How Google search drives 60% of our top-of-funnel leads

Arko Ganguli: 00:00:00

We have spent zero money of marketing. Mm-hmm. we have done no digital ads and people are actually actively finding us on Google and trying to solve this problem for them. That's how painful it has been. Um, case in point, um, uh, without having an inside sales team, we actually have closed, uh, a contract of a million dollar value with a, with a financial institution, But, but, but for what we see the funnel coming to us, we see 60% coming from Google and 30% coming from LinkedIn. So, so yeah. So that's what I, I, I honestly feel there's a lot of, um, requirement for Notarizations

Upendra Varma: 00:00:29

hello everyone. Welcome to the B2B SaaS podcast. I'm your host of PRA Verma, and today we have Arco Ganguli with us. Arco here is the co-founder of a company called Legend Defi. Hey, Arco, welcome to the show.

Arko Ganguli: 00:00:39

Hey Pra, thank you for having me here. It's a pleasure to be here. Alright,

Upendra Varma: 00:00:43

Arco, so let's, let's try to understand what your product does, uh, and what by why your

Arko Ganguli: 00:00:47

customers pay your money. so, so, uh, uh, we are, um, the world's first crosswater, notar, notary, uh, remote or digital notary. Um, we help, uh, people notarize documents, um, whenever they need to notarize one. So basically, if you don't know what notarizing documents means, there is, um, that guy, you went to an office who's a notary, who stamped something, and you don't know why you waited 15 minutes in that office, that guy. So the use cases are varied. It can be for banking services, it can be for employment, cross border. So any kind of a cross border transaction where there are more than two different legal systems in place, you would do need the, uh, notaries until prior to Covid 19. This was a predominantly an in-person process in most countries, but post the pandemic, uh, like related to EdTech, a significant group of people started going to US digital. Similarly, it happened with the world of notaries and the laws were updated and solutions like gas came about. So we are the first early move to the European and the em.

Upendra Varma: 00:01:43

Alright, so, so, uh, before we get further into the product, right, I wanna understand your customer basis of today, right? Because I wanna get a sense of who you're selling it to and what primary use cases you're dealing with as of today. Can you talk about that?

Arko Ganguli: 00:01:56

Sure. So, uh, the, the, our primary customer base is b2b, uh, primarily focusing on B2B enterprise. Um, so the specific use cases for us are varied. For example, the first ones that we focus on right now is, um, A A M L and K Y B use cases where you need to verify identities of corporate. Structures across various jurisdictions, uh, which means it is a TUS and UBO os and in that area. So we help banks and financial institutions with, uh, certification and as well as the document identification processes. Currently, we are their, the, the primary partner of a revenue business to carry out all their K YB processes in the eu. Um, as, um, which may, which. People work coming from outside the EU as well. Another use case that we primarily focus on is international real estate. Um, which means, um, where we work with companies like Fascist Perran, uh, few people have been skewed. Marky real estate companies like Sotheby's also started using a solution, uh, predominantly because we help them with power of attorneys, um, for agents and, and we, there's a lot of work there. Um, when it comes to international real. The third thing that we do help with, with companies that are expanding rapidly for their, um, their operations across various jurisdictions space in point. We do, we have done transactions, um, with deal.com, a payroll outsourcing company that you must be aware of that's grown like an in amazing space in, in, and we also working with, um, remote, um, um, like, like we have not activated it yet, but. Uh, gonna start working with them, a few other payroll companies as well. So that's one of the primary use cases we are focusing on. If you think about it, the number of use cases you have for notarizing documents, it's crossing various industries and various use cases. Um, so, so we have to focus on a few.

Upendra Varma: 00:03:44

Alright, makes sense. So, so let's, let's talk about, you know, product a bit more, right? So in terms of the exact, you know, thing that you're selling, right? Is it just software or do you have anything else on top of it? So,

Arko Ganguli: 00:03:56

so. Uh, so sorry. Please go. Please go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah, I think you got the question. Yeah. So basically what we are doing is, um, we are, uh, connecting you to the relevant notary of the appropriate jurisdiction. Who's competent to actually notarize the document for you. So for example, you are based out of Panama and you want to get an. Document notarized from Sweden, right. Uh, you have two options. Use a solution and notarize the document from a Swedish notary, or take a flight from Panama to Sweden and meet the notary in person. So we have a human element, uh, where licensed professionals who are as from the government, who are notaries, uh, work, uh, and help you get your documents not raised. That's what we are doing right now going forward. We have roadmap to pre give, uh, pure software value add on as well. That no, that's what we. And

