How Akiflow CEO Sebastiano Favaro grew to $200.3K revenue and 200 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is nuncio martinello he's building a tool called akiflo it's a productivity app he started off as a coder turned marketer managed the growth of i'm a watch just started building a smart watch in 2010 he then moved to india when he was 23 to start his own company a software developer and then expanded to italy and started one of the fastest growing marketing agencies in the country he managed the innovation department and the spin-offs like in food esports technology and affiliates and then founded akifo which got funded by y.c then pivoted and now here he is today nuncio you're ready to taste the top alright thanks for having me nathan so what was the original idea before you pivoted we were building a common bar uh similar to spotlight to control your web apps so it was like uh alfred but it was much easier to connect like asana or gmail and you could just type you know gmail send an email or asana create the task and it would do it in a second um but we found a much better opportunity and something more exciting in the new product so we decided to people your headline on the website says the productivity out for busy people tell me what you do today um so akiflo is a is a productivity tool that consolidates all your to-do's from multiple platforms the api like from emails la casana and in the same place in the same inbox it has a fast and very familiar interface that can calendar and we have a superhuman approach to manage and process your tasks so mainly keyboard shortcuts it's real it's really fast and and i mean it's going pretty well we we launched three months ago and we started to charge uh users a month back and the first signs of tractions are just great how many customers now in the first 30 days um we have around 200 uh paying customers uh but consider that we charge a premium and it's really an mdp like we have no mobile apps we don't have a web version you have to download an app so um we're pretty we're pretty satisfied with the first uh results especially in terms of you know uh the validation from the market that we're you know we're on to something here nuncio how did you convert 200 into paid did you have a big wait list or something and if so how'd you use the waitlist to get your first paid customers um no we used the waitlist trick on the previous version this time i just wanted people to use it and try and get feedback so we gave everyone two months free trial uh after the product and launch we actually reduce it to two weeks right now and at the end of the trial like uh most of the users not most of the users but like a very good uh bunch of them converted to paying customers how many users converted to paid uh from active to paying customers we have uh about 15 percent which is how do you define an active customer an active user um somebody who didn't just download it and try it somebody who at least use it for a day so somebody you know tried to use akiflo uh managed to use it for one day and perhaps this is an active user what does that mean though they've tried to use it for data i mean they're logged in one time in a day and that counts as active or what uh no we we consider that they they have to at least created one task or mark one task is done um you know with with this kind of tools sometimes you're just curious and you wanna you wanna see if you have a fit with a new productivity app so you just install it you look at it and you know and you kill it sometimes so for us we really wanted to see people who understood it and tried to use it if they would actually convert into into paying customers and the the conversion rate is pretty good and you said that the conversion rate was one five percent or five zero percent no one five it's actually sixteen point five percent yeah that would be that would be too great that would be great let's go back to early days so you launched yes you launched this couple months ago but you've been tinkering around on the business since about 2019 correct boston yeah no i don't think i got your question when did you actually launch the business the product you launched only about a month or two ago but you guys were working together back in 2019 i think right yes yes so we we started the previous product with that one we got into yc we did demo day but around demo day we had a lot of uh users that were using the product but we also saw like a very bad retention and we we tried to look into that and we realized we were actually uh building something that was not solving a major problem so we went back into talking to customers for two full months we did no coding just user interviews and we we realized that we had we had there was an opportunity in this in this field like i think there was no one really focusing on consolidating tasks which is uh something that is necessary considering the the the new workspace which is very busy and it's getting even worse now that there is kobe and every company had to uh put down like install some apps to collaborate online and um and and the main reason why we also choose this is that it really focus on fundamentals of productivity like it makes you faster in capturing and consolidating information and processing them and visualizing them so compared to other tools that focus a lot on how you visualize information we really focus on making you faster than whatever the methodology you want to apply on top of it it's and can you quantify that all right so you have 15 percent referring to pay you have 200 paid customers today but what do they like pay on average are they all paying 15 bucks a month the average is 13.5 um 40 of our customers actually committed to the yearly plan so you have about 200 customers at 14 a month many paid annual upfront but