Anant Gupta: And the other one we have is, ⁓ hey, I think the call was not getting recorded. I think it just started. Abhishek Pinninti: No, no, no, it got done. It's back now. You can continue. Yeah. Anant Gupta: So one of my SaaS is Whatchimp, which ⁓ is our official WhatsApp marketing platform. We are a verified meta business partners. And the platform allows you to send bulk messages on WhatsApp using the official API, of course. And the second platform ⁓ that I'm currently working on is Growtoolkit.io. It's a B2B prospecting platform that helps you find anyone's email and phone number. whether they are on LinkedIn or any other social media platform. This is, you you can say a competitor to platforms like Apollo or ZoomInfo. And what we, ⁓ how we differentiate is that ⁓ we offer better, higher quality data ⁓ at a much affordable price as compared to some of the names that you might have already heard of, Apollo and ZoomInfo. So yeah, these are the two businesses that I'm currently pursuing right now and hoping to start a few more SaaS in the future. Abhishek Pinninti: you I would like to know Yeah. Being a SaaS founder myself, the data that we reach out for, know, sales is very crucial. We spend a lot of money on segregating data for targeted users. So as you say that you are competing with Apollo, is like globally has captured the market of providing the data. So how do you guys are competing with it in terms of efficient data which is because it has been existing in the market for a decade for now. Anant Gupta: Yeah, that's true. And I think they are also one of the reason why we even thought about getting into the market because, know, these players like Apollo, Lucia, Snow.io have already created a demand in the market. The total addressable market for a product like this is huge. Like if you look at Apollo, Lucia, these are all like a billion dollar company and they are coexisting together. So first of all, I really liked that market that, you know, that if I get into this, I'll have a space in the market. I can coexist with these guys as well at the same time. Now coming to the data point, I think ⁓ we've been working on this from last three years. And this year is going to be a final launch. We have been selling data from a very long time because I told you, the very first company, the very first product that I started was the Instagram email scraper where we were scraping emails from Instagram. And then we pivoted into something else where we are getting V2B data instead of personal emails from Instagram. So we've been in this space from last five years and we've been selling data to some of the biggest companies. Our customer has been Sequoia Capital, some of the employees from Google and Amazon as well, when it comes to selling the data. And ⁓ by this time, I think we've... Abhishek Pinninti: Bye. Anant Gupta: procured really high quality emails and phone number. Plus we've also built some internal tools that allow us to verify the emails, not only verify the emails, but also get through the catch all emails. Example, there are companies like Uber and Google. These companies usually have a catch all enabled in their domain, which companies like Apollo are not able to really verify whether the email exists or not. But we built technologies that can also give you a 100 % guarantee whether someone at Uber, let's say have this email called john at the uber.com, whether this email really, really exists or not, whether you can be 100 % confident about it or not. So that's the kind of confidence we are able to give on top of Apollo. And that's going to be our GTM and the USP when we're trying to compete with players like Apollo. So pricing is one thing, I said, we are going to offer, of course, because we are new in the market, we're going to offer a really very competitive pricing. But I think the data quality is also a big reason why people would be looking for switching from Apollo to our platform. Abhishek Pinninti: Right. ⁓ So I, when I, when we have been using for cold, I've been running from my own marketing agency for the last five years. So, you know, when I've been trying to get data to reach out to, through cold mails, ⁓ even though I scrape a lot of data from, you know, Apollo, I wouldn't see that enrichment happening for the data they provide as well. So. Anant Gupta: Mm-hmm. Abhishek Pinninti: How is that, how are you going to solve that particular issue? that you are providing only data that is very enriched and clear or how is that? Anant Gupta: Yeah, so two things. One is we ⁓ get you the data on real time. That's one of our USP. For example, if you're trying to unlock Abhishek's profile. So if Abhishek has recently changed his job or job title, we're going to make sure that we get the exact real time data about Abhishek. And number two is we're going to ensure that the email that we provide you is coming from Abhishek Pinninti: Right. Anant Gupta: the companies that Abhishek is currently working on. Not the one like if Abhishek has worked at Google, we're not going to throw you such emails. And we are going to guarantee you that when we give you the best email, we're going to guarantee you that this best email is 100 % reachable and 100 % valid. As compared to when you do it with Apollo, you have to extract the email and then take it to an email verification software, clean the email. There is an additional cost. You're not 100 % sure when you are getting the email from Apollo, whether it'll land in the inbox or not. So we are taking out that process completely and giving you the best email that you can, that's just ready to like import in your cold email software and start your email campaign. Abhishek Pinninti: Are you guys doing the mobile numbers as well? Anant Gupta: Yes, we do have very good coverage of phone number as well. And we are pretty confident because the sources of data are like very high quality. Abhishek Pinninti: globally human. Anant Gupta: Globally, yes. That's correct. So some of our data vendors also include ZoomInfo. Abhishek Pinninti: I think I was using. ⁓ cool. Anant Gupta: So I mean, ZoomInfo, if you go individually trying to get the phone number from companies like ZoomInfo, it's going to be very, very expensive. But since we've been doing this from a very long time, we've been selling the data to lot of companies, the economy of scale allowed us to give such high quality premium ⁓ phone numbers at a very affordable price with Growth Toolkit.io. Abhishek Pinninti: telling that I'll be I think I'll be your first user once you launch because you know we are launching the next week and I'll tell you my niche as well we are building a performance market tool it is a revenue leak detector for D2C brands and most businesses And also another feature we have added in is an AI citation engine where it will help businesses to cite in AI search engines. So our time will be mostly all businesses globally for the AI citation engine, but for revenue leak detection engine, would be T2C and e-commerce brands. Anant Gupta: Got it. What do you mean by ⁓ revenue leak? Abhishek Pinninti: Yeah, so revenue leak detection. I'll take you deep into that. See when you spend on meta and Google ad as a B2C brand, okay, you see, ⁓ you see a brand spend thousand dollars on a campaign and he runs and he generates a revenue of let's say 3x Roa's that is $3,000 out of it. Okay, he seems that he's doing good at it. But that is not the efficiency that you can generate out of a general campaign. There are Anant Gupta: ⁓ huh, ⁓ huh. ⁓ huh. Okay. Abhishek Pinninti: When you go deep into the campaign, are a number of revenue ⁓ algorithm leaks which has been there in terms of targeting, in terms of ⁓ anything, location, age, know. Anant Gupta: So how is your platform solving the problem? Abhishek Pinninti: Right, so we have took a base of comparing all the, you know, competitors in that particular industry when let's say you're a jewelry brand, how are all other competitors are doing good in that particular industry with an ad campaign? How are they targeting that particular need with the creative, you know, let's say, ⁓ we call it as creative intelligence where Anant Gupta: Mm-hmm. Abhishek Pinninti: It differs to creative to creative if it's creative Drawback if it's you know location drawback if it's age factor drawback if it's there are you know a number of things you target I think you might know so and these things Changing this keep changing. It is not a one-day task where you know Set it up and it will make it you make it run. There is no automation for this Anant Gupta: Got it. So does it provide the intelligence to us or it also ⁓ does the work? It also automates Abhishek Pinninti: it goes inside and fixes the issue. Anant Gupta: Oh wow, this is cool. So it's not only just like chatting with the data, also 24 by 7 someone is taking care of the ads as well at the same time. This is very cool. Abhishek Pinninti: Yeah, it's automatic performance marketer. If you are a performance marketer, you're handling 10 or D2C brands, you give better efficiency to all your clients. So yeah. Anant Gupta: Got it. Got it. It's like having a 24 by 7 AI agent sitting and monitoring the leaks and fixing them as we go. Got it. Very interesting. I mean, all the best for your launch. This sounds very interesting. Abhishek Pinninti: York. Exactly, exactly, exactly this way we can. Thank you man, thank you. mean the product is prune in the market but yet there is a lot of awareness in the market. There is one of our competitor called Triple Whale. He has already hit a 100 million revenue. ⁓ Yes, a bit. Not all the features but a little bit. Anant Gupta: Mm-hmm. Interesting. Is HiROS also your competitor? Got it. So you must be also having like a server side tracking too as part of the GTM, right? Got it. Got it. I think I also come across, I've also spoke to the founder of this guy, Mad Gix. Yeah. Abhishek Pinninti: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. the Israeli guy. Anant Gupta: I don't remember his name, but these guys are doing quite well. The last time I spoke to them, they told me that they were doing close to $6 million ARR. And they've also raised funding from SF. So yeah, it's a very interesting market. Abhishek Pinninti: Yeah. 20 million year. Yeah, yeah, it's an emerging market. It's a growing market. If I target only India as that as a market I would see