[00:00:00] Saravana Kumar: So one of the challenge, what we have seen with the customer success product, is there's no defined processes in any company when it comes to customer success. They all have their own way of doing things. Some people use some kind of CRM, some spreadsheet and then, you know, like the way they correlate data between all these things. There is no unique ID and then it's not like a CRM market where the sales guys know exactly how a CRM product should work and how they use it. It's a system of records and then there's a defined processes for 20 years, how to do it. But if you go and talk to any customer success team, every company got its own way of running a customer success department.

[00:00:00] Andrew Michael: This is Churn.fm, the podcast for subscription economy pros. Each week we hear how the world's fastest growing companies are tackling churn and using retention to fuel their growth.

[00:01:05] VO: How do you build a habit forming product? We crossed over that magic threshold to negative churn. You need to invest in customer success. It always comes down to retention and engagement. Completely bootstrapped, profitable and growing.

[00:01:18] Andrew Michael: Strategies, tactics and ideas brought together to help your business thrive in the subscription economy. I'm your host, Andrew Michael, and here's today's episode.

[00:01:29] Andrew Michael: Hey, Saravana, welcome to the show.

[00:01:31] Saravana Kumar: Hi, Andrew. Thank you very much for having me on the show.

[00:01:34] Andrew Michael: It's great to have you. For the listeners, Saravana is the CEO and founder of Kovai, an enterprise software company offering multiple products at scale in the enterprise and B2B SaaS space. Saravana started his career as a software engineer before moving into consulting for companies like CGI, Microsoft, and Accenture. And prior to Kovai, Saravana was an enterprise architect at Fidelity International. So my first question for you is, where did the inspiration come to build Kovai and what prompted your multi-product approach?

[00:02:03] Saravana Kumar: As you mentioned, I started my career and still, I'm overcoming, from a technical background. I'm an engineer at heart and I've been a software developer for my entire life. So I'm originally from India and moved to the UK back in 2000. For the first 10 years, I was working on different services as a consultant, specializing in one of the Microsoft products called the BizTalk Server.

[00:02:30] Saravana Kumar: So I think it's not a very popular product, it's a very enterprise-y. You can think of, like today people use Zapier and IFTTT and Make and you can think of something equivalent or maybe these products are derived from something like a BizTalk and IBM webMethods and those kinds of things. So I specialized in that area. After spending 10 years, I spotted a gap in that particular product. Microsoft moved their focus towards cloud and they're not really filling in those problems, what the customers got in that Microsoft BizTalk Server.

[00:03:04] Saravana Kumar: So that is how the company got started. So initially the company was called BizTalk360 as a single product. And for the first five years or so, that was the only product and we scaled nicely. And then around 2015, ‘16 is when it kind of reached a saturation point in terms of what you can do in a single product because it's all done and then we are scaling nicely. And then I saw like, okay, what is the growth plan for the company? And I started diversifying.

[00:03:34] Saravana Kumar: And then today we got three main products. And in the journey, we also killed a few products as well. And today we are focusing on three different products. And Document360 is the last product. And that is one of the products scaling extremely well. And today we have customers like Yahoo, Netflix, G2, Midjourney, they are using Document360. Yeah, I think, you know, that is how it started.

[00:04:00] Saravana Kumar: And around 2018 is when we rebranded ourselves to Kovai.co because since we're doing multiple products, we need to have a, we'd like to have an umbrella brand to wrap everything up into a single company. And that's why we… Today we are called as Kovai.co, but originally we started as BizTalk360.

[00:04:18] Andrew Michael: Very nice. Yeah. So I think the notion of like, multi-product strategy is very interesting. And it's interesting to sort of hear at which point in time you started to look at the second product in its iteration. Because I think pretty much every SaaS business, at some point, they get to the saturation point in the market and they need to start thinking, okay, what do we want to do?

[00:04:37] Andrew Michael: Do we want to scale growth on one end? Do we want to go multi-product? Do we want to dive into pricing and packaging? And there's various options. And what were some of these signals to you that said, okay, this is the right time now for us to just focus on the next product? And then a follow-up to that would be like what are some of the criteria that you had going in to be able to decide what that next product should be?