Upendra Varma: 00:04:42

just help me explain. So is it sort of a marketplace that you're trying to build or do you sort of, uh, you know, hire these government entities or whoever those, you know, notaries are so,

Arko Ganguli: 00:04:52

so legally speaking, you cannot hire the government, right? Sure. So, uh, but, but what we do do is we have a kind of a marketplace model where there are notaries are who are the suppliers on one side and the customers who are the, uh, the people who need the documents, on the other. How, um, and, and that has its own set of network effects because not. Once we see the, the efficiencies of the product itself, they are extremely interested to bring their own customers into the solution. Uh, and those customers have notarization needs, which are not necessarily this notary's competence. Yeah. And vice versa, right? So for example, when we work with revenue business, a significant part of our, their market customers at their onboarding also have their own notarization use cases, and we have independent relationships with them as well. Um, so there is network effect, definit. But, um, I wanna give a clarity on the challenge here. Like, as, as, and Chan talks about the coldstar problem, the hard side of the market is the notary, the customers. You honestly wanted to notarize a document you'll prefer. It's, it's, I don't need to sell it to you, you'll find me and you'll get it done online. The bigger concern is from the notary side, who are more traditional. Um, and, and they have been working in a, in an industry that's predominantly not been Aztec enabled as the rest. Um, so. So we primarily wanna focus on getting the quality rather than the quantity of suppliers. Uh, so that's fundamentally what we are focusing on, right? So let's try

Upendra Varma: 00:06:12

to quantify this, quantify this part of it, right? So I wanna understand how many sort of. Customers, do you have on your platform purely businesses who are using these notarized services?

Arko Ganguli: 00:06:21

Yeah, so we have had more than 550 customers u use a solution, um, where they have used the notarization at least once. Um, and we have, uh, a very high rate of repeat customers as well. Um, so, so, so we

Upendra Varma: 00:06:34

are, so, uh, When you said repeat customers, and you're also saying, we hired a bunch of customers. Right. So how does the model work? Is, is it like once you onboard somebody, they're going to use you for forever, for those, you know, notarized, no reservices, or is it a one-time thing that they come to you use, sort of help them out and they just leave?

Arko Ganguli: 00:06:49

Yeah. Sorry for that. I think we need to need to clarify that. So basically, um, we are currently on a, on a transaction basis or a PSU go. Uh, but we do provide volume related discounts for significant amount of volume commitments that we provide. Um, also we have specific offers that we provide. Like for example, we are an antler portfolio company, so we provide, uh, specific offers to antler companies. We are also, so basically there are various programs which we have partnerships with. We have startups. And companies. But yeah, fundamentally right now we have a transaction PS U model. Um, but if you have, uh, specific commitment or volumes, we provide you volume within this company. That's not

Upendra Varma: 00:07:26

my question. I understand. It's, it's a pays you go model, but my question is more around do these, uh, customers of yours, right? So do they have to sort of do, use your service again, time and again or is it the typical one

Arko Ganguli: 00:07:39

time thing? It depends. It depends on the use case, right? So for example, if, let's say you're relocating from one country to the other and you need to get. Notarized for an immigration process. You won't do that every year. However, if you're do opening a bank account and you are providing, doing a K I V certification, you have to do it at least annually. Um, if you are doing, if you're an accountant for firm and you are trying to get international customers, uh, to work with you and they wanna give you part of attorneys, you may need to do it 40 a day. Right. Uh, so it really depends on the use case. Sure, sure. Number for, um,

Upendra Varma: 00:08:08

yeah, I got it. So just, just help me sort of complete the stories, like how many notaries do you have on the other side of.

Arko Ganguli: 00:08:15

So we have more, more than 40 not trees activated in the marketplace. Uh, but we are primarily focusing on quality right now. So actually gonna go down going forward. Um, and um, because in the EU it's kind of different from LA with the US. In the US if you, the people pay their college tuition with their no free degree in the EU need, need to be a minimum five year solicitor to be considered a notary. So it's a much more. Gated community, so you want to get the right quality notaries on board. Um, we have notaries from three jurisdictions as of now, just Sweden, Ireland, and England and Wales. And, um, our, uh, under the Apostle convention, our documents are, can be used um, in more than 101 countries. And we have customers from more over 45 jurisdictions. Got it. Including India and the us. Sure. All right. So, so how do

Upendra Varma: 00:08:58

you. You know, track revenue and growth for a company like yours. I mean, I can't even ask you those questions because it's really crazy, right? I mean, customers using you for one, one reason, they're moving out, right? So how do you even track revenue? How do you track growth? How do you predict churn? All of these things. Let's talk about the process you're using here.

Arko Ganguli: 00:09:15

Most definitely. So basically what we have done with the ED use cases, because otherwise it's this absolute nightmare to figure out what is right and what is not. So we kind of use, if we have cohorted based on use cases. Um, so if we have um, um, for example a financial institution, uh, uh, pushing their use cases, um, uh, to us, um, we wanna see the number of leads that come from that financial institution and how many of them are actually doing the transaction, and how many are coming back based on the specific use case. To do the same transaction. Right. So we have cohorted it. Um, uh, churn is difficult, uh, to actually assess for our case because, um, more often not, especially when it comes to SMEs and smaller businesses, they don't need, they need it sporadically. For us, it's more about building those enterprise partnerships. Cause enterprises, especially companies that have more than one jurisdiction where they have their entities, will always have an ongoing requirement for notar. So for us it's more about an enterprise transaction model where, um, you want to focus on relationships with bigger organizations and, you know, work with different units across the world and help them get their documents certified and not write and verified as opposed to figure under the churn rate on the SM e sector so that, those, those metrics. Sure.

Upendra Varma: 00:10:27

So my, yeah, my question is more around like, do you even consider this a subscription business?

Arko Ganguli: 00:10:32

So, so that's what we, we actually started building funny thing, supporting first we substitution layer and then we decided, I don't know how to use it because the question is, if I ask you as a business how many times you have notarized the document, you're like, many times that I don't know. Right? So to actually package it into, um, um, substitution fee seems to be No, no, no.

Upendra Varma: 00:10:50

So, so like you, you really don't have to have a subscription fee. Right. Just imagine something like this. Exactly. Let's just say you have a $0 subscription fee and you obviously. I'm gonna charge them based on, you know, pay as you go model. Right. That's still okay. My question is, for example, if you sort of managed to acquire a customer today, right? Do they stick with you, let's say, for the next couple of years to solve, sort of, solve all of the notary use cases with you? Is that is, is it something that's happening today?

Arko Ganguli: 00:11:13

As of now, we have not seen. So its the only way you can, we can figure a churn is for us, our case is basically because we, not a SA subs subscription model, right? Mm-hmm. So basically they're not dropping off, they're not taking the card on file out. Right? Yeah. Well, so it's very difficult to ask to get a churn rate, so to speak. But what we do see is people who have been notarizing our documents, uh, are coming back to the solution and Notarizing documents not, they're not active competitors in the space right now, in the space that we are in, so, sure, sure. We don't

Upendra Varma: 00:11:37

see, yeah. So, so I just wanna get a sense of, you know, I wanna quantify this. For example, you mentioned you've had. 5, 5 50 customers. Right. So what was like, how many of them sort of used you in year two or you know, how many of them used beyond that first use case that you

Arko Ganguli: 00:11:51

saw sort of solved? So we, we basically, um, we we're actually quantifying that and we seen more than 70% of the people have come back and actually use the solution again. But then again, we'll be wrong assessment because the lesser 30% we're probably notarizing a password of immigration. Yeah, right. They may have referred someone to use our solution. So it's not a churn actually. So it's very to assess of cases. Alright, so let.