in the last six months I have seen to I mean 2000 D2C brands launched by Gen Z itself and they are all running the campaign on their own Anant Gupta: Yeah, that's That's true. That's true. But how do you think that a product like this is going to compete when Meta is also launching Manage AI and Meta is also trying to give AI in the hands of small business owners? Abhishek Pinninti: Right, ⁓ see when you use MANUS, MANUS is not regularly ⁓ automating your campaigns. It is just giving you the suggestions. Even MetaAI just tells you, you can do this, but it is not going to do it for you. 24x7. ⁓ Exactly, even Cajp tells you that, CloudK tells you that, Perplexity tells you what to do. Anant Gupta: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. It does not do the job. It only gives you the intelligence, but you have to take the actions. Mmm. Abhishek Pinninti: But who is going to setup and fix it and regularly optimize it? Anant Gupta: So real proposition is not the intelligence, it's the intelligence that comes with the automation. Abhishek Pinninti: Exactly and also the intelligence is layered upon all these intelligence platforms. So we are refining the value of intelligence in that perspective aspect. Yeah, so I would need the data from you, ⁓ the D2Z branch globally man. Anant Gupta: got it. Yeah, this sounds very interesting. Sure. Sure. think we do have like good ⁓ chunk of, because ⁓ I know one of the biggest performance marketer in India is also using growtoolkit.io and he told me, I would not name him. Like I know a couple of them who are using growtoolkit.io and he told me that, you know, he was able to find the contact details of the DTC founders that are sitting in India. In fact, he was approaching some of the Shark Tank founders as well. So Grow Toolkit very accurately gets there for number and email ID. Abhishek Pinninti: Sounds really great man. ⁓ Coming to your bootstrapping journey as know bootstrapping your tools and taking them to a 1 million dollar revenue. How did you manage the distribution strategy at this current times where Anant Gupta: Yeah. Yeah. Abhishek Pinninti: brands with million dollars of fundings where I was, I'm also in the same space. They splurge cash on marketing and they'll be available for a of their users. mean, they are exposed to a lot of users. us, with bootstrap funds, we try to cold mail and cold EMS and improve the distribution strategy. Can you give us an insight as a startup founder who's trying to build a bootstrap SaaS? Anant Gupta: Yeah. And I think first of all, it's a scary place to be in as a bootstrap, bootstrap founder, because you have a limited budget. But I'll tell you when I started in 2019, I started with SEO instead of paid ads. And that worked beautifully for me because the very first thing I tried a lot of things, by the way. So my first product that I told you was an Instagram email scraper. And I first thought, Hey, why not? I reach out to people on Instagram and ask. if they would be interested in something like this. So I've DM'd like 200 people and it didn't work. Then I started scraping everyone's email from Instagram itself. But that time I was quite amateur to know who would be my target audience. So I just went to like hashtag digital marketer and then just scraped everyone who was posting content on that hashtag. And I started cold emailing and I got like one or two customers from there. But I felt like, you know, the effort to reward ratio was not so good because Back then I was selling a lifetime deal instead of a monthly subscription. And ⁓ the amount of effort that I was putting and the revenue that I was doing is not good. So I thought I need to figure out a way to ⁓ reach more people. that's when I, myself, went ahead and searched, is anybody even looking for an Instagram email scraper on Google? And if they'd search for it, ⁓ what would come on Google? And then I found that there was a Quora article ranking back then. So what I did is I went to that Quora ⁓ question and I wrote, you know, I planted my, you know, answer that, you ⁓ my software name and it's the best Instagram email scraper. And the very next day I got two sales. I was just getting started. So I got two new sales and I was very surprised at how did it come because I was not even doing cold email. Abhishek Pinninti: Mm-hmm. Anant Gupta: And then I realized that my Quora article had some views. So I did realize that, this is something interesting. This is kind of a funnel. was quite amateur to understand that this is called as SEO, but ⁓ yeah, I thought, you know what, let's just plant as many answers as possible on Quora. And I found scrape like every single question that was there on Instagram email scraper. And I went ahead and planted my, ⁓ you know, ⁓ Abhishek Pinninti: Yeah. Anant Gupta: website with like multiple answers. So anyone who's going to the first answer, then the second, third, fourth, they'll find the top three recommendation as my own product. And the second advantage that I had also was, you know, it was a very niche product. There was only one competitor back then, which was like coming from 2012, I would say. So it was a very old software. Mine was like 10X better than