[00:04:58] Saravana Kumar: Yeah, sure. I think most of the company startups typically start with one product and then they kind of reach a saturation and then they start thinking about, second or third product. So typically the companies will go in adjacent products. They would build something adjacent. A lot of times what happens is, your customers will signal like they want XYZ features. And there's no point adding those as a bundle into your main product. And rather it's a significantly bigger thing and that can be, spin off as a second or third product.  

[00:05:32] Saravana Kumar: For example, if you look at maybe, subscription billing business, that’s okay. You build subscription billing and all of a sudden customers are asking about revenue dashboards and revenue accounts payable and accounts collection and those, kind of, things. That is how typically the companies will go in the second or third products. But in our case, it's a completely unique story. I won't recommend people doing this. In our case, what happened was that the first product, the market size is not big enough and it's kind of, I don't know. I don't know whether we haven't covered it. We are a fully bootstrapped business. So we haven't taken any external gap.

[00:06:15] Saravana Kumar: Until this point, today we are close to 300 employees, company and then over $10 million in revenue. It's more than that, but 10 million is what we publicly commented on a few years ago. So the first product worked extremely well as a bootstrapped business because it's a very small niche, not that many competitors want to jump in and start building stuff in there. And it's also technically a very complex product as well. You can think of something like building a security product kind of thing. So a lot of parameters came aligned and then we were able to build that product.

[00:06:52] Saravana Kumar: So after doing it for five years, I as a founder need to make a decision. You know, what am I going to do? Like, am I going to run it like a lifestyle business with really good revenue? You know, like the profit margins are significant. I can happily run that business. At the same time, after spending five years, you know, you build a solid team. The team is, you personally as a founder, handpicked and build those teams.

[00:07:17] Saravana Kumar: And someone coming from an engineering background, I know you get bored, right? After some time, there's nothing exciting for you to do in the product. Like it's all about the bells and whistles around adding more and more on the site. That is where I took the decision, okay, we need to do something. Otherwise there's a risk of losing good people you have built and also you might run the business as a lifestyle business forever.

[00:07:41] Saravana Kumar: And that is what prompted me to go into a second product. And the third product is a different story. That's how I moved from one product to the first product to the second product. The second product to the third product is a different story. That story is basically like these two, the first two products are more enterprise products. We are talking about customers like IKEA and Airbus and Boeing, those kinds of things. And you need to have, a very good documentation for your product because documentation is super critical.

[00:08:10] Saravana Kumar: When I started analyzing, I was looking to get a good documentation product in the market, I just realized that market is dominated by one side by customer support products like Zendesk, Freshdesk, Intercom, where they all come with some kind of knowledge-based platform within those customer support ecosystem. You start using it, and the other side is a very complex legacy products, like Adobe RoboHelp and FrameMaker and component-based content management system, headless CMS, and those kinds of things.

[00:08:44] Saravna Kumar: There's nothing in the middle where you need to have the usability and flexibility of what comes out of a simple product, and then the power of what you get from the legacy product. And I just couldn't miss the opportunity. Just, you know, we didn't do any market research or anything, I just took a bet, okay, that's a big gap somebody left in the middle, and then we went into Document360.

[00:09:07] Saravana Kumar: And then that is how, today, nearly 60% of our people, 170 people work on Document360. That happened in the last six years. So it worked out extremely well. To answer your question, in our case, there is no real planned strategy of, hey, we need to go product after product. We just found opportunities, and then we just went ahead and built it.

[00:09:33] Saravana Kumar: And I won't recommend what we have done, because the products are almost run like independent companies. There is no cross-selling between the products. Even the GTM motions are completely different between these products. The first two products are more sales led, enterprise. We need to go after large customers. And the Document360 on the other hand is more like a product led, heavy marketing and digital driven GTM motion.

[00:10:04] Saravana Kumar: So you're running, like, in a multiple strategies and multiple things within the company. So yeah, I think that typically, if you're going multi-product, you'll go to something, what I mentioned at the beginning, the customers will say what they want from your core product, and then you just keep expanding so that you can sell more to the same customer base. That is how it starts. So in our case, you're completely different.

[00:10:29] Andrew Michael: Yeah, it didn't. Yeah. So you said the first case was sort of like you hit a saturation point in the market and the market just wasn't big enough to continue. What were the specific signals that you saw that indicated that this market wasn't big enough? Like what are some of the research that you did to understand this is the ceiling? Like we don't see this expanding any further than this.

