How Churpy CEO John JumaKiptum grew Churpy to $196.6K revenue and 5 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is john juma he's a ceo of chirpy he's an ex-banker and tech professional after working at city for nine years he rose to head of operational risk in east africa and i t projects across sub-saharan africa he worked for several startups including net guardians a swiss fraud management startup and senior rolls across risk and account management then he founded his own risk startup helping cooperative unions to digitize client onboarding and loan origination and now building chirpy.co account receivables automation john you ready to take us to the top absolutely happy to have this discussion today thank you for having me you bet what does account receivables automation mean so simply this means reconciliation for outstanding receivables from your debtors and i'm talking about imagine your business and you keep sending out invoices so that people can pay back for goods and services that you've delivered now that's what you call a receivable now anytime this receivables are out you know not yet paid out there that's what now you refer as outstanding so we've automated that process over as soon as you receive payment for that invoice be able to instantly allocate that payment and reconcile it against an outstanding invoice i see and what are businesses paying you on average per month to use the technology so for us we've we have an entry fee of 24 dollars per annum to just use the service that's about two thousand dollars a month that's basically the cost of an accountant um as a basis because we're augmenting the um you know the tasks that the accountant spends time doing so as opposed to doing those manual tasks they should be you know spending more time in strategic roles like budgeting etc where they will provide more value to the business and just leave the mundane finance operations to choppy who's a an accountant that never falls sick he's always on time and you know reconciles 100 about standing receivables all right so the average customer pays 24 000 a year absolutely for that reconciliation yeah and tell me more about this back story here when did you launch the business what year so we we launched proper april of 2021 but we were registered in delaware us in december of 2020 um so we we now formed the team the co-founding team myself kennedy who runs product and james our cto and for the last one year uh we've basically been building a lot of product and a couple of anchor clients that you're working on did you guys just the three of you split equity evenly 33 each uh for me and kennedy we had an event split james who joined us later got a small stake and most of that remaining equity some of it went to our pre-seed investor antler a global bc company and then there after release we raised a million rounds a million dollars around where we embodied investors from new york and a couple of other interesting angels but when you launched it sounds like you and kennedy own like 40 each the third co-founder owned like 20 something like that before you raised yeah before we raised uh the 20 was uh owned by antler i see so okay tell me more about the fundraising story when did you raise your precede round it is a precede round march of last year march of 2021 a hundred thousand dollars um after graduating from antlers uh generator program uh where we spent about 20 weeks with kennedy uh just ideating and you know the mantra there was fall in love with the problem and that's what we spent 20 weeks identifying what's this major pain that businesses go through while they're managing the finance operations um so that's that's after the program antler now invested after seeing the size of the problem and how you know we were addressing it uh considering the fact that myself and kennedy have worked in banks understand clearly what customers are looking out for how they're suffering from this problem around receivables oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love 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rounds about a month ago and this article was also highly posted into ad you know like techcrunch and a couple of other payments and john what most folks in their seat round are selling you know 15 to 20 of their business is that the range you were in uh precisely we that was about 14 ish okay okay you got it so so you're you use what does that mean so blah blah blah twelve ten eight nine you you did about it it was about a a eight million valuation something like that it was about six point five six point five pre money yeah post money post money six point five okay that feels fair to me and then i guess uh tell me more about the customer journey here so how many customers are you serving today uh we have about um about five customers already okay and so high touch obviously high price right so that means you're doing 10 000 a month in mrr um there abouts um but it depends because we have varying products within our portfolio sets uh that are priced differently so we have four main products we have the reconciliation we have trade finance um and you know that's really picking up um then we have payments products to just help customers reconcile um and i think that's essentially what we are working towards so both of all these have separate um pricing points yeah but now john but make it simple for us what is mrr today is it about ten thousand it's about ten thousand yes and where were you exactly one year ago do you remember zero all right fair enough so you're off to the races you've got capital how many folks are on your team full time about 14 how many engineers about uh eight eight and what's your approach for finding these first five customers are they specific to any region you have obviously deep roots in sub-saharan africa and other locations or are you more global we're very much a sub-saharan africa driven business but breaking into the middle east north africa region but our anchor clients are all based out of kenya so we are talking about payment companies uh we're talking about manufacturing businesses we're talking about pension companies that i now portfolio of customers yep and did most of those customers come from relationships you built when you were working inside of these banks um so we have a team team of two sales or three sales people uh full time so we are doing a lot of um boots on the ground um speaking to a lot of these clients but secondly we are also doing a lot of and leveraging a lot of digital marketing just having a lot of press on uh you know digital media no okay that makes a ton of sense uh what's an extraordinary product i mean you have four for referrals how do you how do you know that you like to build four products most people can't build one product right why did you spend all the...