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 you're not bootstrapped yep yep yep we just raised the preset round so also fundraising right now so yeah okay the precede around you closed last year uh yes how much did you decide did you decide to raise at that point okay and was that on a convertible note yeah it's like a safe note okay the most safe was it capped or uncapped do you remember it was uh like post manipulation yep okay post money I mean most folks closing precedes early last year before the market started tank we're closing on like five million caps something like that is that what you closed on um physicals yes okay fair enough maybe something a little under that yes maybe I can say that but yeah it's actually like we raising another round right now so yeah the relation is way higher so yeah and why why why do you need a bunch of money to build this tool it doesn't feel Capital intensive to me actually if I get in the world out there so we invest a lot of in the content and interdigation of our users so like prospects how they can use the word automation to make their processes more efficient I mean but you can only throw so money at content creation I mean do you guys have a Clear Channel you know you can take five million dollars and spend it to get more users yeah sure so actually like we've written a lot like on the go to market strategy just trying to quite figure out what works for us best so so far we have like defined some channels that can bring the desired results in the like end goals is to build a billion dollar company so yeah so what's working right now I mean how do you go from nothing to 700 customers or users yeah let's say the most like the First channels was the battle hunt also search engines just people looking for Solutions like ours then we added some markets well what specifically on the search engine though I mean there's there's a lot of nuance there what keyword is is your top keyword yes like slack approvals Microsoft teams are privilege Finance approvals Forex automation some something like that yeah okay interest I mean you know when I started slack approvals I get like wrangle.io as the first result I see YouTube stuff and then I see approve it on the first page above the Salesforce ranking you're talking that's what you're talking about right yes exactly I see um okay so so you would say SEO and search is your top channel or your second to Top Channel uh so I say yes sorry would you say search is your top channel that's where you get most of your customers yeah so search is quite a significant amount of like uh yeah uh quite a bullet journal for us but also marketplaces so listen to we got we already listed on slack Marketplace we also got this from jira Marketplace listen to add a big books and zero Marketplace we get some organic audience from there and actually as we ask in our existing users to write us a reviews on those channels right so we also get in some uh yeah just organic reviews from you know and also we can utilize our big channels to convert into those reviews which Marketplace drives you the most sign ups I imagine it would be the slack marketplace right yeah at this point yes you're right yeah yeah and like I'm looking at your listing right now on the slack Marketplace I don't they don't allow do they not allow for reviews yet yeah not yet interesting so how do you how do you make sure that your slack listing in the app directory ranks high if there's no review system yeah so actually there is a few ways to optimize for that first just use keywords in your listing so like just people looking for something they want to just that that also helps your rank in and it just helps people to find a great solution for the amusement looking for something and also yeah just uh building a great product that would be efficient instead so it's like the admins of the marketplace like a product they will be having a visual you so it also helps what category do I see categories analytics communication Etc what category are you under yeah let's say like it should be a finance right right now but also with being in productivity so oh I see yeah Finance got it yeah and I can sort by I can sort by popularity which I guess is like number of installs I see Zoho books team pay and you guys are on this list further down that's what you're that's what you're referring to right yeah yeah interesting okay very cool so so Marketplace so search engines Marketplace is what else yeah but also like paid search uh something we recently started working with and it seems like it works for us quite well and yeah just engaging with the existing communities it's actually helps a lot uh we just yeah we're just getting out there spreading to worry about the private also like Investments and education of the end users network is quite well for us and share us a little bit about sort of your team today how many folks are on the team full time yeah so far it's seven people and also like two for acceptance part-time so yeah okay so seven and how many I think you guys have a bunch of Founders right how many co-founders are there actually two yeah oh just two of you okay okay two co-founders were you guys nice at the start you just split it 50 50. yes something like that that's awesome all right so you start coding back in 2021 you split it 50 50 or seven full time today you raised a little bit of pre-seed money you mentioned you're trying to raise now how much are you looking to raise yeah we're raising the million right now okay and why I mean most people are saying oh my gosh now's a terrible time to raise why are you doing the opposite yeah because we believe in our product we see the direction we see the value we see that the existing customers they're willing to expand and use up my intensively well but surge I mean just just just to reframe my question it has nothing to do with your product it's the macro economics right a lot of VC funds have no money to lend because LPS are not wiring dollars has nothing to do with your application right how do you how do you break through some of those walls yeah so still like if the product is good I really believe that BCS are very happy to invest in it it's just you know like this the filter is a bit like uh more you know like just more filtering happening on the market but still the projects we have funded especially in early stages so is there something specific about your unit economics or your conversion rates where you go man or world class we think we can still get funding right now yeah for sure again go go to market strategy and just like the way we can efficiently allocate the resources I think it's the most important part okay and you mentioned earlier 300 customers you mentioned an average you know an RP have caught 300 400 bucks a month that would put you right around 90 000 a month right now on revenue or something like that is that a generally accurate uh not sure have to double check that okay come on what do you mean you're raising money right now we're talking about economics and you don't know what your revenue is I don't believe you oh that's something just uh again disclose um yeah but well but I'm just multiplying your numbers right 300 customers times 300 bucks a month you're somewhere around 90 000 bucks a month in Revenue right hmm maybe I can't say that unfortunately well which of those numbers I mean one of those numbers it's a multiplication question so either the customer account you gave me is wrong or the r poo is wrong yeah I would say like the customers could be a different figure but I I can't say it's exactly here at this point unfortunately yeah we know 700 right I mean we know 700 are total users and you said some portion of those are paid you said quote around minute five of this interview quote we have a very high conversion rate I would consider free to pay to average conversion rate is five percent so high would be you know 10 so maybe you have less customers but you still have nice growth yes that's true that's true do you think you can break a hundred thousand bucks a month in Revenue this year sometime yes definitely okay okay there you go with even without raising or you would need the money from the raise to grow that fast yes we still needs to raise the money but I would say that we quite I'm a great boss like in a great space without the money as well and when you look at your Revenue growth last 12 months without actually sharing the revenue percentage-wise are we talking like 100 year-over-year growth 200 year over your growth where are you at yes I would say yeah we grew four times like it's 400 4X okay so it'd be about 300 year-over growth or 4X year over year growth yep all right Serge very good let's wrap up here uh with the famous five number one what's your favorite Business book I would say uh yeah zero zero to one number two is there a CEO you're following or studying hmm uh you're a musk I guess number three what's your favorite online tool for building approved uh say again sorry your favorite online tool uh I'll say jira you're right yeah that's a good one number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night uh I would say six okay and what's your situation married single kids uh nothing just not married any kids not yet okay and how old are you Serge and 28 28 last question what's something you wish you knew eight years ago when you were 20. I would say um that's an interesting question actually I don't know just like work more and like eventually you will get the result right 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 a hundred thousand bucks a month in Revenue this year if they are able to close this one Million Dollar Round of funding they're looking for they closed 170 000 pre-seed round 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 Serge thanks for taking us to the top thank you one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm 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 our poo 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 2PM Central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the Subscribe button below here on YouTube their 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 black 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 nathanlacka.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 and 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 got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys's support all right I'll be in the comments see ya