How a $12K MRR Exit Built a $1M ARR SaaS

All right. I'm here with Paresh, the founder of Bolo Forms, who got acquired in 2021, a long time ago for a life-changing amount, it sounded like. And now he's doing some bigger and better things. So I'm connecting with him again. Paresh, how you doing today?

I'm doing great, Andrew. Thanks for asking. How about you?

Doing good. I'm super excited to hear about this because you recently reached out and Shared with us about your acquisition a long time ago and what you're building today. But before we dive into that, do you want to just give a brief introduction for people that may not know you? Sure. So I'm Piyush.

I'm the co-founder and CEO of Boloforms. You know, a digital signing company for small businesses, and we have currently over 5 million users that are using our product.

So that's briefly about us.

And prior to this, I've also had 2 SaaS exits in the $200,000 to $500,000 range.

Nice. Let's talk about one of those. What did the company do? What problem did it solve? Let's start there.

Sure. So me and my co-founder Chirag, back in our college, after graduating, we started a small side project while working full-time. So back in 2020, there were, you know, times where people used to work remotely. So we brought up this idea of building a product that will help businesses you know, sell as well as have a CRM on top of WhatsApp. So that was the product back in 2020 that we built it and we launched it on the Chrome Store. After launching it on the Chrome Store, as well as doing, you know, a lot of SEO, we wrote a lot of blogs around this and then getting into Facebook groups. Over the next 2, 3 months from August of 2020 to like up until December, we grew to 10,000+ users using The product, it started with a simple, like, partnership with a Facebook group owner. We just, you know, gave him affiliate commission and that's how we started. And over the course of 1.5 years, we grew it to 100,000+ installs, a lot of users. We could not monetize the product that well, but we got to like around $12,000 in MRR and that's how we got started.

Yeah. That is incredible. I love stories like that, like, especially how you're able to get so many users from just like one partnership or. Finding an area where all those customers hang out and you market to them specifically. I think that's great.

Yeah, that's that, I guess, like you do a lot of things and one of the things hits. That's what happened. Like there were a lot of things that did not click at all, but this partnership brought in the first paying set of users and then it just started to snowball from there.

That's such a big part of startups is like that process of elimination where you're figuring out what doesn't work so you can get closer to what does work. What would you say like the hardest part of building the startup was?

The hardest part was the initial 10 customers. That's what I still think was the hardest because once you have built the product, we built it for a specific customer. So prior to this, we were also doing a lot of, you know, consulting for small business owners. We used to build their Shopify websites or things like that. So one of those customers itself suggested some kind of a tool that will help him on WhatsApp as well as iMessage. We started with that, but after selling it to him, then it was tough, like to get the next 4, 5, 10 customers. How do we do that? And then we launched onto Chrome Store and then Facebook marketplaces. It took a good 2, 2 and a half months to get to 10 customers. But after that, you know, the partnership and everything kicked in. So just sticking at it for that amount of time and not giving up on the project altogether, or just thinking like this was a one-time consulting You know, thing and could not go any higher. So that is the main toughest part as well as the learning just to keep going. If you feel that this is a product that multiple businesses can use. Yeah.

I mean, building startups is hard. Yeah. You gotta be patient. You gotta stick with it.

Yeah.

Like you just gotta give it enough time to let those lucky moments pop up. If you give up too early, you miss out on all that.

Yeah, for sure. That's, that was the learning and post that. Not to get too distracted with, you know, all the other things that are going on. So on Twitter, on social media, you see a lot of people launch something. They get a lot of users within a week, and then you just feel like, am I choosing the wrong idea or am I building something wrong? And should I jump to that new hot thing that has come up? So just focusing on what you're doing and slowly the results will come. That is not, you know, talked about as being as tough, but it is, you know, not to get distracted and just keep on doing what you're doing, even if the results are not seen immediately.

Yeah. That's true. I love that. You know, you have product market fit. You had a ton of customers. You said you were at $12,000 monthly recurring revenue. Why did you ultimately decide to sell the business?

Yeah. So around that time, I was also active on Twitter and that's the time like MicroAcquire launched very freshly, I'm guessing right around 2021. That time you did not even have like an escrow service or nothing. It was very bare bones. Yeah. I remember those days.

have been me just running the company because it was just me for, I think, about a year.

