How Appsurify CEO James Farrier grew Appsurify to $67.8K revenue and 4 customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is james ferrier he was born in new zealand and has always enjoyed technical challenges he focused his career on test automation because finding bugs always felt rewarding and he always enjoyed streamlining processes within this automation he recently founded aposhurify because he saw companies facing the same challenges and thought he could build tooling to improve how they tested their software james ready to take us to the top yep let's go good i'd pay you a fortune to join my team i've never heard anyone say they love hunting down bugs and fixing them what the hell is wrong with you i don't know i found myself to be a weirdo at um university everyone else enjoyed like writing the code and i i was like oh man that that's like a really funny bug like i'm gonna go hunt in the code to work out why that happened um it reminded me of like the puzzle books when you're like kids and stuff like finding this part you're the kind of guy and i love this by the way but like when google says we'll pay you a million bucks if you can hack us or facebook you're the kind of guy that goes after those challenges aren't you yeah no it's i think it's more fun than actually doing the code itself that's great all right talk to me about the company so so how does it actually work is it like qa symphony or how does it work um well we're sort of applying machine learning to a whole bunch of different aspects of testing we're assessing the risk of the commits as they come in so then you can target you're testing it where like there are risky parts of the application and then we're also sort of working out which tests you should run based on the changes that the devs have made usually you have to run like thousands of automated tests they take hours we're making it so they take seconds um so speeding up the testing process so how are you actually doing that i'm talking over my head here because i'm not a developer but here's what i've heard tell me if i sound like a total idiot most people most developers tell me when they look at automated testing platforms they don't actually get real savings of time because they still have to go right all the tests and all the variations and that takes just as much time so have you figured out a way to help them not have to write all those tests uh no not smart enough to do that okay so what we're doing is we're making those tests more reliable and more valuable so usually you write tests they break um or they don't run fast enough we're sort of handling those problems and those objections okay and is your business model a pure play sas yep yeah we're exactly that just a pure place sas okay so we don't we're not a new automation we're essentially essentially augmenting and enhancing your existing testing and test automation interesting what are the reasons yeah it does what are people paying on average per month for this um well it really just depends on the team size so we've been charging like ten dollars per user per month okay and we think that there's a lot of value there and and per user so when a team signs up typically how many users are they signing up um well honestly because we've been mostly focusing on startups um like as our better customers because startups seem to be friendly we've got mostly small teams um so there might be 10 15 users we've got a couple of big companies and that might be 200. so so an average signup for you might look like 100 bucks a month 10 10 customers or 10 users at 10 bucks each at the moment yeah so at the moment really focusing on the small companies um getting fast feedback from them and then going up to the big companies and as we're building up sort of our integrations to make the product um more valuable to them talk to me about uh history here where'd you found the company what year well it would be two years ago now in 2017. okay so it's been a while now and and team size what are you guys at today do you have a co-founder um yeah actually just looking to bring on a co-founder right now um so it was just me for a while i built the mvp um i'm an okay developer but not great so i hired three devs that are much better than me um so four total today oh no so now we're sort of essentially sucks with a designer and a co-founder coming out ah okay so it's exciting okay six six people and um you'll have to forgive me here the webs your guys's website it's just appsherify.com right that's right okay just making sure good so that makes sense um so six p obviously scaling now six people four devs uh then two others supporting is everyone based in new zealand no no we're like spread across the world so the co-founder um will be in the usa i've got one dev in uk a couple in russia and uh designer and philippines and how many of me here and how many teams now are on the platform um well that's on today only four but it's ramping up quite quickly at the moment the problem is it's a long on-boarding process because it actually takes data before uh results accurate yeah so four teams at a hundred bucks a pop you're doing about 400 bucks a month right now in revenue a little bit more but yeah around that mark okay so let me ask you a question i love you're going all in but i mean how have you supported yourself for the past two years on this very little revenue um so i just saved up my money sold my house and decided that i'm gonna give this a go full time this house though that you're in looks very cool are you overlooking a body of water here uh no but there is a body of water a little bit further out oh interesting i'm actually at my sister's place at the moment where so like i said i just got married um and we're trying to get an e2 visa to go to the states this year where do you want to move um so we're trying to i think maybe san diego or new york okay well san diego's san diego is beautiful 75 with a slight breeze all day every day it's great yeah no um we we actually stayed there for a month this year and we're like wow this place is amazing yeah um there's just way more opportunity in the states and a lot of the people that were on boarding are coming from the states we've got far more interest like the new zealand market is very small um comparatively so yeah have you bootstrapped or raised i know we're bootstrapped where we're starting to get some interest from um pcs but i'm we're trying to work out exactly what to do so let me let me ask you as i say let me ask you a question first off what's the name you just got married what's the name of your spouse sure okay do you guys have nights where you're like babe like we're getting married we're moving you just added expenses to the tune of like five additional full-time people i mean does this ever keep you up at night no no i'm i'm pretty confident that things are going well at the moment we've got like a large customer group that we're putting bringing on in january so i'm pretty happy with the way that we are how much before you bring that group on though i mean how much are you burning right now per month it's got to be what 10 15 grand yeah around about 15 grand us okay and you sold your house and built a buffer of what 15 grand times 12 months or something like how many months of time did you buy yourself oh honestly i think i've probably got about 12 months left but i bought myself yeah so we're not desperately in need of funds right now and now we're still pretty low on the burn rate i think yeah um well look revenue sold revenue solves all the stuff can you say large customer group bring on in january what do you mean by large how many so those are the companies that are 200 people 200 devs so they're if they're like a couple of companies that are 2 000 us dollars a month um maybe one that will be even more than that uh then they'll start to stabilize everything and the the burn will not be anywhere near as bad why has it taken two years to get four customers and then you're having this big blip in january i mean i would look at that and go there's like a major marketing issue here um yeah so i'm not a salesperson um and i also i built an mvp the plan was to go into this one big customer customer in new zealand they completely restructured their management and during like the redlining of the process everything broke down so that was sort of like a big beta customer that we wanted to work with it just felt miserably it was like this lesson don't put all your eggs in one basket and i i also think that because i'm a tester i like to be a perfectionist i don't like bugs um i don't like having things like not working correctly so i think i took too long to launch um so we've only been really trying to get customers that weren't like the first beta customers for like the last three months and what were you doing before all this just building and testing um we needed a lot of data to make sure that this was working correctly no what were like in your career what were you doing before you launched this um so i was in testing and test automation for like my entire career uh at various stages so previously i worked at a company called fisa which is like i know we did mobile banking apps and mobile or...