Aydi Revenue, Valuation & Funding (2024)

[00:00] Aydi.com is helping big farms in The UAE hire seasonal workforces quickly and manage their Egypt. Sorry. In Egypt, manage their workers and acreage. They're working with 10 big farms right now, 1,200 active acres engaged, 5,000 seasonal workers placed already. He's hoping to be able to charge a dollar per acre per month, active acre per month, and also about, call it, 75¢ per day per hired employee, which should be about $3,700 per day. But launching pricing next [00:28] month, nothing yet. Burning $40,000 a month with a team of, call it, 27 people, 11 engineers as he looks to continue to scale and turn on that paywall. Hey, folks. My guest today is Hassan Fayed. He's the co founder and CEO of aydi, a b two b SaaS company that helps commercial farm source, manage, pay their seasonal workforce. He's also a board member at tradeling.com, a leading UAE based b two b e commerce platform, and Scalidy, [00:51] a Dubai based startup landing and acceleration platform. Hassan, ready to take us to the top? [00:57] >> Let's do it. [00:58] Alright. So give me an example of a commercial farm that might use you. Are these, you know, walnut farmers, pineapple? What kind of farms? [01:05] >> Yeah. So the main crops that are grown by commercial farms here in Egypt are citrus, grapes, strawberries, potatoes, and so on and so forth. So quite similar to what you would typically find in states like Florida or California in The US. Mhmm. [01:26] Okay. So a potato farmer, walk me through there. Why does a potato farmer have to hire a seasonal workforce at all? [01:32] >> So the way that agriculture works is you have spikes and seasonality in terms of when they need workers to come into the field to either prune trees, harvest the crop, do field maintenance and so on and so forth. So the nature of that market is you cannot hire people full time. You need to bring them in on a seasonal basis. And there's 1,000,000,000 people globally that work as seasonal agriculture workers. So that's one out of every [02:05] >> seven or eight people in the world that do this kind of work. [02:09] And so walk me through how that potato farmer how you make money from them by helping them hire these seasonal workers. [02:16] >> Sure. So we we offer our software that helps them put out kind of like requests for workers to come in and and and and work on the farm when they need them to come in. And then our software, essentially, what it does is it digitizes the farms by creating digital identities for each and every plot that they have with QR codes. And we have a supervisor app that allows the field supervisor to track and register every [02:51] >> task that a worker does on the field and report that back to the management that are typically sitting in an office somewhere not too far so that they can have real time visibility on everything that's happening in the field and how the workers are performing and be able to reward and retain their top performers as well. [03:11] And Hassan, what does the average farmer pay you per month to use your technology? [03:16] >> So we're actually still in the beta pilot phase. So we haven't started charging our customers. We're working with 10 of the largest commercial farms right now to perfect our product before we we launch it [03:31] to a design why not charge them like a design fee? I mean, a co a co build fee or something. [03:39] >> So the the the challenge here is that we're really introducing software probably for the first time in this sector. A lot of these firms still use pen and paper to manage most of what they do. And so really demonstrating the value is a crucial prerequisite to us gaining their trust and and being able to charge them once they've seen the value. So a lot of the conversations that we have are not us trying to pitch our [04:09] >> solution versus other existing solutions in the market. It's really us selling the idea of bringing software into the farm. [04:18] So, Hassan, how much have you spent so far to build the software? [04:22] >> So we've spent about $250,000 so far to build the software, and it includes four different products basically that one is for the worker, one is for the supervisor, one is for the management itself, and one is for our internal tools and and and management. [04:45] 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 [05:08] 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 [05:33] 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 [05:55] 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 1,200,000 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 [06:20] 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. Alright. We're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second, but