DecaLab

Raj Sheth's journey to founding DecaLab began decades earlier with failure. After graduating in 2003 and working at EMC for three years, he launched his first B2C startup in 2006—a Craigslist for India classified platform. It reached thousands of users but had no revenue model and no real team, just a freelancer programmer. After 2.5 years, his savings ran out. Undeterred, he tried again with another B2C marketplace in 2008-2010, this time focused on high-end diamonds, partnering with manufacturers in Israel, India, and Belgium. But he couldn't get supply to commit or demand to stick around. By 2010, both ventures had failed.

"The biggest hard-hitting lessons from these two were that I want to be quick to revenue. Have something that was super tangible and did not rely on any flywheel," Raj explained. That lesson would define everything that came next.

In June 2011, Raj co-founded Recruiterbox with two engineers—a backend engineer and a frontend engineer. The idea came almost accidentally. They initially wanted to solve job searching, but when they talked to companies, they discovered the real pain: hiring departments were drowning in email and spreadsheets. "It's impossible to receive 400, 500 resume attachments on email and sift through all of that," companies told them.

They built the simplest possible solution—a shared inbox to sort candidates. It wasn't the full product. They didn't design the opening section, candidate section, or onboarding. Just half the product, tested with 5-10 companies who dog-fooded it as they built. "The first person was paying the first revenue three months after any code was written," Raj said. When that first customer paid, they knew it worked.

The first 25-30 customers came from a scrappy combination of channels. Google Apps Marketplace (which, unusually, didn't require Google integration at the time) sent steady trickle signups. So did the Chrome Web Store. Raj spent time on Help A Reporter Out daily, answering relevant journalist queries to get mentions. One response got them covered by MSNBC; another led to a guest post in the New York Times online. They ran a content-heavy blog with interviews and checklists.

By 2013, after nearly two years of grinding on SEO—site redesigns, great content, and lucky timing with Google's Panda update that penalized competitors—they ranked in the top 2-3 positions for "applicant tracking software." From 2013-2016, organic search became their primary growth channel, driving most gains.

They also experimented with paid ads via Google AdWords, CapTera, and GetApp. Early attempts at $3,000/month didn't yield enough data. They learned a hard lesson: you need at least $7,000-$10,000/month in spend and six months of data to understand if a channel works. Even then, attribution was messy. By scale, they were spending $30,000/month across Google AdWords, retargeting, LinkedIn, and other channels, though efficiency declined as costs rose.

By 2013, Recruiterbox had 25,000-30,000 monthly visitors. 3% signed up for the free trial (1,000 people). 10% of those converted to paying customers (100 people). At $100/month average, they added $10,000 MRR monthly—all fueled by organic traffic and word-of-mouth.

The SMB segment had high churn, which became a bottleneck. Around 2015, four years in and near $2M ARR, they began experimenting with going upmarket—targeting $3K-$10K annual deals and even some $50K/month enterprise deals. But they never fully made the transition. "The transition was never made," Raj admitted. They attempted to fork their onboarding to route different customer sizes differently, but most revenue still came from self-service SMB. The larger market wanted demos and sales processes—not self-serve.

They grew to 50 employees, distributed globally, and eventually reached $4-5M ARR by 2017-2018. Private equity came knocking, and they took an all-cash exit with no outside investors in the entire seven-year journey.

After Recruiterbox, Raj launched DecaLab in June 2020—a SaaS factory acquiring companies between $1-3M ARR. His first acquisition was Fly Data in 2020. The company had raised $9M previously, attempted three products, and was left with just its core data integration product. It was doing under $1M ARR but had low churn—a sign of resilience.

Raj paid a reasonable price (investors had written it off; the founder wanted out), immediately cut costs by 50%, and reinvested the other 50% in growth. His team rewrote large parts of the product to integrate with Snowflake and BigQuery (not just Redshift). Within 13 months, he sold Fly Data for a 3x return.

"Honestly, I had no clue if we could fix it," Raj said. "I was just looking at two things: we're getting this at a great price, and if we screw everything up it will be a wash." The flipped timeline was accidental—a buyer emerged offering a price too good to pass up.

The DecaLab model is now clear: acquire 5-10 profitable companies, own them for 5-10 years, aggregate revenue and profit, reinvest profits from one company into the next. Raj has spoken to 40-50 founders since launching his acquisition campaign in December 2020. He no longer tries to build from scratch; he buys struggling but fundamentally sound businesses, fixes operations, and scales them with SEO, great onboarding, support, and outbound sales. The value is in the aggregation, not the flip.