How Approveit CEO Dmitry Matveev grew Approveit to $1.5M revenue and 150 customers in 2024.

approve it dot today guys they are effectively expense management inside of slack they launched on product hunt in 2021 500 upvotes got their first paying customers today they've got over 700 users on the platform a couple hundred of them are paying somewhere between called 200 and 400 bucks a month in Revenue he does feel like they can make 100 000 bucks a month in Revenue this year if they are able to close this one million round of funding they're looking for they closed 170 000 precede around last year it caught somewhere between a three and five million dollar cap that was on a safe note got two co-founders team of seven today and then another two that are part-time as they look to continue to build again not just expense management inside of slack but also expanding to other marketplaces and also expanding to other use cases hey folks my guest today is Serge Gustav he's the CEO and co-founder how to prove it the number one product of the day on product hunt top 10 growing workflow automation software according to sasworthy he's a tech geek and entrepreneur product owner and expertise with business process automation that's what he's building up today it helps you spend approval send approvals in slack Ms teams and email search ready to take us to the top yep awesome all right so what what did you launch on product hunt uh service again what day did you launch on product hunt oh it looks like a couple of months ago actually uh I think yeah somewhere like February or March last year something like that and when you launched on product on is that where you got your first customers or did you already have paying customers I actually have a long start of this product hunt because if we did I played three launches already and so the first launch was around a year ago maybe a year and a half the thing is that that time we got top three products of the day but the product was really bad it was just testing the idea and at that time I got a lot of feedback that the idea is great but profit sucks so please do something about it and then just next six months we'll spend just uh iterated on the like feedback we got from customers until we finalized the platform like in some form that we have it now now it's like of course more advanced but at least at that time we was able to launch again and at that time we got like number one product of the day at Brotherhood we also got a lot of positive feedback first paying customers First Investors so yeah yeah this was back you launched exactly almost exactly one year ago you got 510 upvotes that day 104 comments that post today has over 1600 upvotes 5700 reviews how many new users did you get one year ago when you launched on product hunt do you remember uh I would say Yes somewhere between like 20 to certain users and among those some paying customers I would say around 10 percent you got 20 to 30 users yeah yep it's like the active users I think sand Maps was about a couple of hundreds but yeah in terms of activities like three to four of them three or four signed up as paid yeah but still those are like yeah teams of like yes it was supposed to get into the head counts so yeah those are great and I guess help me help under for folks that missed the launch what what does approvement do how do you work with slack yeah so actually I prove it allows you to automate your spend approval breaks first and basically you can create like as an admin first you can set up the workflow using our like workflow Builder like visual virtual Builder templates and integration we have once you set up this like Frameworks this pipeline of the process the end users like people you're working with they can just in slack or Microsoft teams or over email they can just initiate new approve requests uh add all the information like I don't know what spent will spend date like how much should be spended which item Etc and all they gotta do is just click submit the request automatically goes to the like right set of people based on the inputs so like based on category based on the amount Etc and once all the sign offs are going standard you can also automate the post approval actions so you can first take all the approvers will get notification in slack they will be able to approve the requesting stack and then once you get all the approvals you can also add this data to some accounting system your business task managers what's your most popular integration there bill.com QuickBooks something else yeah let's say QuickBooks zero or sujira for some ID departments to working with but yeah 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 the 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 evaluation this year now the secret valuation 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 frownerpath 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 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 raise they sold 22 percent of 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 valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path 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 want to check this tool out if you want to 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 so guys the way to think about this basically is expense management inside of slack uh in a really nice sort of UI search would you agree yeah there's also a couple of more use cases to add to it as actually because we really like serious about the compliance and actually I believe it brings the system of workers for organizations and now we see that a lot of companies they like adopt and first approve it for some Financial use cases but then as more departments gets involved into those approval processes they're also like very interested to add more use cases on top of it such as access provisioning uh what else like payrolls there's like a candidate approvals so there's a lot of use cases that we have around the uh just around the organizations but yeah and for all these use cases sort of sum this up for me what are customers paying you per month on average to use the technology yeah I would say somewhere between Southern to five thousand dollars per year okay a thousand of five so I mean you're talking something like 300 per month on average something like that yeah yep okay and what do you price off of is it number of seats number of automation something else it depends on the team size but yeah for like the bigger teams teams of more than 50 employers which are for a number of sits and for smaller teams we have a tiers of like how much approval requests you can make per month that's like 99 a year or 100 requests per month and 199 for 250 requests per month and then put this on a timeline for me when did you launch the business when did you write the first line of code I would say yeah it's like a year and seven or eight months at this point yep all right so late 2021 something like that yep exactly and then how many customers are you let's fast forward today how many customers are you working with yeah so far it's a couple of hundred customers so yeah you have 700 on your website are those are those all the paying customers or some of them free some of them free some of the paying but yeah I would say the conversion is quite high right now and we're working to get more paying customers okay so something like 300 paying customers out of the 700 something like that yeah okay very cool now you mentioned when the product launch happened funding also followed so I assume that means...