it's about 2800 a month in true mr correct it's around 2.5 yeah yeah okay got it so you're going to you know call it 30 35 000 bucks in a right now how do you like grow faster right how do you get your next 2 000 customers um i mean we keep we keep getting users from word of mouth which is pretty good but of course we know we we're gonna start to put some team features in in the product uh uh hopefully real soon tell me about the team today how many folks you have working on this oh we have two coders and other four of us working on marketing and product and design so it's six of us in total got it six total two engineers the rest are product design customer interviews things like that yeah and do you guys have enough runway to sort of keep testing here from 125 000 you raised back in 2019 yeah we raised a little bit more from from angels and we can go on for uh almost two years but uh we plan to raise the seat round this month or now i see how much do you plan to raise what are you targeting uh 1.5 million dollar that would be enough for us to um to get to a round a and why is that the right number it's always tricky to come up with how much you want to raise why 1.5 um i calculated how much i want to spend on the ideal team to build all the features that we have in mind and especially to keep talking to customers and get data from them and and i consider that we are actually charging so we also make a bit of money so that would be that would be enough to to get us uh to have a bunch of team features and more virality like a higher variability coefficient to um you know to to get a lot of users and uh and raise more and more have you thought about what valuation you would target you're doing like five million free money 10 million free money something else we're raising a 10 million plus money right now 10 posts okay and and what i mean what is the likelihood you think you get that evaluation are you getting you know inbound interest sorry nathan i i lost i lost the last question what do you think the likelihood is that you were able to raise that valuation are you getting inbound interest um yeah we well we already raised uh 150 150 k at this valuation and we have we have a few people and fans who are pretty interested in investing so we'll we'll talk to them and then and ignoring this current round how much have you already raised um this yc just 125 000 from yc yep got it and that i forget what their model is they what would they would they take for that seven percent ten percent they take seven percent okay got it so seven percent now are they participating in the 1.5 million dollar round uh no this is still our seed round so they if they participate in the participants you know like any investor coming in is going to see that you have like that you went through yc and it's a negative signal if yc is not in this current round making it really hard for you to raise more capital yc doesn't invest how do you deal with that um no it's not happening in this case because basically we did not do a round after yc so usually we see they invest and then you you raise capital on your seed round without yc and the yc will come in at the a round if they decide to invest well there's a lot of companies where yc will they will put money in right out of yc and if you're not one of those like chosen companies it's a negative signals of a marketplace i'm just like i know this because i've had friends that they've fallen into this sort of trouble you're getting around that um well to be honest there will be very like a lot of reason why yc doesn't decide to continue like they don't invest in all the companies throughout the batch after the uh the precede so um it's uh it's just about like we are in a very tough market and it's a very crowded space and a lot of investors have already invested in similar companies i don't think that's necessarily a very bad signal not in our case but um we we haven't approached yc for specifically this round because it's uh it's uh for us it's right after demo day basically you're saying why see you're not approaching yc because you're way past demo day at this point and you're doing your own thing um yeah usually usually yc they they bring you to demo day and uh then you close your seat round that's that's what happens usually and we are in uh we aren't close to uh to closing our seat round yet so uh the more the uh our sid round gets you know uh filled in then of course we will we'll have a chat with our partners well that was two years ago though the demo day was back in 2019 you know you're raising now was last year actually i was 20 20 12 months back yeah the the point i'm trying to bring up though is a lot of people though i want to get the yc1 get to yc but they don't realize a negative they're very real negative signaling risk where if you leave ycn you do not raise on demo day there's like a black mark on you effectively right and so it sounds like you're not feeling that though um no i'm not really feeling that like what happened is we did demo day with a different product we figured out it wasn't the right thing to build we stopped fundraising for a sid round because it made no no sense at that point we were back into into building and right now we feel we have a product uh that can raise a sid round uh i guess ideally this stage would have been uh 12 months ago if we started to build this product during yc but that didn't happen and yes we we were for 12 months we know apparent progress on on that product actually so it's it's a new thing it's like we feel like we're just out of the model in terms of maturity of of our product and the state so it's i think it's just it's just fine you know all our investors also people who gave us money or even yc they they were all fine with us be voting and not wasting their money on something that we