How Adadot CEO Alex Harris grew Adadot to $75.3K revenue and 200 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is alex she's the founder of atta.com it's the world's first fitness tracker for work for developers she leverages data hiding and productivity and collaboration software to help developers improve how they work and feel rooted in science integrates with gitlab github and slack alex you're ready to take us to the top yeah all good all right so is this a physical thing people are installing or no it's digital no uh we call it the fitness target but really it's just it's just software basically it functions like a fitness tracker but not uh not a physical thing interesting okay so explain to me i guess are are are uh teams paying for this for all their engineers to use to become more productive and happy or are engineers paying for this themselves directly actually a little bit of both so our pricing works in the same ways that notion does you have a personal pro and then you have two licenses as well so it can happen both ways okay and so um i guess how many individual license usually costs it's just a small one it's about ten dollars per user per month ten per user per month and uh i guess help me explain maybe explain the story of how an engineer has used you and how they change their their habits or behaviors because of what they learned from the dot the app yeah so we have some real life examples so uh for example an engineer that was working front end he was very scatty with his approach in his calendar uh wasn't actually accounting for a lot of focus time during their day so essentially a lot of meetings cramping into their time and once they've noticed that this basically stopped kind of arranging meetings in the middle of the day which basically left them three or four focus hours a day which increased productivity by 50 months and months very interesting and are you um are you is your main go to market today like did you start off selling direct to enterprise selling massive team plans or did it start bottoms up individual engineers yes so we're kind of like um using a hybrid approach at the moment so sometimes you speak to how do you start how do you start though yeah so we essentially start usually at the individual level and then basically sell upwards so when did you sell your first individual do you remember the year yeah no it was like a few months ago so it's a very recent product yeah when did you launch like when did you when did you launch the business so the business started back in 2019 we actually pivoted a couple of times before we arrived in our current destination the current product launched on product handle and 28th of january and how'd the product hunt launch do uh number one product hunt uh kind of item of the day that's amazing okay and did you quantify like how many website hits or signups did you get from product hunt so it's a very good question because we had the free tier of full story as a tracking kind of tool and actually we surpassed it so we got notification from full story going we you can't track anymore so it's definitely above a thousand uh sessions and that's how we know but that was that was the limit that we had so um definitely above a thousand interesting so that launch was january 28 2022 you got about 400 up votes right yep okay and over a thousand signups now how many of those signups converted to paid do you know yeah so to be honest with you not all of them obviously so we had about kind of like 50 signups out of that that were kind of fully integrated and kind of proceeded to to go into like the more premium tier so the individual licenses right now are mostly kind of on the freemium side well 50 converting to paid out of a thousand is a five percent conversion rate that's pretty good those all those 50 started paying 10 bucks a month yep that's awesome well congrats you don't seem very excited no it is very exciting sorry just i'm always thinking about the next stage and you know growth and getting like bigger and better so i'm always i'm always focused on the next thing so those were 50 from product on how many total users do you have today customers paying customers yeah so if we look at essentially both uh kind of corporate customers and individuals so it's about 200. oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're going to get a different valuation a vc is going to pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when i hover over here right so the teal is what a vc would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on youtube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 to their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of sas valuations than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you wanna check this tool out if you wanna jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform i hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview can we take 200 times 10 to get your mrr yeah well actually no because uh the corporate ones are charged at double the price so essentially you have to basically take that into consideration so i would say they're half and half right now so you're doing about 3 000 bucks a month right now on revenue something like that yeah yeah yeah very cool and where were you exactly a year ago do you remember it was a completely different product we were doing a very very different thing uh so we were trying to solve the problem of again it's a work related problem but it was about kind of time analytics and how people are utilizing their time from a kind of broader perspective not just developers i see okay and talk to me about the founding story here are you soul founder do you have a co-founder i have a co-founder uh technical guy cto you guys were nice to each other and split it 50 50 or did you keep more i kept more now we're jigging a little bit actually we're in the process of redistributing a little bit of that and why is that well because when we started we're a completely different product we were um doing something different and it made sense to speak that way and now because obviously we're way more technical products there's much bigger contribution on his side so actually it would make sense to have a more equal split okay and have you guys self-funded or have you raised capital we have raised capital now so we just close around a nice chunky precede if you basically put all the money in including government grounds and everything that's about like a million essentially in dollars okay and what uh most folks are sort of raising precedes these days it's sort of a million on a five cap is that sort of what you guys did uh no um no we have we have a few uncapped notes in that round oh good okay so it's not a price drone it's an uncapped note so some of it is priced because of uk government rules some of it is essentially uncapped oh i see interesting okay well let's let's look at future right so how do you sign up a thousand more customers what's the go to market what's the growth strategy yeah so we as i mentioned we have a two prong approach so we're basically kind of uh doubling up on kind of like the team aspect and the individual aspect but from a distribution perspective we're looking at a number of distribution deals right now with some very very well known not gonna name who uh online who are they marketplaces it's it's the usual suspect we you know just don't don't want to say these are like the githubs of the world um some of that but also like actual like marketplaces that cater to you know you know lifetime deals and stuff like that so there's you know tiered approaches to how we're gonna get to a thousand customers well why would you sell a lifetime deal though that doesn't enable you to drive recurring revenue and make hiring decisions and invest in future products yeah so we have a good reasoning for that and it has to do with some of the features that we are working on which are a lot of like data intensive essentially and predictive modeling of the back of it so actually for us it's in our best interest to get as much data as many users ask so then why charge it all why not erase your pricing altogether we do have a freemium so we do do that but at the same time we need to prove the value in the use case right so you do that in three ways you do that through proving that you have you know you're solving a problem that's real and people are willing to pay for it very cool all right um talking about your team today how many folks seven seven okay and how many engineers most of them there's literally just two of us who are not technical so five okay that makes sense for what you're building listen we're rooting for you this is a heck of a story um again guys check it out uh added.com alex let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite book oh god great book uh venture deals number two is there a ceo you're following are studying it's gonna sound very common uh i do like elon musk he's like a huge visionary uh so nothing too special there i guess just the only ones number three what's your favorite online tool for building out a dot uh figma number four how many hours i sleep to eat every night four and what's your situation married single kids oh wow i am i am married yeah uh hence the harris awesome any kiddos or no no no none can i ask how old you are two olds probably two old uh yeah uh about well 35 30. i will say 30 years young okay last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. how to how to basically uh scale to 2000 customers oh i wish i kind of knew that guys there there you have it added.com they got going with a big product launch now have about 200 customers paying you know 10 to 20 dollars a month for their tools so caught three grand a monthly recurring revenue just closed a million dollar pre-seed round including some grants and other stuff to really double down on growth seven on the team today five engineers and really the purpose of the tool is to help engineers understand how just how to basically build a healthier life healthier workflows collaborate stronger get more done quicker and again be happy while they do it so looking to scale at two thousand three thousand customers we're rooting for you alex thanks for taking us to the top thank you so much one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathan lacka dot com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive i am on these shows but i do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that i appreciate your guys support all right i'll be in the comments see ya