From Preschool Owner to SaaS Millionaire: Karthik’s 10-Year Journey

What's going on? What's going on, everybody who's actually tuning into the podcast? Once again, welcome back to another episode of The Nikhil Sai Show, which is hosted by me, The Nikhil Sai. And guess what's going on today? I'm back with another amazing entrepreneur, this time more like somebody who built a successful SaaS business, gone through the whole agency shebang, and, you know, really got frustrated with it and built something really cool for agencies who would like to scale. And I think AI, how it's disrupting agencies, especially service-based entrepreneurs, is insane. I'm looking at most creative agencies being disrupted overnight with new ChatGPT updates and new and new AI tools are making previously sold services, creative services, obsolete. That's why we have somebody on this podcast today who's going to not just talk about getting that one big client, but actually building a sustainable revenue stream. Consistent recurring revenue by selling SaaS as a primary business. Okay, so let's not waste any time and actually let's welcome Mr. Karthik Nairu, who is the founder at StartYourSaaS.io. Hi Karthik.

Hi Nick, thank you so much for having me here. It's great.

Yeah, we are excited to hear your story and understand why have you started StartYourSaaS.io, and we'll get into the details of that. Before that, Karthik, you are one of those very few entrepreneurs in the Indian space that are respected, well known, and have built massive influence. So give us a quick rundown of your journey of you being in the business for almost a decade now. Give us a quick entrepreneurship breakdown on how did you start? Why did you get into digital marketing? What was your business space like? Why did you choose to get into SaaS right now?

It's actually a very curious journey for myself as well, because when I look back, I always wonder that was I really meant to be in digital marketing? Was I meant to be in online space? The answer is no. When I started in 2014, that was the time I got into entrepreneurship. I finished my law, so I'm a lawyer as well. So I'm enrolled in the Bar Council here back in Bangalore, in Karnataka. So when I finished my law, the first thing I wanted to do was about start a business. To be very frank, it was not education. So then when looking at multiple options, I said like, okay, education is something that really goes well with what I like because I want to like create an impact as well as something that can be sustainable forever. And I think educating people is one of the most noblest things, no matter what. So I said, let me start a preschool for kindergarten, from right from 2 years until 6 years. So in 2014, we started and didn't do well. 14, 15, 16. So 3 academic years, we hit rock bottom. So we just had like 4 students and 8 students and 12 students respectively. That's where we realized that, okay, this is not working. And when I look back upon, there were multiple reasons why it didn't work. It could be the business dynamics, it could be the marketing, it could be getting the students. So somewhere I was learning in these 3 years and I said, okay, let me get into completely with my own brand. So I had a franchise of a different preschool. Then I said, like, let's begin mine. And I named it as White Petals. And 2017, we did all the local marketing and there was Facebook Boost at that time. So I also tried my hands on some online marketing and we got very good admissions on first year. Hit about 30 numbers. Second year we got in some 85 students, and third year was 160 students. So that growth was phenomenal if you look at the number-wise. And we, we had the enough funds to actually grow the institution, build a good auditorium, and life was very good till 2018-19. And we even started giving a franchise of this brand. So I used to help people like, okay, I'm going to help you to start a preschool. We had about 3 or 4 franchisees until 2020. Then March 2020 being a biggest turning point, we hit COVID, and I think one of the most impacted industries was education because the entire schools were closed down. And I didn't have anything to do at that time. So March 23rd, I remember still the date, and we said we're going to close down the schools and for just a couple of weeks. But that turned down for a couple of days, weeks, and I could feel that it's not going to open anytime soon. And one thing that was driving me was two parts. Okay, one was leadership and one was marketing. Said, I have enough time right now. Rather than sitting and watching Netflix or Prime Videos, I'm going to go forward and learn something that can help me as an educationist. And that's where I got towards the coaching. If not COVID, for sure I wouldn't be here. And I said, let me learn about the skills of speaking in front of camera, in front of huge people, so that larger crowd so that I'll be in a position where I can improve my leadership skills as well as learn some marketing online, which can help me get more admissions or get me more franchisees for my education brand. That was the entire idea. So when I started my journey in 2020 after COVID, I said, okay, let's learn coaching. And I happened to teach people on how to franchise your business, and I started teaching them like, what are the SOPs you need to create, what kind of marketing you need to do, what kind of business model you should create. The coco model, the coho model. So I went deep into it, helping them even with the agreements and what should be the format of it, how do you collect royalties, why most of the franchise brands fail because they don't get royalties on time. So while I was teaching this for a year or so, that's exactly where it got me very interested in running an online business. Because as I was teaching franchising, I needed a complete funnel, right? I need a landing page, I wanted an email marketing system. WhatsApp was not that popular at that point, so email marketing was good. WhatsApp groups were there, and I was like, how do we create the entire funnel for a coaching business? Now can I implement the same, a simpler format for the other businesses? And I was teaching people about scaling their business using franchise, but the core problem is most of them are not profitable in their own business. Now I said, okay, now I'm in the scaling stage helping people. I think I need to get to the grassroots. So I identified with my community members and asked them, what's your problem? Why do you think you're not able to make that revenue? They said, we are not getting enough leads. We are not getting quality leads. We are not qualifying them. We are not profitable. We are not getting that much of sales as expected. And that's when I understood that, okay, these brands, my community members, rather than scaling, the need first is to build their own business. And that's exactly where we got into SaaS, because at that point of time, before software as a service, the first point I used to redirect them to go towards GoDaddy, build a website there, buy a domain, go to GetResponse, use email marketing there, and use multiple tools. Okay, and then that's where I realized that there's too many things, and I happened to bump into GoHighLevel at that point. It was relatively like unknown in India probably at that point, okay, 2020, 2021. Hardly anybody knew about it, and I saw the product. I just loved automations. I knew how Zapier works and how funnels work, and I could see everything in one place. I said, I'm going to use this tool to build my own franchise, first thing. So what I— what my idea was initially, to not build a SaaS business, was just to use it for my franchisees. I had about 8 or 10 by then, so I said, I'll give them a sub-account so they can do marketing they can do the automation, they can have a CRM, and we can actually help these brands get more students. And I can run my whole brand under this. That was the initial idea. But the moment I started exploring, I could see some of them doing really well in the West. I was like, okay, this is interesting, so why don't I try in India? Okay. And I had a good influence, I had a good community size, about 500, 600 back then. And I launched this product. I said, you can build all your business in one single place. The moment I launched it, people went crazy, okay? And they had no idea about what actually all-in-one marketing system can do. So I started educating them, I started teaching them, I showed about how to build funnels, marketing automation, and it grew crazy. Like, it— the, the journey was like very, very awesome. So I think GoHighLevel gave us the platform to actually generate a lot of revenue. But 2022-23, businesses change, models change, okay? We all know that. They went into the funding route and we could see that the monetizing started in terms of emails because until 2021, I think there was no monetizing. Okay. It was just the subscription. Then the billing started. So now it, it, it kind of gave us a slow thing because we already had about a couple of thousands of users. And imagine if you're paying $20 for WhatsApp, that's a lot of money. And it kind of hit our reputation saying that You told us there's no extra charges. You mentioned that it's an all-in-one marketing system and now you want us to pay for this. I think that's exactly where we found a small conflict while selling it. And that gave us an option that, okay, going further, what's the plan? What's the roadmap of how the product is built? We could see that there's monetizing in every stage, like emails or WhatsApp and other things. Now we said, okay, this premium triggers workflows and other things, and card doesn't work in India, auto debit doesn't work. I said, it's not for India. Okay, at this point of time. So that's where we made like a hard decision to get into building an Indian software as a service. So I wouldn't say it's just an alternative to GHL because GHL has multiple things. It's beyond— it has e-commerce and other stuff. We just focused on our problem. What does the business need? It needs a funnel, it needs a website, it needs a CRM, it needs automation. WhatsApp is a big time here. So WhatsApp Cloud API, WhatsApp Sender, LMS. So we started building brick by brick. We didn't do it overnight, so it took us about 3 years. And after 3 years, right now we are at a stage where we are helping marketing agencies, just like an alternative to GoHighLevel. We are helping marketing agencies to start their own SaaS business in India, built by Indian, and suitable for Indian market. But nonetheless, we're all set to take off to global as well. So we kind of like doing it step by step. The kind of product we are building is not just an alternative, but we are actually getting into a space where even the competitors are not there. Okay, it could be project management replacing ClickUp. So we're just following with the problems of agencies at this point, understanding what they want and just building what they want. We want to keep it simple, easy, and give what they want. Okay, so that's a 10-year journey to what we are doing in 2025.