Upendra Varma: 00:12:11

talk a bit about your top funnel, right? We can come back to this later. So like, where are you finding all of these customers and what, what does it take to sort of onboard

Arko Ganguli: 00:12:19

customers? We have spent zero money of marketing. Mm-hmm. we have done no digital ads and people are actually actively finding us on Google and trying to solve this problem for them. That's how painful it has been. Um, case in point, um, uh, without having an inside sales team, we actually have closed, uh, a contract of a million dollar value with a, with a financial institution, which I'm not, which, which I'm It's okay. It's okay. Doesn't matter. Yeah. So, um, so the fact of the matter is the plane is real. That's the most

Upendra Varma: 00:12:43

important thing. So when, when you say people searching for you on Google, like what exactly are they searching for and like, have you optimized your, and do you rank

Arko Ganguli: 00:12:52

on the top? Are, we are not the top three socialists. The other one will be brought with the, a government website. Yeah. And like

Upendra Varma: 00:13:01

did you put, and was this a conscious decision? Did you put, put any extra efforts in terms

Arko Ganguli: 00:13:05

of, you know, we did not do any seo. Nothing. Okay. We just came up like, like that's how painful it is. Like, and basically someone said like, how did you find us? So this question like, oh we, I just Googled Notarization Europe and you. Search result. Oh, like, oh, really? So, so that's how it has been like, actually, uh, we have not done a lot of thought, but, but now that, um, we have research, uh, so can, so can I, can I assume that

Upendra Varma: 00:13:24

like a significant percent of these five 50 customers sort of discovered you using Google search? Is that how it is?

Arko Ganguli: 00:13:31

Um, so if you look at that, like Google search is the primary constituent, the second bigger Constitu will LinkedIn searches. Uh, so because predominantly is being used by professionals. So first is Googles, uh, second is LinkedIn. So what happens

Upendra Varma: 00:13:42

on LinkedIn search people search for? Why would anybody search for Notary on a LinkedIn search bar? I mean, it's pretty

Arko Ganguli: 00:13:48

ba uh, I don't know. So we have a, what what we see is a lot of Clickthroughs from a LinkedIn page to our website, and we have $0 spent on LinkedIn.

Upendra Varma: 00:13:57

So you are assuming it's, it's from organic LinkedIn discovery. Is that you're assuming or is it true? Is it?

Arko Ganguli: 00:14:02

So we have a clickthrough from a LinkedIn to our portal. So we are tracking that and that constitutes significant percent percentage of the funnel. That's all we know. Okay. What we make up? No, my

Upendra Varma: 00:14:12

my, my question is who, who, what's driving your traffic to that LinkedIn page of yours?

Arko Ganguli: 00:14:16

It may be Google. That's what I'm saying. Right? Okay. So it may be Google, it can be circular from Google, but, but there many people. But, but if you. Notarization Europe, our LinkedIn page doesn't show up. Mm-hmm. but, you know, we, we have not assessed that. But, but, but for what we see the funnel coming to us, we see 60% coming from Google and 30% coming from LinkedIn. So, so yeah. So that's what I, I, I honestly feel there's a lot of, um, requirement for Notarizations that people. And there are a lot of organic conversations happening where, how, how can I get this done? Mm-hmm. And we, we've rang really high on that. We also have a significant amount of PR on in the market. We have been covered by Sifted, we have been covered by, um, by Silicon, um, uh, Silicon Republic, uh, Duggans industry, these laptop, uh, startup, um, journals all over Europe. Um, we are also gonna be recently featured in another internationally renowned, um, uh, startup journal. So we have been got, getting a lot of good PR in our. Our startup. So that probably also drives up the traffic.

Upendra Varma: 00:15:11

Got it. So, uh, just help me explain, right, so in terms of, uh, how you're pricing it, right? For every dollar of, you know, every dollar that you charge your customer, how much do you actually end up making for how much profit do you end up making for yourself? Because the, I'm asking this specifically because you, you've got a human

Arko Ganguli: 00:15:26

element in there. Absolutely. So, so as of now, um, and I would, I would say as of now, because we are currently working on different pricing model because we are doing some product, uh, changes, but as of now, the way it works is basically we have a base fee of 35 euros, a convenience fee, uh, over and above the notary fee that is fixed Chinese transaction. Um, and, um, if the transac not fee is above 115 euros, we charge a flat 30% convenience over and above the notary. So in case you are, um, charging, if the not fee has aff fixed, if you have 200 Euros for your document, the, the, the, the platform will charge you 260 Euros. We're pretty transparent about our pricing. We know exactly what value we're bringing. I think the 60 Euros will not hurt you as much as going France, getting something not. And can I

Upendra Varma: 00:16:10

ask you how much the did you do last month? I It's gonna be seasonal. It's gonna vary a lot, but just

