Long Bootstrapped Journey into Cutting-Edge Generative AI: Jeff Kuo, Founder of Ragic (Part 6)

So I wanna double click down on both of those marketing and go-to-market strategies: Google AdWords and Facebook advertising. So let’s do Google AdWords. Are you trying to do lead generation on no-code platforms?

Jeff Kuo: No-code platform is only a tiny portion of our keyword targeting. We target a lot of different types of application keywords. We try to target a lot of keywords so that we can target these long tail smaller needs, which cost less to acquire clicks.

Sramana Mitra: You do long tail within what theme? Is it still within the theme of no-code platforms?

Jeff Kuo: No. Different kinds of enterprise applications like CRM, ERP, HR, project management, business process management that a no-code product can do. A lot of people don’t think of no-code platforms when they look for a solution. They look for business process management, they look for ERPs, they look for project management, they look for solutions. So they don’t really look for no-code.

Sramana Mitra: But that’s a big stretch, right? When looking for a business process management solution and comes to a no-code platform, that’s a very long conversion cycle, isn’t it?

Jeff Kuo: Well, what we did is that we have different landing pages and different blog articles describing how to build these kind of solutions. So yeah, the conversion process is, of course, longer for these customers to adopt no-code applications to solve their problem. That is what we are. We are a no-code company.

Sramana Mitra: You’re getting enough conversion using this strategy to make it worthwhile is what you’re saying.

Jeff Kuo: The majority of our sales leads or new registrations is still not coming from online advertisements. So that’s still only a part of our new customers.

Sramana Mitra: If I assess your situation, my take would be Google AdWords is not going to be very successful in generating leads for you. Facebook is not going to be very successful in generating leads for you. What would be successful is if you write a lot of content about no-code product development and harness the traffic as search engine optimization traffic, where people are searching for no code and coming directly to no code, and then no code in the context of business process management, no code in the process in this context of CRM, no code in the context of ERP, etc.

You could have landing pages on all of those and harness that traffic. But for your business to scale with any velocity, people have to be looking for no code to begin with.

Jeff Kuo: Yeah. That’s exactly what we’re doing right now. That’s also like a little bit after we tried out online advertisements. We tested the waters for quite a bit with online advertisements. Then, as we slowly grew, we had more resources. We started hiring content writers and editors for our marketing team. So most of our content marketing team are content editors. They write blog articles, make videos, they drew comics to attract people to understand the problem and understand the solution.

Sramana Mitra: What scale are you at? What kind, how many customers, where are these customers coming from? What kind of revenue levels? How do you price the product? Tell me a little bit more about the evolution of the business.

Jeff Kuo: Before the call, I looked up our growth process. We started to see ARR growth around 2014. So it’s still very low from 2014. And then, and then it started kind of growing in 2014 to 2015. So right now we’re doing about like $5 million a year in ARR. We have around 4,000 companies with active subscriptions, but because we target a lot of small, medium enterprises. The churn for small media enterprises is significantly higher than large enterprises. It’s still pretty low as comparing with other SaaS products in small medium enterprises.

But it’s gonna be, it is, it’s still kind of who you look at, look at things in the long term. We, we still churn out a lot of customers because we target small and medium enterprises.

Sramana Mitra: And a hundred percent of your customer base is small medium enterprises?

Jeff Kuo: No, not a hundred percent, but a pretty high percentage.

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a bit about your team. It’s you and how many other people, how has the team evolved through the time that you’ve been doing this?

Jeff Kuo: Well, we had a team of like four people for a long time in the past, and right now we have,  50 people on our staff.

Sramana Mitra: All in Taiwan?

Jeff Kuo: Mostly in Taiwan.

Sramana Mitra: What is the distribution? So you have people in engineering, you have people in content marketing?

Jeff Kuo: We have about 20 people in engineering and about 10 people in customer success doing customer support, technical support. And we have another about 10 people in content creation marketing. Okay. Yeah. And, and the rest are in like QA and IT, and administration and hr, finance, accounting.

Sramana Mitra: Very good. And you continue to be bootstrapped and self-financed?

Jeff Kuo: Yes because we have struggled for such a long time and then we became profitable. Then it became relatively easier for us to get funding. But I just feel that I struggled for so long, now I don’t really need the money. I have a quite a bit of startup friends and we talk on a regular basis. There are a lot of benefits of bootstrapping a startup as a startup founder. I don’t want to lose those benefits as a bootstrapped founder at this stage. I like the way of a bootstrap startup now. But in the beginning, it’s tough.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Long Bootstrapped Journey into Cutting-Edge Generative AI: Jeff Kuo, Founder of Ragic
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