Founder Interview
How Adadot Reached 200 Customers and $36K in Revenue With a Fitness Tracker for Developers (Interview with CEO Alex Harris)
- Interview Date
- May 26, 2022
- Interviewee
- Alex HarrisCEO
Company Metrics at Interview Time
Revenue (2022)
$36K
Customers (2022)
200
Total Funding (2022)
$1M
Team Size (2022)
7
Price per Seat (2022)
$10 per user per month
Historical Snapshot
These numbers were reported by Alex Harris during the interview recorded in May 2022 and are a historical snapshot, not current figures. See Adadot’s current numbers.
Key Takeaways
- 01Adadot had 200 paying customers as of May 2022, split roughly half corporate and half individual
- 02The company reported $36K in revenue in 2022
- 03Adadot closed a $1M pre-seed round in May 2022, including government grants and uncapped notes
- 04The product launched on Product Hunt on January 28, 2022 and was the number one item of the day
- 05The Product Hunt launch generated over 1,000 sessions and 50 converted to paid at $10 per month
- 06Pricing is $10 per user per month for individuals and double that for corporate customers
- 07The team has 7 people total, with 5 engineers
- 08One engineer using Adadot reclaimed focus time and achieved a 50% productivity increase month on month
- 09The business was founded in 2019 and pivoted before arriving at the current developer productivity product
- 10Growth strategy includes Product Hunt, app exchange marketplaces, and a hybrid bottom-up and team sales approach
Company Metrics at Time of Interview
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue (2022) | $36K | Founder interview, May 2022 |
| Customers (2022) | 200 | Founder interview, May 2022 |
| Price per Seat (Individual) (2022) | $10 per user per month | Founder interview, May 2022 |
| Product Hunt Upvotes (January 2022) | 400 | Founder interview, May 2022 |
| Product Hunt Sessions (January 2022) | 1,000+ | Founder interview, May 2022 |
| Product Hunt Paid Conversions (January 2022) | 50 | Founder interview, May 2022 |
| Total Funding (2022) | $1M | Founder interview, May 2022 |
| Pre-Seed Round (2022) | $1M | Founder interview, May 2022 |
| Team Size (2022) | 7 | Founder interview, May 2022 |
| Engineers (2022) | 5 | Founder interview, May 2022 |
| Year Founded | 2019 | Founder interview, May 2022 |
| Engineer Productivity Increase (case study) (2022) | 50% month on month | Founder interview, May 2022 |
Growth Breakdown
Revenue
Adadot reported $36K in revenue in 2022. Individual licenses are priced at $10 per user per month, while corporate customers are charged at double that rate, with the mix roughly half and half at the time of the interview.
Customers
The company had 200 paying customers as of May 2022, spanning both individual engineers and corporate teams. The first 50 paid customers came directly from the Product Hunt launch in January 2022, representing a 5% conversion rate from over 1,000 sessions.
Team
Adadot had 7 people on the team in 2022, with 5 of them being engineers. Alex Harris is the CEO and co-founded the company with a technical co-founder who serves as CTO.
Funding
Adadot closed a $1M pre-seed round in May 2022, which included government grants and a mix of priced and uncapped convertible notes. This was the company's first external capital raise.
Growth Strategy
Product Hunt Launch
Adadot launched on Product Hunt on January 28, 2022 and earned the number one product of the day. The launch drove over 1,000 sessions and converted 50 users to paid plans, seeding the initial customer base.
Freemium Model
Adadot uses a freemium approach to lower the barrier to entry and accumulate user data. The free tier allows engineers to experience the product before upgrading to individual or team paid plans.
App Exchange and Marketplace Distribution
The company was pursuing distribution deals with online marketplaces at the time of the interview, including platforms that cater to developer tools and lifetime deal buyers, to accelerate customer acquisition.
Hybrid Bottom-Up and Team Sales
Adadot starts by acquiring individual engineers as users and then sells upward into their teams and organizations. This product-led growth motion is paired with direct outreach to corporate teams.
Data Network Effects
Alex Harris explained that accumulating more users, even through lifetime deals, serves the company's long-term goal of building data-intensive predictive models, making user growth a strategic priority beyond immediate revenue.
Best Quotes
“No. We call it the fitness tracker, but really it's just it's just software, basically. It functions like a fitness tracker, but not not a physical thing.”
“It's just a small one. It's about $10 per user per month.”
“So, we have some real life examples. So, for example, an engineer that was working front end, he was very scatty with his approach in his calendar, wasn't actually accounting for a lot of focus time during their day. So, essentially a lot of meetings cramping in 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% month on month.”
“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.”
What Happened Next
This interview captured Adadot at an early stage in May 2022, just months after its Product Hunt launch and immediately following its $1M pre-seed close. At that point the company had 200 customers and was actively pursuing marketplace distribution deals to scale toward thousands of users. Visit the Adadot company profile on GetLatka for current metrics and updated figures.
