Cheat Code: I learned what SaaS to build for dentists by building a $7m agency first

please welcome

thank you so I am a founder of bpk tech which is an agency we do custom software development out of our India office and then simplified Dentistry which is a SAS business we built for selling RCM solutions to dentists so this is the story of how kobit actually helped us first survive and then start a new brand new business so I thank kobit for that I don't know

how many people actually thank Kobe for what happened for us it actually gave us an opportunity to create new things so today I'm going to talk about how kobit actually forced us to go from agency to SAS and then I'm just gonna tell you some really nasty mistakes I did one of them is like spending a lot of money don't tell my wife and then last but not least talk about how we

grew the sales without actually having any salesperson and then having the Consulting team help out this has business so here is our today this is our agency we just got into Inc 5000 this year so the business has been growing so as you can see from 2020 to 21 uh by employing some really cool strategies and statistics we were

able to get into uh Inc 5000 this year and this is the revenue for our SAS business which is doing around a million this year and we're expected to do around 4 million next year based on number of clinics so today we support around six around 400 dental clinics next year with the way the pipeline is without actually doing any selling directly to

dental offices we're going to grow to around a thousand offices so how are we doing this let me take you back two years ago where when covet hit in March 2020 we were doing around 2 000 200 000 per month in revenue and uh so you can see me uh wherever here I had I lost during that March and so almost 90 percent of our customers called me and they said well you know everything

is shutting down especially dental offices at that time were shutting down and we were doing a lot of custom software development for them and they said well we can't support you and we don't know when it'll come back so now I have around you know going from 200 000 to 25 000 per month in revenue from this custom software development shop and then around 40 people who have no work so they were losing their mind and I mean it's not like they were searching

for a job because no one was hiding in fact everyone was fighting and so I I had seen a lot of my friends and family members get laid off so that was the last thing I wanted to do so I said I'm just gonna see how far I can take this I had enough cash to survive three months and so now I just want to call out that a lot of our team members were in India because that's where our software development happens and then we had around at that time we were a team of 50 people or so we had like five people in

the US and so I thought what we will do is we will just pivot our team to build something I don't know what that was so my idea was that we'll build a SAS company and I felt at that time well not at that time after we spent a whole bunch of money and wasted it it just came to me that we were doing what Ted lasso did where you know he goes from coaching a professional yeah football team here to go to UK to

coach a soccer team so you know how that can go so that's exactly what it felt like for me so desperate times call for desperate measures so this is what we ended up doing and it may sound crazy but during those three months we basically told all our prospects that we will do free software development for them for the next three months because we had no customer right no one was buying and the good part was that whoever we called

or like our sales active didn't stop so we kept pushing sales really really hard and we only had like three sales people we still only have three sales people and so we kept pushing hard and one of the things that was happening because everyone was at home so we actually had a lot of meetings right because there was no one working and especially dental offices were shut down so we had a lot of meetings happen but no one wanted to sign up because even though we were offering free software so we probably

had our sales activity go up three times during that three months and we approached probably a thousand prospects and one of the prospects said okay I will sign up with you but I don't have money to pay you so what I did I created a contract and I said look you don't have to pay us we will co-develop the solution you tell us what problem you want to solve and once the once the product is built you pay us 10 a month

and that's what we ended up doing so if you look at on the bottom left it was around a 25 month Roi and on the top right if you look at our SAS agreement I mean we were new to SAS so that SAS agreement looks like a statement to work like a timely material basis right so but in the two errors that you see here uh where it says bpk Tech Will license our eligibility bot to be used in in your clinics that was our SAS agreement

we don't use that thankfully anymore but this was the first agreement that we had in place and we still have that customer in fact this customer became a testimonial for almost all the business that we do today now let's talk about some really crazy mistakes we did my daughter is here she's giving me smile because I've gone through this presentation with her and uh it was funny I was we were in a uh me and my wife and her we were doing dinner and I said you know I'm doing this

presentation any ideas of how to break eyes and she said just tell them that you love your wife and I said that doesn't sound like break the ice she's like no that'll be fine and then she sends the daughter here so that I you know she can go back and tell her that I did that so uh not to embarrass you so have you I mean many people have actually lost money on building products that didn't go well almost all of us right

here is my story uh top left 50 000. this was a compliance software to air you were talking about doing one thing this is the story of us doing too many things and wasting a lot of money and wasting a precious amount of money and so top left bottom left and then too much to admit to the right one I mean just too much cash we burned because I think it was my mistake because I was sending

them in 10 different directions and saying oh we have these free resources available we don't have any Consulting project why don't we just keep them busy right and then every day I will look at a shiny object and say oh maybe we should do this maybe we should do that and so read this book called The One Thing by Gary killer did you read that too oh my God it's an amazing book I highly recommend everyone reading this if you are building your SAS or even if you are early stages of SAS or you're planning

to build something new on the left you see there are 10 priorities that I gave to my team I said let's just do it in six months there's no possible way that you can do it in six months but when we started working with our customer we actually got a lot more insight into what really did the customer need and so from there we change our Focus to only doing one thing which was revenue cycle Management in dentistry basically what that means is collecting money faster from insurance companies and it's a working