That's insane. I mean, there is a lot of transformation. There's definitely different phases of entrepreneurship you have gone through. Now, why do you have so much conviction about SaaS businesses in particular, because you have done that agency route where you are helping other people, you know, from franchisee standpoint, you know, building funnels for them and doing digital marketing for other brands. Why is SaaS so attractive to you? And I've seen your messages, like, you're pretty— like, your marketing is hardcore. You're like, you kind of don't like just selling that one-time sale, and, you know, you're more about like building that recurring revenue. Give us your mindset. How did it start overall?

See, I think the recurring revenue is there from 2014 by the time I got into a business, because the first thing I used to validate into 2014 when I had no idea about starting a business was I will build something not for today but for next 10 years. My goal itself was when I'm 70 years old, I need to get into the school, sit down in the chairman seat, and still run the school. So the long-term goal was always there from right from beginning. And coming to SaaS, I think what made me get into software as a service itself was the problem that every business face. I can guarantee you, you can't run a business without a good software, no matter what. In 2018, 2019, maybe you could, but 2025, 2030, you'll be out of the business if you don't do it. And I've seen many business coaches or anybody training on how to build your teams, how to make more efficient, and I'm like, it's irrelevant at this point. Okay, you need to learn how to build systems, how to build automation, and how to leverage AI to actually do the work of what a human can do. And that's exactly where we are heading towards. So I'm completely bullish on how the AI is transforming the SaaS industry. So I've heard even like some of them say SaaS is dead. It can never. You know why? Because people think wipe coding is easy. They can create an app overnight and launch it. But these are the small apps what people can use it. Maybe a small-time app, but the point is those will not sell in the future. These are the apps that will actually become extinct because it's accessible to everyone. So they can just get on Lovable or Cursor or Bolt and they can create a simple app for their business and they can use it for themselves. But when it comes to large SaaS models, I actually call ourselves as like how LLMs are there, it's like LSM. It's a large SaaS model. Now when you have 40, 50 features combined in one single place, now that's hard. Yeah, you will not find another person do it that easily because it requires time, effort, object knowledge, and you need to be a hardcore deeper understanding about softwares. And that's exactly where I don't see any threat coming to AI SaaS. No matter what, SaaS is always going to boom because going further with the workflows coming in NA10 and a lot of other things, it's just getting more technical at this point of time. So people understanding those workflows, connecting those Gmail or connecting their databases and then allowing an agent to work is going to be very, very hard. So going further, people would love to have all of their data in one single place. And that's going to be the SaaS model, which I'm looking at as extremely useful in the future where they can pull in their Gmails, they can pull in their messages, WhatsApp, SMS, email in one place. And then create a staff like AI staff, and now you can allow them to work within your system. So working with 80 systems outside is not going to be that easy. It can be a good point for agencies to charge their clients. But if you are a business owner, which is the majority number, so you'll never find business owners going and dealing with 50 different applications and then allowing AI to grow. This is exactly the same way. How Zoho or Salesforce, when they got in, people were having multiple tools and they kind of got into one place. The AI is going to transform that. So I call it like AI SaaS revolution, which is probably going to be bigger than AI because AI is a large language model. It has an intelligence. But to get that work done, you need tool and you can't go around building hundreds of tools. You need everything in one place. So I feel SaaS is something that will change for the next 5 years for very good thing, and it's going to be big and massive.

Yeah, that's so true. And it is like, I think business owners can't use fragmented tools, especially multiple tools and multiple logins and databases, and integrating them is always a big pain in the bum. And I'm glad you are fixing this. Karthik, are you technical? Like, do you know how to code? Do you understand? Can you build tech by yourself?

I've learned it. Initially, no, but at this point of time, I understand the entire infrastructure of— we hosted on AWS, so I understand how it works, what are the servers, what are the kind of databases, what we are using, front-end, back-end. And I also use AI to code right now. So though my code might not be perfect to deploy, but I can say 80% of the code can be done by me using AI, and I take the help of my team to deploy another 20% so they can build and make it functional. So the best part is the front-end functionality. I don't have to wait anymore because I used to have a long process of coming with an ideation, giving a reference point to my UI designer, and then he comes with the UI/UX, tweak it, then talk about functionality. But right now I think the entire thing is taken away. I can say almost 60% is taken away by some amazing apps like Lovable or Bolt and other things. So I use it like a workshop. I kind of build what I want and I create a prototype and I tell my team, this is what we want to accomplish. And then we get deeper into it. And then we look at how to connect this feature to the rest of the 40 different features we have in our platform, connecting to our databases or connecting the memory, the cache, how long should we keep it? So there's more technical stuff. So if you ask me, absolutely, I love tech and I've just fallen in love and I'm so excited to learn all of this stuff as well.

Yeah, that's interesting because I'm asking this question, I'm not a technical person, I don't know how to code. I built a software like app business and it cost me like half a million dollars and I do regret going deep without having a strong understanding. And it's quite interesting to see you having that courage to be like, I don't know how to code, but I'll figure it out and let's just jump in. How was the early journey like for StartYourSaaS? Like how did you get traction? Because There is a big misconception in the Indian market saying, oh, Indians don't pay monthly for tools. Indians just like, you know, lifetime deals. They just buy, you know, one thing once at a time. But in reality, if you look at the whole GDP, it's all recurring. I mean, recurring at least. So I'm kind of curious, how did you convince yourself to sell SaaS to Indians?