View Adadot’s current profile and metricsFull Transcript
Chapters
- 0:00Introduction and What Adadot Does
- 0:22Software vs Physical Product
- 0:42Pricing Model and Individual vs Team Licenses
- 1:11Engineer Case Study and 50% Productivity Gain
- 2:23Go-to-Market Approach and Sales Motion
- 3:25Founding Story and Product Hunt Launch
- 3:44Product Hunt Results and Sign-Up Conversions
- 5:54Total Customer Count: 200
- 6:41Founding Team and Equity Split
- 7:17Pre-Seed Funding Round
- 8:35Growth Strategy and Marketplace Distribution
- 8:49Team Size and Engineering Headcount
- 9:11Famous Five Rapid Fire
- 10:38Closing Summary
Introduction and What Adadot Does
Nathan Latka
00:00Hey, folks. My guest today is Alex. She's the founder of adadot.com. It's the world's first fitness tracker for work for developers. She leverages data hidden in productivity and collaboration software to help developers improve how they work and feel. Rooted in science, integrates with GitLab, GitHub, and Slack. Alex, you ready to take us to the top?
Alex Harris
00:17>> Yeah. All good.
Nathan Latka
00:18Alright. So is this a is this a physical thing people are installing or no? It's digital?
Software vs Physical Product
Alex Harris
00:22>> No. We call it the fitness tracker, but really it's just it's just software, basically. It functions like a fitness tracker, but not not a physical thing.
Nathan Latka
00:32Interesting. Okay. So explain to me, I guess, are are teams paying for this for all of their engineers to use to become more productive and happy or engineers paying for this themselves directly?
Pricing Model and Individual vs Team Licenses
Alex Harris
00:42>> Actually, little bit of both. So, 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.
Nathan Latka
00:51Okay. And so, I guess, how how many are some of the individual license usually costs?
Alex Harris
00:57>> It's just a small one. It's about $10 per user per month.
Nathan Latka
01:0110 per user per month. And I guess help me explain maybe explain the story of how an engineer has used you and how they changed their habits or behaviors because of what they learned from Adadot, the app.
Engineer Case Study and 50% Productivity Gain
Alex Harris
01:11>> Yeah. So, we have some real life examples. So, for example, an engineer that was working front end, he was very scatty with his approach in his calendar, wasn't actually accounting for a lot of focus time during their day. So, essentially a lot of meetings cramping in 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
01:36>> increased productivity by 50% month on month.
Nathan Latka
01:39Very interesting. And are you Is your main go to market today? Like, you start off selling direct to enterprise, selling massive team plans or did it start bottoms up individual engineers?
Alex Harris
01:49>> Yes. So, we're kind of like using a hybrid approach at the moment. So, sometimes you speak to team.
Nathan Latka
01:53How'd start? How'd you start though?
Alex Harris
01:55>> Yeah. So we essentially start usually at the individual level and then basically sell upwards.
Nathan Latka
02:01So when did you sell your first individual? Do you remember the year?
Alex Harris
02:04>> Yeah. No. It was like a few months ago. It's a very recent product. Yeah.
Nathan Latka
02:09When did you launch? Like, when did you when did you launch the business?
Alex Harris
02:11>> 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 Hunt in January, January 28.
Go-to-Market Approach and Sales Motion
Nathan Latka
02:23And how did the Product Hunt launch do?
Alex Harris
02:25>> Number one Product Hunt kind of item of the day.
Nathan Latka
02:29That's amazing. Okay. And did you can quantify, like, how many website hits or sign ups did you get from Product Hunt?
Alex Harris
02:36>> So it's a very good question because we had the free tier of FullStory as a tracking kind of tool, and actually, we surpassed it. So we got notification from FullStory going, we you can't track anymore. So it's definitely above a thousand sessions, and that's how we know. But that was that was the limit that we had. So definitely above a thousand is Interesting.
Nathan Latka
02:58So that launch was 01/28/2022. You got about 400 upvotes. Right?
Alex Harris
03:02>> Yep.
Nathan Latka
03:03Okay. And over a thousand sign ups. Now, how many of those sign ups converted to paid? Do you know?
Alex Harris
03:08>> Yeah. So, to be honest with you, not all of them, obviously. So, we had about kind of like 50 sign ups 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.
Founding Story and Product Hunt Launch
Nathan Latka
03:25Well, 50 converting to paid out of a thousand is a 5% conversion rate. That's pretty good. Those all all those 50 started paying $10 a month?
Alex Harris
03:32>> Yep.
Nathan Latka
03:33That's awesome. Well, congrats. You don't seem very excited.
Alex Harris
03:36>> 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.
Product Hunt Results and Sign-Up Conversions
Nathan Latka
03:44So those were 50 from Product Hunt. How many total users do you have today? Customers, paying customers?
Alex Harris
03:49>> Yeah. So if we look at essentially both kind of corporate customers and individuals, so it's about 200.
