Alfinder revenue, CEO Eris Verne, team size, customer count, churn, and more in 2022.

hey folks my guest today is eris vern he's the ceo and founder of a a l f i n d our off finder which lets companies get a deep understanding under over their ideal customers it helps you understand exactly what your likes hobbies interests and pain points mean by using ai they're able to figure out all these things out so when you market your company you're able to write your marketing copy your case studies everything more accurately errors you're ready to take to the top let's do it all right it's not all finder it's ai finder right well it's al finder actually so it's that is very that is very confusing because it's you're using ai but it's alfinder i was very concerned to pronounce it doesn't that create a brand new problem that is also yeah it's pretty interesting it's it's a good um you know tweak on ai and alpha already all finder that was the whole you know idea behind the name uh but it does heavily uh indicate the ai aspect um here's the deal with alfinder it's a very unique project that i'm working on right now and um the best way to describe it is that let's say right now the normal bread and butter you know ai company marketing that the process that they go through is that they look at the market they see when to post something they look at that you know the historic data there's some so much data out there so many tests out there that you can see for that industry based off of that customer let's say when is it best to i don't know post on instagram for example and then they use that trend to reflect on their customers there are plenty of software's out there how we look at it is somewhat completely um from an inverse perspective such that let's say you have a well you have a bookshelf behind you that's pretty convenient as an example um so let's say i look at your uh bookshelf and say oh these are the books that are there so based off of those books you probably are going to like this one but that's going to be um [Music] most most uh most likely it's going to be wrong because you might er sorry i want to jump in we're all over the place i want to set some context first and then we can talk more about the product so who's buying this product first off who's the customer oh marketing agencies okay marketing agencies specifically and what are they paying on average per month to use the technology a couple of thousand one so you're sort of meeting up you're sort of like mid market moving towards the enterprise agency yes okay and on the timeline when did you launch the business what year um last year oh so brand new oh yeah okay we've been working on it for a couple of years it takes a lot of time to you know get the ai engine up and running but we launched last year on a beta notice okay got it um and are you bootstrapping or you decide to raise capital uh bootstrapping we raised a little mostly on my own from previous um exits but uh we are bootstrapped how much of your own money or from angels did you end up putting in at the start i put [Music] about a hundred thousand and i have about a 200k um outside investment from angels got it so 300 000 bucks total now when you say you put in 100 grand we want to get an entrepreneur's mindset here i mean is that a lot for you is that your whole savings do you have to make this work no it's no it's not it's a pretty conservative amount okay so why not go all in why not want to plow all your money in build faster grow faster go quick oh that's a good question it's money doesn't always get you um it doesn't help you get there faster especially with such an ai it's such a huge risk on such an ai because we don't have a product that we are trying to let's say automated with ai the whole thing is is an ai you know engine that we train it and then we find use cases for it you know so the the you know the very initial idea of mine uh coming from some ai backgrounds was that can we do behavioral analysis on people understand the end customer and say this is the best way to get to them okay now when we do succeed on the training of that ai with loads of data and so on and so forth then we are able to build a product on top of it and then um you know find out what's the best market what's the best user for our product uh which constantly consequently is going to help them you know gain let's say more customers on their end 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 and 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 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 understood now do you have any customers say are you guys still pre-revenue uh we are brand new we've had a couple of um crazy beta testers huge companies um international companies um locally we have i mean there are upwards of 200 people that beta tested it and they have an account you know from marketing strategists all the way to very small marketing agencies nothing crazy i want to say i guess that comes down to my standards but uh we do have solid traction okay but just back to my question so do you have paying customers today are you pre-revenue i'll give you pre-revenue okay pre-representative so let's walk through it sounds like you have a healthy beta sort of pipeline so how did you get 200 people signed up for your beta over the past 12 months um outreach cold outreach um it's a very interesting product to say the least okay in going inside a strategist mindset or a very small you know marketing agency's founder owner telling them you don't have to come up let's say per se um for come up um for a marketing strategy and this software generates this strategy for you and you can only focus after the strategy focus on you know executing implementing that strategy monitoring all the data on the ad platforms that's a huge relief for them because that's seriously enhanced like my i totally get the product my question was how you got 200 people to pay attention right so when you say outreach it's an amazing product it's very it doesn't matter you can have an amazing product and no one knows about