Yeah, that time I remember, you know, a lot of people talking about MicroAcquire, listing on MicroAcquire and those things. So we just listed on it just to see what all things will happen after listing. Are we getting any offers or not? That was our first intention. And post that, we did not sell immediately after listing on MicroAcquire. We sold it like 4 to 5 months after that, out of which the first 3 months, the listing was just there. We were getting offers, but, but the offers were way too low either, or what used to happen was thought that we could grow the company even more and get, get a higher multiple. So those 2 things we were conflicting on, but then over time we realized that, you know, we did not want to spend like a good amount of years into building this into be something bigger. We wanted the exit to focus on some other idea that we had at that time. So that's when we made up our mind to sell it. And then like after a month we got the right offer and then that's when we decided to sell. So yeah.

Nice. So you sold Progress Analytics.

Yeah. That time it was crypto. It did not work out in the end, but, but yeah, that's how things are. But yeah.

Nice. Well, tell me about what you're doing now, because what I'm really curious about is You built a business, you sold that business. Would you say any lessons or things you, you know, mistakes that you made translated into making it easier the next time around with this new business?

Sure. The one thing that I recommend, this is focused towards international founders, is that have a US corporation as soon as possible. It just makes everything very simple. Like, for example, payment providers do not switch countries, at least at that time they did not. So switching the recurring subscriptions to a new country and their system was way too tough. So that's where, you know, the offers will get lowballed for you because the acquirer is not getting all the subscriptions upfront. And that will cause a lot of hassle. And if you're registering it in the US, the buyer pool also increases significantly. So that would be the lesson. Like, I don't know whether anybody else has told this or not, but I found it very interesting. If you would have done that, you would have gotten a higher exit offer as well. So that's it. And currently, you know, after that exit happened, we used the funds to explore, you know, a bit of crypto. We were in the market for like 1, 1.5 years, won a lot of hackathons, but no users, no paying customers or no transaction volume locked or anything as such. So we came back to SaaS, which we knew. And that's when we again, you know, started with Holoforms. It was an internal form approval product. That's what it started off with. So companies could use it internally to have leave approvals or in inventory management companies to have certain inventory management forms, which they can approve, reject, multiple level of approvers. So that's what we started off with. These companies used Google Sheets to manage all of it before we made it formal. But then these companies did not have the budget to pay for this tool, even though, you know, it simplified their workflow. It was a good to have sort of a tool, not something that is something that they will pay for. Then we realized people are signing off on all of these approval forms and they are paying for other e-signing providers as well, parallelly. So we thought, let us market our product as the signing product and the approval will become the lock-in that will be a free add-on. So that's what the product eventually became. And currently we just compete in those areas where DocuSign and other big players like are rated 2-star or like 1.2, 1.8 stars, that sort of a rating, because these guys are like very focused on the mid-market or the bigger enterprises. enterprise customers, but they don't integrate well with the small business owner tools. So we focus a lot on the integrations so that the tool can be used in their system of record and it works seamlessly. So that's where the differentiating point is when it comes to DocuSign and other players.

That's incredible. It sounds like a great business. I love that space. I used to have a company that sold to small businesses and it's just such a huge market. There's millions of small businesses throughout the world. There's just so many ways to win in those markets.

Yeah, exactly. Like I know of at least 30 e-signing companies each doing more than like a million dollars in ARR for sure. Like, and very small teams and very leanly in a bootstrapped manner. So it's a big market and multiple winners in this.

Yeah. You don't need to win the whole market either. I mean, a million in recurring revenue is no joke. And to be like 50th in the market and be making millions in revenue, I think that sounds amazing.

Exactly. That was that thought as well. And. Yeah, we have grown this company now closer to that number in the last 3 years. Like it's close to $1 million in ARR now. And yeah, the users have now started to use the product. And as the users grow, they send some document to sign to some other business owner and then they discover us. And that's the growth flywheel. Now we are slowly starting to see.

Nice. How would you say the previous business that you built and sold helped you With experience building this business, was there like mistakes that were easier to avoid? You feel like you were able to move faster?

Yeah. The first thing is like, you just know what things to do, like which agencies to partner, for example, or what things you need to do in SEO in order to get the results and what is the timeframe towards it, like how to hire better. That's one of the things the first-time founders, they really struggle with. In the initial part, they don't fire fast enough or they don't, you know, check for the fit that early on. But in this startup, we learned that lesson and then we did not overhire a lot. We run it as a very lean company. So all the lessons that were there in the previous startup, particularly with regards to marketing, with regards to building the product, not making it too bloated, building features only when, you know, they are required by a lot of our users and then cutting down on features. That's what we learned in our previous startup, which we implemented from day one over here. So those things obviously have contributed to a higher growth trajectory in a short period of time in this one.