capital usually it takes them anywhere from 30 to 120 days and after that the accounts go delinquent and so our goal was to build tools and Technology to do insurance verification to do collections much much faster so um so that's what we ended up building and even today that's been the focus now we are adding more bells and whistles to it because customers are asking for it but that has become the core product for us

the second big mistake was not measuring anything like literally um so I'm I'm a software developer by trade and then when I switch to start my consulting company one of the things that I wasn't sure was how do I do sales because you know I'm an introvert and doing sales requires a little bit more taking the step forward and talking to strangers in a networking event or whatever and so

um when I wanted to do Consulting as well as the agency sales was one that was always like I would say pain in the ass because I could never figure that out so over the years as I started to learn and read books when I came across this and say that's fine even if you don't know but what if you can just set some parameters and you measure that against those and so measure what matters changed my

thinking so now on the bottom right is we use a tool called zendesk cell which is not many people use for CRM everyone uses Salesforce or some others but zendes cell has worked really wonders for us where we can keep track of all of these things and so what we have done is we have automated all the reporting we have automated all the activity so every morning we have a sales call and then every Thursday we have a sales Sprint meeting which is

what we're going to do for the next two weeks and so we set up targets and I'll talk about what those targets are and we're measuring against those and then the third thing that we implemented which is probably nine months ago as the business is mature growing is an operating system uh I'm a big fan of a book called traction by Gino Vickman he talks about how entrepreneurs like us we need a methodology through which we can grow our business systematically so that I

can go take a vacation and the business should still run and frankly I like I've been going to more and more of such events and I've been checking less of my email and teams messages and so this helped us create very simple goals like 90 day goals so this is a 90-day goal for my product Dev team then I have a sales 90-day Dev goal then I have a marketing 90 datab goal and then every week we meet uh we meet every Thursday for hour and a half all

the leadership people and all we do is just discuss issues and resolve them how many of you are meeting with your leadership team every week for two hours one hour and resolving issues usually there is no agenda and people just talk and it just ends up like wasting everyone's time so with using this framework it has actually helped us we keep track of every single Matrix that we have in the company we're still learning as more and more customers are

onboarded there are still areas of improvement but at least it gives us the Insight that we need into the business and not only just me but my leadership team because it helps us open up be very transparent and direct right mine is a distributed team I have half the team here some team members are in Europe and then most team members are in India so for me I think the biggest thing that I

learned in the last two and a half years is how to make sales predictable I don't know in your organization can you tell how many deals you're going to get next month I think we're getting good at it I don't think there is a perfect formula for it but this is what's working the first thing was trying to understand who your customer is and how do you want to sell so it so I'll just give an example of Dentistry um in in U.S there are over 206 000

dental offices and U.S and Canada so there is one way of selling I can go sell to dental offices directly that means I need a huge sales force to support that I don't have it we're a bootstrap company so we looked at the market segments of the dentistry and looked at it and said look around 50 000 practices are owned by groups that own maybe 20 to 50 practices and some groups own more than a thousand practices so

why don't we start there and that's what our Consulting business focused on so we do custom software development for those large corporate customers from there we looked at Channel Partners like CPA firm accounting firms marketing firms or it help desk firms and so we have half a sales team member there we give them 10 to 25 margin on our on our business and they as you can see we got around 600

000 selling directly to groups out of a million which is 60 of Revenue and then around 20 revenue of 200 000 came uh from the channels and we are we're still not planning to sell directly to uh individual dental offices because it requires a lot of hand holding and none of the dentists are going to go to my website and download the software it's not going to happen it doesn't work they still are in Dark Ages I hope I'm not offending any dentist so

um here is our script that we have used to automate everything that we do in this business so uh I'm sorry you can't see it but the scripts are essentially when we onboard a new salesperson there is no okay I've done this before it works yeah great bring that idea but this is a recipe that worked right let's stick to it unless your idea is going to give me results which you know ideas are welcome and we look at it and then we say if this makes sense or not but there

is no guesswork I know by doing this and oh by the way and by doing this which is number of touches that we have so we touch we connect with our custom with prospects around 14 times and this is the timetable that everyone uses so like how many touches are needed around eight or so they say and we have built this this sales sequence that everyone follows and we are starting to get very

good predictable results with this if I look at my pipeline for the next six months I can with 80 confidence say that we're going to get 28 deals every month and it has been going on for a while so so here's our average deal size we do around eight thousand dollars per Clinic per year we started the business with uh three month Auto renewal now we're

going to three month trial and two-year contract and this is the software sorry we will just skip this uh but the idea was we solved a very difficult problem which is combining AI computer vision RPA and a whole bunch of other three letter acronyms and solve the problems so that we are way ahead of our custom or our competitor because we are solving a really hard revenue cycle management problem that others are not able to

solve this is our Oak chart so just around 30 people who work on on this uh side of the business and uh we haven't added a single person in the last two years now that the business is growing more and more customers are asking for more features and functionality so we are starting to look at adding more Dev team members so so initially we started working on this as a one-off product but now we've moved it into a platform so

that if there are other products that we acquire we could then bring them into the mix so that we can create stickiness with customers so that it's really hard for them to leave us well that's it I hope you enjoyed it thank you so much [Applause] [Music]