How Futurefit CEO Hamoon Ekhtiari grew to $4.4M revenue and 3 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is hamon aktiri he's the ceo and founder of a company called future fit a global launch pad for audacious innovation previously he was the director of strategy innovation for the executive vice president at telus he's passionate about unlocking the potential of people organizations and societies to reimagine and build the future moon you're ready to take it to the top ready all right so futurefit.ai is the website what's the company doing how do you guys make money sure feature fit ai essentially the google maps for jobs and skills and it allows organizations and governments to help people upskill and reskill for a world that is impacted by automation the way we make money is through sas licensing with our partners and clients as well as transaction fees from learning and training providers okay i don't understand the product um is this like indeed like a recruiting tool no this is a to help you learn any skill you want from around the world no matter where you are it identifies your capabilities and and skills and then recommends pathways to get to the next job uh inside inside or outside the organization you're at okay so is this like i can go on you know udemy or creative live and teach or i can go to a greenhouse and learn coding or let you know or is it like that so yeah it integrates uh it integrates dozens of those various online providers and it also connects to labor market information so it allows you to explore jobs based on automation potential growth change demand and so it connects what you want to do next with where you are today and at the pathway to get there just like a google maps might so i'm living in austin texas right now i might say you know what this summer i want to go and live in dublin for six months tell me what and i want to be in i want to be doing front end coding right you'll basically check the job board say these are what's available and then you'll say take the this course from you to me this course from greenhouse this this one from treehouse and get ready to get accepted exactly yeah so you set your destination it locates where you're starting from and then gives you the pathway to get there interesting okay very good what do people pay for this uh individuals pay nothing uh governments and enterprises pay a licensing fee based on the particular agreement we have with them uh for users okay um give me an average what's the average company or government gonna pay permission yeah average average is about a hundred dollars a month per user okay how many users typically are with the individual government uh wouldn't it within a program that they might run anywhere from uh 500 to 5000 users okay so i'm taking 500 times 100 so you're charging 50 grand a month minimum uh on on the when it is uh invested into the user uh data side yes that's that's what they would uh that's the that's what they would i'm just trying to get because there's a bunch of different customer stories you can tell on average what's the customer gonna pay you per month per month it's anywhere from 20 to 80k that they pay per month yeah per month okay got it so 20 so someone that's paying 20 000 per month um how many people will be on that and just be clear these are governments or companies that are paying who are wanting to essentially use your platform to recruit and get talent yeah or help their existing talent find their next opportunity okay so a 20 000 per month payment that company or government is it has probably how many users on your platform so for for twenty thousand dollars a month they have a group of about two thousand users on the platform okay got it great all right and then put this on the timeline for me when you launch the company uh so this was launched about a year ago uh and so we're now in in in operation with our first group of partners uh in north america middle east and east asia so 2018 is when you launched and then how many actual paying customers are you working with today 22 okay 22. now if i take 22 times a minimum of 20 thousand dollars per month that puts you at 440 000 per month yeah so i mean again private company but uh the numbers i'm just talking numbers you just gave me 22 customers at 20 000 per month minimum that multiplication is 440 grand per month you've built that in less than 12 months so the revenue numbers on the company nathan i can't directly share but you just gave me two very specific numbers and it's a multiplication problem it's very easy you said 20 000 is the minimum contract per month you then said you had 22 customers i multiply those i'm not making stuff i'm only going up data you just gave me so why would one of those two numbers not be accurate nathan i i i'm not sure what the approach this conversation is but this is not you know the approach is very the listen we've done 3 000 of these the approach is very simple i like to make sure i get to the actual data so that the strategies you share with my audience we know are grounded in data so what you just told me is you've essentially gotten 22 customers over the past 12 months paying you a minimum of 20 grand per month those are numbers you just told me so what what i shared with you nathan was not that every one of those customers the exact same use case on the ground i did tell you some of them were based on transaction fees from the provider side some of them were fees they were paying us uh on on the on the individual user side so look if if this is where this is where we pause this and stop this i'm happy to do that that is uh no this is not what i think by the way i don't think you would want to pause or stop right now because people are very confused and will probably not be great for your brand to not clear this up so i'm going to try and help you clear it up what you're telling me is you have two different pricing models one is sas based one is transaction volume based is that accurate correct but nathan i i just this is not what i understood this conversation was going to look like with this with this uh approach and level of detail on the numbers this is a private company we're talking about the moon you understand you told