that. And, ⁓ you know, I found a good niche. I found a good place to market. And I think. I took it to ⁓ close to $10,000 in MRR in just five to six months, just doing that, just planting reviews on Cora. And yes, I wrote a few articles as well on how to extract emails from Instagram. That was my article. even that, because Cora was referring to my software, even those articles also started ranking because of that. ⁓ I mean, Google does favor you when ⁓ you're getting traffic on that given keyword, even if it's coming from Quora. So yeah, like I think back then I become like the number one Instagram email ⁓ scraper because of the SEO that I did. And I think it still works not with Quora, but now there is Reddit and LinkedIn. ⁓ People call it something else. I don't know some, some para. SEO kind of a thing, the term has changed, but I think this strategy still works. It's quite ⁓ interesting and you know, one who's just getting started, definitely go to Reddit community, find such questions and plant their answers. It's very difficult. It's become very difficult to do it on Reddit, but it still works. Yeah. Abhishek Pinninti: Yeah, well then. I know, mean, a lot of techies when they're launching SaaS, everybody, as you said, Cora was doing good at that point of time. Now everybody has shifted to Reddit. And even if I try to give a genuine answer, Reddit is not taking it right now. It's deleting with its own moderation. Yeah. Anant Gupta: Yeah, that's true. But that's something for the people to figure out because if everyone knows the game, then it becomes, again, a place where people would not take a recommendation from. So if it's difficult to get your answer up on the top, it's better. And there is a scope. I gave you the hope that... ⁓ Abhishek Pinninti: Thank you. Yeah. Anant Gupta: If you do something like this, you can take your SaaS to even $10,000 in MRR. I took it myself to $10,000 in MRR just doing this. had no like ad budget on paid ads. I, back then though I was like, I just graduated out of my college, right? So I had no marketing experience as well. Now people call it SEO, the fancy terms which are there. I did study like post that I did study, um, you know, uh, There's a college called IID, Indian Institute of Digital Education. I studied digital marketing. ⁓ I did my post-graduation from there. But prior to that, I've been doing all of this and I didn't know that these are the things which are called SEO. So I think people need to think about the marketing from a lens of a noob just like me. How would someone organically find my product? And not like try getting so deeper into, you know, this is Abhishek Pinninti: Mm. Alright. Anant Gupta: X kind of SEO. is the S ⁓ this is the strategy of SEO. Just get started with the basic thing. Where are people finding you and just plant yourself and it's going to be a hundred percent going to be difficult. But if it's difficult, it's good for you because the competition is going to be less over there. So Cora is where I started, but my product back then, you know, since it, it ranked on Cora and it was a very niche product. ⁓ There is this guy named Abhishek Pinninti: Thanks. Mm-hmm. Anant Gupta: Daniel Fazio. He currently runs a coaching program, I think, Client Ascension. But back then, he was like an OG cold email guy. I think everybody who talks about cold email today is actually a student of this guy or student of the student of this guy. So he's the guy who actually made cold email very, very popular. he reached out to me in 2019 or 2020. Abhishek Pinninti: Okay. Anant Gupta: said that, I want to become the affiliate partner of your product. He became an affiliate partner of my ⁓ Instagram email scraper and he planted my product in his course. He talked about it. So I think that also become a game changer for us because ⁓ I think in a very short span of time, in a year itself, we've been able to grow like really, really fast because of Abhishek Pinninti: you Anant Gupta: him promoting the thing in his course and his course also become one of the most popular cold email course. In fact, the course also got pirated. People were like downloading it from all over the place and they got to know about Gromio Organic from there. So yeah, this is how I mean, you know, if someone is just getting started, think the two strategies as a bootstrap founder, which I can recommend is, you find someone who's already running a successful course and you can partner with it, maybe give him equity, if you can afford to pay for the affiliate commission, good for you. But if not, then, ⁓ you know, maybe do an equity share or something like that. Someone who already has an expertise in your space and you go ahead and partner with them. This is going to give you a massive distribution. And even these guys are looking for people like you who wants to, ⁓ you know, they want to build their own SaaS because they are tired of recommending someone else and giving the revenue to someone else. So if they get a piece of your software, they get equity in your software, they would be like highly motivated to talk about you in their courses. So one deal with a successful creator or you going ahead and planting your answers