The Playbook for Bootstrapping your Way to $1M ARR with JustCall Founder and CEO Gaurav Sharma

Within the first year, 2016, I lost this new company called SaaS Labs. And within first year I'd already burned almost all the money I had left with after buying all the fancy stuff that I can buy after selling a company. Right. I mean, so I actually burnt out all the cash. I mean we hired like 20 odd people to, you know, build something quickly. But over 12 months the money was gone. I had to let go almost 18 people. We were just five people left. And we were like, what to do now? I mean, there should be a way we can build a business. So that's when the journey for the playbook for building a sustainable, profitable business sort of started. So yeah, so, so these are some of the things that I learned. So there's this, it's almost 2020 sort of point playbook that I built. And this is something you'll find some of the points very common and very simple. But sometimes simple things work really well. Right? So the first thing I figured out is, you know, to pick a big and growing market. Why I say so. There's a very simple sort of math to it. Let's say we pick up a big sort of market, which is like a $10 billion market and let's say it's growing 10% year on year. So every year there's a 1 billion dollar coming into the market. That's a new dollar which is coming to market. So it's easy to capture that sort of revenue through low hanging fruits. Right. So make sure that whatever market you're targeting, make sure that it's a big market. And what's the easiest way? What's the hack that I normally use? Either building new product or either if I'm investing in a company or something. I look for the market sizing by going through G2 Captera or any such sort of review sites and see if the average ratings of the products are about 5.4.5 or less. There's a chance to build something which can, which can go organically and can make a significant money, which can be like millions of dollars in revenue. So make sure this is the biggest point. This is like 60% of your success will depend on your size of the market. Right. But having said that, you can always start with a very small niche and then expand within the same market. The next point would be launch your, your whatever product you're building, launch that MVP super quick. I've built like dozens of products in last 10 years and I've seen that every product where I took longer to launch, it failed. I mean if you, if you look to build that till the last feature, it's gonna fail for sure. So just launch your MVP with one single feature, with one single promise that you're doing and just launch it. Don't fear for bad reviews or bad feedback. We'll take care of that later on then. This is again a very interesting thing which I actually didn't know and probably that's why my first year was a disaster and I burned so much money. We never sort of stressed upon the early distribution channels. So whatever product you're building, figure out a distribution channel for it without figuring out that for your app or your product, it's going to be a tough ride, right. For example, in case of just call, the distribution channel was integrating it with other CRMs, right? Because we provide a phone system if it integrates with CRM and let's say pipedrive or Salesforce lists your app on their marketplace, you get a distribution channel going for you. And even till this date for in last three and a half years, 70 to 80% of our new customers actually come through our integrations. So we get about 200 new customers every month for free of cost because of these distribution channels. So you have to figure out what's your distribution way for your product. So that's very important key point. Whenever you're launching or thinking about any idea like what will be my distribution channel, this is your first goal as a CEO, as a founder of the companies. Get 10 customers yourself. Don't hire salesperson. You have to have to sell first. Be ashamed of salesperson or whatever requires. But your first end sales should be through you. I mean I remember doing, doing sales day and night, 24 hours. 7. I mean the early days, I mean when you're building the playbook. I took all the demos, I gave all the demos and converted, I don't know, 25, 2025 people customers. And then only we sort of started looking for a salesperson. So make sure your first 10 sales are actually coming through. You do whatever sort of hustling you need to do, but you have to do it right. The connected to this is, this is when you. When we are small as a company, we don't really have amazing differentiators. So what we used to do was we used to pitch our customers that customer service is our differentiator. So in the early days, if you're building a CRM and people ask you like how you're different from Salesforce, you can say that you will get amazing customer support and you'll see the early adopters will love that, right? So in our case, in all our products, app and we are building, we consider customer service as a feature, not as a service. So a feature can't break, right? I mean if a feature breaks, a product breaks. So start considering your customer service as a, as a feature. Start giving customer service for longer hours than your competitor is giving and you'll see the kind of retention, the kind of love your customers give you. So make sure whenever you're doing a new business or current business, make sure this is your differentiator Demo for everyone is must I by default. I'm a programmer, I write code and that means I was an introvert guy. But for the sake of business, for the sake of not repeating the same mistake again, I started giving demos for every customer. And even today in just call and help wise, we make sure every signup that we're getting, we pitch them a product demo. Even if they can sign up and add a card and start using it, we make sure that we're giving demos. Demos are the best way to reach your product market fit because people come to you, they talk to you, they'll share their use case and through use case you can streamline your next set of features. So demo is