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INSIGHT: Leadworx growth interview with Naman Bhutani

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Name: Naman Bhutani
Age: 24
Role: Sales Specialist
What is your SaaS called: Leadworx
Founded: 2017

How many people are on the team right now?
We’re currently a team of 8 people.
2 Co-founders
2 Developers
1 Designer
1 Sales Specialist
1 Sales intern
1 Marketing Manager

Where are you based? Los Angeles, California

Did you raise money? Not yet.
We’re currently Boostrapped and we’ve mostly put in our money in raising the quality of our product (Leadworx) and the database which backs-up Leadworx.
We’re now starting to put money on our Marketing efforts.

Can you tell us what Leadworx is and how you make money?
Leadworx is an Inbound Lead Generation Platform which tracks the visitors on your website and can tell with a great accuracy which company the visitor is from. We relay those names to you on our dashboard and in our daily emails – along with information like size of the company, their industry, email address, location etc. We’ll soon be adding Leadworx contact, where we will be able to give you contact information of the people working with those companies and a lot more super-powers like re-targeting capabilities, etc.

We’ve just launched our premium plans 2 days back and that includes detailed insights on the analytics of your visitors and a few more features. Our main money making ways would be through our premium plans and Leadworx Contacts (which we’ll soon be adding to Leadworx).

Leadworx homepage
Leadworx homepage

How did you get this idea?
Leadworx helps automate the lead generation process in a fast-paced marketplace where B2B buyer behavior and buying patterns are rapidly changing and businesses are struggling to find relevant leads to pursue.

The co-founders of Leadworx have a combined experience of almost 35+ years in the B2B industry and their last exit was with Symantec for about $150 Million. While they have been working on multiple products for B2Bs, they themselves faced a lot of challenges in identifying who have interest in their business and curating sales-ready leads.

In lieu of that, many founders/marketers face the same challenges, Leadworx was built to ease and simplify this process and give you sales-ready leads all round the year, with a lot more chances of conversion, since these people already know about your business.

How long did you work on it before you launched? When did you see your first dollar?
We have been working the database which backs-up Leadworx from the past 3 years and finally spent about 4 months in building a solid product, which was made open for market in June 2017.

We got out first dollar about 2 days back, as soon as we launched our premium plan, but on-boarding free 4000 active users is an equal win for us, until now.

Who are your clients? What is your target market?
Our major clientele are Software companies and Agencies, but we cater to each and every company in the B2B industry.

Are you profitable? if not, when do you think you will get there?
Currently, No.
We recently launched our premium plan (only 2 days back) and we have already got a dozen paid clients and we’re looking to acquire thousands of more in the coming couple of months.

Starting point MRR: $0

MRR today: $1100

MRR after 6 months (planned): $50,000

MRR after 12 months (planned): $150,000

Number of trial users: 3,986

Number of paying customers: 13

ARPU: $90

Churn: Expecting a churn of about 15%-30%

How did you get your first 100 customers?
LUCK! Just kidding, we experimented a LOT OF THINGS which helped us acquire 1,000 sign-ups within 7 days of our launch.
To point out the top 4:
– PR
– Mass Email Marketing
– Affiliate with local agencies
– Facebook Ads and interactions

What are the 2-3 main distribution channels that work best for you? What channel didn’t work out for you?
The main distribution channels that worked for us will be:
– Email Marketing
– Affiliate, and
– Facebook

We tried a lot of stuff, and when I say a lot means we tried almost hundreds of things to get to the market. A lot of channels didn’t work out for us, but I’m sure all things would definitely work-out if optimized correctly.

Tell us 2-3 growth challenges you encountered recently (and if you have a strategy how to solve them.)

Growth Challenges, umm, many! A few of them would be –

1. Emails and Domains being marked as spam – We finally solved this by sending out thousands of personalized emails and reducing the email volume to 20,000 emails/month.

2. PR is highly expensive – We couldn’t find a solution to this, but we will sure be on the stage, where agencies would love to write about us.

3. Time – While we had 10s of 1000s of ideas to pursue, we only have limited bandwidth when it comes to time, but we were able to achieve good results acquiring our first 4,000 users in about 3 months.
We’ll definitely expand our team and I’m sure we’ll be able to over come this problem.

Some of the tasks are not worth to do in-house. What do you outsource?

Content and Scraping web.

What are the 3 tools you and your team can’t live without?
MailShake – To send out sales emails.
Zapier – To automate stuff.
Alexa – To analyze our prospects website.

Tell us the biggest mistake you had through building and promoting your product and what you’ve learned from it.
While promoting our product we ran a lot of email marketing campaigns, which led to our emails being landing into Spam. After days and nights of finding the right way, we finally cracked a way to get our emails landing to Inbox, with heavy personalization.

Learning: Gmail is absolutely a giant place with the tiniest entry, you need to be smart to get through it.

If you had to start Leadworx today, what would you do differently?
I think it would be little early to answer this properly considering we have just started (launched beta 2.5 months back). But in our short life span, if I was starting up again, I would get the word out sooner. We waited till we had a working product before we told anyone about it. It was like one day there was no product and the next day there was!

So I would maybe create some buzz (no matter how small) to tell potential users that something like this is coming

Where do you see Leadworx in 5 years from now?

Our goal is to solve the challenges of B2B marketing. This domain has been undeserved since forever. Leadworx is the first step in that direction where we built the tech to show the companies who are looking at you (you can call it GA for B2Bs). As we progress we are going to add more offerings which enable our users do marketing effectively.

Well, ask us where we would see ourselves an year down the line, and we still won’t have the right answer. Our mission is simple, we want to be like WordPress in CMS or Slack in communications.

Highly dedicated entrepreneur, co-founder of Poptin and Ecpm Digital Marketing. Nine years of experience in the digital marketing field and internet project management. Graduated with an Economics degree from Tel Aviv University. A big fan of A/B testing, SEO and PPC campaigns' optimization, CRO, growth hacking and numbers. Always loves testing new advertising strategies and tools, and analyzing the latest start-up companies.