How Avify CEO Pilar Sánchez grew Avify to $159.2K revenue and 100 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is pedro gutierrez he was born in san jose costa rica he's a computer engineer and has developed multiple businesses the past five years specializing in marketing e-commerce development and mvps right now he's running abbify that became the first startup to be accepted into 500 startups all right pedro you ready to take us to the top yeah all right so so what is abbify well adify is uh centralized back off is for e-commerce automation so during the pandemic and the last few years we noticed that there is a lot of people uh getting new orders from social commerce uh but they still use e-commerce channels like shopify etsy and other uh different channels so they need a platform that can centralize everything and we created a social commerce tool that helps them to uh have everything in one place and synchronize channels and so how much do they pay you per month on average to use this tech this tool you've built uh they pay 49 bucks a month for the basic plan we just opened a super basic uh plan for 4.99 bucks just if you are testing a product see if you can you can start selling it uh for less than 10 orders but the basic plan is 49 bucks amazing and put this on a timeline for me when did you launch the business what year well this is uh crazy because uh we were a software agency until december last year uh we started abbify in february 2021 as a pilot and after five months working on pivoting and uh checking new things we needed to to create we launched officially in july last year with a name and uh we started um acquiring new customers we shut down the agency in december and we started acquiring new customers and totally dedicated uh team uh from january to to date and we have double the amount of customers we have how much revenue was the agency doing uh in that moment the agency yeah it was a 30 grand per month probably okay okay so it wasn't that hard to shut down then yeah no no at the beginning it was like um we were struggling because of the pandemic to get uh high tickets for the consulting side but we were dreaming with having a sass uh every month so it was a great idea at the beginning and then when we got accepted in 500 we say okay guys this is the time we need to cheat down the shoot out the agency and just focus on this i think it's funny everyone listening right now who's an agency owner is going man i'm also an agency owner wishing for higher margins to build a sas company that's what everybody wants to do um well you can tell that you really know your customers because your website's beautiful it looks like it's really really well done i imagine you got your first customers from the agency is it accurate yeah when when the pandemic started and we we created the software at the beginning we started receiving a lot of requests from people that they needed something for start selling through internet uh they didn't notice in that moment that the social commerce was the most important channel uh but the first customers they came because we are elite of opinion of e-commerce development in central america and um i started knocking door to door hey guys we have this new system what if you try it for a month for free and just tell me your feedback and in that moment we were finishing the startup school for yz and we were pretty familiarized with retention retention retention so i told the guys like hey you know i'm gonna start interviewing as many people i can so the first customers they came for the interviews my first cold message is hey how are you i'm the owner of this software uh i really want to have an interview with you what do you think and they jump in a chat in a call with me and i sell the product in that moment and then well you know i really want to try it so let's do it so so far we have more than 100 customers and that's probably what we have been doing 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 it 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 valuation this year now the secret evaluation 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 frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're gonna 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 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 raised they sold 22 to 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 valuations and 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 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 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 that's amazing so 100 customers at 49 per month you're doing about 5 000 a month in revenue um no yet because we started with a better price for the first early beta testers of 29 bucks is an evergreen price for them and we started acquiring 49 dollars per month this month in may so i see we we're in three thousand three thousand five hundred exactly three thousand five hundred and um that's amazing though your your officer off to the races now have you bootstrapped this from your agency revenue or did you raise capital yeah it wasn't at the beginning it was with the with the profit of the agency then uh when we started seeing that everything was getting traction we raised a small family and friends round of 30 grand and then 500 startups uh continued the process with uh with so how much total have you raised uh 90 000 and right now we have a pre-seed round opened we are raising 600 000 and we have closed 140 000 so far and what valuation are you hoping to get uh five million post money and the ninety thousand that you already raised what valuation was that at oh it was at the beginning was uh half million and then seven hundred and fifty thousand okay so not not too much dilution you only sold what is that about 15 percent of the business and your priest pre-pre seed exactly exactly all right thank you yeah and now you're selling another call it you know 15 20 percent in the million seat on a six million valuation exactly yeah the idea is that we can finish this part with a 25 26 percent delusion and we can start working get more uh revenue uh hopefully a break-even point in the next 15 months that's what we're planning and go for a seat round with real numbers and positive positive numbers there you said sorry you're raising 600k today at a mill at 5 million valuation 5 million cost money yeah post money got it yeah cool this makes a ton of sense tell me more about the team how many folks are full-time oh right now we are 12. uh so the story is that we only we talked to the guys in the town hall in november hey guys we're going to shut down this and we're going to turn into amplify in january that's what we're going to do so all of them they translate all their labors to abbify and we are 12 right now we are four founders and eight uh people in the team and we are joining two more people next week for sales and marketing so when you for founders started you just split equity 25 each at the start no um my brother is one of the founders he was not working with us at the beginning uh he's a magento and shopify specialist so he created the infrastructure behind adify for integrations and diagnostic layer we have there my cto alexis is uh infrastructure and everything about devops and i do product management sales and the administrative part and pilar she's our cmo she's focused on marketing and having all our customers um yeah updated with everything so we have our specific divisions uh but they're all different...