While building the SaaS, the first thing was it was not easy, but I could say that I'm very, very lucky to have an amazing team. Okay, like, I mean, the kind of dedication what my team has, it's hard to express in words, to be very frank. We work almost 16-18 hours every single day, and we have a lot of developers and have a very good team. And one of our key players is like Vishal, so he's, he's a part of it. He takes care of the entire operations of development. So I tell him like, just do this, and he's able to get that work done, right? So I can work on ideation and how to build it, and he takes care of the execution and operations. I think I've been very lucky and to kind of get that team who really understands the sense of urgency. Because to work with me is, is not that easy. If anybody is watching this, knows that, because I don't— I'm not relaxed. I don't wait. I want it now. I have a lot of urgency. And I feel that's exactly how you need to build a business. Okay, you procrastinate, you think that I can do it tomorrow. No, it's now. Okay, if any team member tells me I can't do it, I'll ask them, either you convince me you can't do it or you finish and give it to me. And they find the second option easier. They just do it and give it to me rather than convincing me, which is not going to happen. And right now, with some of the AI things coming in, so it's made me more equipped. I can understand, I can put my thoughts into words, create good prompts, get out the output, and now I can show them exactly like what I want. So I think to build a SaaS business, definitely you need a great team, undoubtedly, at this point of time, no matter what comes in right now, you need that team that you can trust because it's not about just building the product. It's about constantly monitoring how the product works because your product itself is a software as a service. Imagine your servers could hit the ceiling, the servers could hit an error. Now, how do you fix that? How quickly can you come back with that? I think that you need a great team to do that. Okay. And as I mentioned, like, I think I've been very fortunate to have an awesome team who's very, very solid in terms of that. Even I don't worry at this point of time because I know that we have a team who takes care of that. That's the first thing. Second thing, coming to SaaS in India, I think we figured out a lot of things. It's not been an easy journey in India, to be very frank. I would rather put it across that Indians love definitely lifetime deals, undoubtedly. But I'm completely opposite to that. I'll tell you the reason. I would never sell a lifetime deal. For two factors. One is, if I'm selling you a lifetime deal, my job is done with you. I got my money, you got the product, my relationship is done. Now the same person, once you sell it, what keeps me motivated to serve you more? So the motivation dies, no matter how good an entrepreneur is, right? Let's say that you sell 100 accounts and the following month your lifetime deals reduce. And 3 months, let's say you don't have sales. What's the kind of dedication would you have to really serve those customers without getting anything? So I feel it's— it can— any business must be a win-win. And I feel recurring and subscription model is the ultimate one because anybody getting in, they start into subscription, let's say 2 months down the lane, 3 months down the lane, they feel this is not for them. They just have a little capital they've invested and they can cancel it and go away. Right? And you can still get in new people. And as a company, you know that no matter what, your active subscriptions is there so that you can plan your future of your company according to that. We all know that servers and storage and streaming is not free. I mean, it's super duper expensive. Let's say if I'm using AWS and I have, let's say, some 5,000 or 10,000 sub-accounts who are using, uploading their courses, they're streaming it all the time, they're running funnels, they're getting traffic into it, There is no way on earth you can sustain a lifetime deal business with a product like this. You need to be on subscription. Now coming to subscription, what you mentioned was, I would absolutely agree initially. Okay. Because when we started, we found it very hard to convince people to pay monthly because they were getting attracted towards many deals that comes on lifetime. And they used to say, mention that this is available here. One thing that set apart was about having a lot more value in terms of features and products which made them stick on to us. So let's say I had only email marketing system, so there could be like 50 options, right? Now when I have a 50-feature product, I mean, like, what are the options? Hardly one or two, right? So this gave my clients confidence that, okay, this is something not short-term, it's long-term. And when we got into the B2B segment, uh, we made a very clear understanding because I always believe that you need to have a clarity in conflict of interest. I'm the company, I built the product, now I'm giving it to an agency, and I would never sell a sub-account. That's the kind of conviction as a company what we have. I told my agencies who are picking up, you will never find me selling a sub-account to a business owner until date and in the future. So I said, we are in the B2B space, we are here to serve you, and you go conquer the market. Now this is some of the things that's come through my grounded principles of where I come from, saying that if I'm selling, let's say, $100 and competing with against my agency agencies, there's going to be a lot of conflict of interest, right? People would come to me directly. Why would they buy from them? And that's what I said. I'm going to highlight my agencies. Anybody comes to me, I'm going to show my agencies and tell you can never buy an account from me, but you can always buy it from them. Because the people who want a sub-account are never going to be my clients. Only agencies would come to me— freelancers, coaches, anybody who wants to build a SaaS business. So that kind of a structure what we've built, I think, is something that's more refined. And thanks to people who have already built businesses around this, right? Like, it could be any businesses out there. We've learned from their mistakes, or we've learned from something that I didn't like personally when I was doing it. And we said that we are not going to do this again. How do we solve this, make it more comfortable? And how can we create that? So rather than— Start Your SaaS is, is a promotional name for us, but we have a development company. We call it as infinext.com. So that's my core development company. So that's my parent company, and Start Your SaaS is a product that sells to agencies. So let's say tomorrow he wants— somebody comes and questions my agency that, did you build this product? And sometimes the client might be doubtful and suspicious, asking, I don't think you've built it. Can you tell me like really who's built this? They can always point the finger towards infinext.com and say that this is my development company. And they've built this. And you go into my website, it's just going to have as a developer company. That's the kind of positioning what we've seen. And this gives so much of confidence, comfort, long-term vision to my agencies who have actually taken up, uh, the subscription. We don't call them white label, uh, we call them as black label, or we call them as like the SaaS owners. Okay, so we call them, we give them that entire privilege with a lot of customization The UIs are different, the UX is different, your dashboard can be customizable. So these are some of the things that comes as a user myself. Me running a SaaS business, I would have loved to have all of this. And right now, as a founder of the product, I give— build all these stuff so that they can actually leverage and build their business for them.

Makes sense. That's quite an interesting point that you have publicly mentioned you're never going to sell sub-accounts. That's quite interesting. Because I know HighLevel and I know the founders. I think 20% to 30% of the user base is the businesses themselves who used to have sub-accounts from different agencies and/or they just found HighLevel by themselves. It's quite interesting to see how we are winning the confidence of agencies in India with this approach. That's an interesting observation right there. Pretty cool. Now in SaaS, I mean, it's cool, right? Like with white coding, everybody thinks it's It's easy to build software, but in reality, you mentioned this already, it's not that easy when you're building so many apps together and functionally with one brain. Now walk us through when somebody sign up for an account, they have that 30 days time before they pay you again to get a win. Otherwise they will question, they'll doubt themselves, they'll cancel. And this is probably why many SaaS companies don't have a real good sticky rate in the Indian market. In US, they just put credit card, small subscriptions, doesn't matter, automatic payments, forget, right? Forget about it. Not a big deal. In India, it's different. How do you ensure when somebody comes in, what's the customer journey like? How do you activate them fastly? How do you make sure they actually get a client or sell a sub-account to make sure they are actually winning and they are going to continue paying for your brand?

Very interesting question. And I can tell you about the funnel, what we run. You mentioned about 30 days for them to make the next payment, but we never offer free trials.

Hmm.

Never. Hiros way, right? You've seen Hiros doing amazing in this space. And I've observed something very serious. If you're working with a B2B, it's not just about the product. It's about the experience of onboarding them and making them use the product is a bigger winner than the product itself. And giving a free trial actually makes no point because a new person coming into using such a large SaaS model is going to get lost in the product. So we said we are just going to train people, educate them over the product, show them the vision, how they can build a software as a service business even if they are like a working professional, agency owner, freelancer. Is this what you want to do in the next 3 months? If the answer is yes, then jump into this and we will handhold you a lot. Like when I say handholding, we have a dedicated WhatsApp group for each and every agency who takes from us. All the— all their team and my top development team is there in that WhatsApp group. We have hundreds and hundreds of WhatsApp groups, you can imagine.

I can only imagine.

And that's what I say, right? Our team is so amazing that you will find people thanking us for the kind of support what we give them. I think the biggest strength what we have is handholding, giving them support, and helping them get started. So we don't give any free trials. I pitch my direct 3-month package. And people who are interested will shortly get in. And we have many serious people who jump in and they have a stake in that. We have a stake in that. We both are here for a mission. They wanna build a business out of it, and we want to help them build a business because once they get started in 3 months, the 4th month onwards, they're gonna stay with us, right? For the next 5 years or 10 years. So we wanna put in that effort initially to give them that jump. And once they take off, I think they just need a small support here and there. Once they're good. But 3 months is very crucial, especially if you're onboarding a SaaS agency. It's not about subaccount, but agency needs a lot of support. It's not easy. I mean, we know how much of time we put in with each and every agency, but we love doing that. And once we get them started, I mean, there's no looking back for us.

Yeah, makes a lot of sense. So from an agency standpoint, it makes a lot of sense for you to provide that additional support because agencies are paying you monthly and If you make them win in the first 3 months, they're going to stick. This is a problem like even HighLevel has faced, which is the subaccounts need support. And in their ecosystem, the new startups came out like HL Pro Tools or Extendly and all these other support companies came up. How are you handling that subaccount level support? Is that the agency's responsibility? Because in India, I'm assuming people are not like PC heavy. They don't have laptops to build their own sites. So I'm curious, like, how are you maintaining the relationship? How is the expectation? How is the support provided?