Arko Ganguli: 00:16:15

last month. No, no. So basically, uh, uh, we, we are on, on route, uh, on road to complete 175 K of, uh, revenue, um, by the end of the year. Um, so that's per year, right? That's per year, yes. So monthly tracking happens. Sure, sure. There's always a seasonal element, 10k, I don't wanna do that. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So

Upendra Varma: 00:16:38

let's get a bit of backstory here, right? So when did

Arko Ganguli: 00:16:40

you start the. Uh, so, so it was a funny story really. I am professionally a lawyer and I was a part of the Antler program in Stockholm, and we are looking for my co-founder, one of 5, 3, 5 things I had on my bucket list I wanted to change in the world. Like I've always had an outlier profile when I was in school, I always wondered why I'm studying trigonometry. I still figured, haven't figured that out. Um, so my, I met my co-founder there, uh, ADA, and she's more from a professional finance background. She lived most of her life in New York, and, uh, we met, um, and. The thick of Covid in 2020 here in Sweden. It was in all, all the wrong reasons. There was no social distancing, no lockdowns there, so the entire world did not let anyone leave it. And we needed notarized a couple of documents. I needed to notarized a document in the UK and I incidentally needed to Notar document in Ireland and. It just was like one of those random conversations that, look, people say you idea together, have that eureka moment like arches and you solve the problem. And we went backwards. We had a problem and figured on just build a startup around it. Yeah. So that's how we startedi to solve our problem itself. Basically we had to, um, open a bank account and we didn't notarized some documents. Right. So, so we notarized it. So basically we built a problem for our solution for ourselves, and then we have been selling it to the public. It's, it's been a couple of years, right? It's been two years to years,

Upendra Varma: 00:17:54

months. Sure, sure. And how many folks do you have on your team and have you

Arko Ganguli: 00:17:57

raised any external funding? Oh, so we have lean team. Right now we are a team of six. Uh, and, um, we are growing. Sure. And have you raised

Upendra Varma: 00:18:05

any external

Arko Ganguli: 00:18:05

funding? Yeah. So, so, um, we are about to close, uh, a specific undisclosed amount Sure. Which will probably come to do in the next couple of weeks, um, and beyond. Before that, we have raised, uh, uh, just a north of $300,000. Mm-hmm. but we have, we just closed our, I don't, I can't say. Sure. Yeah.

Upendra Varma: 00:18:25

So, Alco, one last question. Right. So what's the vision for your company? Right? So, which direction are you gonna take? Right. What, what's your next big goal and how are you gonna reach there, you know, in terms of revenue and.

Arko Ganguli: 00:18:35

So INS revenues, basically we have to, uh, reach, um, uh, a hundred Krr, um, sorry, a million dollar, a million a r as as fast as possible. My question

Upendra Varma: 00:18:45

is, does a r r even apply to you?

Arko Ganguli: 00:18:49

As in that's what we, we are kind of changing a few things about the pricing as well. So

Upendra Varma: 00:18:53

are you, are you gonna take that subscription route somehow?

Arko Ganguli: 00:18:55

Go there because now we have some sense on understanding of volumes. Um, now that we're doing this for a while, um, that being said, uh, we, we want to have, uh, uh, uh, we wanna move to one villa, um, within the next 12 months, uh, to raise our series A. That's, that's the, that's the primary North star revenue metric when it comes to the vision metric, which is said like, I don't know if it's a metric. The vision is basically the fundamental reason we did this was, uh, we need to, we wanted to live in a world. Legal processes need not be archaic unnecessarily. Um, and the most low hanging fruit was the importance of notarization. And it's still kind of, I feel it can be done in a better way than in what has been done presently. Sure. Uh, we are gonna move in that direction where we actually take specific user journeys and legal processes of verification and validation. And make it better. But in the short term, short to the medium term, what we'll do is we are gonna implement more features, make the process more cleaner. We'll make notarization simpler, we'll build APIs, we'll integrate with various user journeys and various enterprises and you know, we'll strategically place ourselves in every step of the user journey. So that users need not even think they're using electrify, they just get documents notarized. Alright,

Upendra Varma: 00:19:58

Arco, thanks for taking the time to talk to me. Hope your scale divide to much, much greater heights.

Arko Ganguli: 00:20:02

Thank you. Thank you so much. It was a pleasure talking to you. Have a great one.