Actiondesk Revenue & Funding (2023)

hello everyone my guest today is jonathan parasot he was born and raised in france and as a business school graduate before starting his company action desk he ran one of the country branches of african e-commerce unicorn jumia group action desk enables non-technical teams to build powerful automations using only their spreadsheet skills they're based in station f and paris and are in private beta jonathan you ready to take us to the top absolutely all right so by the way you have to own this right off the bat and i'll have so much respect for you is private beta code for pre-revenue um no we do we do have revenue okay well that's even better i was expecting to say yes we are pre-revenue okay so you have revenue that's great um let me uh let me dive into the product here so so this sounds very much like it's a kind of a combination of kind of google sheets and like zapier right yes absolutely we are we often define ourselves as images between google sheets and zap here um so the problem we're solving is that you know i'm sure you've seen that you've seen that in most companies you have people salesman customer service people logistic people pulling out uh excel reports from biosystems whether it's your database or business app then crunching that data on excel and then either uh you know looking at a report that will lead to some professional actions or push that data back in a system uh no now that causes two problems right the first one is that it's very time consuming and you don't really want your highly skilled sales person to spend time crunching data on excel and the second problem is that it doesn't really enable to have real time data so the solution we're offering with action desk is where you can program automations that will do exactly that so first it will you will automatically import data from all the data sources you might may have in your business second it will run some predefined data transformations that the user has programmed and third it will push data back in a system and the third step could be sending some kpis on an email triggering a slack message or just putting some reports on a google sheet that your team can look at and jonathan what are people paying on average per month for this uh in average that's 250 dollars okay 250 bucks this by the way this feels to me a lot like air table yeah uh well airtable doesn't really have uh this zapier-like uh integration with any of your apps i think they're they kind of going toward that direction with their recent feature called blocks base it's not quite there yet right if you want to import let's say data from hubspot and stripe in your editable base that won't be as as smooth as you may expect it to be with us it's just two clicks and and you have it uh when did you launch the company uh we started about a year ago full time i worked on on it part time before that okay so 20 kind of 2017-ish 2018 yeah exactly and how many customers today so we have four customers so we're doing 1k on kmr that's great and you're doing what zero a year ago right yeah i mean we were doing zero three months ago yeah jonathan i have a lot of listeners who are stuck in a job they hate and they're thinking about jumping off and doing their own thing and they're gonna also have to go get their first four customers here soon how did you get your first four customers um i'm just thinking about it uh the first very first one was i kind of went and talked to all the vcs here in paris and just told them what we were doing and some of them made intros to some of their portfolio companies uh and since we were targeting startups and smbs that was a that was i think a good channel to get um to get some first users and the other uh customers we got was through uh email email outreach that's where we would call this is yeah absolutely called email so our target is a ceo in a technology company uh startup or smb between 10 and 300 employees uh so what we did exactly is you know you go through linkedin uh you get a linkedin premium plan uh you target your people and then you have tools that will uh get the email and the name of those people and then you you you send a an outreach campaign and what is your what does your outreach campaign sound like i mean what's what's it say um it's like three sentences in the first email where it says uh you know are you tired of going through your technical team anytime you want to automate a a business uh and database process uh if yes then we might be able to help and what was this what's the subject line on that email typically um currently the the subject line is a quick question uh with a smiling they up that's so smart um i assume that probably gets a pretty healthy what 40 50 open rate uh yeah the open rate is actually higher than that it's around uh so it's a sequence of four emails at the end of the four uh it's usually 70 to 80 yep guys by the way i a lot of people think like oh if you don't have like the atlassian ceo on the show the billion in arr it's not valuable but i freaking i think these things jonathan is teaching right now are like the most valuable things for a lot of you guys that are just starting out if you guys are if you latch onto these kinds of like ideas these little growth tactics that i ask ceos and you want me to do it more make sure you do something to tell me whether it's text me or send me something on twitter or linkedin like let me know jonathan i love this kind of stuff i think it's super actionable i totally agree and i really i was asking myself the same question at the beginning and i'm still asking the same question right how to get the first customers is always challenging and i think you don't have that many resources online that that tells you how to do it so yeah i i do think that's very valuable uh what is uh talking about how you've capitalized this so are you bootstrapped or have you raised capital no so we have raised a small precede around uh last summer of uh 200 and thousand uh euros okay 200 000 and was that convertible note or equity all right i was going to build notes and then what's your team size today how many people [Music] so we're four people uh it's microfonder and myself plus two new software engineers that just joined us actually three weeks ago okay and everyone's in paris everyone is in paris yeah that's good station f huh it's taking off yeah exactly exactly i think we'll look back at station f in a few years and we'll think so many now big companies were were there at the same time yeah how many companies i've interviewed i think like six companies from station f how many are how many of their total i i i'm not exactly sure about the total but it's probably between 500 and a thousand yeah it's massive all right so four people 200 000 bucks raised are you i assume you guys are probably burning cash today how much are you burning per month uh yeah we're burning uh we're burning around 19 000 euros 19 000 euros okay so that's like about maybe 21 000 or something like that um yeah yeah do you it's probably two i mean i shouldn't even ask this question it's too early you don't really know yet things like churn and cac and that kind of stuff right uh uh i mean we do know it it's pretty simple we don't have any churn yeah and the uh keys is zero because we haven't uh we don't do any paid acquisition well i mean you could argue that whatever you pay yourself or your people that are doing the cold emails that should count in there but it's really just your sweat equity right now yeah that that'd be like a fully weighted uh yeah uh and yeah if you count that then it's it's pretty high but that's normal for a for company at our stage i guess so you're at 40 sorry four customers today how do you get up to 100 is it just doing more cold emails or are there other tests you're running yeah no great question uh so the other main channel we have now for creating leads is content marketing so we we publish at least one blog article week uh with some use cases some thoughts on the industry on spreadsheets on you know all no code tools um ryan hoover from product hunt just published a few days ago an article on that on all the no code tools that exist now in the market and we actually just published an article uh that bumps off that that idea i invite you guys to to to have a look um so those are the two main things we do now we are actually launching on product hunt on the 18th of february uh if anyone wants to check it out we already own products upcoming so you can subscribe there if you want to launch so i we expect that to to bring us a flow of leads quite um quite big and that that's where we will go from private beta to probably better yep let's uh let's wrap up here with the famous five jonathan number one what's your favorite business book uh it's not fully a business book it's more personal on business but i i would say the uh these seven habits of highly effective people number two is there a ceo you're following are studying right now [Music] i think you know beyond the usual suspects like jeff bezos and steve jobs et cetera i would uh mention matild uh colleen uh from the ceo of uh front uh who's quite impressive yep she's been on the show i think three times now is she she just opened an office in paris is it there at station f uh it's um no it's not right by uh but paris is a small city so yeah it's not far very good yeah we'll see that i mean she raised a massive i think it was like 50 or 60 million bucks at a crazy evaluation i'm just hoping that she's able to grow into that valuation and not get stuck in some down round situation we'll see did you know what the evolution was i i don't think well not well when you when you when you look at the arr that she shared with me on the show relative to how much they raised you can kind of understand that she is so impressive she raised at a valuation that is going to take them a little bit to grow into yeah if that makes sense yeah all right very good number three what's your favorite online tool for building the company um again beyond like the usual suspects i'll mention one company called phantombuster it enables you to use some kind of predefined gross hacks like what's it called sorry autofluiding some yeah so what's that what's it called spell it uh phantom booster p-h-o-a-n-t-o-m buster b-u-s-t-e-r and it enables you yeah to use pre-defined hacks like auto following some specific people on twitter on linkedin and that kind of thing that's been very helpful for uh for a number of things yeah do you know the founders uh i don't know them personally but i think i think they're here as well in session f yeah all right number four how many hours i sleep to get every night eight eight that's great and what's your situation married single kids uh i am single okay uh not married and no kids how old are you i am 30. 30. last question why do you wish your 20 year old self knew how much compounding is a big effect and really how important it is to take things step by step even though those steps are really small yep guys compounding is a massive lever don't take it for granted launched action desk back in uh 2017 for customers paying 250 bucks a month it's essentially uh kind of google sheets plus zapier built into one they've crossed a mill sorry they've crossed a thousand dollars a month in revenue up from zero a year ago because they just recently launched they raised 200 grand based in paris team of four they're burning about 20 21 000 per month right now as they look to scale jonathan thanks for taking us to the top thank you