That's a very interesting question because when we were getting started, this was also our biggest question. But right now, to just give you one-word answer, all the support of the sub-account is taken care by the agency itself. Okay, now the question comes in about having, let's say, HeadshotPro tools, or anybody who wants to give that support to their clients. And one thing I always mention to my SaaS agency as I'm training them, and being a person who's actually scaled multimillion company in SaaS with GHL as well. So I understand one thing: a support ticket or a support is an opportunity to build a relationship with your client. Yeah, I mean, I would never lose that opportunity. I always tell my SaaS agencies the same thing. So the moment you get one ticket or somebody wants to reach out to you, it could take you 10 minutes, 15 minutes to get on a call or solve that problem. But the moment you do it, you don't have to call them for the next month renewal. And all our agencies understand the value ladder that can actually make a difference. So in turn, they hire a technical person, and that person in turn helps their agencies itself, their SaaS brand. And the best part is, wherever they're stuck in this whole journey, even if it's a problem of their sub-account, our team jumps in as their company and we solve the problem. So yeah, yeah, and we don't charge anything for anything. So we just have subscription. And to be very frank, there is actually zero billing we ever do. I mean, like, WhatsApp Cloud API is free. You name it, it's, it's there. Okay, so we see a lot of people have that comfort level, and they know that, okay, this, this is their expense. They're not surprised by the way their card is charged, right? Imagine you open your statement and you see like $1,000 is charged. I mean, you're gonna freak out for sure. But here the point is, they know that the subscription is the only thing And whatever they spend on, let's say WhatsApp marketing, okay, we connect it directly to Meta and they make all the payments to Meta. And you want SMTP, we give you some free credits. You want to connect your own SMTP, there's an integration. You can just put in all your port details and other things, click on Connect, Integrate, and you can use your own SMTP. So we are making it more like iPhone. So that's what I feel as a product you should do is not just keep a control of everything. Rather give the freedom to the SaaS owners who start a business because that's what they intend to do, right? They want to have control. So I want to give them a product like a phone. You use Airtel, use Jio, use different network, use any broadband Wi-Fi, it's up to you. So my business is in the subscription, giving you good product which operates and functions well. That's it. My, my job is done. Beyond that, what you can actually do is, is totally up to you.

Makes sense. Quite, quite an interesting model. Fascinating to see somebody who's having service-first mentality while building a SaaS. That's pretty rare. I've seen many SaaS founders, I've helped them raise money and whatnot, and also exit businesses. They have a different perspective. They're just at the top talking to investors, raising money and playing the acquisition game and spending a bunch of money on ads and whatnot. Do you have any plans to raise funds? Is that something which is in your mind? What's the long game for your brand overall in the next 5, 10 years? You have to project?

As of today, I can tell you the answer for it, because next 2 years, 3 years, 5 years depends on the way the community grows, the brand grows, and if required, we might have to make decisions based on that. But at this point of time, as I'm talking to you, I can say it's completely bootstrapped. So I own 100% of the stake of the company. I've invested 100% from my pocket. So I built the product, and at this point of time, I don't see any investors required because we are a cash-rich company at this point. So we have, we are profitable. We get subscriptions, renewals happening amazing. We have a huge retention percentage. Our churn is very, very negligible. And the kind of support community what we are building, I'm not saying anytime soon we would ever require funding because we don't need money to build the product because we've already been there and we have enough money right now for marketing, customer acquisition, growing the business. So funds is not something that we need at this point, but we might require somebody to take— open up new markets for us. Let's say that we want to open up for international market. Now let's say that if Russell Brunson is interested to join and probably compete with GHL with us, I mean, I would be like jumping out of and flying to US. I mean, that would be crazy. Now that's not for the money, that's not for raising funds, but I feel that's exactly what you can impact a lot. Like even for GHL, Frank Ankur was a big thing, like Peng Joon got in. So these were some of the needle movers, I would say, rather than just a client. So if given an opportunity, we know that there's new markets opening up. I mean, we would love to explore that, not for the funding game, but actually to reach out to more people and build it with experts who've already been there and done it.

Makes sense. More like strategic partners and— exactly. Okay, makes a lot of sense. Many SaaS businesses struggle with acquisition, their acquisition costs are through the roof and they even struggle to just sell trials transparently speaking. And the cancellation rates are insane. I know a few numbers behind the scenes and it's mind-boggling. What's your playbook for acquisition of agencies in India in the B2B space to get, start your SaaS paying clients?

Awesome. Good question. I can give you a number straight away. We make 3x in the front end at this point of time. Okay, that's crazy. We make 3x very easily in the front end at this point of time every single month. Okay, so we are highly profitable on campaigns and the way we are actually built a funnel, the way we've strategized it. So agency acquisition, retention, the cash flow is solid in terms of what we built in last 6 months. So I can see a huge growth potential which can actually like get 10 years of success in 3 years. So that's how fast we can move in terms of B2B agencies. I would also love to mention the business of the agencies also, because I've always believed this one important thing: as long as your agencies are not winning, you will not win. So I'm extremely concerned about how they build the business. So looking at their business acquisitions, the point you brought out was very true. You can get a lot of trials, but there's going to be huge churn, and that's how the SaaS business works. You get, let's say, 100 people and your conversion could be 10%, okay, or 5% sometimes. You still have that 5 customers. Now, if your churn is high, then you will struggle acquiring the customer. What I've seen in the space of SaaS is not just the tool cost. So if you're playing the game of selling this tool only, uh, you will get a hit because of the marketing cost. Your acquisition cost is going to like be a struggling phase for you. But if you can introduce service into the SaaS, that's where the real money is. And the best part is the service need not be social media posting. It's not that what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the setup of the account. As a SaaS, let's say I'm doing a B2C, so I'm not startup SaaS, I'm running an agency. And I would— all I would do is educate people about the product, bring them on a small trial cost probably I would say like I'll charge you ₹1,999, ₹2,000, or ₹3,000 and give them like a 30-day access to my system with a bunch of courses which can help them accomplish a goal. So I had my courses called as 1 lakh challenge. So in Indian rupees, like how to reach that first 1 lakh rupees using systems and automation. Now this is not about the tool, this is not about the product, but this is about how can you reach that journey. And this keeps them involved in building their business, getting those leads, converting them, and that's where they can actually build a connection with their clients. Because many of them absolutely have no clue about creating a workflow, connecting a Meta account, like having an integration in CRM, right? So what if you could solve those tiny problems? It's a smaller problem for you, but for the other person, it's a big problem.

Problem.

Find the people who have the biggest problem, create your own snapshots, keep it ready, help that industry solve that problem, set it up for them, handhold them for the next 1 or 2 months. Because we stand as an example for our agencies, telling that if we could give you this kind of support, now what should be the support that you can give your client?

Makes sense.

And we literally tell them that imagine if we never give you this. What would be the case? They would say like, oh my God, I don't think we'll be able to build it. And that's exactly your customer is expecting from you. If you can create a WhatsApp group, you can connect with them, handhold them for the first month, second month. Believe me, third or fourth month, they're not going to come to you. But people want a lot of time, freedom. They don't want to work. They want the revenues to come in, money. I don't really understand how it works, but for me Money is hard work and you put in that hard work, help that person accomplish. And once the 2, 3 months happens, that's where the passive kicks in. Now, after 6 months, my agencies reach out to me monthly 4 times or 3 times. That's a leverage of money that I can make after 4 to 5 months. I can't expect that from day one. The ideology of having a mindset that I can sell the tool, I'm gonna make a lot of money is not gonna work. You need to educate them. You need to make them use the tool. The more they use, the more they're gonna stay. And I think it's just in the culture of the community that we are just like showing them what they are getting and just telling them follow the same path. If you love it, your customers are going to love it. I think that's exactly what we're doing.