[00:10:46] Saravana Kumar: Yes, since that was my first product, the first product, you know, as a founder, and I built the product and you know, in and out of the market, right? You know everything. You don't need to have a market research. Maybe you know the best answers for every single thing within that segment. That's what happened. So in my case, I know exactly like Microsoft themselves got only 10,000 customers worldwide and that is our total addressable market.

[00:11:12] Saravana Kumar: And after running the business for five years, you know roughly, like what percentage of the customers you can require. And also very clearly we can see Microsoft focus moved from on-premise products like that to more cloud and they're not going to be, too much growth potential. So you don't need to point, make it clear, something to do. The research, you know clearly, that where things are going and you just take a bet.

[00:11:39] Andrew Michael: Yeah. But I think anyway, in any way, you had sort of this back of the napkin maths that you could understand. You had data points to reference, for example, only 10,000 customers globally Microsoft had. Like that's the entirety, that's your time there because the product is based on, Microsoft ecosystem. So then you can narrow it and understand, okay, like where you've hit those ceilings.

[00:11:58] Andrew Michael: The second product is interesting as well. Then after the third product, the second transition was your own itch that you were scratching, you were looking for a product or service to improve the documentation for the first two products and saw the gap there. So to some degree there was like, a light user research, but you became your own customer. I think like most times when we hear of success stories in startups is when you're scratching your own itch and you've experienced the pain firsthand and you know the problem.

[00:12:24] Andrew Michael: The one I'm interested in as well then in terms of the problem space is Churn360. We talked about this a little bit before the show, but which number in the sequence of products was that and where did the inspiration come to build Churn360?

[00:12:37] Saravana Kumar: Yes, sure. I think again, I said to, kind of, trying to solve your own problem. That is how the customer success of Churn360 started. Churn360 was our fourth product. It's after Document360. We started in 2021, January 2021 is when we assembled a team and started working on it. Kind of a similar, kind of a principle, saying like in after doing nearly 10 years of business by that time, the company was started back in 2011. So 2021, we had 10 years of experience running, subscription-based business.

[00:13:12] Saravana Kumar: And we did have, we do have customer success teams inside, and we have different forms of doing it. And we thought, okay, we know the problems face well. And then there are very few players in the market. In this case, we thought we could be one more product. There's enough room for one more product in the market. Even if you look at it today, there are only 10 customer success product in the market. It's not a huge market like CRM where you have 100 different CRM products. That is the bet what we have done with customer success. And then we started building it.

[00:13:48] Saravana Kumar: And then, you know, like the later we realized a lot of other challenges, we can probably, depending on how deep you want to go, we can discuss about it. And then we thought, you know, like that's not the product we can scale and build. And then we dropped it in ‘24. After three years, we invested significantly. At its peak, we had close to 60 people working on the team. So it's mainly engineering driven. We haven't gone to the GTM motion. We're slowly building up the GTM motion, the later part.

[00:14:19] Saravana Kumar: The first two and a half years or so is a heavily engineering focus and we're burning significant money. You can imagine like running an engineering team with 50 people or so, it's a significant investment. But you know, like I just took the decision of we can't run it. You know, like the two factors have taken much more time, whether we had the time and bandwidth to do that. At the same time, when you see, like a successful product, this product is scaling faster to focus your energy.

[00:14:52] Andrew Michael: It's interesting as well that you sort of opted to go for the customer success product, having built three products in the past where you said sort of two of them were very sales led, the second one was PLG driven. Like how much of that as well informed the product strategy for the Churn360 product then? Because I think when we think about customer success, there's typically two types of motions and we have the high-touch and we have low-touch. And that's how most teams, like split themselves up and break out.

[00:15:17] Saravana Kumar: Yeah. I think if I feel customer success, low-tech will not work. Simply, do not work. It doesn't exist. Even if somebody is saying, somebody can just come, sign up for a customer success product and then they can hook up everything and then start using it, it's impossible. So one of the challenge, what we are seeing with the customer success product is there's no defined processes in any company when it comes to customer success. They all have their own way of doing things, right?