Nathan Latka
03:57Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders. But imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 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 Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second. But you log in, you connect
04:20your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time, you can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna
04:44get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation, Private equity firm is different. If you're gonna 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
05:06not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder share with us on the show. So traction 1,200,000 seed round 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna 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
05:32going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll 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 dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. 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
Total Customer Count: 200
Nathan Latka
05:54if 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/products/valuations. 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. Alright. Let's jump back into
06:20the interview. Can we take 200 times 10 to get your MRR?
Alex Harris
06:24>> Yeah. Well, actually, no. Because 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.
Nathan Latka
06:34So, you're doing about $3,000 a month right now on revenue, something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. And where were you exactly a year ago? Do you remember?
Founding Team and Equity Split
Alex Harris
06:41>> Oh, goodness. It was a completely different product. We were doing a very, very different thing. 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, just developers.
Nathan Latka
06:58I see. Okay. And talk to me about the founding story here. Are you sole founder or do you have a co founder?
Alex Harris
07:03>> I have a co founder, technical guy, CTO.
Nathan Latka
07:06You guys were nice to each other and split it fifty fifty or did you keep more?
Alex Harris
07:10>> I kept more. Yes. Now now we're rejigging a little bit, actually. We're in the process of redistributing a little bit of that.
Pre-Seed Funding Round
Nathan Latka
07:17And why is that?
Alex Harris
07:18>> Well, because when we started, we're a completely different product. We were doing something different and it made sense to split it that way. 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.
Nathan Latka
07:33Okay. And have you guys self funded or have you raised capital?
Alex Harris
07:36>> We have raised capital now. So, we just closed around a nice chunky pre seed. If you basically put all the money in, including government grants and everything, that's about like a million essentially in dollars.
Nathan Latka
07:48Okay. And what most folks are sort of raising pre seeds these days. It's sort of a million on a five cap. Is that sort of what you guys did?
Alex Harris
07:55>> No. No. We have we have a few uncapped notes in that round.
Nathan Latka
08:00Oh, good. Okay. So, it's not a priced round. It's an uncapped note.
Alex Harris
08:03>> So, some of it is priced because of UK government rules. Some of it is essentially uncapped.
Nathan Latka
08:08Oh, 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?
Alex Harris
08:15>> Yeah. So, as I mentioned, we have a two prong approach. So, we're basically kind of doubling up on kind of like the team aspect and 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 going to name who, online Who are they? Marketplaces. It's the it's the usual suspects. We, you know, just don't don't want to say
Growth Strategy and Marketplace Distribution
Nathan Latka
08:35But these are like the GitHub's of the world?
Alex Harris
08:38>> 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, a tiered approach as to how we're gonna get to a thousand customers.
Team Size and Engineering Headcount
Nathan Latka
08:49Well, 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.
Alex Harris
08:56>> 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 data intensive, essentially, and predictive modeling off the back of it. So, actually for us, it's in our best interest to get as much data, as many users as possible.
Famous Five Rapid Fire
Nathan Latka
09:11So then why charge at all? Why not erase your pricing altogether?
Alex Harris
09:15>> 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.
Nathan Latka
09:29Very cool. Alright. Talk to me about your team today. How many folks?
Alex Harris
09:33>> Seven.
Nathan Latka
09:34Seven. Okay. And how many engineers?
Alex Harris
09:37>> Most of them.
Nathan Latka
09:38There's literally just two of us.
Alex Harris
09:39>> We're not technical.
Nathan Latka
09:39So five.
09:40Okay. That makes sense for what you're building. Listen, we're rooting for you. This is a heck of a story. Again, guys, check it out. Adadot.com. Alex, let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, favorite book.
Alex Harris
09:51>> Oh, god. Favorite book. Venture deals.
Nathan Latka
09:53Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?
Alex Harris
09:57>> It's gonna sound very common. I do like Elon Musk. He's like a huge visionary. So nothing too special there, I guess. Just Elon Musk.
Nathan Latka
10:05Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building adadot?
Alex Harris
10:09>> Figma.
Nathan Latka
10:10Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?
Alex Harris
10:14>> Four.
Nathan Latka
10:14And what's your situation? Married? Single? Kids?
Alex Harris
10:18>> Oh, wow. I am I am married. Yeah. Hence, the Harris. Awesome.
Nathan Latka
10:22Any kiddos or no?
Alex Harris
10:23>> No. No.
Nathan Latka
10:24None. Can I ask how old you are?
Alex Harris
10:27>> Too too old, probably. Too old. About well, 35.
Nathan Latka
10:3130. We'll say 30 years young. Okay. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.
Closing Summary
Alex Harris
10:38>> Something you're doing. How to how to basically scale to 2,000 customers? I I wish I I mean, knew that way.
Nathan Latka
10:45Guys, you have it, adadot.com. They got going with a big product launch. Now have about 200 customers paying, you know, 10 to $20 a month for their tools. Call it $3,000 in 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 just how to basically
11:07build a healthier life, healthier workflows, collaborate stronger, get more done quicker, and again, be happy while they do it. So looking to scale at 2,000, 3,000 customers, we're rooting for you, Alex. Thanks for taking us to the top.
Alex Harris
11:17>> Thank you so much.
Nathan Latka
11:20One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM Central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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 one
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