Sunil Patro, founder of SignEasy, a technologist, product thinker and entrepreneur. He has a decade of experience as a member of multiple early stage product team at Microsoft, Juniper Networks and Tokbox. Putting enterprise communication apps to carrier great routing system to consumer focused video conferencing software. After facing many problems to sign an important job offer while traveling in Mexico, he was inspired to build a product that could solve this hindrance. Since bootstrapping SignEasy in 2010, he led SignEasy to a growing and profitable company that putting 3M downloads with a 5-star rating in over 150 countries, ranked 1 of the top 15 apps and in top 100 downloaded apps for business including Apple’s Best New Apps and Editor Choice Picks.
Famous Five:
Favorite Book? – Crucial Conversations What CEO do you follow? – Jason Fried Favorite online tool? — Slack Do you get 8 hours of sleep?— Not everyday If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “Just focus on being part of a great team and focus on learning things rapidly and just have an experience. Find the things you enjoy the most at work”
Time Stamped Show Notes:
01:32 – Nathan introduces Sunil to the show 02:33 – SignEasy is a cloud-based easy to use app 02:50 – SignEasy allows users to be completely paperless 03:00 – SignEasy is a SaaS model and has a free trial for 14 days 03:12 – Pay-as-you-go is also available 03:17 – Businesses can subscribe to pro and premium plans 03:34 – Sunil started coding SignEasy in early 2010 and launched around July 2010 03:35 – First year revenue 04:02 – Current number of customers in 2016 04:20 – 40-45% are on subscriptions and the rest are on one-time payment 04:33 – Average monthly RPU is $ 4 – 5 for pro and 80-90% are pro subscriptions 05:09 – Average monthly recurring revenue for SignEasy 05:58 – The difference of their payment plans before and now and how it affects their MRR 06:41 – SignEasy has grown high double digit over the last few years 07:07 – SignEasy is totally bootstrapped 07:25 – Team size 08:00 – Sunil is based in the bay area 08:52 – Gross monthly customer churn 09:02 – SignEasy is focused on SMB 09:45 – Customers can only pay SignEasy annually 10:35 – Lifetime value 10:46 – SignEasy hasn’t done paid user acquisition yet 10:55 – Almost 100% of SignEasy users are inbound based or app store driven 11:57 – Sunil shares how they are reaching high number of downloads in app store 12:10 – SignEasy has been in the app store for 6 years 12:30 – There are many factors that app store considers 12:43 – SignEasy has been using keywords for app store 14:10 – SignEasy gets 60K downloads a month from app store 14:35 – In iOS, the conversion from free to paid users is 5-6% 14:44 – In Android, the conversion from free to paid users is half of the iOS 14:50 – The free trial is either 14 days or limited to 3 documents 15:15 – SignEasy’s paid features 15:39 – SignEasy just launched a new feature wherein a user can send a document to sign to multiple people remotely and they can establish a work flow 16:00 – Sunil’s philosophy 17:10 – Nathan made a mock offer of $ 15M and Sunil is open to it 17:47 – Find Sunil on Twitter and send him an email 19:27 – The Famous Five
3 Key Points:
Build something that people want. Follow your passion and do what you drives your passion. Focus on being part of a great team and focus on learning things rapidly.
Resources Mentioned:
Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Drip – Nathan uses Drip’s email automation platform and visual campaign builder to build his sales funnel Toptal – Nathan found his development team using Toptal for his new business Send Later. He was able to keep 100% equity and didn’t have to hire a co-founder due to the quality of Toptal Host Gator – The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible. Audible – Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books. Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives