ApuTime Revenue, Valuation & Funding (2024)

[00:00] Aputime.com. They help field teams that have a lot of field and human operations, optimize their time and their planning. Launched in 2016, he was building the MVP for six years before launching, but he's grown now from 10,000 a month in revenue to 50,000 a month in revenue in the last two months, really rapid growth. They've raised about 1,700,000 total today. Their last round was $800,000 seed round last year at about a 4,500,000 valuation. He sold 15% [00:23] of the company. Team at ten today as they look to continue to scale. Hey folks, my guest today is Martin Lonsky. He's building a very cool tool called aputime, which is a it's the first autonomous ERP. It's a putime.com. Martin, you ready to take us [00:38] to the top? [00:39] >> Hello guys. [00:40] All right. What's an autonomous ERP? Give me an example of a customer that's using you. [00:45] >> Yeah. Basically, let's imagine you are sitting in your car and you turn on your navigation. [00:54] >> Basically your navigation will calculate the optimal route into the destination and it will tell you when you arrive into destination. And let's imagine you can do the same in company processes and the whole execution management inside the processes and hundreds of projects. We can tell every employee what is the best thing to do right now and we can recalculate it in real time. So when anything is changed inside the company, we can recalculate everything what is [01:25] >> going on in in the company. [01:27] Martin, can you give me a specific example of the company that pays you today? [01:32] >> Well, we are SaaS, so software as a service. So we are very similar to SAP in the process management platform, but we make it autonomously. The most of our customers are from manufacturing or light manufacturing where a lot of projects are running and they are very complex in the processes. So we can handle the whole scheduling for the human resources. So basically we optimize work time schedule in real time. Mhmm. [02:06] And is this specifically for folks that are driving, like, on roads and maps and you're saying there's a mountain there, it's too expensive or that's too costly here? [02:15] >> Yeah. Basically basically, there was there was just similar to to the navigation, but we we don't care about about the roads and and so on. We calculate the the tasks. So, basically, we are like Asana, but with with autonomous scheduling system. So we can optimize the work time schedule inside the company. We can tell tell people what is the best task for this this time. [02:44] Understood. And what's the average customer or company pay you per month to use the technology? [02:50] >> Yeah. Basically, for around [02:55] >> 1,500 per per per month. [03:03] 1,500 per month? [03:05] >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Most of our customers are pay paying annually, so we are talking about about 10 k. [03:12] 10 k per year. And what obviously, don't name the customer, but what does your largest customer pay? [03:18] >> I believe that it is Siemens or or we have we have customer which is a public television in here in Czech Republic. We are based in Czech Republic in the middle of the Europe. So maybe maybe the public television it's comparable, but it is absolutely different segment. [03:38] But are you talking $100,000 a year contracts or a million dollar a year contracts? [03:44] >> No. We are still thinking about about 20 k. [03:49] Okay. So you're still trying to figure out how to get your first customer to 20 k a year? [03:53] >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Basically, are focused on on on the small and medium sized companies because there is a very huge gap between between only simple task management tools and solution like SAP. [04:08] So Yep. And just to be clear, you launched in 2016, I believe. Right? [04:13] >> Yeah. Yes. And have you [04:14] bootstrapped or raised capital today? [04:18] >> Currently, are bootstrapping, but we are running the fundraising roadshow. [04:23] >> But we don't need to close it as as soon as possible. [04:28] How much are you looking to raise right now? [04:32] >> $1,722,000. [04:35] Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this, you love watching these interviews with SaaS founders. But imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 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 Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you connect [04:59] your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time. You can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna [05:23] get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation, Private equity firm is different. If you're gonna 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 [05:45] not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder share with us on the show. So traction 1,200,000 seed round 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna 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 [06:10] going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll 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 dataset of SaaS valuations than 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 [06:32] 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/products/valuations. 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. Alright. Let's jump back into [06:59] the interview. And, Martin, what are you learning in the market? A lot of people are saying it's very tough to raise equity right now. [07:06] >> I'm pretty pretty clear with that because we absolutely know that we have we have a disruption technology. We are we are reinventing the whole area of of managing processes because No. [07:18] But you're avoiding my question, though. The question is not about you. It's about the market. Do you have someone that's already given you a term sheet? Or what is the market telling you? Do you have any equity investors ready to pony up? [07:28] >> Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. We we are cool with that because we we've grown from from $10.10 k MRR to $2.50 in just in just two months. So we have very quick traction. [07:45] Say that again. You're at 250,000 a month in revenue? [07:48] >> From from 10 k to $2.50. [07:51] Wow. 10 You were doing 10,000 in MRR a year ago? [07:55] >> Yeah. We are at 50, 50 k MRR at this time. [08:01] Sorry. Are you doing 250,000 a a month right now or 58,000 a month? [08:05] >> We've we've grown from from 10 k MRR to 50. [08:11] Five zero. Five zero. And that growth happened over the past twelve months? [08:17] >> No. That growth faster in the last two months. That is very, very, very quick. [08:24] So if you're doing 50,000 a month today in revenue, what were you doing exactly one year ago? [08:30] >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. [08:32] >> Two two months ago, we we No. Martin were on 10 k. [08:36] A year ago, how much revenue were you doing monthly? [08:39] >> Okay. Around one or two. We've entered the market one year ago, so there is a huge research behind the aputime. So six years we were doing the research. I'm a past academic academic researcher. So there is a huge huge research behind the aputime and we've entered the market last year. So everything's [09:04] not pay your Martin, how did that six years of building an MVP? You launched in 2016. You go to market last year. How did you pay your bills for six years? [09:12] >> Easily with the angel investor behind. [09:15] I thought you said you bootstrapped the company? [09:18] >> Yeah. At this time, we are we are bootstrapping. Our angel investor doesn't need to invest anymore. We are bootstrapping, but but we need to to Martin, [09:28] how much capital have you raised total to date? [09:31] >> 1.7. [09:32] Okay. So you're not bootstrapped. You have raised capital. When you raised the 1,700,000, what year was that? [09:37] >> Yeah. Sorry. Sorry. I was thinking that you you are you are asking for a bootstrapping right now, but we are not bootstrapped in the past year. [09:47] So when did you raise the 1,700,000? [09:50] >> During the seven last years. It was in in a lot of tranches. [09:56] Oh, I see. Was it a convertible note, was any of the were any of them priced equity round? [10:00] >> Yeah. A private equity round. [10:02] So you do is they someone did put a valuation on the business? Yep. Okay. So when was the last tranche of money raised? Was that this year or last year? [10:12] >> It was last year. [10:13] And how much was that tranche? Just that one? [10:16] >> Just the just this one tranche. Let me calculate it. It it was in in Czech crowns. Okay. [10:28] >> Almost 800 k. [10:31] Okay. So a lot of it. And most folks in their pre seed round are selling between 1520% of the company. Were you in that same range? [10:39] >> Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. We are we are talking about 15%. [10:43] Okay. Yeah. So 15% if you sold 15% for 800 k, that puts your valuation at somewhere between sort of 4 and $5,000,000. Is that right? [10:54] >> Yeah. Yeah. After after the after the market fall fall down, we have we have a valuation from from the global company, Grant Thornton, made for 15, almost 15,000,000, but it was last year. So maybe it's a lot of different this year. [11:16] Understood. How did you go from $2,000 or $10,000 a month a month ago to $50,000 a month today? What did you do over the past thirty days? [11:25] >> Yeah. [11:27] >> This is a crazy roadshow because we were selected into AppSumo Select and we've got a lot of ambassadors who who wants to to cooperate with aputime. So they very quickly started to with the affiliate, and that's it. So so we we we were selected to cooperate with you with the optimal. So we've launched the campaign. [11:52] Martin, how many paying customers do you have today? [11:57] >> Around 300 to 300 companies. And then, of course, a lot of AppSumo lifetime deals, but we don't count that because it is only marketing and spreading our our our idea abroad. [12:12] Okay. If I take 300 customers paying on average $1,500 per month Yep. That would put you at $450,000 a month in revenue. You're one tenth that size. So where's my math wrong? [12:27] >> Not every customer is is so big. So some customers are very, very tiny, about 10 or two to 50 users, and some customers are around one hundred and fifty fifty employees. So [12:43] So the average customer today taking your monthly recurring revenue of 50,000 divided by 300 customers, the average customer today pays something like a $150 a month, not 1,500 per month. Is that right? [12:54] >> Yeah. Yeah. [12:55] I I see. What's your tactic? You know, I've seen AppSumo work for people and then really hurt other people, and it really can hurt if you don't have a plan to move one time lifetime deals to monthly recurring plans. How are you [13:08] doing that? [13:10] >> Yeah. Yeah. [13:12] >> Currently, we've