Yeah, I love that. That's really a lot of accountability right there. And thanks for sharing the playbooks you're actually using. Now you kind of played low ball when you're saying you built the team and you're lucky. I believe there are some things that went into it. So walk us through Because building that type of culture, right, the ingrained culture of getting stuff done and being accountable and being super productive and not just laying around but actually doing the hard work of talking to customers and having that hard feedback conversation and making their product better, it is a way of company. And I think you've built it exceptionally well in a short period, building the scale of the company and especially all the features. I'm like, oh my God, that's a lot of work that went into it. So walk us through what went into hiring these people. If you have to give some leadership advice, on handling a team and handling operations, what would that be like?

I would still say that, uh, I think as a company we are fortunate, okay? Because we've never put in that consciously that we need this culture, we want to build this. We never had that. To be very frank, we never even thought we'll actually build a large SaaS like this. Never. When we started off, we just wanted to build a subscription payment gateway system. So we didn't start off building actually a full-fledged platform. We just started with subscription management that could be integrated with GHL because the billing was not happening in India. So we said like, let's maintain the subscriptions. But once we started cracking that as a subscription, connecting Razorpay, we got interested. People started asking, can we send payment reminders using WhatsApp? Can we have a small CRM where we can manage the people who didn't pay us the money? These are the requirements which actually allowed us to build one by one. We never planned to build a product like this. So as we started, we never had bigger vision, bigger thoughts. We just said we're going to be using this, but we just need a gateway, a system to manage the subscriptions. And as we started doing it, we started off with one developer, then we got in another person, we got in another person. And as people got in, I think somewhere it was never about that they were working for us. It was always that they used to to actually take the ownership of the problem even till date. And that culture has been same because it was very clear from day one. I said I'm good at marketing, I can generate revenue, I can teach people how to make money, I can use that. But when it comes to the backend and the technical part to maintain this, I need a team to do that. I understand today, but still I cannot do it myself all alone. So that's where my team— as I mentioned, Vishal is my team member, so he takes care of the entire operations. So he's that one person who's completely focused. He's just like me, how obsessed I am. So he's very obsessed with building it, and that is the point which actually sends a message to the rest of the team. So you can't have like 20 people being with the same mindset, but if you can have a leader who can actually put that mindset to maintain 20 people, that's where you'll have a team with a culture. And I think that's what has worked. So you need that key people in the leadership roles to really take accountability. Even in sales, our team is pretty solid in terms of that. So we are building that team where they work, operate independently. So not depending on me on getting sales. So I do it individually, my funnels. They do one-to-ones, they do the demos, they convert it. So it's profitable everywhere. They're doing their own works. And I think that's exactly what we are looking at because we know how big the future is for this brand. And as a product itself, right? So everybody knows the vision of what we are building, and this is easily going to be like 100 or even thousands of crores worth company very soon. And we just need to be focused. And you don't get an opportunity to work on a product like this every time in your lifetime. Yeah, I would feel like it's probably once in a lifetime that we have been lucky to be on this journey. We've really been fortunate to get in the right time, be in the right space, build the right product get there, build the trust, helping agencies scale. They are being profitable. And I think right now it's not time to just relax or go into funding game, exit. That's not the mindset. So at this point, our goal is to help as many as people to genuinely build a good business in software as a service, and then we can give them that support. And people who join us are more dedicated. They have a massive future because definitely as the company grows, they grow with us.

Makes sense. Makes a lot of sense. If you have to share some advice for people who are listening, who are running their SaaS business, what would that be?

In the sense like agencies or agencies who are actually trying to get clients? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, they might be running their agency anywhere. I mean, they're running with GoHighLevel, they're running with StartYourSaaS. See, end of the market, end of the day, the market is very important. I always tell that you use any of those products, it's more about what you use. Now, if you ask me what's better, is it Mercedes or BMW? So people have their own choices. Some might like Mercedes, some might like BMW, some like Ferrari, some like Lambo. So it's their own choice the way they build it. But as you're building, the business formula becomes same, right? No matter what, which tool, which product you're actually building in, your customizations can be there. You'll love it, it's your favorite. But end of the day, as you're building an agency, the first principles I would say is it's all about your customer. And software as a service is not a business that you just build it and the money keeps hitting your bank account. If you heard that anywhere, I'm sorry to say that you heard it wrong. Software as a service is a recurring revenue business, but it involves you in this business. The more you're connected with your clients, and once they start using your product, they're going to be your lifetime customers. It's like internet, it's like electricity bills, what you pay. Imagine if you have a lot of disconnection happening in your internet, you're going to change the internet. And if you have a stable connection, you're never going to change it. Like, product is like that, your business is like that, SaaS is like that. The more relevant you are, the more consistent you are with your clients, you're always going to stay there for a very long time. And all you have to focus is be obsessed with your client's problems, no matter how silly it might be. They might say that I'm not able to log in. It's a smaller problem for you, but it's a bigger problem for them, right? So never treat any problem as a small one. I mean, this person is not even technical enough to log in. You can't say that. And because you are the expert, right? So you need to make sure— imagine if doctor said that you're, you're not feeling well, you go to them and they say it's just like a cough and cold. And why this person is reacting so much? Wouldn't be good, right? So it's just like that. Like, yeah, we are doctors. So no matter what problem they come from, We need to listen to them, have the patience, understand, and guide them and support them. That itself will give you like a success in your SaaS business.

Yeah, I completely agree. And I like the perspective you have. I think the one who wins in the longer run is the one who takes the most responsibility. And I'm seeing that very thoroughly in your community and in the way you speak. You are ingraining that pretty well, saying take the highest responsibility and be there for your clients. Let's change some gears. I have a few questions for you in a different format. Would love to know what tools are you using on a daily basis to run your personal projects, make sure you're productive, and manage your teams and whatnot.

Okay, so the number one product I use is Stardew SAS. Okay, it's not because it's my product, because we build it because we want to use it. So if I'm not using it, then I can't— I don't have the authority to tell others to use it. So always tell my team that if we are not using— like, we built the projects feature, which is an alternative to ClickUp. Okay. We didn't build it because it's a feature. We said we want it because we want to maintain the development roadmap. So I don't want to use ClickUp. I want to use my product and I want our agencies to use our product. So we build features that we use is the first thing. So apart from talking about the automation systems and other things, I use a lot of mind maps. I use MindNode and it's a fantastic tool. You can create mind maps and I teach all the time with that. I make mind maps with that. But the second one, Zoom— can't live without it. I just hope somebody builds an alternative to Zoom ever, which I don't think anybody has been successful in that space, but I think it's a monopoly, right? I read a beautiful article today that Google is monopoly, right? You don't have an alternative to that. So no matter what you build, you can't survive without Google. So I think even Zoom is in the video space at that time, Skype being brought down at this point. So Teams are there, but still I think Zoom is ultimate. I can't I can't imagine my business without that. And anything else, tools I use, all, all are inside Mac and iPhone. That's it. Okay. Nothing specifically. And I don't believe in using a lot of tools. Okay. I see some of the posts out there, huge respect to people who create the content introducing 20 tools, 30 tools. But I say is that with 20 tools comes the responsibility of logging into 20 different tools.

Yeah, it's a lot of work.

Lot of work. So I don't believe in that 50 tools, 20 tools concept. I want a single sign-in, right? I sign in and I should be done with that. So I think Slack is one of them. I missed out that. So we've still not built Slack, but we are very close to it. So we will end up building it for sure.

