How Apiway CEO Anton Viborniy grew Apiway to $17.1K revenue and 25 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is anton viborni he's building a tool called api way.ai it's an api integration platform and b2b software marketplace great tool he's living and building this from kiev ukraine anton are you ready to take us to the top yes uh hi nathan thank you for having me nice to meet you i'm ready now your early stage which we love help us understand where you're at today or do you have customers or are you free revenue uh yes we have some a little bit customers but we have another business model like uh our competitor like our competitors and now we are focusing on uh acquiring users so we provide an ip integration platform uh and we provide it absolutely for free and we hope that it will drive traffic to our platform and when the user connects different apps and automate their workflow we show their recommendations of other sales vendors for example when the user uh connect uh facebook leads and google spreadsheets it means that he is launching ads and he managed leads in spreadsheets but the next logical step for automating their business it will be uh implementing in crm and we say that okay you can use for example hubspot crm or you can use a pipedrive user clicks and we we get a affiliate commission or vendor paid for it and we have some custom paid customers uh with affiliate links but in most cases it is actually it is a users who will use our platform so antoine how much revenue did you do last month uh our revenue is something like why one thousand dollars a month in a affiliate affiliate partner program and why did you choose to get your original revenue via affiliates instead of selling customers a sas platform directly uh because when we started our business two years ago we wanted to create integration platform in russian and ukraine but we think that okay we need to uh go to a global market in english-speaking uh market but uh there are strong values from competitors like zapier integra mod and to compete with them uh it is it's very hard and we started thinking how we can be different and so uh we say okay what will what will what will be if we provide integrations for free users will like us but how we want we need to earn money so when we say okay we saw the gt proud or capture websites and we say okay what will what will be if we combine these two business models so when we provide something like a free zapier and gt proud mix and so right now who which affiliate pays you the most money who do you make the most money from active active campaign active campaign uh because i was a reseller at active campaign and i know these tools and in all placement we provide active campaign affiliate link and we have some customers from feed move we sell active campaign and mailerlite and fibre because now we are focusing on uh email marketing and crm automation so when people want to connect their gmail to google spreadsheets or to facebook leads or power editor on facebook they'll use api way for free when they come use you for free they get introduced to new tools like pipedrive or active campaign when you sign up a new customer to pipedriver activecampaign you get an affiliate cut back that's how you make money today yes yes yes but now we uh one month ago we launched our community award where where people can post articles ask questions about different software every software has his own subforum and we want to uh to create something like a social network for automation next because i i don't i don't know any a place where you can find a strong community for local specialists and especially market automation uh specialists and we want to create a place where they can publish their useful content and communicate with each other and have you bootstrapped or did you raise capital uh we yes we raised a little bit capital uh precede around uh it's 130k uh one years ago and now we want to rise the seed round maybe on the end of this year or at the beginning of the next year but i think it's bootstrap 100k when you raise the 150 000 what valuation did you raise at uh it was 1.5 million valuation and who was the investor or was it family and friends uh yes it was a it's it's company called unicenter unicenter it is a russian mailchimp it is a leader in cisc countries in the email marketing software uh so when they invested in us because they paid money for coptera gt proud and xavier and they understand what the difference because because the cost of striking customer acquisition was for sas vendors it's extremely high and uh we want to provide um we want to reduce the customer requisition both for vendors yeah are you doing this yourself anton what is your team size today uh we have a 12 team size with me and my co-founders uh five engineers and uh also i have two co-founders they are coders two ctos maybe so something like this and the other people it is uh um in marketing uh we have a event manager because we are providing online conferences and uh assistance will help me with another tasks so so how many founders are there are three or two three three three and did you split equity evenly uh no no with one founder we split um 50 50 and after that we give an option pull for for third founder and he become a co-founder i got it so you own 50 percent your other co-founder owns 50 and a third has options well options yeah but i i don't want uh to tell what what what the what the percent but uh um with the one one co-founder we have uh equal and the the uh the third compound is uh less less than you two yes yes i see i see very cool and and so what's next do you mention the community you're launching you're doing a lot of events what's the next product you're gonna be pushing uh now we will not push uh the next product because we already create a lot of things and we will develop a details for example uh we we provided some feature that where you can post a software battle for example you came to our platform and make a post like in facebook and say what what who is best for example mailchimp and mailerlite and uh this post become online and on this page people can post positive and negative arguments from the different sides so it's not just like reviews where we're reading reviews of jitter crowd and all these reviews are good so you have a page where you