How Aydi CEO Hassan Fayed grew to $6.6M revenue and 10 customers in 2024.

id.com is helping big farms in the UAE higher seasonal workforces quickly and management yes sorry in Egypt manage their workers in acreage they're working with 10 big farms right now 1200 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 uh call it 75 cents per day per hired employee which would be about 3 700 bucks per day but launching pricing next month nothing yet burning 40 Grand a month with a team of uh 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 idea B2B sasking it helps commercial Farm Source manage and pay their seasonal Workforce he's also a board member at tradelink.com a leading UAE based B2B e-commerce platform and scality a dubai-based startup landing and acceleration platform Hassan you ready to take us to the top let's do it all right so give an example of a commercial farm that might use you are these you know Walnut Farmers pineapp what kind of farms yeah so the main crops that are grown by commercial Farms here in Egypt are Citrus grapes uh strawberries potatoes and so on and so forth uh so quite similar to what you would typically find in States like Florida or California uh uh in the U.S okay so a potato farmer walk me through there why does a potato farmer have to hire a seasonal Workforce at all so um the way that agriculture works is you have spikes and seasonality in terms of um when they need workers to come into the field to either prune trees harvest the crop uh 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 on a seasonal basis and there's one billion people globally that work uh seasonal um agriculture workers so that's one out of every seven or eight people in the world that do this kind of work and so walk me through how that potato farmer how you make money from them by helping them hire these seasonal workers sure so um we we offer our software that helps them put out um kind of like uh 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 forms by creating uh 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 um every task that a worker does on the field and report that back to the management uh that are typically sitting in an office uh 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 uh their top performers as well and assign what does the average farmer pay you per month to use your technology um so we're actually still in the um better pilot phase uh so we haven't started charging our customers we're working with 10 of the largest commercial Farms right now uh to uh perfect our product before we we launch it why not change them a design why not charge them like a design fee I mean a co-build fee or something so the the challenge here is that we're really introducing software probably for the first time uh in this sector a lot of these forums still use pen and paper to manage most of what they do and so really demonstrating the value is a is a crucial prerequisite to us gaining their trust uh and and being able to charge them and once they've seen the value so a lot of the conversations that we have are not us trying to pitch our solution versus other existing Solutions in the market uh it's really us selling the idea of bringing software into the farm so it's not how much have you spent so far to build the software uh so we've spent about uh 250 000 so far to build the software and it includes uh four different products basically that uh one is for the worker one is for the supervisor uh one is for the management itself and one is for our internal uh tools and and and management 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 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 evaluations 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 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million dollars okay 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 two million bucks pre any pre-pre product yeah we've uh we've already so previously I had built a few companies in the UAE uh in Dubai and we've scaled these to uh uh quite healthy uh to become quite healthy businesses uh that are standing on on their own two feet um I think that what we what enabled us to raise uh this amount uh at an early stage is a the validation for the value that this product can bring uh from uh the from leading industry players uh measure by what number of scans number of workers hired what's the utility metric you're measuring there the activation metric so the main thing is number of Acres engaged and the numbers of workers uh that we uh that we onboard as well uh So currently in the pilot we have over a thousand two hundred acres that are engaged on a daily basis and uh we have uh close to 5 000 workers that are also engaged on it daily what does that mean five thousand workers have been hired by one of these farms and are making money via your app yeah exactly wow that's impressive okay I mean so I guess why do you have to keep waiting to charge I mean that sounds very valuable Why not start charging now um so the the main thing is really to make sure that our software uh and our products uh 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 going to start paying is next month in December uh and we charge them we charge them on a per acre basis how much uh uh so we're starting off with a dollar an acre a month uh uh with the with these customers uh plus we charge uh we're gonna charge uh service charge for the workers that we that we bring in basically because we do the vetting and the onboarding on the training um we charge a service a service charge so basically it's a five percent on the overall order value that uh that they place in that order value though I mean we're not talking about objects here we're order value is really the salary they're paying a seasonal worker exactly yes so what does the average of those five thousand hire what's the average seasonal worker make uh a day or uh sure yeah a day so it's around um I mean it's around maybe 15 a day give or take 15. okay okay yeah so if you're if you're gonna if you're taking five percent of that and it's sort of 75 cents per worker per day something along these lines yes yeah yeah yeah okay I mean with 5 000 out there though I mean that's three thousand seven hundred fifty dollars 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 112 000 bucks a month in revenue for you yeah turn it on baby it's coming I mean look it's it's 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 uh 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 uh go through is uh quite large and we're finally at that Tipping Point where our technology is at a stage where it's reliable enough for these forms to be able to base their to depend their operations on us uh and and we needed to get to that Milestone before we start telling customers um uh you can start paying us for the software essentially yeah how many farms like individual customers make up your 1200 Acres engaged today uh so today these are 10 farms and basically this represents around anywhere between five to ten percent of their penetration of their total acreage yeah uh so a lot of these forms we're working with them in kind of like just a few plots where we're testing out the product uh yes you can scale this 10 times the current with the current with the current customers right you go up to 12 000 engaged Acres exactly yeah and even more some some of them have 50 60 000 acres and so on so yeah when did you write the first line of code for the platform uh so that that finally I mean it we've built quite a few uh platforms that we've uh that we've kind of like discarded uh over time yeah I want to know when you started the first the first one how early so the very first one was in November of last year so it was exactly a year ago yeah 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 most of them some are still because we're giving them a 60-day free trial 60 to 90 day free trial um so depending on the customers I mean some should come online in terms of payments by January yeah and how many folks are on your team today full time uh so we're currently 27 people 27. yeah so what does that mean what are you what are you burning per month in terms of head count like 30 40 Grand something along these lines yes does that make you nervous um I would say three four months ago I was a bit nervous uh 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 creating the first of many things and and the and and now kind of like the the the nervousness has faded and a lot of uh excitement is is there it's the first time uh farmers get to find work uh or I mean workers get to find work opportunities while sitting at home and very easily uh it's the first time supervisors are able to log all of their work uh in a very simple way uh through their mobile phones it's the very first time that the management can see what's happening in the field uh from anywhere uh it's the first time that that uh these acres are digitized and and there's real data on on uh on what they're doing so so I would say the nervousness has faded quite a bit and and there's a lot of excitement now understood and then obviously this becomes big you want to keep as much Equity as possible most folks are selling about 20 in pre-seed rounds these days is that about what you sold pretty much yes okay so that'd be eight million pre-money 10 million post uh something along these lines yeah was it priced or you did a note no it was a note with it so 10 million cap something like that yeah yeah yeah very cool all right of the 27 how many full-time how many are engineers uh so we have uh 11 Engineers uh we have uh nine people in product so between uh design and uh and quality and product managers and so on and so forth 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 um the hard thing about hard things number two is they're a CEO you're following or studying um I would say I mean he's he's he's no longer the CEO as of this year but Ray dalio is I'm a big fan of him yeah number three what's your favorite online tool for building ID click up number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night four and four That's not healthy yeah it comes with a job yeah but you'll die eventually if you only get four hours of sleep every night um what's your situation married single kids single okay and uh how old are you I'm 28. okay last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. um oh that's a good one um you'll get you'll get there guys there you have it id.com is helping big farms in the UAE higher seasonal workforces quickly Egypt that's right in Egypt manage their workers in acreage they're working with 10 big farms right now 1200 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 uh call it 75 cents per day per hired employee which would be about 3 700 bucks per day but launching pricing next month nothing yet burning 40 Grand a month with a team of uh 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 thank you Nathan appreciate your time 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 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