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

EP 499: GetSignEasy Passes $200k MRR and 130k Customers To Help Sign Documents withCEO Sunil Patro

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders