Mobstack
Sharod and Ravi met in fifth grade and remained close through high school, undergrad, and even as roommates in New York. In 2010, they launched Mobstack as a mobile-focused company, generating less than $5,000 in their first year. They bootstrapped and experimented with different products in the mobile space for five years, growing modestly to about $250,000 in revenue by 2014 with a small team.
After observing that 90-93% of retail still happens offline despite e-commerce hype, they realized physical retailers had no way to leverage digital practices like retargeting and footfall analytics. In 2015, they pivoted to Beaconstack, a SaaS platform using Bluetooth beacon technology to enable proximity-based marketing. The insight was that customers needed a one-stop shop—rather than sourcing hardware from one vendor and software from another, Mobstack partnered with a Chinese OEM and built software on top to make it seamless.
Their pricing model proved clever: $49-$99/month for up to 10 beacons, then $5/beacon/month for additional ones, plus a one-time $22/beacon hardware cost (sold at near-cost with minimal margin). Within roughly two years of pivoting, they hit 100 customers generating $25,000 MRR. Their biggest win was Google India, which deployed over 2,000 beacons across 117 train stations to promote free Wi-Fi, sending Chrome browser notifications to waiting passengers.
Content marketing became their growth engine, generating 450-500 business leads monthly with a 10-20% conversion rate into customers. They spent zero on paid acquisition. Their customer base ranged from mom-and-pop stores deploying 2-3 beacons to enterprises deploying 2,000+. They also got creative with guerrilla marketing—Sharod put a beacon in his car that sent notifications about Beaconstack, and a freelance artist customer got a $3,000 contract using a beacon at events.
With a 20-person team split between Bangalore and a one-person sales office in New York, they had raised $3.5M from Accel Partners (lead investor), Cisco (strategic), and angels. On track to hit $500k ARR by end of 2017, they focused solely on Beaconstack as their core revenue driver, with other products generating less than $5k/month. Sharod and Ravi still owned more than 50% of the company, with investors and a 12% employee stock option pool splitting the remainder.
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