our head of sales was actually based here, but he moved to Canada. And then he continued to work for us. And our head of channel sales is in LA. And he's probably the most experienced person that you can find in the market on G Suite business development.
Speaker: So we had it because it was absolutely impossible to find someone like him in any part of the world for that matter. As for regular sales and onboarding, we intend to run it out of India for the time being. We might build small teams technically in the US, et cetera, to handle very large customers if we need to. But I think people are coming more and more to terms with being remote. So we'll see. What is channel sales for you?
Speaker: Chancells is going to G Suite resellers, you know, people who sell G Suite. Okay. Got it. Yeah. So that's more of an offline relationship building kind of thing. That's more of an offline relationship building kind of thing where, you know, they, when they sell G Suite, they also pitch us or help us get through it. Okay. So I've asked you this earlier in another way, but have you crossed a hundred billion dollar milestone and you can feel free to not answer. We are far away from that, but hopefully we'll get there sometime.
Speaker: $100 million in SaaS terms means you are a $2 billion company based on current valuation multiples, right? I mean, we have so many companies getting 15 to 20 X valuation multiples. So what do you think will be the like, you know, by which year? So, you know, if you keep doing well, so we will have to raise tons of money to get $200 million. My guess is that we'll have to raise $150 million or so to get $200 million.
Speaker: But if we play it right, if we keep working on the product, if we have a great team, we can probably get there in five years. It's totally doable because it's up to us, continue on us to do it. Because the market is large enough for you to do it. Yeah, the product works. The product is very highly reviewed, as you have seen, people love it. So totally doable. And are you looking at parallel products like we were talking of sales, those on the pipeline or you want to
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