you so it doesn't matter right so my question is the question my question is specifically how did you get these people to pay attention right so when you pipeline wise well linkedin mainly okay so what specifically did you do on linkedin what was the who did you target let me finish my question who who were you targeting what was the title of the person and what was typically the copy of the first message you sent oh these are all again these are all marketing strategists and small marketing agency owners okay so you're targeting literally marketing strategist as title on linkedin yes okay can you target small agency owner on linkedin and get a list i don't think anyone calls himself a small agency owner do they no but you can do uh marketing agencies branding agencies and then you know filter based on the size and the revenue that's what i'm looking for so you search for branding agencies you filter by what size usually uh normally from 700k to 5 million revenue linkedin gives you revenue data to filter by you can yes okay are you paying for that in sales navigator yes i see okay got it that makes sense okay so and then what does the message say what's the first message say well it's a very short introduction to the product uh and um having them sign up for for a demo and then i'll show a demo to them you know different use cases and they will take it from there yeah but i get those emails all the time in my linkedin i ignore all of them so what did you put in your copy that got 200 people to sign up okay it's it mostly comes down to examples that's at least what we've tried and then it's it's it's proved uh perfectly um such that we say okay this is the process that you go through and we know that so they know that it's very convincing to them it's not like an advertisement it's like this is a process that you go through based off of who you are within that agency let's say and this is going to help you with that specific aspect of it okay got it can you get instead of using like that specific aspect and we know what you go through can you actually like read to me sort of what that copy sounds like right so here's here's what goes through an agency when they uh let's say onboard a new customer they go through the data they're asked quite a bit of questions about their industry sorry just to be clear is this the email this is the link the message you're sending me you're reading me that message oh you want the exact message this is how it goes um let's say hey x person this is um this is who i am this is the company blah blah blah as part of your process you do a lot of research on your own and you use um softwares that use static data main historic data to derive marketing strategies rather gaining knowledge to create the strategy on your own our software does all of that for you with a click of a button okay what's it called action well they book a demo and then i'll show them a demo says click here to book a demo exactly people respond to that huh yes they do interesting okay so that's how you get 200 beta users signed up why is no one paying yet well they're all beta testers we are still um collecting a lot of data um one thing uh to point out about the marketing industry is that specifically anything relating to the whole process of onboarding a customer to deploying a strategy on all the ad platforms it's it's not that you can you can't tell them hey try it for 30 days for free and then see what happens because they can't rely on the you know specifically for our case for alfinder they can use this strategy deployed and then see if it failed or if it if it's succeeding in 30 days most um strategies take like maybe up to three months to six months to understand if that strategy is actually working so we are monitoring all these beta testers we're encouraging them to um keep using the you know strategy generated by our platform implementing them and then at some point where we have solid you know feedback from those users then we have a very you know bright green light to when were your first beta testers signed up oh um about a year and a half ago okay so you just said they need about six months to see traction so if there's people that have moved you for a year and a half why are none of them converted to paid well the more we move forward we have more data we can't just collect data from 10 you know beta testers we need a lot of data just to you know that's a pr have a good solid proof um for the platform let alone the investing aspect of it you know i mean what if you spend all this time getting more and more data you finally have a lot of data and then no one wants to pay you just wasted what four years of your life that's the beauty of an entrepreneur life yeah but isn't a smart entrepreneur going to try and hedge that by trying to sell the idea ahead of time or get to revenue as quickly as possible well here's the thing we can get to revenue this isn't comes down to my mindset as a founder we can get to revenue as soon as possible we we can charge these beta testers uh like cheap let's say a couple of hundred bucks and then get to quote-unquote revenue but what's the point of that we're building something far bigger because the moment we integrate into the uh any agencies you know environment alpha is going to be the only software that they're going to use they're going to cancel all their other software they don't need anything else because right now they use software's to get data to look at industry you know research and all that but with alpha there you don't have to integrate any type of data that you already have if we already have all the data we need we just ask questions about your customer your client and then the goal is to make you independent of you know even the business on businesses of any marketing agency so you do that generate the strategies um you get a couple of option options you select one and then you directly launch from house finder you select let's say google platform and then you launch so your success is directly correlated to your ability to convince marketing agencies to