Sramana Mitra: Out of the 10,000 registrations, how many converted into paying customers?
Abhinav Girdhar: Mostly these were small customers, so people were coming in on a freemium model. I would say the conversion rate from freemium to paid was pretty low – 1 or 2 out of hundred users.
Sramana Mitra: 1-2% conversion rate. That’s normal in freemium. If you can get to 4% conversion in freemium, you’re doing great.
>>>Sramana Mitra: So what precisely was the gap? Is it a pricing gap, was it more expensive, or was it a support gap? What was the gap?
Abhinav Girdhar: The gap was mostly on the support side of things and also servicing in terms of how do we go about serving these customers. The US companies mostly have a ticketing platform; there was no live support to assist these small medium businesses.
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Abhinav has built a $15M+ ARR business by bootstrapping using services. Of his three products, one is a GenerativeAI design tool. Read on for more nuance.
Sramana Mitra: All right, Abhinav, let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from, where were you born, raised, what kind of background?
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This annual ranking feature from Gartner ranks the leading supply chain organizations and identifies the underlying trends that drove their performance. Schneider Electric was at the top, followed by Cisco Systems, Colgate-Palmolive, Microsoft, and Johnson & Johnson. New to this year’s list was NVIDIA. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links.
>>>Sramana Mitra: Right. What else do you want to share with me?
Justin Grooms: I just want to share how excited I am for where I think commerce is going around identity. So much has changed in e-commerce over the last decade, but one of the things that hasn’t changed too much, unfortunately, is curated, specialized shopping experiences.
>>>Sramana Mitra: Interesting. So, the customer, however, has to do the first sale for Bolt to kick in.
Justin Grooms: The customer needs to create a Bolt account somewhere in our network.
Sramana Mitra: The customer acquires the consumer. And then connects into the Bolt network and then Bolt provides additional identity data and more marketability to that customer. But the customer acquisition is happening at the retailer.
>>>Sramana Mitra: Can you talk me through the business model evolution of the business? This is probably before your time, but when the company was selling the checkout software, were they charging on a Software as a Service basis?
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