[00:15:49] Saravana Kumar: Some people use some kind of a CRM, some spreadsheet and then, you know, like the way they correlate data between all these things, there is no unit guide and then it's not like a CRM market where the sales guys know exactly how a CRM product should work and how they use it. It's a system of records and then there's a defined processes for 20 years, how to do it. But if you go and talk to any customer success team, every company got its own way of running a customer success department. So that is one challenge.

[00:16:19] Saravana Kumar: And the second challenge is, for a customer success product to be successful, you need to integrate like five different systems together. And then five different systems got five different owners, convincing all of them to give them access to their point of records. And then, you know, like getting this data and then having some kind of a unique identifier to go through and then give some clear… clarity. It's a lot of work.

[00:16:46] Saravana Kumar: So the onboarding process is very long, to make a company successful in terms of customer success. It's a very long winded process. You need to educate them, you need to go, correct certain things from the way they're doing it to the way how a tool should work. And we felt it's a, you know, and also if you look at the ticket sizes as well, it's kind of, you know, people got a mindset of, okay, 25, 30k is something what they would like to pay for a customers [unclear], the market is set, you know, like, okay, you got that the top gain size and the tangos at the 100k mark, but that is an extreme age and you know, like…

[00:17:30] Saravana Kumar: And the other thing is the market size, you know, the most successful company, you know, the top leader gain site, the top valuation is 1.1 billion, right? That's the top end valuation. And when you compare it with the CRM market and things where like 200, 300 billion is what the, it's the market size, clearly shows that's not a big enough market. The product is as complex as CRM, but the market is not as big as the CRM, right? Well, the signals are very clear, yeah.

[00:18:04] Andrew Michael: I actually saw a recent post, somebody mentioned this on LinkedIn as well in terms of like the… has Gainsight ruined the customer success market with their top end valuation at $1.1 billion? And then does that set sort of like this frame and mindset for investors and for others when they start to think about how do you evaluate these companies? And I think to some degree it does, but then on the other end as well, you hear some of the best founders and stuff, they create their own markets and they innovate and they work their way. So I'm sure somebody will break out.

[00:18:36] Saravana Kumar: To answer that, we are happy. We understand, we are not actually looking for a billion dollar company. The way we operate the multi-product company is, one angle I believe, it's easy to create multiple 20-30 million dollar businesses than creating one 200 million dollar business. Because the scale and everything is different. But we have playbooks to go, create, easily 20-30 million dollar businesses. In that context, we thought, okay, There are only five, six players in the market, customer success, and we could be one more player and we can actually build like, you know, 20, 30 million dollar business over 10 years period. That's the thought process, you know, like.

[00:19:17] Saravana Kumar: That's perfectly valid, you know, if you're continued, if you add the energy, bandwidth, you probably would have continued and we could be one of those mid-level success products, like, you know, ChurnZero, Planhat, Vitally, and there are like five, six, we could be one among them, easily. You wanna go after spending four or five years. So, but I thought even that is too much work to get there.

[00:19:41] Andrew Michael: Yeah, I see the point as well, like sort of the product scope and what's needed to go in to actually facilitate all the needs from the customer success standpoint. Recently going through like this process with the CS team as well, and sort of evaluating tech stack and seeing what was needed. I see the sort of the onboarding path so a lot of friction points for quickly. Even if you just start with the data, like what data you want to get into the tools to enable and set them up correctly. So very interesting.

[00:20:08] Andrew Michael: And then I think reading from your blog post as well, then the team just got rolled into the existing products. Obviously you're seeing a lot of growth on the other end. I'm keen to understand a little bit then in terms of like, churn and retention overall, when it comes to the business, because you have this multi-product strategy, you say they almost operate independently of one another, like startups within a startup. What are some of the differences you see between churn and retention between the three products that you have today?

[00:20:32] Saravana Kumar: Yeah, I think as I said, the first two products are more enterprise-y and then they are more sales-led, heavy. It takes a long time for us to close a deal, but once it's closed, the lifetime value of these customers are significantly higher. On the Document360 on the other hand, it's a typical, I won't say it's a complete PLG, but it's a, sales cycles are closer and then smaller. And then we do, close all kinds of customers for a Document360 right from a start. So the SMB to large enterprises like Netflix and Yahoo. So the spectrum is very wide.

