Bootstrapping a Micro-SaaS to $5m+ in Revenue - JustCall.io (Part 1)

Welcome to the Micro-Saas week at The Indian Dream Podcast.

We're going to explore this upcoming trend of Micro-SaaS and talk to a few people who've built Micro-SaaS businesses. What is Micro-SaaS you ask? SaaS is a business that Sells Software as a Service and follows a subscription business model to accrue recurring revenue. Over the last 10-15 years, we've seen some huge organizations being built in the SaaS Industry. Salesforce.com, Hubspot, in the US, Freshdesk, Zoho in India are all examples of giant SaaS companies with revenues in 100s of Millions of dollars and in some cases, even Billions.

Micro-SaaS on the other hand is about focusing on a niche and building a software to serve their needs. A small addressable market that has enough opportunities for you to build a high margin, low capital investment business . To know more about Micro-SaaS, checkout our Trends Newsletter. Over the couple of years, entrepreneurs across the globe have built Micro-SaaS businesses with revenues in Millions of Dollars. We have a story of someone who did just that sitting out of India. 

Gaurav Sharma has a strong bias for action, you'll always find him building something on the internet. Most of his adult life has been spent building different kinds of technology products. In college, he built a WinX, a virtual stock market software. This spread like wildfire across different colleges and at one point  the product had 2L users. This software led to a job at an Investment Bank that Gaurav ended up quitting fairly quickly. At that point, our man had decided that we was going to choose the entrepreneurship route and going to build products!

After experimenting with a few products, he built an Analytics for Pinterest and coined the term Pinfluence. This went viral, literally overnight because a few big media houses covered the app. The global media attention resulted in an attractive offer from Startup Studio in Los Angeles called Science.Inc. Gaurav then moved to LA and worked Science Inc. and lived the good the Sunny LA life building another business that would scale to Millions of dollars in revenue. In 2015, the urge to startup again grew stronger and this time, he moved back to India to build here.

Since then, He's built JustCall.io, a Cloud Phone System that allows you to monitor and log all the calls that your sales and service teams do. Over the last few years, he's used his experience to scale this to $5m in Annual Revenue. He has also launched Helpwise.co, a Shared Inbox for all customer conversations across different platforms. he's setup SaaS Labs, a studio similar to Science Inc where he builds and invests in other SaaS companies. All of this while being bootstrapped! What a fascinating journey.

This is a two part of episode. In the first part we cover Gaurav's journey so far and how he built JustCall. In the second part, we go deep into the 20 point Micro-SaaS Playbook that Gaurav has created.

Gaurav's Twitter
Gaurav's Linkedin

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