I think those are hard lessons to learn unless you just go through it. Like I've gone through that myself where specifically relating to product, you think adding more features increases the growth of your company. And that's true sometimes. But a lot of times making your product super simple to use and just making it solve that one customer pain point as best as possible. And like saying no to 100 different things. Yeah, I think that's hard to really do unless like you've gone through that pain of like you build something, no one used it, it started confusing users.

Yeah. And also like the first startup taught us a lesson to market really hard. We tend to really overlook the marketing and sales part. We are just very focused on building the product and the users will come. But not just empty marketing. Marketing has to, you know, also have the same rigor as building the product. Yeah.

Yeah, I would say it's even more important sometimes in some markets. You know, there's so many bad products with really good marketing and, you know, you see these great products with terrible marketing and no one uses them, unfortunately. So marketing is like something you just, you gotta learn how to get users' attention, make them care enough to sign up and use the product, a lot of stuff that you can only learn just through experience.

For sure. Like reading a book and all, you know, can give you some insights, but once you've been through it, you just instinctively start to do things and don't drift away.

Yeah. 100%. How far do you think you're going to take this company? Do you think you're going to run it for a long time? Are you hoping to sell it at one point? Are you just loving what you're building right now? Never thought of it.

We are thinking right now to acquire some companies in our space. It's up to like get to a higher revenue number. Like we have a couple of Targets in mind. That's where the growth can come in very fast in a short period of time is what I feel. And running this company for you know a good amount of time at least right now is in our minds. But over time we want to build something that acquires a good amount of healthy SaaS companies in that five million dollar range, one to five million dollar range, and sort of build like a B2B SaaS. Portfolio of companies. That's the goal for the next few years.

I think that's a great growth strategy. Acquisition, acquiring other products or companies in your space that maybe have an overlap with your customers.

Yeah.

Is that kind of what you're thinking?

Yes. Yes. That's what we are thinking. That's why we have also been on Acquire as a buyer for the past several months to see if we are able to find these kinds of companies or even like for that matter, some A healthy SaaS company where we can add in value by reducing costs or either getting the growth up. Those sorts of companies are what we are looking at.

Nice. Do you care to share any specifics of the types of companies you're looking to acquire in terms of like size or abilities? Would it be like an email tool or anything in marketing space or anything like that?

Yeah. So we are looking to acquire, you know, products like we are not that particular when it comes to the sector, like we are fine with marketing support or even e-signing contracts, those types of products, but the revenue size we feel should be at least over $25,000 a month. That's the minimum that we are looking at. And it should be profitable. Some profits, we are not expecting very high gross margins, but some profits. If it is run very inefficiently, we'll obviously, you know, improve that. And the third part is If we are seeing that we can bring in growth, so that is very subjective. I cannot define it in a line, but after looking at the company and looking at the space, if we are able to figure ways in which we can try experiments, which could lead to possible growth, that's the companies that we are looking at. So minimum $25,000 in MRR, profitable, and have like at least 2+ years of history, those metrics. Yeah.

Right on. I love it. As we wrap this up, I guess my last question would be if you wanted to just close this out with any advice to other founders that are seeing this that are maybe grinding to get their first customers or just trying to build their first startup, what's like one piece of advice you'd give them?

In the current day and age, I feel like every week there is something new that is happening in the AI world. So if you have found some niche or some, you know, segment in which you can operate and you can get customers. Just don't get distracted with every new shiny thing that comes up every week. You focus on that particular thing, get the most, and you know, that will eventually pan out in the next like few weeks or months. Jumping from ship to ship is not going to help.

You gotta focus. You gotta stick with it.

Yeah, exactly.

Awesome. Well, Presh, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. I really enjoyed hearing your story. For people that want to follow you online, where can they find you?

They can find me on LinkedIn. That's where I'm most active on. Typical B2B sales arc of a founder, I feel. They can search up my name, Paresh Deshmukh, on LinkedIn, or they can also connect with me on Twitter at Paresh Mukh. Paresh Mukh.

Yeah. I'll put that in the show notes. Well, Paresh, congrats again on the acquisition. I'm sure you're going to keep crushing it. Maybe I'll chat with you on here again in the future.

Sure. Look forward to it. Thanks, Andrew.