How I grew my GovTech SaaS $50k to $350k

please welcome Ibrahim assim to the stage good afternoon everyone my name is Ibrahim I'm a self-taught technical founder I ran a web development Agency for about 10 years and then I specialized in Environmental Compliance and GIS software for primarily government agencies and defense contractors so including Lockheed Martin the governor the U.S government and the United Nations

the products and the company that we're talking about today is ecorte I wrote the first line of code for ecorte in August 2019 August 31st actually just remembered from the conference from the slide deck and we launched our first automated integration about four months later with the state of Colorado we did a Statewide launch of our product January 1st 2020. in this talk I'm just going to talk

about ecorte how we're gaining our users and how we compete and bid on public rfps government buyers are a bit different uh the government persona they're uh they're not exactly known for Speed they have a very different dynamic in terms of the value that they see from working with vendors and the types of relationships that they develop with

vendors I would say that the biggest thing really is the high risk and no reward for change you know like if you have an I.T in any government purchasing decision you're not going to have one buyer you're going to have multiple buyers from each department you know of course if it's a small like in our case we work with the court system sometimes we might have a local courthouse they have a judge and they have a court clerk done there's no I.T Department you do one demo you're done they like the product they sign up and they start moving forward

but in most cases especially larger uh populations anything really over 50 100 000 population uh you're gonna have multiple departments you're gonna have a long procurement cycle you're going to have uh local preferences so they definitely will ask that they want five referrals from other courts in their same area not just in their same state but in their same area their same size the similar case

types of similar case loads very very it's not just risk averses risk management and so they have these built in into their procurement and uh procurement procedures so it's not something that's just dependent on each individual uh County or or government customer and the other problem so to speak is uh or opportunity startups are a bad word you know when we were first doing demos

with judges and Court clerks and administrators and I.T that's one of the first things we'd say we'd say you know we're a startup working with court reminders Court notification system immediate shutdown immediate shutdown really they want vendors who have been established who are mature who have a Pro existing product not something new not something that's going to get developed not something that's going to get customized so it really is a bad word and it might

even like I've had judges where they'll visually recoil within the within the demo like oh we don't we don't want to work with your type of people but all of these also have all of these cons so to speak there's also advantages so there's also Pros that if you do understand it and you do have to change from a typical B2B or uh or consumer oriented startup and you know patience is one of the biggest things related to that

our revenue is still moderate like I said we started in the beginning of 2020 right now we're about a little bit more than this in terms of uh recurring subscription Revenue and in our case um our primary problem is text messaging so we have a combination of all of our customers have subscriptions other than limited customers who do like a pay as you go but even with the pay as you go they have some type of annual

subscription and then they pay the usage based on their messages

um so yes text messages are our primary usage-based product um and we really API first we really automation first thinking about just you know you have a court system or a county and they have thousands of cases at any given time you're not going to have a clerk log in and manually send off a message at least that's what I assumed so we went API first from the beginning that's what really got us our Statewide customers that's what got us our Integrations with a lot of the biggest case management companies in the in the

in the space um and then we started building out more of the the GUI or the UI so to speak for the web application for court clerks administrators officers um to log in and kind of use it as like a WhatsApp or a messenger uh for their clients and for um you know for the people that they're working with and although to this day our automated customers of course they continually grow and grow and especially with post

covet our uh our usage is is constantly growing um the the ratio of growth with the one-off messages the manual messages is actually more so we see more uh or a higher increase in terms of just Court staff sitting on this all day and using it as their messenger um and it allowed because it's multi-channel it really covers all of their bases if they have a court cancellation they can send a court

cancellation if they need some jurors to show up they can send a message to the jurors if they need to verify whether a defendant clicked on a particular message because he failed to appear to for a court date they can do that and so this is something that is like a a email or a calendar it's a utility that they're using all day in addition to the automated Integrations so we really started primarily text messages emails phone calls majority of

his text messages like I said um and the initial use case was reminders for defendants court date reminders you have a court date coming up this is pre-covered uh it's not going to be online you know they send you a reminder multiple reminders with the information that you need to know and I'm not sure if anybody has worked interacted with the court system in the U.S if you don't get a text message you're going to get a letter that letter may take a month two months from the first