cancel all their other software to a degree yes you've created a lot of friction for yourself i'm trying to figure out why oh well don't be good or go home i guess maybe people don't want to pay for it right and so your answer is we haven't tried to get people to pay for it well we have uh we've had the two um big companies that i told you about we've had contracts um those contracts totaled about um 150 000 in nine months so we tested with them they're huge companies so they have let's say as part of their r d you know budget uh we've had four months of free for them and then if they decided to move forward we entered into a paid contract so it's it's full proof um but that's a bigger have you you've collected that cat that cash and you're is in your bank account that is right right so we've had we had like uh beta um you know paid pilots if you wish and those are big big companies um it's it's only a matter where we're we're launching in like two months or so as part of uh we're raising another um you know round right before we launch and then you've only raised 300 grand today or have you raised other capital yeah we're trying to raise another a couple of million um seed stage before launch and then we're planning on launching uh mid-march ish why raise so much capital i mean it's your seed and your pre-senior seed are the most dilutive ever and you've you've told me in your bio you've had multiple exits in the quote seven and eight figures so why would you sell big chunks of the company for your revenue that's a great question um well going back to like my exit it's not a matter of me pumping so much money into it um the connections within the industry comes from the money that we gain you know that two million a couple of million is worth almost nothing i don't care about the zeros in front of the you know the cash in the bank account rather the connections that comes with that capital that's the biggest gain okay that's why i'm very selective on who i raise from but because there are many ways to get people close to your company without letting them buy a massive chunk of the business that you know otherwise everyone would always have to sell a picnic their business to get anyone to care about them which is not true well when you say big chunk that's that that's like up to the team right we're not really selling a big chunk now to how much do you think how much do you think if you raise 2 million bucks pre-revenue how much you think you're going to sell the business high single digits okay so you think you can convince people to give you let's say you sell 10 you think you convince people to give you a 20 million dollar pre-money valuation yes based on all with no revenue yes based on the ip yeah we have the dd black is the i where's the ip coming from if you had 30 engineers that have been coding for two years i'd get it but you have two people listed as employees on linkedin so what's the ip so that's that that's going back to the first part of your question so the main need for the capital is to uh move our development team engineers from offshore to onshore how many people are full-time today um offshore about seven are they full-time yes well they're contract based but they are working for us so okay but so but it's u plus seven so eight total eight total yeah okay got it which country you said to work with by the way is it eastern europe or argentina or somewhere else uh no in india mainly india pakistan pakistan on the ai side mainly india under on the website that's it yeah yep yep that makes sense um interesting we'll look i'm certainly rooting for you i mean is there a plan to ask these big two enterprise accounts to start paying a monthly fee outside of their big pilot since they paid 150 grand so we will notify them and then that the paid process starts the moment launch so the moment we officially launch uh which is when the solid um before april okay okay and you're gonna try and you're trying you're gonna try and get them pay something like three to four to five grand a month when you launch in april yes well they've been testing this offer honestly like maybe 30 of them for at least a couple of months you know most of them signed up you know it's exponential so the person who signed up a year and a year and a half ago or that chunk of people are not so many out of the 200 that we have so most of them signed up like recently uh and out of uh that uh we will convince them obviously some will not continue uh but that's not going to be a huge percentage all right we'll see what happens we're rooting for you in the meantime let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book business book hmm it's not really a business book uh but the atomic habits i would say was the best one how come i can have it shames clear number two is there a ceo you're following are studying steve jobs all the time number three what's your favorite online tool for building all finder type four number four how many hours of sleep to get every night oh i don't even count i don't know sometimes four sometimes i don't know six seven all right and what's your situation married single kids single okay and how old are you 22. 22. last question something you wish you wish you knew two years ago when you were 20. some connections are way too overrated says the guy who says he wants to raise 2 million bucks for more connections we'll see what happens in the meantime though guys i'll find her dot com launch she started working on it caught a year and a half two years ago has two big beta customers that paid 150 grand already total on pilots hoping to be able to charge them a monthly fee starting in april of two three four five grand a month we'll see what happens but today pre-revenue in terms of sas 300 000 bucks raised closing a two million dollar ish round right now we'll see what happens again to help make marketing agencies way more efficient uh eris thanks for taking us to the top absolutely thanks for your time 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 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