The Ledger
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Founders cannot build a bootstrapped software company in Western Europe
“You cannot build a product company, especially a bootstrap company from London or anywhere from Europe.”
Kumar: Founders should avoid flat organizations and build hierarchy quickly
“And don't build a flat structure. Because what typically happens is when you're in the early stages, like, you know, 10 people, 20 people, et cetera, you try to build a flat structure, right? Everybody reports to you. And it's fine. But once you start scaling,…”
Kumar: Building multiple $20M-$30M products is easier than one $100M business
“It's harder to build a single product, hundred million dollar business. Then, you know, like, it's fairly, comparatively easy to build, like, a 20, thirty million dollar businesses.”
Sourcing elite product developers in India is difficult despite massive talent pools
“I think in India, the challenge is the quantity is there. If you want, say for example, tomorrow you want 1000 developers, you can go to one of those TCS and Wipros and say, tomorrow I need a team of 1000 developers. It's not a problem. But if you wanted to ge…”
Indian software engineers value cash and bonuses over startup equity
“I think it would be very difficult to convince on a equity basis because, you know, it's a paper money for them, right? Like I think it's you will be better off paying them a good salary and maybe some kind of a bonus rather than explaining equity”
Kumar: Kovai.co targets $100M run rate by 2030
“And the objective for us is to build a hundred million dollar run rate business by 2030, like, sooner, sooner if possible.”
Kumar personally approves invoice payments at Kovai.co to ensure financial visibility
“Still I approve a lot of invoices. Okay, there are, you know, like, it goes through workflow, the people put through everything, but the final approval, the money that going out of the bank is actually, you know, like, I control it. I won't control it in the s…”
Hiring developers in India is two to four times cheaper than London
“It will be anywhere from one is to two to one is to four. You know, instead of hiring one developer here. Four, four developers there. That's the ratio. For some of the higher technical people, the ratio will be the one is to two roughly.”
Junior software developers in India cost around $20,000 per year
“You can get a decent developer for a 20,000 dollar market.”
Kovai favors high base salaries over commission-driven sales compensation
“So we have the company culture is, you know, we run it on a good salary rather than a commission driven model.”
Major helpdesk platforms underinvest in their bundled knowledge base products
“At the moment, the customers might use something from bundled along with your help desk products like Zendesk, Pressdesk, or Intercom. But the problem is they don't invest enough on the knowledge base side of things.”
Kovai.co generated over $10M ARR in 2021 and has since grown
“So we have over ten million dollars ARR, but that's slightly old number. So it's a 20, 20, 21 number. So we are above, that's a publicly disclosed, disclosed data.”
Kumar: All management meetings are scheduled in the week's first 1.5 days
“My entire week is the first 1.5 days. You know, like, I got the management meetings on the day one, and then some items on the day two, Tuesday. And after that, you know, like, it's all about just ongoing activities, and you keep it, try to keep it as free as …”
Kovai spent $1.2M outfitting its 260-person office in India
“We spent about eight months and we invested about a 1.2 million just on the interior office space in, in, in India. That can take about 260 people capacity”
BizTalk360 has roughly 700 enterprise customers
“Until 2016, we didn't have any other product. We focused on that one particular product, and that's one of the successful products in the company, and for that particular product, we have about 700 enterprise customers now.”
Document360 has approximately 230 active customers
“We are across over 300 customers, but are taking into account all the churn and everything currently about 230 active customers at the moment for document three 60.”
Document360 averages $100 in monthly revenue per user
“The ARPU for Documentary is about a hundred dollars per month.”
Kovai enterprise customers pay $10,000 to $100,000 annually
“So an average enterprise customer will pay anywhere from 10,000 dollars to a 100,000 dollars per annum.”
BizTalk360 generates approximately 80% of Kovai's total revenue
“Still, the company is 80, 90% or 80% of the revenue comes from this stock three 60 because that's our core product and that's where a majority of the company runs.”
Kovai generates between $8.5M and $9M in annual recurring revenue
“No, we are close actually. Like, you know, we are about somewhere around 8.5 to nine, something like that.”
Kovai is fully bootstrapped and has raised no outside funding
“No, it's fully bootstrapped. Yeah. We don't have any funding.”
Kovai handles engineering in India while keeping sales operations in London
“We offloaded our entire engineering QA support and all those kinds of things to India. And then we keep sales marketing and the leadership team here in London.”
Document360 SDRs carry a $1,200 to $2,000 monthly MRR quota
“But for the document three 60 it's basically we are looking at about 1200 to 2000 dollars per MRR per month is the quota for a typical SDR.”
Document360 experiences a 2% to 5% monthly net revenue churn
“It, it's right now, the last six months data is looking somewhere between two to five percent monthly churn. This is a net revenue churn, not logo churn.”
Document360's customer acquisition cost is roughly $1,500 to $1,800
“For a document three 60, the current CAC is around a 1500 to 1800 per per customer.”
Kumar requires monthly two-page executive reports split into personal and team achievements
“At the beginning of each month, following month, our executive team need to give a document. It's two page document. It's a precisely, you know, they need to cover it within two pages, two A four pages. The first page is all about their personal achievements, …”
Kovai generated $50K from seven customers in its first six months
“I would say about 50 K. So I started in the mid of June, 20 11, and it started as its enterprise product. The price point was about five, eight to 10 K dollars, and I think we finished that year with about seven customers in six months. So I'd say roughly abou…”