time that you maybe got a traffic ticket from the uh from the police officer and you may not have a consistent address you may not have the same address you may travel it's just it's it's an outdated archaic system um and so in just with municipal courts in the United States um so that's like traffic tickets and other normal like simple cases average of 23 FTA rate no show rate in terms of the number of people that don't

show up for a court date and that impacts in terms of of course that impacts impacts the court itself you know you have lots of government officials lots of government staff that it's it's it's a huge cost every time somebody someone doesn't show up but in addition now the sheriff's office or the law enforcement department has to leave it will get a bench warrant issued for the rest of that individual even if it was a simple mistake even if it was they didn't get the letter

um they were you know they had whatever case may be um they weren't even aware but now they have a criminal record they get arrested and all over some hundred dollar traffic ticket um so secondly our payments uh feature our payments usage or use case um this is for you know sending you uh you had the court date reminder now you have a hundred dollar uh reminder or you have a message to that you have a hundred dollar

obligation to the court um and so we built this in with a built-in payment portal with built-in payment uh pay plan calculations monthly payments that kind of thing and we're just we launched in the beginning of this year and we're just seeing um you know this month is roughly 956 000 last month in terms of payment reminders sent and collected on by the courts um as it is although we do have a payment portal

we don't have the merchant accounts the processing accounts so what the courts all end up doing is is they use their own Merchant uh provider and so we're not monetizing on that end transaction but this is something that we do expect to the self-pay something that we expect to launch uh in the coming year in January of next year and in that case the defendant or whoever is making the payment is technically paying us and then we pay the court the amount

that they're that they're due have you ever paid a traffic ticket online most of those websites are pretty horrible right and there's usually at least five or ten percent processing fee like above and beyond yeah exactly so our plan is just make it beautiful make it easy make it fast make it simple and in addition because there's also a a trend or a wave or a trend within the justice system to try to make uh the justice system within the us more

accessible more fair um you know eliminate uh undue burdens undo hassles and that's one of the things that these that the existing payment companies like Encore really take advantage of people because they're charging 10 processing fee you know you don't need to do that um and actually one of the interesting things about this is that some jurisdictions like in Washington are actually making it against the rules of the court to charge

any money Beyond so if the court if the judge orders you to pay a hundred dollars the Court's not legally allowed to accept anything more than that and so we actually have a list of existing customers in the state of Washington that are ready to use our full payment processing feature um as long as we don't charge beyond the three percent that you know the typical three percent plus or minus two point nine percent plus 35 cents whatever processing you know like typical credit card processing fees

um and then we give the court exactly what they uh what they requested the hundred dollars and they don't get anything beyond that um we're also doing fairly well in in SEO primarily desktop all of our users are desktop of course this is a niche within a niche so there's not a lot of uh there's not a lot of volume but uh notif keywords like Court reminders since the start we've been essentially number one or number two for organic position for that and we're working on

launching a a brand new website and we're starting to rank on a bunch of other similar keywords like juror reminders victim reminder software probation reminders geolocation reminders all these different types of notifications and the use cases um so yeah that's in terms of Court reminders

of course in terms of SEO I've heard a lot of people talk about SEO today content is king that's a big one good performance accessibility mobile friendliness and there's a lot to it um uh in terms of our SEO with our Market what we've found really is that we basically become the standard or the requirements that they use or that the court uses if they're going to issue an

RFP and RFP is a request for proposal that's when the court says or when any government customers really any customer technically but usually rfps are only used within Enterprise and government and they'll put out their specifications and their requirements and uh you know allow any vendor any approved vendor it's a bid on that and so in our case what we found is every time we update the website and there's new rfps the verbiages that are on the rfe is exactly pulled from our website

um and so that's that's actually been quite nice because every time there is a new RFP I'm not saying there's a huge volume of these rfps uh you know there's only so many government agencies uh we get a phone call so actually one of our customers is Tarrant County that's Fort Worth um here in Texas we started with them in 2020 I'll show uh yeah I'll also an example of of of them