on platforms like Reddit is the secret sauce, I would say in 2026 for a bootstrap founder who's getting started. Abhishek Pinninti: Have you heard about this venture capital firm called SecretSauce.VC? Anant Gupta: I think I've heard it but not like digged very deeper into it. Abhishek Pinninti: They invest into D2C brands itself. So that's how I got involved with them. I think in your story, Anant, I found that your product itself ⁓ sold itself rather than you selling it before. It was that good when you know, just like one guy, it is word of mouth. Word of mouth never goes. So I feel, yeah, you were saying something. Anant Gupta: Got it. Got it. It was not, I wouldn't say it was a good product. would say there was nothing like that back then. Like it was so novel, people were searching for it. And I would clearly define this as a micro-SaaS. So it solves only one problem and there's nothing like that which existed. There was one product which was like, which was created back in 2015 or 2014, very old software. So it become like, Abhishek Pinninti: Yeah, yeah. Mmm. Anant Gupta: very, very easy for me to ⁓ compete with them. But also a reality check here is that what I was doing was not 100 % ethical, ethical in terms of ⁓ I am scraping data from Instagram, right? So Instagram, it goes against the terms and services of Instagram and Instagram hired one of the best lawyer. to send me a legal notice ⁓ after running this for like 1.5 years. And I have to like shut it down completely. my revenue from like, think till then I reached like 15, $16,000 in MRN and it went straight to zero in a single day. Because I got a notice that says seas and disease. Abhishek Pinninti: Mmm. ⁓ There is no legal way that we could have ⁓ fought for the case. Anant Gupta: Yeah. There is no way. mean, see, the area of scraping data falls under the gray area. But Instagram, even if you think that you are right, you cannot fight with a company like Meta, who have unlimited funds to just sue you, just ⁓ make you come to the ⁓ law court and ⁓ present yourself. So I said, I will lose all my money just fighting. Abhishek Pinninti: Mm. Anant Gupta: fighting the battle with them. But I know someone, I have a friend of mine whom I don't want to name, but he's doing quite well. Instagram sued them, but they continued battling with them in the space and now they are very successful in the same space. They've changed the twisted the business model a bit. I can't name them publicly, but they're doing like very, well. And this, this advantage that they had, Abhishek Pinninti: Yeah. Anant Gupta: was only because ⁓ of the country that they live in because the country where they live does not have a meta headquarter. So it becomes very difficult for meta to really ⁓ take them down. Abhishek Pinninti: Mm. Sounds interesting. Is it Bangladesh? Anant Gupta: No, no, no, it's not. It's a European country. Abhishek Pinninti: Right, right. So as a SaaS founder, see this, have been into, I mean, as I said, I was running a service based industry before I was into a product. mean, ⁓ FNB, FMCG brand before. So this is my first SaaS entrepreneurship as a entrepreneur. So for me coming as you have known the industry for so long and you know the product now as well. So what would be the challenges for me when I enter the market? How do I compete with the competitors who are already doing good in the market? How do I capture their market share from them and how do I create my own market share in the market? Anant Gupta: I think the first challenge for you is going to be finding the product market fit. Because when we look at a product, let's say we look at Madgex, some of your competitors, let's say, right? When we look at them, we think that, you know, this is the pricing, this is the feature they're offering. This is all I have to recreate to do the same kind of business as they're doing. But secretly, like their secret sauce is that they found the perfect fit of ⁓ the ideal customers who are spending money, let's say, on paid ads and struggling with the problem that you're trying to solve. And then ⁓ the price point that Madgex is offering or some of your competitors is offering. So if you find a perfect combination of that, it becomes extremely easy for you to convince the user. For example, if I go to a company who is a tech savvy company, a tech savvy SaaS company. Abhishek Pinninti: Mm. Anant Gupta: And I tried convincing them that, you you use my ad thing, the ad automation thing. I think it is going to be very difficult to do that. Right. But like you mentioned, the Gen Z founders, right, who are starting a D2C business. I think if we can present the whole system ⁓ as a fancy like D2C, ROAS, ⁓ booster kind of a thing, I think it will be a game changer. But then you also have to figure out a pricing because you have to understand how much these guys are really paying. ⁓ Do they hire a marketing agency or do they do it on their own? And, you know, if I give them the product, can they immediately get started without ⁓ someone getting on a call and training them how to do this? Like, can the onboarding be so fast for specifically this first target audience that I'm Abhishek Pinninti: Yeah. Anant Gupta: you know, looking to target, can they just get on a platform and not think like, you know, it's a rocket science for me. It should be stupid, simple for them. When I say stupid, simple, for example, if you're asking them that tell me about your brand, right? Do not ask them to feed about their brand manually one by one. Now you, now that we are living in the era of AI say that, Hey, you know what, you provide your website. Abhishek Pinninti: What? Anant Gupta: and I will scan the DNA of your brand. I'll get all the pictures, I'll get all the products, I'll get all the ⁓ logos, headlines, et cetera, et cetera, and I'll present it to you and you tell me, do you like it? And if you like it, then go ahead and make any changes, like wherever you think, I made a mistake in getting all the information. And then you move next and then you help them with whatever they need help with. But what I'm trying to say is that in the current era, in 2026, people when they are using ⁓ technology should not feel that they need help from someone to use this technology. Yeah. Abhishek Pinninti: Yeah, it should yeah. I mean, very good insight that you have given. It should be as easy as possible that a first time founder should come, link his website and go ahead running with the ads and get the performance done from day one. Anant Gupta: So, yeah. Correct. So it is all about how faster you can give them their first aha moment. I think I have used Madgex for some time. ⁓ And I think they were pretty good at giving the aha moment really, really fast. I'll tell you how. They said that, you know, your ad comments are very spammy. Abhishek Pinninti: Right. Mm-hmm. Mm. Anant Gupta: There are lots of spammy comments. So let's just get started with just deleting all of the comments. And they had some automation on deleting the ad comments. So they said, let's just start with deleting all of the ad comment. And your percentage, so they have a percentage kind of system. The percentage will move from 50 % to 70%. So I don't know in terms of the value how much valuable this was for me. That whole gamification for me that I could see that, OK, as I'm the next step, as I'm progressing towards the next step, I am getting some value out of it. My ads are getting better. So the feeling of the human, that I'm making some progress with this tool, is also something you should definitely consider. Because as a SaaS company, you can do a lot of stuff in the back end. But if a user doesn't realize that, they're actually making progress, they are not going to move forward with it. Or they're going to feel that, OK, this is a bit gimmicky. I don't know whether it works or not. So the presentation is very, important, I feel. Abhishek Pinninti: Yeah, we would have that only time in the seven day free trial that we can show what we can do for them is my Yeah Anant Gupta: Yeah, think not even seven days. I think you have the first 15 minutes and the user will make a decision in the first 15 minutes itself. Abhishek Pinninti: For that we have built a dashboard that as soon as they connect their backend meta ad manager to us, we would give them a report of what's going wrong in their campaigns. The revenue leak. I can't show you the screen right now, but I'll definitely show you how does it work. Anant Gupta: ⁓ huh. ⁓ huh. Got it. Got it. Abhishek Pinninti: ⁓ If you are losing a thousand dollar revenue, will be showing up your revenue linkages thousand dollars and you Anant Gupta: Yeah. that should like, you know, whatever data that you're showing that should hit hard. the user, the user, for example, if you're showing number that you're losing thousand dollars in revenue, right? That should not come in black color should come in red danger. Yeah. Like, Hey, okay. If you're doing this, I think, yeah, this is a very good strategy for onboarding a user, making them feel that, Hey, how much you're losing right now. Yeah. Abhishek Pinninti: Yeah, obviously, No no no, right? Yeah, yeah. These are the aspartanes, Yeah, I mean, I feel very confident when you are validating the system which we are trying to build. Anant Gupta: Yeah, I've not seen your system, but I think if you're doing if you already done this, it's a very cool thing. Abhishek Pinninti: Yeah. Right. tell me about your closing the discussion. Tell me about your founder journey as a founder. What challenges you have faced and as a first time founder who is getting into it, how his mindset should be to take this forward for the next decade. Anant Gupta: Okay. So, ⁓ as a founder, like I said, I've been doing this from last five years and I've tried multiple SaaS, killed many of them. I, you know, had a vision for myself that I do want to build a bootstrap profitable business that can become a legacy business for me. Although this sounds very difficult in the era of AI, let's see how long we can sustain. being in the SaaS business. But anyways, I still have a lot of confidence in SaaS. I started as a solopreneur, but now I have a team. Yeah, like right now I have a team of 30 people. Yeah. Abhishek Pinninti: You are a solo artist, all your gigs. ⁓ cool. Yeah. Okay, I mean I'm talking about you do you have co-founders or you're just the