blocked the the AppSumo customers on our AWS account with which is which is with a 100 k [13:28] >> activate program. So we we don't have any cost with with that during this this and and next year. [13:36] Well, sure you do. It's your it's your time. You have to support all those users that never gonna pay you again potentially. [13:42] >> Absolutely. Absolutely. And they are helping us to make this service absolutely amazing. Currently, was talking about that we are mostly for the companies medium sized and yeah around the medium sized company. But we've learned something very important because we've acquired a lot of freelancers and we are missing some few features to be best for the freelancers as well. So maybe we can open this market and we would never know it without AppSumo. [14:26] Martin, how of the 300 paying customers today per month came from AppSumo? [14:32] >> They are paying multiple ways. They [14:35] are upselling. [14:37] >> They we are creating the marketplace. So [14:41] No. Martin, my my question my question is, of your 300 customers today that are paying you monthly Yeah. How many of them came from AppSumo directly? [14:55] >> Ten, fifteen maybe. [14:56] So why do you credit AppSumo for your growth when they make up less than, I mean, than 6% of your total paying customers? [15:05] >> Currently they spread this idea. We have a lot of customers who just signed up because of the campaign and they don't know about the AppSumo. So people just talking about it and use the affiliate, but nobody nobody Got it. Our partners. [15:25] How many how many folks are full time on your team today? [15:29] >> 10. [15:30] 10. Okay. Great. And how many engineers? [15:34] >> Three. [15:35] Okay. And last question before we wrap up. ChatGPT, robotic process automation, what's the future of your space? What are you building next? [15:44] >> Okay. [15:58] >> When we are when we can optimize the work time schedule, are we are coming with AI insights into aputime because everybody wants to know the the deepest the deepest information about the company people cannot calculate during the life. So this is next. And another thing on our pipeline is budgeting because if we can calculate to the future how the projects are going on, we can calculate the cash flow, how the cash flow will going on in [16:32] >> the time. So it will be huge. [16:34] Great. We're rooting for you. In the meantime, let's wrap up with the famous five one word answers here if you can. Number one, what's your favorite business book? [16:42] >> Business book? Maybe zero to one. [16:46] Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? [16:51] >> Number two… I love I love leaders is lost. Maybe number number number three is [17:05] Martin one is fine. The third question is what is your favorite online tool for building aputime? [17:14] >> Currently [17:17] >> online tool, I love the product lift at this time because Wow. It is very important product lift. [17:26] >> It is very important to have a public roadmap because it makes the community and the relationship between users and between between aputime team. So we use product lift to have completely white labeled road road map and wish list and so on. And people are are very active there. We can we can communicate with all our customers and they communicate between each others. So And that works. [17:55] That works. This is rapid One word answers if you can. Okay? Number four, how many hours of sleep do get every night? [18:02] >> Maybe five to six. [18:03] And what's your situation? Married, single, kids? [18:08] >> I'm currently single, but I have two kids with with the same same girlfriends, so we are to get to get married. [18:15] And how old are how old are you? [18:18] >> 33. [18:19] 33. Last question. What's something you wish you knew when you were 20 years old? [18:26] >> And in in the next twenty twenty years? [18:28] When you were 20 years old age, what's something you wish you knew? [18:38] That so that [18:40] >> everything don't need to be done. [18:45] >> That's something. [18:46] There you have it, aputime.com. They help field teams that have a lot of field and human operations, optimize their time and their planning. Launched in 2016, he was building the MVP for six years before launching, but he's grown now from 10,000 a month in revenue to 50,000 a month in revenue in the last two months, really rapid growth. They've raised about 1,700,000 total today. Their last round was $800,000 seed round last year at about a 4,500,000 [19:09] valuation. He sold 15% of the company. Team at ten today as they look to continue to scale. Martin, thanks for taking us to the top. [19:17] >> Thank you very much. [19:18] One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM Central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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 1PM [19:43] 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, 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 SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a big [20:06] fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or 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 SaaS 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 [20:27] for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty 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 [20:47] got to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. Alright. I'll be in the comments. See you.