[00:21:08] Saravana Kumar: So if I look at the way the customer success operate between these products, the first product, it's a kind of, like a deep relationship. And then once the customer is on board, it takes a lot of time for us to onboard it, but they stay with us forever. It's like a more one-to-one personal level, attention. And also the volume of customers are very low. So that means that we can provide, like a very personal attention to detail to those customers.

[00:21:34] Saravana Kumar: And then, you know, like it's a named accounts almost like, you know, the people in the CST will know exactly how many accounts they're dealing with. They will have, like a one-to-one almost like a friendly relationship with a group of people they are dealing with. And that the personal thing is what helps us to do the retention. And expansion, we don't really focus too much on the expansion. We don't have, like a typical account management kind of function to actively looking at selling more.

[00:22:03] Saravana Kumar: We are more focused on making customers happy. And we believe those products, if you make them happy and then you solve their pain points, both the problems will be solved. You can retain them and they see more value and they buy themselves. That's how it works on the first two products.

[00:22:20] Saravana Kumar: But Document360 on the other hand, it is very challenging in terms of where do you cut the line? Are you going to provide customer success for your entire spectrum, for somebody who is paying $100 per month plan, or you're going to cut only to that top-end customer base? Like, okay, you say if people are paying like $10,000 a year, we can provide some customer success and then we can provide it. So it's very difficult to deal with it.

[00:22:50] Saravana Kumar: And what we realized is for the Document360 product, onboarding is so important. I think we keep experimenting it and then say, onboarding is super critical. Then it's otherwise the turn is actually like, it's a lagging indicator, right? It's too late by the time, you know, like when you have, like the conversation of, somebody says we wanted to leave, it's too late for you to go and fix it.

[00:23:16] Saravana Kumar: So one of the things what we're trying to do is we spend a lot of time on the onboarding side and then make sure they're onboarded correctly and the business value, they need to get the business value, why they signed up for, and we're investing a lot on making sure we onboard the customers correctly. Yeah.

[00:23:36] Andrew Michael: Yeah, I'd say the onboarding is something we talk about quite a lot on the show. It's almost always around activation and onboarding when it comes to churn and retention issues. And most often people start there at the end and they say, okay, like, what are the reasons for churning? How do we fix that? But really it's like, did you get them to the point, to where they're extracting value from the product?

[00:23:57] Saravana Kumar: One more point. We also made corrections on the sales team because a lot of times what happens is if you look at the churn, it's actually you sold it to the wrong customer in the first place. And that is what will contribute. It will come late. If somebody is saying, you know, okay, we are going to churn because of pricing, you know, you'll ask yourself, the pricing was there right from day one. You know, it's not that we're asking you for more money. You signed up for that price at the beginning. And what's changed now? You're saying like, you know, you're too expensive.

[00:24:29] Saravana Kumar: Okay, I'm sure there are maybe competitors coming in the market and offering something equivalent or maybe even if they're not offering equivalent, that may be good enough for them. But if you're seeing a lot of the pricing reasons why customers churn, not only pricing, generally see, you need to fix the problem right at the root. You need to sell only to the customers whom you can serve long-term, and also they will be happy with your product. Because we all have limited resources, right? The engineering can't go and build every feature what their customers want.

[00:25:03] Saravana Kumar: So you can only have built a handful of features. And that handful of features should be really good features for a cohort of customers. And that's the cohort you need to go after. Otherwise, there's no point in fighting the churn at the end.

[00:25:19] Andrew Michael: Yeah. And I think, to the pricing point as well, is if a certain number of people aren't complaining about pricing, then you have an issue with pricing and you probably are too cheap as well. So yeah, I think there's a lot of aspects, but I think to your point, the onboarding is probably one of the key elements and focuses. And I'd say both in PLG and sales-led, but even more so in a PLG business where you don't have the customer success hand-holding people through their onboarding experience. You really need to make sure that your product experience is up there and it's fine.

[00:25:52] Andrew Michael: You also mentioned that you have a playbook when it comes now to building these 25-30 million dollar companies. You've done this now with sales-led, you've done it now in PLG. Which of the two would you say is the easiest to get up off the ground?

[00:26:08] Saravana Kumar: Nothing is easy.

[00:26:10] Andrew Michael: Easy is the wrong word, but the E like, which one is the less stressful?

