How Ayooh CEO Ahmed Shalaby grew Ayooh to $1.5K revenue and 25 customers in 2021.

hey folks my guest today is ahmed shalabi he's building a very cool tool called iu app it's a marketplace for online seafood ordering uh he operates the company uh since 2021 in alexandria egypt he has a mechanical engineering background with passion and tech and he also has an mba from the university of northampton from back in 2018. ahmed are you ready to take us to the top yeah i'm ready okay what's the passion for seafood you're an engineer but you also love seafood i guess huh yes i live in alexandria which is very famous for seafood restaurants and it's a seaside city so we we are brought up to love the seafood and fish and i've been my entire life fish meal is the main main blade in our family so here come my my passion to seafood and in other words uh seafood is not um it's not a great focus for uh similar apps in the market the uh there is a clear gap we are making in delivering seafood so ahmed just to be clear who who is buying seafood on your app is it consumers like me or is it restaurants consumer buys seafood meals from restaurants and i'm the middlemen between consumers and restaurants how many consumers ordered something last month um around 70 orders zero orders yes seventy order months last month okay and how many restaurants delivered in order uh on board my application i have about 25 restaurants seafood and sushi 20 seafood and about five restaurants for sushi and just to make sure i understand so last month consumers like you and me seven zero of them ordered something through the application so you're just getting started is that right yeah yeah that's right how do you make a small number but well hey i don't mind small numbers you have to start somewhere your first congratulations on the first 70 but tell me how you make money i make money from commission on order okay what's the commission if i what's the average order size the average order size around 250 egyptian pounds and my my commission is around 15 of this value okay interesting so how much money did you make last month um roughly around 2 000 egyptian bands next revenue okay and and what are you building this yourself currently do you want 100 of the business yes i'm bootstrapping we love that how are you where are you getting the money from to bootstrap from my savings what were you doing before this yes i'm working at the clinical engineer as i said uh it's my day job so you still work as a mechanical engineer yeah yeah i'm not a um what do you say full time full yes i'm not a full-time founder okay well when are you gonna when are you gonna pull out the safety net when you're gonna quit the full-time job and go all-in on the seafood application um hopefully when i 3x my day job salary um and are you married yes and i have two kids would uh would your partner kill you if you quit your day job yeah sure that's the real reason you haven't quit and gone start up full-time right well you have two kids as well so you have to balance right you have real expenses of course of course how do you how do you grow the business i mean it's impressive you've gotten 70 people to use it last month how did you get them to use it uh digital marketing um just small campaigns on facebook and google ads how much did you spend on google ads last month around 500 okay 500 bucks and same for facebook okay so what there it's just you doing this right now right you're the only person on the team is it just is it just you right now one person on your team yes one person yes okay so so what's the what's the plan how do you get a thousand consumers on the application um bigger market campaigns and i need a team i need to hire a team for helping me in operations and acquisition uh just i'm planning for a bigger market to be an online campaign also as well because offline campaigns are campaigns are doing well in our market but it's so expensive who do you compete with who what's the biggest ordering app right now for seafood or do you completely like ubereats in my niche there is no competitor because i'm fully dedicated to fish restaurants and seafood but about having the biggest market share also have some of seafood restaurants on board um so i'm not con assuming them they are not a direct competitor but you you may assume that yeah they are competitive how did you convince the 25 restaurants to let you give them orders and give you a 15 commission uh because my commission is less than half what about take from them they are asking for them for around 35 on order what was the name of that company yes owned by delivery hero germany the mother company delivery hero if you hear about it so talabot is sort of like ubereats essentially yes yes and kind of okay interesting we had global ones in our market but they are they quit because i acquired all the market share entirely when did you launch this business uh in january this year okay seven months ago uh but i um i have a yeah a good feedback from users about about my service that it's better than all about itself uh in terms of customer service and in terms of delivery in terms of a good application symbol to use but still their customer acquisition is not that easy no it's very hard you do have a beautiful app though i'm looking at it right now i can see your gray mullet for 80 egyptian pounds your karoos for 120 egyptian pounds and you can add to favorite add to cart right yes yeah very cool all right well listen this is a lot of fun now do you plan to keep bootstrapping or will you try and raise capital um the budget i have for my bootstrapping is almost over so how much did you budget um three fifty seven uh three fifty hundred thousand egyptian bounds okay so three hundred fifty thousand egyptian pounds and where did you spend most of that on uh mainly on the application itself the developer the development company i am hiring i'm renting the application from them with mostly with monthly fees 500 amounts yes multiply this by seven months now so the biggest bulk of money uh went to the mobile application developer what is the who is the application developer what's their website i coders high quarters okay interesting okay great so so what happens after you go to the budget yes i've just run out of budget so i am looking for a funding fundraise and if you can see the founder institute i'm an alumni from front institute and they are making funding lab but they are seeing that i am still in the early stage so they can't fund for me at this stage how much do you want to raise um for marketing campaign only i i need just half a million issues compound yeah guys just so you know if you're doing the conversion you know he budgeted 350 000 egyptian pounds that's about 2500 us dollars so if he wants to raise 500 000 egyptian pounds that is effective about 4 000 us dollars is what you're trying to raise yes what percent of the company are you willing to sell if someone gave you 500 000 egyptian pounds um i didn't calculate numbers but uh i might give two percent two percent that's not enough i i don't get it no one gets excited about owning two percent also the half million is not that big number yeah yeah yeah no i agree i agree well hey we're rooting for you ahmed i hope this goes well only one campaign can uh can take can he can eat that half a million yeah well listen we're all rooting for you and i appreciate you coming on i think it's probably pretty late there uh so thanks for making time for me now let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite book my favorite book yep um rich dad number two is there a ceo you're following are studying ceo yup in my my startup anyone who you're a ceo that you're that you like that you're following or studying number three what's your favorite online tool for building a yahoo i didn't hard coding yeah i knew but i rented as i told you what's your favorite tool though just any any tool you use to build the business um visual studio code maybe okay number uh four how many hours of sleep do you get every night [Music] how much hour asleep yep that's seven hours and you said two kids and you're married right yeah how old are you ahmed 41 41 last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20. uh i wish i learned the coding guys there you have it daytime he's a mechanical engineer on the side he budgeted 2500 bucks to launch a side project a marketplace an app to order seafood in egypt alexandria specifically last month seventy consumers placed at least one order uh he made fifty percent one five percent commission average order size is 250 egyptian pounds so he did you know call it a couple hundred bucks in us dollars revenue last month he looks to scale 20 restaurants on the platform he just launched it looking at raising 500 000 egyptian pounds you know for two or three percent of the business it's about 4 000 5000 us dollars in the next couple months we'll see what happens it's just him right now and it has been bootstrapped ahmed thank you for taking us to the top thank you one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm 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 arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every...