must. So what we really do is in the sign up email, when a person signs up, we just send them like, hey, thanks for signing up, I would love to get on a demo call. It's a free demo call, here's a link. That's it, right? And after the demo call, someone schedules a demo call with us. After specifically 18 minutes, we send them an email, a very personal looking email, like hey, thank you Mrs. Booking a demo with us. Can you give us these answers to these three questions so that I can come prepared on the demo call? Right, so make sure you create such processes around different things happening in your business. And mind you, at this stage I'm saying that you don't have any employees. We will start hiring now, right? So this is a playbook from, from starting, from zero ship updates daily. It's kind of connected to the previous things I said. I mean the one hack that we used is that we created a new blog for our products which is like just follow tile updates. And in that blog, what we do is whatever small new feature, update or fix is coming, we publish that as a quick, small sort of blog post. And our engineers actually handled that blog. So the idea actually came from the movie Social Network where Mark Zuckerberg was writing a journal while coding for Facebook. So we got the idea from there. So the programmers handled this blog and they keep on posting stuff that they are launching or updating. So this helps us not only showing our customers that hey, we are very active in improving the product, but it also helps you with the SEO. So this has worked as a great sort of hack for us to grow our traffic and organic traffic. Simple point Prepare help guides. I'm saying this when we are starting this company as just the founders, we don't have any people. So make sure when you're starting up, make sure you have all the help guides, you have all the videos. The attempt here is to make things automated. We don't want to hire a lot of people, which I did when I started the company and blew so much money. So we don't want to do that again. So make sure you could prepare a lot of self help stuff in the while. Now comes hiring part. Like it's a very critical and very important part for any business growth. So my take on this is that you should first create, process and then hire. The mistake I did in my first year of SAS law was that I hired 20 odd people and made them figure out things. Rather the next year I did was I created processes around sales, around support and then started hiring. So that totally changed the game for me. So what I did was because I was giving demos so I knew how the sales cycle was working, I knew what sort of email templates were working so I created the whole sort of collateral ready. Similarly I had the help guides ready, I had some FAQs ready now when I hired. So I hired now one salesperson who will give the demos in place of me and one support person will answer the queries in place of me. And those people had the guides ready and the whole collateral ready. So the things kick started super quick and super smooth. So this is very important. Another thing that I've seen both in the companies that I have invested in and probably the companies I was running myself five years back. We just hire people and let them do things or expect them to do things. We never coach them. So make sure you coach them every day. Keep, keep, keep coaching them till they are ready to become a mentor for the next hire that you do. Right? So, so this is very important. It's going to take a lot of your time, but it's worth spending, it's worth spending that time, right? So yeah, so now that you have some customers, you have a salesperson, you have a support person and you have some time spare with you as well because you're not giving demos anymore. Start collecting NPS score the Net Promoter score. There are a bunch of products, tools available in the market. You just have to copy paste the code in your website or blog or app and you can start collecting your nps. And once we have this. So we are trying to create a process here to for our next step. So let's say we start getting NPS score as well. People are rating you from 0 to 10. Some are, some are rating you 0, some are rating you 10. So let's create processes around the NPS score as well. So if the score is like 0 to 3, send them an email or in message that hey, we are very sad that we failed you that we couldn't make you happy. Offer to get on a call, right? I mean your support person will get on a call with the person or you can also go because CEO or CTO makes a lot of difference if he or she is going on a call with a customer. Unhappy customer. If it's three to eight, you're almost there, but you're not that awesome. So tell them that, hey, thank you for sharing the feedback. We're working on it. Try to loop in the engineer who has worked on the product or something like that. Make it look more personal. Make it look that you're empathizing with their problem. And my favorite is when they give you 9 to 10. This is where you can win your G2 and Capitera game. When you start getting 9 or 10, automatically shoot them an email that hey, love to see that you are loving our product. Would like to give us a review. I'll give you, I don't know, $10 $25Amazon card or something like that. I mean that's, that's an optional thing but that's something you can do because that's the best time to ask for a referral or a review. And that's the best hack to increase your reviews on G2 and all other things. Right so and all these steps can easily be automated either by writing your own code or you can use a zapier or any sort of things or you can pay for G2 paid accounts or whatever you want. So it's, it all can be automated. And once you have this process ready comes the customer success role, right? So now you will have salesperson, a support person and now it's time to have the success person going and making customers happy. All right, now that customer success person has come your automated system at 9 and 10 people are getting emails, thank you emails and a $15, Amazon credit card or something like that. So you must be starting to