but we started with them in 2020 and that was one Court then the next year it became two other courts um and now we're working other courts so that's 11 uh 11 courts in total and then the state of Texas uh finalized a new bill making Court reminders a legally required obligation on the courts uh within a couple weeks we got a phone call from the Department of Texas department of information resources here

in Austin wanting us to you know talk to them about doing a Statewide implementation um absolutely of course there should be enough for everything uh one of the if you are going to work with government which I don't recommend uh the terms of service the jurisdiction like anything that really is related to

their risk there's a there's a legal term for the for the in the uh indemnification thank you sir anything related to that they're not taking it they're not taking the risk um and so all of our contracts of course we've had multiple attorneys uh work with us on them but all of our contracts are friendly to the government customer

I didn't write the Enterprise early I I don't know I thought I saw that before I liked it but I just never use the word Enterprise it's not really it doesn't really make sense but in the sense of you know larger contracts uh you know a longer sales cycle uh relationship based sales cycle not really with the government at least not initially with the rfps but you are able to sell uh you know 25k

plans when just starting we do use the implementation fees um to kind of one-off implementation fees to kind of cover our initial expenses so basically any RFP project is automatically going to be a longer project so they may have already taken a year to prior to us winning the rfe and then it may take another year from there to actually go through and do the implementation and so really the one-off cost is just to cover that that waiting time

and otherwise if we you know we have much lower pricing in the starter pricing and in that case the customer starts paying right away it's all yearly contracts and so they don't really have a one-off implementation and sometimes I made a mistake and and made that one-off implementation optional where it would say if your I.T department does the work basically and not us and then what ends up inevitably

happening is that we end up doing the same higher quality of uh of service like one of the previous talk speakers Muhammad yunus was saying in terms of um immediate response being proactive a done-for-you service and you know just always being there to help them because if if you have a problem and you're sending out just like his with his event virtual event company if there's a problem in a virtual event that's a disaster if there's a problem with our system we could send out you know uh the wrong information to the wrong people

the wrong court cases the wrong victims the wrong you know we're dealing with all kinds of uh victims jurors Witnesses officers judges clerks like all these people get attorneys they all get different types of messaging and so and we're working with case management systems that were programmed in in the previous literally in the previous Century you know and I was thinking in the 80s 80s and 90s um and so that's what these costs that's what

these uh you know one-off costs are for is to kind of work with them a little bit more to offer that to have that budget so these are example um example contracts um one on the right over there is with is with a county in Arkansas one on the left over here is with the Colorado Statewide so you can see like there's a subscription component and then there's a uh a usage component based on what you use this is from 2020 so this is one of the first contracts

that we went live with and this was the mistake that I did that I didn't make it this includes a certain number of messages right and so it's a little bit higher priced just in terms of the base cost um it gives them a certain number of messages so I can always guarantee which they've actually already exceeded this but I can always guarantee that there's going to be a certain number of message subscription or revenue from the message uh from the messages themselves whereas

this one is just 10K a year plus whatever messages you use and they initially estimated that they were going to spend more than 100K a year on the messages but that was pretty coveted so then once covet hit quartz all get shut down now I only have a 10K contract with pay as you go on two cents a message so much much less uh expected volume so a Statewide contract ended up actually spending less than a county contract um just to give you an idea now now thankfully

um that contract all of them have substantially increased that one's now doing um is actually doing close to its full initial estimate and it's expected to probably double uh next year that's because they also they had a Colorado State bill that was passed requiring the court notifications when it was first passed it was optional so if the police officer stops you and says hey you have a 100 traffic ticket would you like to get a reminder uh or would you like to get notifications

about this ticket via text message most people say no I would say no I'm not giving an officer my phone number um so that was I don't wanna I'll be disrespectful um that was not the smartest idea but now they've amended the bill and that's one of the things when you're working with government you're out you have these build tracking software that you use and they just approved it the governor just approved

the amended version a couple months ago and has made it made the notifications required and opted default to optun so you have a court case of Colorado you're going to get a notification no matter what you can opt out after that but if you have another court case coming up they're going to opt you back in um and so that's that ensures a nice volume for us um so yes pricing plans you know if you're going to work with