[00:26:16] Saravana Kumar: Basically, you know, it's a, it will come down to execution. Both will require the right execution. There is no right answer of, you know, one versus the other. It both comes with its own merits and challenges. So yes, we are done. Luckily, we are done, both. In fact, I don't know whether I have energy for one more product. I would rather focus more on the three products what we have. And that's good enough. All the products are on, scale stage.

[00:26:48] Saravana Kumar: And then, I think, to answer your question. It's not a silver lining for a founder to, you know, like somebody listening, saying, Hey, tell me that answer. Like I wanted to do that. It's a, it will say what problem you are picking and then what's the right strategy for you.

[00:27:06] Andrew Michael: For it. Yeah.

[00:27:07] Saravana Kumar: It comes out to execution basically, you know, it's the playbooks are there, you know, if you look at it, there's no magic, you know, like this is how you build a product, these are the set of things you do, and this is how you build a team. And this is how you execute it. Where do you have the energy? What do you like to do? It will come down to that basically. Yeah.

[00:27:26] Andrew Michael: Yeah, interesting. I think definitely on the emotion side, it definitely comes down to who the customer is and what the product is that dictates the emotion. It's not something you can just choose yourself and say, hey, I want to do a PLG business and then start thinking about the other way around. It's more like figuring out who's the ideal customer for the product or service that you're building and then–

[00:27:49] Saravana Kumar: Customer market fit, right? There are multiple things. PMF is one everybody talks about, product market fit. There is also, founder market fit, and then also the customer market fit. Like you're going up to the customer, what is the market, GTM motion that will fit with that customer persona as well.

[00:28:06] Andrew Michael: For sure, I think Brian Balfour has a really good post on that, on the Four Fits to build a $100 million company. We referenced it at Hotjar when building like, strategy there and doing it with others as well now. I think it's a great way to sort of frame the different fits that need to come together to build these businesses. And it's not just product market fits. It's not enough.

[00:28:24] Andrew Michael: So I want to make sure I ask a couple of questions I ask every guest that joins the show. So the first question is, what's one thing that you know today about churn and retention that you wish you knew when you got started with your career?

[00:28:35] Saravana Kumar: There's two points I mentioned, you know, like two, three, I would say. Like one is the churn problem is actually either an onboarding problem or a wrong sales problem. So that's the thing. And the second thing is customer success is not a single department problem. It's a company-wide problem. So people need to be aware of it. It should just, from across the board, sales and product and engineering and then GTM and everything.

[00:29:05] Saravana Kumar: There's the Amp It Up book from the Snowflake founder. I think he talks about it. In fact, when he killed, customer success department when he joined Snowflake, I think that's true. People silo and say, why is customer success not working well? You know, like, okay, we are still, the journey is so high. Like, why can't they fix it? They can't fix it because it's across the board. You need to fix everything.

[00:29:26] Andrew Michael: I've heard both sides of the arguments many times on the show. And I think like probably the, one of the biggest problems customer success faces, it's a positioning problem and it's a naming problem. And it's the same thing that growth falls under like in most companies because people say, well, growth should be the whole company's responsibility to grow. It should be marketing and sales and things. So why is their team called growth or why is their team called customer success? These are like functions of the business.

[00:29:51] Andrew Michael: But then on the other end as well, like I've heard previously on the show, like an argument for why you want a team like customer success in place and to own a metric like retention is because you need somebody within the organization to be able to champion and bring everybody in alignment together and get focused. So definitely is two things. Snowflake is definitely, interesting company that I'd love to learn a little bit more about and how they adopted their approaches there.

[00:30:16] Saravana Kumar: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:30:17] Andrew Michael: Yeah. And Saravana, so what's one question then that and when it comes to maybe, like people seeking advice from you that you wish more people would ask, but they don't?

[00:30:31] Saravana Kumar: Yeah, I'm struggling. It's not striking me immediately.

[00:30:34] Andrew Michael: Let me give you as well, like maybe some direction and sense. Like you probably speak to a lot of founders as well, like in the early stages, wanting to get started with businesses and getting set up. From their perspective, what's one thing that you wish more people would ask you, but they don't.

[00:30:48] Saravana Kumar: How long will it take to be successful?

[00:30:51] Andrew Michael: Yeah. How long?

[00:30:52] Saravana Kumar: If you think it's overnight success. And for… my answer is you need to allocate at least seven years.

[00:30:58] Andrew Michael: Yeah. So that's going to be my next question. How long does it take? No, I think this is an interesting concept as well. It's one of the things, like I asked David, like it's simple. No, David Darmanin from Hotjar gave me similar, like advice, not similar advice. Like maybe contradictory advice is that he sort of said, when you get started with your business, if it takes too long to get to the first million, you should probably stop. Because like getting to the next, everything just increases the complexity. Everything becomes more difficult. And more of the time we think like, I just, getting to million in ARR is like that.

[00:31:29] Andrew Michael: Then you've made it, but no, actually like then only the complexity starts to show and things. So if you don't ramp up in a reasonably, like fast time to that point, uh, things just get more and more difficult as you got a new journey and like, can't you hear how you hear that and think of it as well.

[00:31:45] Saravana Kumar: Yeah. I think again, you know, it's a different founders where, might have different ideology and thought process in my view and what I've seen so far, you know, like any product, like it takes, because I've done four products now and each one of them, you know, like, I can't say like, even the next one, if I pick up one, I can't say like, I'll make it successful in 18 months or two years.

[00:32:08] Saravana Kumar:  I might get initial traction, like maybe 50k under clear revenue, but for to make it like a meaningful business, where you know, like, okay, reasonable revenue, you know, like I have a reasonable team size. Again, that's where the context is important. If somebody thinks, five member team, small business, and then lifestyle business, and half a million, one million is what I'm aiming for, then that's quick enough. But if I think, if you want to get a business for $10 million is my benchmark, then I need to be prepared, to put, at least seven years.

[00:32:41] Andrew Michael: That is a must. Yeah.

[00:32:42] Saravana Kumar: You know, again, also if you look at a lot of those success stories, I think maybe the UiPath is a good example. I think they took like seven years or something to get to the first million. And then after that, it just got a shoot off. Right. So maybe some products, maybe it takes time to build it. You know, it's not that, even Clay, for example, right. You know, like they didn't get revenue for a very long time. Like one day in the last two years, they pivoted and then just find it.

[00:33:12] Andrew Michael: Took off.

[00:33:14] Saravana Kumar: So you need to give enough time, you know, like, [unclear] strongly contradicting the other statement. You need to give enough time for you to see the success. Yeah.

[00:33:25] Andrew Michael: So I think you mentioned like they pivoted and I think that's probably also the point as well. Is it like, if you're trying in one direction for too long and you're not seeing, like the market pulling you in and seeing the thing like–

[00:33:36] Saravana Kumar: The pivot is different. Your ideas might change from where you started but the commitment for you to keep pivoting, keep doing things, it takes seven years.

[00:33:46] Andrew Michael: Yeah, for sure, for sure. Very nice. Also, Saravana, is there any sort of final thoughts you want to leave the listeners with before we finish up today?

[00:33:54] Saravana Kumar: I think we covered all the points. And so of course I can give a lot of pointers, but it depends on, you know, like what is the context, right? We discussed about churn and then I think a few takeaways there, you know, churn, don't just leave it to the last minute, it's all about fixing early stage onboarding and sales kind of issues. And then, be persistent is one thing.

[00:34:16] Saravama Kumar: For if your audience are mainly, I don't know whether founders or more CS people, if they're founders, I would say like, give enough time and be persistent. You know, like it takes, don't give up too soon. You know, like try for one year, nothing happened and then we'll give up. I mean, you know, that's what I would say, yeah.

[00:34:35] Andrew Michael: Very nice. Well, thank you so much for joining. For the listeners, we'll make sure to leave anything we discussed today in the show notes so you can check them out there. And I really appreciate you being with us today and wish you best of luck now going into the new year.

[00:34:47] Saravana Kumar: Yeah, thank you very much, Andrew, for having me on the show. Really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you.

[00:34:52] Andrew Michael: Thanks.

[00:34:59] Andrew Michael: And that's a wrap for the show today with me, Andrew Michael. I really hope you enjoyed it and you're able to pull out something valuable for your business. To keep up to date with Churn.fm and be notified about new episodes, blog posts and more, subscribe to our mailing list by visiting Churn.fm. Also, don't forget to subscribe to our show on iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

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