get some five star ratings as well. So now it's time to start showing that on your website, right? And, and now that your website looks good because of the five star ratings, it's time to, you know, put some money into paid ad as well and start getting some paid traffic. And the good part is because the new traffic is coming in, you already have processes in place, you have people in place so they will handle the new traffic for you and you don't have to worry about like how things gonna happen. Right now that you've started to get some success from your paid marketing initiatives, I think it's time to sort of scale your marketing and it's good time to, you know, hire someone for product marketing or you can do it earlier as well. So I think that's, that's the best way to scale your team, that's the best way to hire people instead of hiring everyone in one go. So this is the kind of process that I built, this is the kind of process I'm implementing on HelpWise, the new product that we have built and within I think seven or eight months we have easily sort of grown it to more than six digit sort of ARR and we're looking to touch about a million dollar ARR pretty soon for that product. Same simple playbook that I've used mentioned here. So happy to answer your questions if anything, anything you have for me. Yeah, one question. How did you validate your ideas before going into launching them? Yeah, sure. So the first very important one is that I look for search results, I mean how the search volumes are. So that's kind of before launching the product. And also I look for G2, G2 or Captata to see if people are unhappy about it. So this is like a pre sort of screening for an idea and after launching the idea the normal playbook that we use is actually it's all about SaaS here. So we launch the product on Product Hunt, we launch the product on Reddit, we launch the product on Hacker News and we get like under 200, 300 sort of visitors from that sort of launch. And we also do some sort of emailing if you want to our LinkedIn contacts or something like that. So from the very early on, if the G2 gives you a good signal, if the search organic numbers give you a good signal and the product have signed up and shared some inputs or feedback, I think that's, that's a good way to start. And the very important is I think going on demo calls, I mean that's, that's the best way. You go on 10 demo calls, you will see if the product gonna run or not. So that, that's sort of my take on that. Okay, I've got some questions in the chat. Okay, so do you have any thoughts on how to communicate an MVP misstep? In other words, some early users weren't very happy with the product. How do you then go back to them and rebuild the relationship? Yeah, I mean, I think in the early days, I mean we have seen both for our products. In some cases we have to let go those unhappy folks and get back to them probably a bit later on. I mean, once your product is ready and you have some feedback or reviews ready with you, because we have seen that people really, it depends on the person actually. I mean if the person is a early adopter, I mean you'll figure out if the early doctor or not, then obviously you can go back to them and offer them either rebuilding or probably customization as well. I mean, in case of just call. We offered a lot of customization around products for specific customers early on. And that sort of worked us in two ways. One, it gave us an idea about what kind of requirements are there in the market. And second, it was that those customers for whom we did some sort of customizations, they actually stayed with us for long because no one else would give them that customization. So it's totally on your call. Like if you believe that the kind of reasons they have given you for not being happy, if that makes sense. And it's kind of, it's taking you in the right direction for the product. I think it's, you should give them everything you can. I mean that, hey, I'll build this for you. Something like that. Quick question about the process development. What have you found the best way to create, maintain and manage your processes so far? People regularly refer to work you've done. Yeah, I mean, I think it's more, it's about how you manage your processes and how people can refer to it. Yeah, so in our company, I mean we use Basecamp basically or Google Docs. And for every sort of profile, be it in, let's say in sales, there are two profiles mainly. One is pre sales slash SDR ish and other is ae. The person gives demos. So both for both the profiles we have written, firstly for every profile, the first part is like, about a company, like what we are looking to do in our case, I've clearly mentioned what our vision is, what our mission is like we want to go public, we want to become a profitable public company in the next five years and blah blah blah. And we want to help 10,000 or 100,000 SMBs around the world in the next five years. So one is that to give them some enthusiasm and all that and then we define their role, that these parts are part of your own. Then the other part is like this is the process, right? So we have documents for everyone and during onboarding we give them this document to read. And also there is a single place where all these processes are properly documented in a, in a simple Google Doc. I mean nothing fancy, nothing, no tool, nothing like that. I mean for few things we use Basecamp, but otherwise it's all simple Google Doc. I mean that's the best SaaS product, I would say. For B2B SAs, what would you consider a good NPS score to claim pmf? Very good question. It actually depends on the kind of industry you are in. For example, in cloud telephony the NPS scores are normally not that great because people face. These are local reasons. People may have some issues like call quality or something like that. So for let's say for cloud telephony then the good NPS code is probably the positive single or double digit sort of nps. But for products like let's say, let's say buffer, right? I mean a social media streaming software, the good entries is about 60 plus but I think anything.