Raj Sheth, Decalab
From $4M ARR Exit to a SaaS Acquisition Factory
Raj Sheth is the founder and CEO of Decalab, a SaaS factory that buys B2B software companies doing between $1M and $3M in ARR and helps them grow faster and more efficiently. In 2020, Raj made his first SaaS acquisition - a data migration company called FlyData. He turned the business around and sold it just over a year later for a 3x return on his investment. But it took a long time for Raj to have that kind of success. In 2006, he launched his first B2C software company - a Craigslist for India - which failed after two and a half years when his savings ran out. A couple of years later, he launched a second B2C marketplace for high-end jewelry, which also failed. In 2011, Raj co-founded RecruiterBox, a recruiting SaaS product. He and his co-founders bootstrapped it to over $4M ARR with around 3,000 customers and 50 employees before selling to a private equity firm in early 2018. It took them seven years to get there, and they never raised a dollar of venture capital. Now through Decalab, Raj is pursuing SaaS acquisition as a repeatable model - buying companies that have hit a bottleneck, bringing them to 50% EBITDA, and using profits to fund growth. His goal is to aggregate five to ten companies and reach $100M in ARR without venture capital. In this interview, we dig into how the co-founders built RecruiterBox using SEO, paid media, and directory listings. We talk about the economics of their paid acquisition, the failed attempt to move upmarket, and how Raj found FlyData through a cold outbound campaign on Crunchbase that generated 22 Zoom calls in three days.