So I think you're just disrupting the biggest platforms. You're like, yeah, we are building ClickUp inside, and then we are building Slack inside our tool. That's insane. I mean, the magnitude of the apps you are internalizing, and I mean, it, it might be a simple feature, but I know you're trying to create one brain and keep everything connected. It is a lot of work because if this breaks, that breaks, and now everything breaks. You got to make sure that you're building it in the right infrastructure. And, you know, I think, I think that's insane. I wish you success, man. Like, that's pretty cool. Walk us through your average day, Karthik. I mean, you're pretty customer-centric. Focused. From what I've heard, you kind of have that 700+ WhatsApp groups and whatnot every day sending messages. So how do you, how do you keep your day organized? What's, what's your daily routine like?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, like, uh, it might look that I'm very busy, but I'm actually not. Okay, I'll tell you my day, how it looks like. So I wake up maybe at some 7:30, 8 AM. Okay, the— I play with my son who's 1 year old at this point. Okay, and that's the first thing in the morning. So we have a time where I just take him for 10 minutes, 15 minutes to show him things around. And then he has his own thing. I'd straightaway come open my laptop, I sit down, I have a quick meeting with my team, so with Vishal. So we both get on a call and we discuss like what the team should work on, and we create like Word files, and then we put it on our projects app like alternative ClickUp, and we allot the work to the entire team. So the team joins at 10 AM to work, but we work at 8 AM. Make sure that they know what to do on that day. Once we've allotted to different teams what they have to do, our job is done. So then 9:30, I get ready, I have my breakfast, I go to my office maybe by 11:00, 11:30. So until then, I'm on the calls and I'm just looking at what people are doing. And once I reach office, I have a few things to do around here and there. I look at what the sales are coming, how the subscriptions are, what the problems that our agencies are facing. I just glance through my entire WhatsApp groups. Okay, so how I maintain my WhatsApp group is also, uh, see, if I'm using just a normal way, my inbox is going to be flooded. I don't feel like opening my WhatsApp. I have a very nice technique I've got in WhatsApp is I archive all the groups. Okay, I don't keep any of the groups on my main screen, so I archive every single group, and archives are in separate in the WhatsApp. Right? So the moment I open my phone, I never get a beep, nothing. I open my WhatsApp, I see some of the messages out there which are only personally messaged to me. Okay? And when I see the archive on the top, I can see that somebody's tagged me for something, right? Unless they've not tagged me, I don't really go deep into it. I just go check out the person who's tagged me and then look at what the current issue is. And people know that if they tag me, that I'm going to be responsive immediately to them. So I go check out what the exact issue is. Once I get it, I respond to them. I tell the team, okay, this is a challenge that we've seen and I think we need to solve this. Okay, and that's a genuine problem that this— we can improve this feature. So if there's no tagging, nobody's like mentioned me, I just glance through it. I just open some groups, I check out what messages are going on. As I mentioned that our team is very solid enough in terms of I can trust them blindly that they will not leave a single message unattended. So that's the kind of track record what they've maintained with me so that I know that trust is there. Somebody tags me, I check out that, and then after that it's lunch, and then I kind of have a look at the product and I kind of do a lot of research and understand AI. Okay. So I'm looking at what AI agents are, what's the future of that, what's voice, what's video. And I love the screen share, which Google launched recently. I was exploring that. I learned a lot about, uh, from different sources about what the future in the next 2 years or 3 years can be. Because I feel as a founder of a product as big as this, I need to live at least 2 years ahead of it. I cannot live at the moment. So I learned this from Apple, uh, because they've developed products which are like next 1, 1.5 years ahead, right? They know exactly what's their roadmap, what they're going to launch. And I feel that's where inspiration came from. I said, I'm not living today, I'm going to live like a year from now. So what should happen in the next third month, fifth month, sixth month? So I keep looking at what are the new things that's coming in, how can we build it, and is that something that— is it just going to be a feature or is it a real problem? Okay, and I do like a weekly training, and after that I connect with my team. So we talk about it, I connect with on Slack, we're always on and off, on and off. There's nothing structured that we plan to get on a call. So anytime we just huddle and we get that problem, we solve that and we kind of troubleshoot them. And 5, 6 o'clock, I think we're done. The entire team, 7 o'clock, they wind up, they put the updates. So I come home, I have my dinner, I play with my son, have some family time, and then I go back to work like 8:30, 9:00. And then I start checking out what are the updates for the day, what they've done. And if it's something interesting, I make a video out of it. I post it to the community and say that these are new features what we've done. And after doing that, we spend some time. I want to connect with my team. I'll connect. And after that, look into some finances, look at what the report says, like what's expenses, what are the income, where we are going wrong, where we need to tighten a little bit, check out the balances. So I do this on a daily basis, which keeps me 100% aware of the company we are building. So in fact, I have a lot of enough time. In between, I get into some coding. I just create some features, UI, UX, and other stuff. And That's about it. I learned this. That's how I'm spending my time.

That's a lot of stuff you're getting done, actually. You know, kudos, kudos to the amount of stuff you're getting done. Karthik, if you could go back and talk to the 20-year-old yourself who is young, energetic, want to build something big, and maybe in college, what would be the number one advice you would give yourself?

I just wish that somebody would have given me Rich Dad Poor Dad when I was 16. When I look at people like you, Nick, I mean, like, I always tell even my team as well, like, these are the people who really understood life within 25. I mean, how is that even possible for understanding? We started our journeys when we were 24, even, like, to understand that does it really, like, work? Okay, and I feel that that's the biggest advantage. This is something that you can't roll over, you can't get back your time. It's not possible. So I just hope somebody would have given me Rich Dad Poor Dad when I was 16 and I knew what I knew later on and started my journey as an entrepreneur maybe at 16, 17. I think that would have been like massive. Okay, I would have actually— I would have been on the hold of 2008 moment recession came in, the e-commerce boom was there. Maybe we could have been there, but at this point we are lucky that we are on the AI wave. So it's also a very important juncture in the future, the way it's built. So 20-year-old, I think I should have just known what money is, how important money is, because I learned it the very hard way, that what money is. Because after finishing law, I was very comfortable not having money, and that was the biggest problem. So I mean, whatever I built is from scratch, so I don't have a big financial backing or somebody who's given me money to build anything. I built literally from zero. And I didn't even have like ₹5,000 in my account when I started off. So that journey from starting there, taking loans on my car, putting it there, working hard, building that institution, and putting back money— I think I've not taken money for over 8 years. And thanks to Rich Dad Poor Dad, the first chapter says the rich don't work for money, right? That first chapter changed my mindset that if you work for money, if you're looking at a steady income in the initial stages, you're buying yourself a job and you're not building a business. I think that's the golden thing that changed everything for me. And I'm very glad that I was able to read that at the right time. And I never took money for anything until like maybe 2021, '22, or '23. In fact, I would say last one year is where actually I'm drawing a salary. Probably 9 years I've never taken something called a salary at all. So I've reinvested everything. I didn't have responsibilities. I was not married. So pretty much cool enough. But now I can see that 9 years putting it back is what has made the entire wealth, the net worth, the institution. I own the building, so even real estate, the place is mine, so building is mine. So we built a network of franchisees, the tool, the software, everything has gone back into the business. And now is the time where on the 10th year is where we are actually seeing a return. So having that persistence for 9 years is something I'm so glad that we were able to like sustain.

I'm so glad you're talking about this, Karthik, because people think building a business is a 6-month game, 3-month game, quick money tomorrow, yesterday. No, it takes 10 years to actually build like a real wealth. And the best returns come when you reinvest your business. You're going to be having that uncertainty feeling when you're doing that. But that's what it takes, you know, to, to really go all in and put all your chips on the table and keep playing, you know. And I'm glad you have done that, and I'm glad you're here. That's so pretty cool. What's your life's biggest achievement and next big goals you have, Karthik?