founder and you're there's a team under you Anant Gupta: So I, I, for the last three years, I have been a solo founder, but then I brought my brother, like my real brother as a CTO for the company, because I wanted to really get out of the tech side of it. And my brother, you know, he was a founding engineer in a fintech company in Bangalore and he quit his job to like join me full time. So now he take care of the product in and out. Yeah. Abhishek Pinninti: Yeah. Anant Gupta: For the, if you talk about the challenges that I've faced is, you know, when you start hiring people, you also have the responsibility to take care of the other guys as well. And I've, there has been, I think last, I think last two years itself, 2025, the end of 2024 and the starting of 2025 has been that year, which was like very, very difficult for me because I kind of felt very clueless. Abhishek Pinninti: Yeah. Anant Gupta: I had so many SaaS products and none of them were doing very good. So I took a decision that I will kill some of my SaaS because I am spread too thin with so many. I mean, right now you see only two products, but I had like tens of SaaS products, right? And I thought, this is shiny, this is shiny, like everything I wanted to try. Right. But I realized that focus is very important because focus give you that compounding effect. Now in the era of AI, when everybody is able to build a SaaS, the only difference between you and them is that how deeper you have gone in your product to understand the entire journey. And it's not just the product. It's the marketing, sales, copywriting, support. I've gone very deeper into all of the areas. So people who are starting new products and spread too thin, ⁓ Abhishek Pinninti: Thanks. Anant Gupta: become very, for them, will become very difficult to compete with you if you are someone who have spent like a good amount of time on a single product. So I went all in for Whatchimp. spent a good amount of time. said, you know what? Forget everything. You know, I think Whatchimp has a good, uh, tam. Um, and we, I went all in, you know, took maybe like 200, 300, a hundred demo calls myself back then. Um, I understood all of the problem that people had and you have to be ⁓ open to listen to the challenges and not give them an excuse. They don't care about like, first of all, nobody who have come on your platform is going to tell you that, this is missing. That's why I'm not using the platform. So if someone is willing to get on a call and give you a feedback, you better note it down instead of complaining. I don't have this because so and so, no, I will have it. I will get it fixed in the future. And it is not just limited to your product. It's going to be about your support, that, your availability of support is not good. Your XYZ is not so great. Someone pointed out that, your documentation of Whatchimp is not so great. I recently rewrote the entire documentation for Whatchimp myself using AI. So every single reason that a customer has given me that is the reason why I cancelled your subscription or why I would not like to move forward. I think I went ahead and I fixed them. Keeping in mind that our TG is cleared. You said that I first want to work with these set of people. But if you're getting feedback from someone who's not at all your TG, you can completely disregard it. But if someone is your TG, you can go very deeper in understanding all of the challenges and solve all of the problems. Abhishek Pinninti: Yeah. Anant Gupta: So ⁓ I started focusing on this last year. Whatchim even in fact started as a side project itself ⁓ last year. And ⁓ we have grown Whatchim alone in last one year from zero to 2000 active paying customer and an MRR of a million dollar like this month itself. ⁓ Whatchimp alone hits ARR of a million dollars. I mentioned that all of my SaaS products combined used to do a million dollars in ARR, but this month itself, has surpassed. And single-handedly, Whatchimp has hit a million dollars in ARR. And we have customers from 150 plus countries right now. We've been able to take the problems that we had with people from different countries and we sat down to solve each and every problem. Not taking them as an excuse, but really sitting down to solve all of the problems. And that's why now it's become very smooth for us to onboard new users. You throw 100 new users and I'm confident that me and my team can serve them really, really well. That's ⁓ the change. Abhishek Pinninti: I want to see the place you're sitting next year this time hitting one MRR for which is back.ai man. am, you know, yeah, I am, you know, just putting that gut of myself. I wanted to ask you a question. What is the pricing of work chip? ⁓ How do you segregate it for the audience to know if they want to use work chip? Anant Gupta: Sure, it's totally possible. I I created two different categories of pricing. is for small businesses starting at $12 per month if they pay annually or $20 per month if they don't want to commit. So a very good discount if they are willing to commit for an annual subscription. That is also part of my strategy in pricing. But for small businesses, the pricing only varies from $12 and $30. And then comes