state of Texas you're not going to do a thousand dollar a year subscription um but if you're going to work with you know a small County and a rural County or a small population really we Define as anything less than 50 000 population um anything like anything uh that size we just give them the subscription plan we say start with that and if you need more messages um you know it's adjustable but most of them will start with 10 20 25 000 messages and then if they need more messages they can you know six months later they can say you know what let's

just increase more or they do the pay as you go

one thing I'm super excited about is finally formalizing a referral process this is something that we don't have unfortunately we should have done you know from from day one um I didn't understand the the importance of referrals within within government buyers but that really is what's been our main driver um between the just organic referrals that lead to our website or that generate in an RFP and so in this case we had a successful

launch with a customer a couple weeks later they put us on on their they put us as the featured uh story on their own conference and their own internal conference and then we just started getting you know referrals from other counties other neighboring counties um right away and that's one of the things that will or one of the taxes that we'll do and we've actually already started doing and has found success but we want to make it automated

um our referral credits so we can't give a government employee you know 50 or 100 to go do a referral on G2 it just doesn't work they're not legally allowed to technically they can accept less than 50 uh gifts but even then it's not it's not it's not look uh kindly on so in our case we give them free credits so free message credits they are cost conscious so if they say hey we just saved you you know we just got you 500 worth of uh

messages which for us costs us you know next to nothing um so then that's value and that's not going into a personal you know the judge's bank account or the clerk's uh Amazon account it's going into their own uh customer account and you know that that we think um hopefully you know maybe a year from now we'll see the true results from that type of program um and in terms of future growth channels we currently have some

Integrations live Integrations with case management companies the biggest company within this space is uh is really an elephant named Tyler Tech a multi-billion dollar uh primarily government software company based in Texas and they don't really like us uh so they actually built out a product um to kind of compete with us their notification product initially they were recommending customers to use us

um they said hey we don't have an API but there's this new company named ecorte that has integrated that has done an integration with Odyssey their case management system we recommend you go use them and then over time that's become a more uh anti-antagonizing relationship but there are smaller case management companies that are more localized so those are the ones like we have some relationships in Illinois in Ohio for

example one one case management company has got us more than like a dozen courts or so and those are really nice because it cuts down on the uh it eliminates basically onboarding um you know they come in they already have their data automated it's just a matter of you know doing their configuration and and setup and and they go from there and then in terms of Partnerships with case management it's a case management companies it's a win-win um you know they have a new product or a new feature

a new module so to speak new Pro that they could build for that they can earn money on and uh you know most of them they're not fixing their they're not adding new features they're from the 90s they're you know they're keeping the product as is um I I can't tell you the number of conversations that I've sat on just waiting for me you know waiting for my next meeting with it employees and they're just arguing with their uh with their vendor about hey we want a new feature for this drop Defender says

we're not you know eight thousand dollars like it's just an option we just want another option in the drop down now sorry it's it's uh it's uh out of life or some other term like that like it's manufacturing life of software apparently is expired um so really we do see the we do see the Partnerships with case management companies as being a a nice growth Channel we are in negotiations that can't talk about it too much but we're in

negotiations with a case management company that has a contract with uh federal courts for all the federal courts basically including immigration um and we're also integrated with our system in an unofficial integration and so that's something where we think they're going to come to us eventually when they realize they can't do it themselves um or they're afraid because our same customers that ask us for the court reminders they ask us for case

management capabilities so really it's just a matter of you know what features and what use cases that we want to support and you know we see the future with that is Limitless especially post covet uh you know the court system and the justice system really scrambled in the last two years to quickly adjust most of them in reality did not most of them in reality just shut down

the court shut down most cases and if it was a simple case or or like like I said like the traffic cases um those that kept running on you know virtually over Zoom at the beginning of this year uh you know many states California Nevada Arizona are starting to formalize the legal procedures or legal rules around Court virtualization justice system virtualization in general you know

because they were operating on their emergency rules before and so once things became normal so to speak came back to normal uh you know judge couldn't just say hey we're gonna go back to zoom they had to have the state have established rules and procedures and now that's actually being formalized and and added into existing law of basically virtualizing the court system so we do see a lot of growth in the future thank you

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