I would say life's biggest achievement is probably yet to come. Okay, so I consider everything has connecting dots. I'm a very strong believer of that, and to an extent that even if I'm leaving Let's say I'm taking out my car at 11 AM, I take out my car at 11:15 AM, there's going to be a lot of difference in my life. Because the moment I hit the road and the kind of signal— maybe I'm waiting in the traffic, I'm thinking something else, my mind starts thinking about something else— that could be that one breakthrough idea that can change the business forever. So everything is connected for me. Like, I always, like, believe the moment if I'm doing this podcast with you right now. This is— this has changed the direction of my life completely. For any reason it could be, the moment I complete this, I could have done anything else at this point of time, but I'm here talking about this. As I'm talking, there could be a lot of things coming in my mind, and I might be realizing a lot of stuff that, oh, this is good, and I think we need to like capitalize on more on this. So these are some of the things what I personally believe is Your life's biggest goals are all connected with each other. So your biggest moment should always be anticipated because the moment you feel it's there, I mean, you're relaxed.

Yeah, that's actually deep. That's actually so true. I have friends who are well accomplished, and when I ask them, they specify to an event. And after that event, I kind of see it downhill. You know, they lose the momentum. They kind of feel that it's done and now they no longer need to work that hard and whatnot. I mean, it's fine if they're okay with it, but then it comes down to choices, right? So that's pretty cool you mentioned that. That's deep. What inspires you? What excites you to wake up, get to work, show up every day, work like a maniac?

I can say for one thing that it's not money for sure. Because if it was money, I think I would have been pretty happy a couple of years back having like a wonderful things around you, do stuff, you have income, you're financially like free, you have your passive income taking care of your whole business, your family, and all that stuff. But I feel it's beyond that is the obsession to work, but I've not identified why. I don't know, I just love to work.

Interesting.

I mean, like, if you, if you meet me personally, I'm actually an introvert. Okay, I can only talk on one topic is business. And my wife tells me all this, like always she mentions that. So when we go out for any family dinners or we meet our friends, or sometimes you meet, I'm not speaking. And the moment somebody speaks to me, I'm like, okay, what do you do? You're in a job, great. What do you do? Okay, you're in AWS, fantastic. So what, what do you think about the security system? Within 10 minutes, I've gone deeper into talking to them on a different topic. And probably you can't hear me ever talking about people. Like, that's not something I've— I don't enjoy it neither. That's my interest. I don't even know what people are doing. So it's just like, I love to work. I don't know why, but I'm always on my laptop. I'm always looking at something new, and that excites me every single day. And the smaller accomplishments that we did something that nobody did, I think that could be like motivating for me that, okay, we have done this right now, let's do something bigger. And definitely it's also my clients when I always take that very seriously, because until they are winning, nothing is going to work. So how can we really create one course, create a framework for them, or create something? Because good thing is we are in a comfortable situation, right? And you can't have it. I always like I've read this beautiful book called Corporate Chanakya. Okay. In that, there's a wonderful lesson which says that a kingdom is as rich as its treasure. The more bigger treasure you have, the more safe you are as a kingdom. Companies are like kingdoms, right? If your, your only work as a king is to fund and take care of your treasure and take care of your people. So if you can take care of your treasure, like accumulating wealth, and at the same time, since you already have good wealth in your treasure, Now if you can really take care of your people who live in your kingdom, look at their well-being, how they're working, what they do, what do they need, I think what else would you need? Because you're not stressed out for money, you have that already. Your company is growing, you're growing as a business, as a person, and the only best job you have is to actually take care of the people who actually gave you that freedom. So I feel like these are the two things that that I feel is the best thing that could probably motivate me to work.

I love that perspective, Karthik. If you could actually save us from the biggest mistake you have made and make sure we don't repeat that, what would that be?

The biggest mistake that I have ever made, uh, definitely I've made a lot of mistakes, and I would say one big mistake would be financial control. Okay, and in the initial times I've done this mistake a lot because what happens is in a business, let's say you get the funds you get money, and you feel it's going to come the same way forever. I can tell you that if you're listening to this at this point of time, I want to save you by telling you it's not, because every business has highs and lows. No matter which business you are in, it can never be on the top. So when you actually make money in your business, in your personal life, taking care of that money, investing in the right way, creating that passive income should be your ultimate goal. If you're If it's your company's money, then make sure that you secure your runway. Like the next 2 years, even if you don't make a single rupee, can you really take care of your employees, your rentals, and other things? This is one of the mistakes that I would say that we made when we transitioned from GoHighLevel to building StartYourSaaS. Because in 2021, when I decided I'm going to build, to be very frank, I stopped selling. I stopped selling GoHighLevel. I said I'm not going to make money because I don't believe in it anymore. Now I feel like India is not able to build it. So if I'm not believing, I don't have the authority to sell it to anybody. So literally, for the next 1.5-2 years, we made ₹0, anything. The recurring used to come in, whatever we had clients. We never acquired a single new client. And then we went into building the product. So it was a huge revenue that we had to like put in. And since I'm the only person who's investing, so all the money what we made, uh, we're not really saved up a lot. We'd made like a couple of millions of dollars, but we never looked at it like we need to like preserve it, the runway, nothing. We just put it on marketing. We did like bigger events. We said like, let's go all in, let's make it ₹20 lakh, uh, into ads. Let's make even ₹21 lakhs, it's fine because I'm going to like get future customers. I think all these were completely wrong mindset. And I feel like it's the mistake what I've done. And marketing budget should not be more than 30%, no matter, no matter what, no matter what funnel you run. You don't— you can't say that I'm a coach, my funnels are like 70%, and then I make money later in my high ticket. I don't believe in all that. If you look at the classic companies who built the bigger businesses, go open their balance sheets, check out the marketing budgets. They're all 8%, 10%, 12%. Yeah, when you see bigger companies spending 10% on marketing, how do you think you're spending 60% on ads and thinking that you're building a big revenue with utterly thin margin? You make, let's say, ₹10 lakh and you're saving ₹1 lakh profit. What kind of a business is that? I think the percentages— what I've done as a mistake, and I would say it's a learning journey for me. So I would, at this point of time, we don't invest more than 20 to 30% of my marketing budget. We can, but we don't. Now, why is it? Because we've learned the lesson that you can't increase your budget more than 20%, and every time you invest that money, you have to be profitable. If you're not going to be making a return on the marketing budget you're spending, you're not building a business. I think these are some of the mistakes that I've done in the past.

That's actually a wonderful lesson you have shared, and I could see that this para interesting mindset of like invest in ads and you'll make your money back in 3 years. I'm like, you're building no IP. Like, there's nothing you're building which has stickiness, you know. And the reason you're spending so much on marketing is because your product sucks, because higher marketing expenditure happens because your product isn't that good. There is always a $100 bill that could be sold for $50 without even marketing it because the offer is good, right? You're getting 50% discount on the same bill. So I think you explained it very beautifully, Karthik. Thank you so much for jumping on. If somebody is listening so far and they want to start their own SaaS, literally like your company name says, StartYourSaaS.io, where can they find you? How do they get in touch? What's the best place for them to get started?

So they can probably like jump onto our website, StartYourSaaS.io, and we have a call booking there. You can just watch a quick VSL. We have a 28-minute video that shows you what the product is. You can see that, you can book a call with the team, get in touch with our team, get a deeper understanding Know everything before you make the decision. In fact, I think one of the best policies that I've learned, and I would probably attribute this to Parthiv Shah, you know about him, right? ClickFunnels. Yeah, uh, there was a call that we got on, uh, some time back, and he brought in a very interesting topic, uh, which actually was not in my mindset. So as we're building a business, the refund policy is one of the things that we look at, that you start using it, then we can't refund you. We have a 3 refund policy. Okay, beyond that we can't. And that's exactly how we've actually built the business, how it's gone. And, uh, more or less, I think 80-90% of them look at that way. And when I was having a call with him, he brought in a very interesting perspective which actually changed the whole mindset of the way I think. And he asked me one question that, uh, Karthik, let's say that somebody takes from you and they're not using a product, or probably they would— they don't want to use it. Now if they ask for a refund, what's the use case? I said any company for that matter, they have a limited refund policy. 3 days before that they come in, that's fine. If beyond that, then they have to use it and they have to do it. And he brought in a very interesting thing, said that if they're not using a product, why do you need their money? And I was like, okay, this is something new. And I said like, because we created the account, we're working with them, so definitely it's like if they make a payment on the webinar and They don't buy it. It's kind of that they backed out, not us, right? And other things. And this is how it's been programmed with many of them. And I don't feel anything to admit that as well. But after that, when we started selling Start Your SaaS in our events, so I collect a booking amount deposit on the call itself. And I told them that no matter what you're paying right now is the booking amount, which is just 10%. And once you get on a call, we're not going to give you the product. After you make the booking amount, you get on a call with my team, go through the understanding of the entire product, ask hundreds of questions, see everything, and then make a conscious decision. Any point of time you feel this is not for you, the 10% amount what you have given, no questions asked, it'll be refunded to you. We don't even deduct your payment gateway charges. I think that's one thing I feel has made us very relaxed. To be very frank, as a company right now, let's say like 40 people paid us the 10% booking amount. Even if 25 people are taking it and 15 people or 10 people say that we don't need it, we're so happy to actually give them back their money. In fact, we chase them back to tell them, and people are not ready to take it back. They say, give us one month, we'll come back the next month. I'm like, no, you take it right now, you come back later. Okay, and they're like, no, no, no, let it stay. You'll not believe, till date we at least have maybe like, I would put a percentage of more than 50 to 60% of the 10% booking amount with us where we are trying to chase them to take back their money. And they just say that we, we know how your company is, we trust it, let the money be there. I just need little time to get set, and once I'm done, I want to start SaaS. So keep my money as a booking and don't give me back with that. We have more than 50-60% of them saying that. I think bringing the transparency, Nick, I think, uh, is so, so peace of mind. You're not really like worried about anything else. Like, you love the product, come to me, we'll do everything in the world to help you. You don't like it, is this not for you, take your money, be happy about it. Tomorrow you feel some time, come back to us. So we work with the best people where we are not just bringing people because we made the sale on the webinar. We educate them, we answer their questions, we handle their objections, we make them take a decision whether it's a yes or no. Even if they say no, right, my team is like, yes, okay, done, we respect your decision, here's your money, and you can come back to us later. I think this has, this has been very interesting development for us in the past 6 to 7 months, and this has made us a lot of— it's given us a lot of peace of mind. And the kind of vibe, the kind of people we are attracting, I can say, are the best.

Yeah.

And we're just like filtering the crowd and getting the cream of the layers into our community. I think that increases the experience of every community member there.

Yeah, I love that. I think that's so true. Like, you can't always take that nickel and dime left on the table because you'll be attracting the desperate ones. I'm glad, you know, you're just softballing and removing the people who might not be the best fit. It's good for the world and good for your company and good for retention and even the community you're building. So that's pretty inspiring. And any last words you would like to share before we conclude the whole podcast for today?

I would— anybody listening right now, if you're watching till this point, I know that you're somebody who really wants to implement things, right? So the one last final words I would say to every single person who's listening to this at this point of time is if you're not building a business in 2025, you're just going to lose out in the next 3 years. The most precious and the most perfect time that you ever imagined it could have been here. And in fact, like, when I see 16-year-olds, 18-year-olds— my nephew is 18 years old, so he's completed his 12th and he's moving towards his university— and I can see such a huge future for him. Imagine the AI, what we are doing right now is text-based. Can you imagine? It's just like words. It can speak, it can have emotions, it can turn into humanoids, it can do a lot of work, it can replace a lot of things in the world. So it is like the industrial age in 1900s. If you've seen Ford being such a big company which ruled the automobile industry when there was a horse and there were things around that time, and when he bought in that motor car— now is the time that AI is there online business is there, where SaaS is there, I would say you need one solid vehicle to build your future. And that solid vehicle could be anything. And if you're in the online space, no matter what products you're selling, it could be your own products, consulting, no matter what, make your product a tangible product. Because I've seen— I've been looking at a lot of people building huge infrastructure without a foundation. They have high-ticket programs, they have so many things around that, but to be very frank, it's just going to collapse one day if there's nothing tangible, because people are going to walk in and walk out if there's nothing there. So you need to keep people with you. It could be anything. I don't say it's just SaaS, but it could even be— it could be yoga, it could be like any other niche you're in. Imagine if people are coming with you, weight loss, improving health, you're helping with fitness, so people can actually stay in that community, they can transform themselves, they can have a bigger goal, give them a business opportunity. What you learn is what you should teach. And I have one rule that I've followed in my life ever, is I never teach something that I've not done, no matter what it is. I know a lot of topics. You will never hear me teach ever anything that I've not done myself. So that one thing allows you to explore a lot of things. So if you, if you are looking at this at this point of time, start somewhere, start now, because starting with nothing, and you don't need money to start a business. Okay, people don't believe this. They feel that, how do I start a business without money? The biggest wrong mistake there itself is thinking about not putting in money. So when you say you can start a business without money, that does not mean that you have zero risk. So the entrepreneurs Definition in Google is a person who takes risk financially for profits is an entrepreneur. So if you want to get in, you don't need money, but you can always leverage money. This is called like OPM. Robert Kiyosaki tells that— other people's money. There's two ways. Either let's say you save ₹10,000 and you have 20 months, you save ₹2 lakh. It takes you 20 months to do that. or simply you borrow ₹2 lakh on day 1, you say 2 years. But if you can take accountability of that money, put it in, make it work, repay it back in the next 6 months— now that's a powerful way to build a business. That's exactly what I've learned, and that's how I've built it. So when you start a business without anything, it does not mean that you don't have risk. There is risk in every business. That's what makes you an entrepreneur. But you need to start somewhere, And one thing you need to understand is the only thing you could probably lose is about probably failing. What, what else can happen? You're not going to die, right? So end of the day, you start something, it didn't work out, you're just going to fail in that. I mean, you can build something else, but it's not going to take away your whole thing. So start small, start lean, keep it in your control, keep it in your comfort zone, a little above that, but take that risk and begin right now. Because in '25 till 2030, this is the best ever time you can actually build something. Okay, don't relax. You need to be on your toes. You need to have the sense of urgency. I saw this beautiful video about this urgency. So if you're relaxed, you can never build a business. You need to be on your toes because all the high performers are having a sense of urgency. They're just so anxious about what do I do next, what do I do next. If you're at peace, you're relaxed, you're done. It's going to eat you up. So you got to be on your toes. You need to work in, but you can have your time, but you can't relax. You just need to be like super quick, be a fast implementer, I think, and just do it rather than assuming will it work or no. Don't, don't think about yourself that will it work and don't do a lot of calculations because you will never, you will never be for what you started. I never started to build a SaaS company. I started as a different educationist, lawyer, and today we, we are here. And that's how life will take you to a different space. So you never think what you're going to actually do. So start somewhere and just be attentive on your journey. I think that can make a lot of difference.

Love that. That was pretty wise talk right there, Karthik. Thank you so much for joining us and sharing your words and wisdom. And guys, hopefully you enjoyed the show for today. Please make sure to share this with your agency friends and people who actually need that push to get out of the comfort zone and start building something super valuable. I mean, the world is coming at you. Everything is going to change next 5 years. AI is going to disrupt like never before. Like Google CEO mentioned this, it's going to be a bigger revolution than electricity. So you can imagine the magnitude of change you could see in the world with the AI. I'm optimistic and I'm excited and hopefully who you are listening here Take advantage of AI in your business. And if you need help, get in touch with Karthik and check out startyoursaas.ai. Stay tuned for another episode of the Nikhil Sai Show. I'll be back with another amazing guest just like Karthik. Karthik, once again, thanks for joining. Peace.

Thank you.