the pricing for the enterprise, which is at which starts at $149, $249 and $299 as we speak. So I only advertise the small business plan because it becomes easier for both category of business. One is the small businesses and the enterprise business itself because they would not want to commit initially for a higher tier plan. So what they do is they go for the smaller tier plan and then they eventually upgrade to a higher tier plan. Most of our customers have come like this way that they found that they were using some of our competitors. were paying a lot, but they said, you know what, there was smaller tier plan. Let's just start with the smaller tier plan. Let's try, let's see how it works. And then they eventually moved to the higher tier. Abhishek Pinninti: And I think there is a number of which is confined to the pricing we pay. What is the number of we are going to get if I use a $149. I'm sorry. Anant Gupta: Cut it. It's the number of, yeah, for us, it's the number of subscriber because that I feel is the, ⁓ you know, true, metric, ⁓ for their success. If they have, let's say 10,000 subscribers, that means they are potentially, ⁓ the number of customers that they are going to have. I mean, not exactly 10,000, but the more the subscriber, I mean, they might be getting in from the paid ads from organic wherever. Abhishek Pinninti: Right. Anant Gupta: But the capacity to spend more might increase as the number of subscribers is increasing. Because of course, they are doing WhatsApp marketing because they want to make money out of it. They are promoting something or the other with that. So that we kept as a metric for us. I think in your case, it should be the ad spend, the amount of money that someone is spending on meta ads. Abhishek Pinninti: Thank Yeah, exactly. A small question I missed. We were doing political campaigning through whatsapp campaigning before. So, we were, you know... Anant Gupta: ⁓ huh. Abhishek Pinninti: compliance issues security issues of not running political campaigns through WhatsApp is there ⁓ If a political party is coming into you to you guys to run the campaign What is the security and compliance check? Are you guys going to give them because there are five to six elections which is going which are going to happen in India and We are we ourselves are working with one of the party ⁓ So and we are looking for what's a baby as well Anant Gupta: ⁓ huh. I think we have had a politician using our platform, but ⁓ I really don't have a deeper insight on how it works for politicians, like the political parties that you mentioned, because our industry, like for us, the industries are so, so much spread that every new business who's using our platform is coming from a different industry. So it is very difficult for me to like tell you the Abhishek Pinninti: Yeah. Anant Gupta: the kind of limitation that Meta has. And as you know, the API, the limitation that is coming, it's not coming from us. It's coming from the Meta. We are only the partner. We are only the, I would say, the interface helping you on board to Meta API as a business partner. But post that, it's going to be Meta compliances and stuff. So it's a good question to ask Meta, you know, how it works. I wish if I had a control to, you know, Abhishek Pinninti: yeah yeah i know i know i know because Anant Gupta: to really comment on that, but we do not have a control. are, we're just the partners. Abhishek Pinninti: Basically, it generally usually blocks your ⁓ account, WhatsApp account and you can't do anything. Anant Gupta: I ⁓ have seen plenty of industries getting banned. I don't keep a track of which industry does get banned. definitely, think casino is one of them. If someone is into sports betting, casino, that category does get banned really fast. ⁓ But I'll tell you honestly, ⁓ for our platform, every day, I get to see 10 Abhishek Pinninti: Yeah. Anant Gupta: new industry as our paid customer. I'm not even talking about the customer count. I'm talking about the industry count because I've seen someone, I've seen a business who sells golden coffin. Abhishek Pinninti: you Okay. Anant Gupta: from South Africa. They're using our platform. And I was very surprised. Like what kind of business category is this? Is there even like a business model who Abhishek Pinninti: you He works globally in the golden cup. Anant Gupta: No, he does it in South Africa. He sells golden coffins. you know, if you love your loved ones so much, you can, you know, bury them in like golden coffin. Very interesting. Like every day I get a new business industry that like surprised me that can there be a business in this category as well? Abhishek Pinninti: I know, I know. sounds interesting more and it is a really great chat that I had with you and it was very insightful as a SaaS founder for myself it really helped and I think it will help our viewers as well and thanks for your time Anand and spending giving us your valuable insights Anant Gupta: Likewise, it was a pleasure to be in your podcast. You have a good day, Abhishek. Abhishek Pinninti: Thank man, I'll see you soon and I'll share you about us as well and keep you posted. I'll see you man, thank you. Anant Gupta: Sure, yeah.