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...