didn't think it could have worked and you know turning into this new product and now we have we have nice metrics i think uh we can prove there's an opportunity over here and we're building something valuable so um no i don't see any problem with that nuncio how much equity do you still own in the business uh me and michael founders yeah uh we just gave seven percent to yc and then we raised the uh one point uh 150 k at a million dollar cap so still most of it got it so you guys own what about 91 percent yc owned seven percent and then other investors on like one or two percent yes it got it and are you guys um i guess do you do you think about like setting up an employee stock option pool did your key employees own any equity or no yeah definitely that's the plan um we still haven't thought about it i'm we're very close i've worked before with all my employees right now they all know as soon as we raise a sid round we'll i'll start to talk to uh our lawyers to figure it out how to set it up and uh yeah i definitely like i'm i'm glad of the team i have right now they're all very smart and skilled people and we we have been knowing each other for a long time so as soon as we get uh a third round to to go forward we'll set up the the option pool cool let's end here with your product launch it was very successful uh number three product of the week back last year in august um you've got a hundred thousand up votes walk me through a couple things like why was it successful i'm sure you hustled on the back end so for other people watching on product what can they learn from you and then how many leads you get from that um we got we got a few thousands download um from product and it was a it was a good journey actually we we had a very successful product as well on the previous product so we learned something from that um it's a it's a long process man like 90 of the work is done in in in the four weeks before so we started to engage like we we engage in a lot of communities we started to talk to our other founders uh we um yeah we tried to leverage all the possible contacts that we had in for to get more exposure and um yeah and that's it actually like to be honest it's there's not many tricks so people can learn from it right so name one community you engaged that helped you get more up votes on launch day um of of communities you mean yeah you just said one of the ways you had a successful launch is engaged communities can you name a community you engaged with um yes we engage with the productivity community on on reddit for example okay individually with uh with users so how big was your email list when you launched on product time uh we had we had six thousand people on our email list and a lot of people they actually subscribe to the previous product so we sent all of them an email saying this and we devoted this is the new product you know check it out on product how many website hits did you get that day do you remember um it was around it was around two three thousand uh but not not the same day was like both the that day and the next day when we got in the newsletter as product of the day and i've got three thousand hits that you got during product on launch week how many actually gave you their email and signed up to try the tool um around i think 30 percent of them okay so call it a thousand actual like email signups and then what about 150 of them converted to paid or 100 or so or what um yeah i guess of that of that batch it was around 100 of them um but consider that product and brings also to people they most of them they were actually not in target yeah so did a lot of them churn they're not active today yeah i love that a lot of them they stopped using the products right away i remember after product we went to 400 active users and yeah and but we also made a little mistake of giving a um saying that it was a free version which we actually kept for the prototype user so there are a bunch of people that um they are in the free legacy plan um but yeah i think uh more than 25 of them actually converted to paid plan hey we're out of time let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite book my favorite book um definitely um well i think gtd man getting things done number two is there a ceo you're following or studying is there a ceo you're following are studying um i really i really love uh what superhuman is doing so i'm a fan of role number three what's your favorite online tool for building your business besides your own um we we use notion extensively but i think my favorite tool is luck number four how many hours of sleep to eat every night sleep how much sleep each night um i slept six hours but i tried to sleep eight every day and what's your situation doing seo married single kids i'm i'm single any no kids running around no kids all right and how old are you i'm 32 32 last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20. to talk to users much more before trying to build any kind of business guys we're having akiflo launch back in 2019 it's a totally separate idea now building a productivity app that combines all of your tasks calendar invites and everything else in one spot they've got 200 customers signed up paying 14 bucks a month doing about 2500 per month right now in revenue or about 30 000 bucks in ar they're looking to raise a seed now caught 1.5 million on a 10 million post money free money evaluation they've already raised 125 grand back from yc in 2019 now looking to scale with their team of six and increase their activation rate in the several thousand sign ups 15 convert to paid as they look to scale nuncio thanks for taking us to the top thank you nathan 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 1 p.m 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 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