can where you can see a pros and cons for example for mailchimp and pros and cons to active campaign and and these arguments are posted by real users and they um in most cases they tell a really true and and on these battles vendors can launch ads for example i see you mentioned the way that you get new users is by building integrations into pipedrive's marketplace and active campaigns marketplace how many total new signups to api weight did you get last month uh we have uh 40 60 signups every day i think how many days i don't know i i i just watched on a day uh a half of the year uh six years six months before it was 10 20 30 signups per day now it can be 15. some conference it can be a two 200 sign ups and and detail but if we don't do anything it's uh 40 50 cent sign ups per day without marketing it's a world of mouse and so you launched in 2019 how many total signups do you have today everybody oh i think uh more than ten more than ten thousand i think and we have a more than one thousand active users who are integrate uh some uh we we call it way ah active way for example facebook lists and google speech is one way people this 1 000 people using uh this integration and they created 3 000 ways for example one one user can create three four integrations i understand and which marketplace drives you the most new signups active campaign pipedrive or somebody else uh pipedrive elective campaign now we maybe two two weeks ago we launched hubspot and we think that this marketplace will give to us leads um in most cases but but there are there are some vendors they are not very popular they are not very popular but uh the support team sent leads to us and it's it drives more uh more traffic than marketplaces uh from vendors for example chatbot software helper support team sends you a lot of new users yes yes and users ask them how we can connect bot help with a pipedrive for amazon ram and they are send leads to us understood and how many companies pay you at least a dollar in affiliate revenue per month right now oh i checked this information uh three days ago and uh more than 25 sus vendors uh uh paid to us uh some some some couple of dollars so we provide we provided for them i think uh three or four hundred four 400 leads and make maybe 50 sales but these 50 sales and something like um website builder it's no it's it's not a lot of money but for example it campaigned because you can selective campaign for 25 000 contacts and the affiliate will be more than a simple website for example understood how much capital are you guys burning per month right now uh i think it's uh 11 sometimes it's 11 it's 11 000 and for 15 000 because we are living in the russian and if in ukraine and we have no so uh expensive coders and uh something and and i think it's it's a good good side because we have a very qualified engineers that have a normal price so you're so you're spending about twenty thousand dollars per month in total expenses you have ten thousand thousand sorry you have eleven thousand total expenses a thousand in revenue so you're burning about ten thousand dollars per month oh yes something like this because uh not sometimes more because for example we provide an online conference and we buy for some ads and uh i i take this money from my previous business it is a reselling active campaign i have some users uh from from from this we have a two to revenue stream from active campaigns actually this ipway and reselling it is another business you're thinking about raising capital right now how much are you thinking about raising uh we want uh 1 million uh 0.5 uh if we do this it will be it will be okay because we our competitors uh uh have a deep pocket and we we need to rise uh a lot of capital because we want to we want to build not just the tool we want to build an ecosystem it will be something like github and you know developers have a github and stack workflow and we want to create something like this for our automation expert and for users who like automation we use a b2b software understand if you raise 1.5 million what valuation are you hoping to raise on we want 10 million we want this this price and do you think you'll get it uh all times i think that we will do it because i'm an entrepreneur and i have to to to to believe in this good answer i understand that this may be hard and we we don't hold this my understandings but uh we want to we want to build a very big things and we try to find the people who will believe with us it makes a lot of sense let's wrap up anton with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book uh my favorite business book is the black swamp number two is there a ceo you're following or studying christopher columbus it's my favorites to you number three what is your favorite tool for building api away you can record the video number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night it's ours sen what's your situa what's your situation married single kids i'm a single no kids don't know and how old are you i'm 51 31 did you say 31 yeah yeah 31. 31. what's something you wish you knew when you were 20 anton when there was what they have to know when i was 20 yeah something you wish you knew when you were 20. move to us i think learn english and learn how to raise capital api way dot ai they help you manage connections between things like pipe drive and google sheets or your gmail they also want to build a community around these automation no code site type type people and personas they're on their way they have 25 affiliate partners that pay them about a thousand dollars a month total so 12 000 a year run rate right now they raised 150 000 last year on a 1.5 million valuation and as they grow this year hoping to raise another 1.5 million at a 10 million valuation with their team of 12 and three co-founders anton thanks for taking us to the top thank you very much 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 pm 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 subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathan lacka dot com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive i am on these shows but i do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we gotta push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that i appreciate 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