if [06:42] 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 the [07:09] interview. Are you rich? How did you get 250 k? [07:13] >> No. I'm not rich. We raised from investors, essentially. [07:17] When was that? [07:20] >> That was in February and March of this year. [07:24] Okay. And how much did you raise? [07:26] >> We raised close to $2,000,000. [07:29] K. And and how did you I mean, do you have a history of building and sort of selling a company? I mean, how did you raise $2,000,000 pre any pre pre pre product? [07:39] >> Yeah. We've we've already so previously, I had built a few companies in The UAE and Dubai, and we've scaled these to quite healthy to become quite healthy businesses that are standing on on their own two feet. I think that what we what enabled us to raise this amount at an early stage is a, the the validation for the value that this product can bring from the from leading industry players in the market. [08:13] Measured by what? Number of scans, number of workers hired? What's the utility metric you're you're measuring there? The activation metric. [08:19] >> So the main thing is number of acres engaged and the numbers of workers that we that we onboard as well. So currently in the pilot, we have over 1,200 acres that are engaged on a daily basis. And we have close to 5,000 workers that are also engaged on a daily basis. [08:39] What does that mean? 5,000 workers have been hired by one of these farms and are making money via your app? [08:45] >> Yeah. Exactly. [08:46] Wow. That's impressive. Okay. [08:47] I mean, so I guess, why do you have to keep waiting to charge? I mean, that sounds very valuable. [08:53] Why not start charging now? [08:55] >> So the main thing is really to make sure that our software and our products are able to deliver the right kind of value to these farms. And it's something that we're planning on doing. I mean, the first customers that are gonna start paying is next month in December. And we charge them we charge them on a per acre basis. [09:17] How much? [09:18] >> So we're starting off with a dollar an acre a month with the with these customers. Plus, we charge we're gonna charge a service charge for the workers that we that we bring in basically, because we do the vetting and the onboarding on the training. We charge a service a service charge. So, basically, it's a 5% on the overall order value that that they place. [09:45] The order value, I mean, we're not talking about objects here. We're order value is really the salary they're paying a seasonal worker. [09:51] >> Exactly. Yes. [09:52] So what does the average of those 5,000 higher, what's the average seasonal worker make? [09:57] >> A day? Or [09:59] Sure. Yeah. A day. [10:01] >> So it's around [10:05] >> I mean, it's around maybe $15 a day, give or take. [10:10] 15. Okay. Okay. Yeah. So if you're if you're gonna if you're taking 5% of that, then it's sort of 75¢ per worker per day. [10:19] >> Something along these lines. Yes. [10:20] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I mean, with 5,000 out there, though, mean, that's $3,750 per day. Right? Yeah. For you. Yeah. It's a lot of money. I mean, if you multiply that times 30 days in a month, I mean, that means that's a $112,000 a month in revenue for you. [10:36] >> Yeah. [10:37] Turn it on, baby. [10:39] >> It's coming. I mean, look, it's extremely challenging to bring technology. I mean, for the field supervisors, for example, it's the first time they ever use an app for work. And it's an extremely challenging environment where you don't have internet connectivity in most places. So the technical challenge that we have to go through is quite large. And we're finally at that tipping point where our technology is at a stage where it's reliable enough for these farms to [11:09] >> be able to base their op to depend their operations on us. And we needed to get to that milestone before we start telling customers, [11:20] >> you can start paying us for the software essentially. [11:22] Yeah. How many farms, like individual customers, make up your 1,200 acres engaged today? [11:29] >> So today, these are 10 farms. 10. This represents around anywhere between five to 10% of their penetration of their total acreage. Yeah. So a lot of these farms, we're working with them in kind of like just a few plots where we're testing out the product. [11:47] >> Yes. [11:48] You can scale this 10 times just with the current with the current with the current customers. [11:52] Right? You can go up to 12,000 engaged acres. [11:54] >> Exactly. [11:55] >> Yeah. And even more. Some some of them have fifty, sixty thousand acres and so on. So. [12:01] Yep. Did you write the first line of code for the platform? [12:05] >> So that that final I mean, it it we we've built quite a few platforms that we've that we've kind of, like, discarded over time. [12:15] Yeah. I wanna know when you started that. The first the first one. How early? [12:18] >> So the very first one was in November of last year. So it was exactly a year ago. [12:24] Yep. Very cool. Okay. So 10 customers today. You think when you launch do you think they'll all start paying when you launch pricing next month? [12:32] >> Most of them. Some are still because we're giving them a sixty day free trial, sixty to ninety day free trial. So depending on the customers, I mean, some should come online in terms of payments by January. [12:44] Yep. Yep. And how many folks are on your team today full time? [12:49] >> So we're currently 27 people. [12:52] 27? Yeah. So what does that mean? What are you what are you burning per month in terms of headcount? Like, 30, 40 grand? [12:59] >> Something along these lines. Yes. [13:01] Does that make you nervous? [13:06] >> I would say three, four months ago, I was a bit nervous. Currently, now that we're seeing the the the the feedback that we're getting from the customers and we're seeing the utility, I mean, we're we're creating the first of many things. And and the and and now kind of like the nervousness has faded and a lot of excitement is there. It's the first time farmers get to find work, or I mean workers get to find work [13:37] >> opportunities while sitting at home and very easily. It's the first time supervisors are able to log all of their work in a very simple way through their mobile phones. It's the very first time that the management can see what's happening in the field from anywhere. It's the first time that that these acres are digitized and and there's real data on on on on what they're doing. So I would say the nervousness has faded quite a bit [14:09] >> and and and there's a lot of excitement now. [14:11] Understood. And then, obviously, if this becomes big, you wanna keep as much equity as possible. Most folks are selling about 20% in pre seed rounds these days. Is that about what you sold? [14:19] >> Pretty much. Yes. [14:21] Okay. So that'd be 8,000,000 pre money, 10,000,000 post? [14:25] >> Something along these lines. Yeah. [14:26] Was it priced or you did a note? [14:29] >> No. It was a note. [14:30] Like, with a so a 10,000,000 cap, something like that. [14:32] >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. [14:33] Very cool. Alright. Of the '27, how many full time, how many are engineers? [14:38] >> So we have 11 engineers. We have nine people in product. So between design and and quality and product managers and so on and so forth. [14:53] Well, we're rooting for you, man. We're out of time now now for today. Let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, favorite business book? [15:01] >> The Hard Thing About Hard Things. [15:03] Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? [15:09] >> I would say I mean, he's he's he's no longer the CEO as of this year, but Ray Dalio, I'm a big fan of him. Yeah. [15:17] Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building aydi? [15:21] >> ClickUp. [15:22] Number four, how many hours of sleep to get every night? [15:26] >> Four. [15:27] And four, that's not healthy. [15:30] >> Yeah. [15:33] >> It comes with a job. [15:34] Yeah. But you'll you'll you'll die eventually if you only get four hours of sleep every night. Yeah. What's your situation? Married, single, kids? [15:41] >> Single. [15:42] Okay. And how old are you? [15:45] >> I'm 28. [15:47] Okay. Last question. [15:49] Something you wish you knew when you were 20. [15:54] >> Oh, that's a good one. [16:01] >> You'll get you you'll get there. [16:03] Mhmm. Just take it [16:05] There you have it. Aydi.com is helping big farms in The UAE hire seasonal workforces quickly and manage Egypt. Sorry. In Egypt, manage their workers and acreage. They're working with 10 big farms right now, 1,200 active acres engaged, 5,000 seasonal workers placed already. He's hoping to be able to charge a dollar per acre per month, active acre per month, and also about, call it, 75¢ per day per hired employee, which should be about $3,700 per day. [16:34] But launching pricing next month, nothing yet. Burning $40,000 a month with a team of, call it, 27 people, 11 engineers as he looks to continue to scale and turn on that paywall. Hassan, good luck. Thanks for taking us to the top. [16:46] >> Thank you, Nathan. Appreciate your time. [16:49] 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 [17:15] Central. Additionally, remember these recorded Founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM Central. 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