How Advensure CEO Manan Vora grew Advensure to $159.4K revenue and 150 customers in 2024.

just got done editing this interview you guys are gonna love it before i do that though i want you to know that i'm going to be in the comments for the next 30 minutes or so answering your questions if there's additional questions you want me to ask the ceo next time i interview them leave them below or if you're just loving the data points i get ceos to share click the thumbs up button below that's your way of telling me you're loving this stuff and i'll get you more of it additionally again i'll be in the comments answering any questions you have all right for 30 minutes enjoy the interview hello everyone my guest today is manon vora he's running a company called avonshore he loves solving problems he also is a scuba diving dive master and hopeful scuba instructor amateurish photographer and awaiting freedom of time to travel manon you ready to take us to the top yeah definitely all right so what is adventure and is it a sas model right yeah so uh adventure is a sas product uh it's essentially a booking engine for tours and activity providers uh it's kind of like shopify for tours and activity operators okay and so how is it more like a marketplace model where you're taking a spread of transaction volume to the platform or how do you make money uh no so we get uh we get these operators online we get them a web presence uh with a payment gateway that they can integrate um and essentially it gives them a web presence and uh we are only involved we are only working we're only b2b uh and essentially these guys get the platform to then deal with their customers okay so walk me through an average customer then pays you per month i'm sorry walk me through what an average customer pays you per month right so we charge uh our plans start from a free plan and then we have the base plan at 25 and then we have an enterprise version at 49 a month uh that gets you uh the entire platform and then at the same time that gets you some uh some amount of bookings for free and then we have uh commissions for booking uh over over and above all of that okay so what i mean if you look at an average across the entire base what would you say the average customer pays per month is it that 25 number or closer to 50 or 60. it is 25. okay interesting and when you look at your total revenue over the past year what percent was from the pure sas model versus the the commission you take about 80 of it was from the sas model okay and the rest commission yeah interesting and so can you i mean tell me more about the commission side of things so when you look at the total volume like the deal volume through your platform over the past year would that come out too right so that came out too close to 250 000 okay uh yeah i'm talking about the last month what about the last year though so we uh the platform launched in may okay uh so we've been running for about uh for four and a half months now okay so 2019 is launch date and now did you do this solo or do you have founders what's your team look like today yeah so we have a total of five people on the team uh i have two other founders with me uh and they look at tech and uh sales and operations so how many engineers are the five uh two engineers and then we have a couple of people that are uh that work on the outsource model uh whenever we have a bunch of work we give it out to them okay yeah so two engineers and how any sales reps quota carrying uh yeah one person who handles sales uh and he is a founder as well okay very good now how did you get started so 2019 was launch date um i mean where'd you get your first customer right uh so essentially we were in beta for about uh four for four to six months before that uh and but the thing is we did we started with like private launches uh we launched the entire platform for one person only and then we tested that entire uh piece out for two months uh and uh after that we started we opened it up for beta customers all around the world and essentially uh our first customers came in through that uh we got a bunch of referrals and uh the first beta customers that we signed on all of them went out and spoke to other people about the platform how did you get those beta users though that's the hard part yeah so beta were a lot of them were people that i knew because i worked in the industry uh so the initial a few customers were relatively easier for us to get because i've had personal connects with them uh and then there was maybe like the first five users was easy and then after that it just it was mostly referrals and word of mouth and how many customers have you scaled to today six months later right so we have 150 active paying users okay and where are you signing up customers today from what's your main channel right so uh we have a lot of these b2b uh review websites uh trustpilot and whatnot so a lot of them are coming in from there and then about a third still coming from reference uh so we are still we're looking to start our marketing spend now but all this file has just been word of mouth and organic can you can you name one of those b2b kind of referral sites right so we have g2 crowd and trust radius a lot of them come from both of these sites and what are people searching like what term are you sorted under on g2 crowd right so we are uh under online ticketing software okay online ticketing software interesting and so is this i mean but people should not think about this like travel perk right people are spending money through you to do more like adventure travel yeah yeah but but businesses so like if a team if a sales team wants to go on a retreat in mexico they'll book through you i know they so they booked through the operators it's just that we get the operators all the tools that they need to get that customer and essentially close that transaction online okay so the surf shop in mexico that wants to land that 10 person sales group that's visiting mexico that surf shop will use you to get that business yeah yeah i see okay that makes sense now have you guys done this bootstrapped or did you decide to raise capital oh 100 bootstrapped i love that stuff now for as long as we can yeah i know it's a good way to do it and it sounds like what you're doing about four thousand dollars a month right now and revenue 150 at 25 a piece yeah pretty much yeah okay that's good now um in terms of how you're i mean how are you guys paying yourselves obviously five people it's not enough three three grand not enough to pay five people right um so we have uh we've started uh along with adventure we also have an agency called uh ekahal uh and how that essentially is a very big revenue stream for us because we take on one time clients um and we just do some tech work for them which kind of fuels uh adventure like you said i mean revenue is uh it's still growing and it'll be a while before we can sustain ourselves through uh through the product so till that time we hope to take the agency model and uh generate revenue for ourselves so if we look at echo hall which is your agency name what did that do in total revenue last year right so again uh that started in may of last year and uh i think about for the entire year we've done four hundred thousand uh dollars yeah so that's kind of substantial because i'm translating it off the top of my head yeah but that's subsidizing that everything else basically yeah yeah very good all right now do you have any insight into churn yet anyone churned uh yeah quite a few people should um essentially the first bit of users after we have how to we got out of beta there are quite a few people that uh that that that turned up and uh i think the biggest insight that we had was uh in that first month our onboarding process was screwed up um and we got to know about that later because uh we got on the call with a couple of the people that had left and then uh we just asked them about why uh they left in the first place so um majority of them told us that they didn't understand the platform and the way we we'd uh created the platform it was different from what they were used to because they're not tech people neither are they particularly business people they are traveling tours and people right uh so onboarding for us was the biggest problem at the time and what's it now today so of the of the customers that signed up last month how many are still paying today um off the last one i think about 90 of them are still paying okay good so it's like it's like 10 monthly charges yeah still still obviously too high but hopefully over time you'll fix it yeah true yeah very good um what about getting new customers do you know what your fully weighted a cac is to get a 25 a month customer uh i'm sorry do you know how much you spend in total to get a 25 a month customer all right so again well as of now we don't spend anything well you do you do i'm not just talking paid spend so you said you have a sales person right so you do spend then again he's a founder um so there's a technical spend out there um and most of that is just giving out demos and talking to...