me those two numbers you told me 20 000 average per month and you told me 22 customers i'm simply multiplying numbers you just told me i'm not asking you to share something private that you don't want to share i'm taking things you already gave me and multiplying nathan i shared with you an example of a use case suite you know i said average amount i said i was very clear my question i said what's the average customer pay per month and i even asked it two or three times and you said twenty thousand to eighty thousand i have the quote right here twenty thousand eighty thousand dollars per month so all i'm asking is just correct that it sounds like that's not the case just correct it so maybe you have one or two that pay that but the rest are on some other model what's the other model nathan i feel like that i had no idea that this was going to be a model where you were gonna uh take like i i thought this was gonna be about the business and what what the health of the business is based off number of customers by the way did you listen to any other episodes before you came on they're very short and easy to listen to 15 minutes did you listen to any others nathan i i i don't think this is as either of us would have intended for this thing i'm simple look you if you i don't i i never commit i've grown a sas company before i've raised cap but i've grown it i would never take a meeting and not prepare by at least listening to a minute or two of a host i'm about to go live with if you did that with any of the 3000 episodes we've published you would know this is the same style we do on every podcast so why did you accept coming onto an interview with me and not at least listen to a minute or two of one of the past 3000 podcasts nathan i my my my best sense of this i i don't know what your approach on this is but i what i'm asking here is if if your goal is to take this and turn this around and say hey look at uh look at this guy that is not why i i i had hoped to engage with you it was on the challenge and the problem that we're trying to solve it's what i understand that's exactly what i want to focus on that's why my first questions were making sure i clearly understand the product that's why i asked questions to understand that your ability to solve that and scale it is directly correlated to your ability to close and grow customers and the pricing models you choose to put around that that's what i'm asking about so what happened here is you gave me an average i asked very specifically we have the recording i said what is the average customer paying per month and you said twenty thousand per month up to eighty thousand you i then said well how many customers have you scaled to since you launched a year ago and you said twenty two i understand what you're telling me that you don't wanna go deeper in the details here but my audience in their head are saying well an average customer's paying 20 000 per month he just did 22 customers what i what i didn't like and look i i clearly could have done my homework with you better what i didn't realize was you were gonna do hard like fast questions add up the numbers and then run run equations back what i was sharing i don't want you to with me like i would not i would you did though because i said what's the average customer pay per month and you said and you doubled down when i asked a qualifier you said 20 to 80 000. i mean i would have loved if you came in and said nathan you know what we really want to be closing customers at somewhere between 20 000 and 80 000 per month we have 22 in a pilot right now that are free we haven't converted any yet because we're only a year old but here's how we're planning on doing that what happened was you implied that you were already doing that revenue i caught you and now you don't know what to do and i'm trying to help you get out of it because i want to get more of your story i want to actually talk about the product in the space so all i'm asking is can you maybe give one or two sentences just to fix the numbers you've already given me so we can then refocus on what you're building with future fit nathan if your goal is to use this contest it's not my go you gave me those numbers that's how you get rev you gave me those numbers why would i not multiply numbers you gave me do you understand do you understand why i'm trying to help you fix this because it looks i mean you look you look very silly if we don't fix this that's the problem here now because you gave me these numbers no nathan for the last 10 minutes what you've done is you've held something over my head to essentially imply from your end you know you implied you implied average revenue per customer is 20 grand you said 22 customers i'm multiplying i'm not implying anything i'm taking your numbers you got caught i'm trying to help you fix it and you don't know what to do now and that's what's happening here nathan the numbers i shared apply to our broader organization audacious futures yeah but they're not accurate you don't have 22 customers paying you 20 to 80 000 per month for audacious futures broadly yes we do okay what's the difference between help us understand that what's the difference between audacious futures because i asked you before the call i said what do you want me to call the company you said future fit so what i said was and i said this to you i said audacious futures was the parent company and future fidei is the product that i wanted to discuss with you today okay what's the difference between those two are there other products under the parent brand that we haven't talked about and if so what are some of those products audacious futures is a combination of a service and product company so we do advisory work uh more broadly with governments and and enterprises in north america and around the world again my ask nathan is if you know again you've done three says the task is just to put a moment of your empathy hat on and just you you have a very simple choice here of whether you're gonna hold the stick of i'm gonna push this content out and make a point of it the content is going out no 100 what 120 which is why i'm trying to help you fix it now it's getting a little more clear you have an agency where you do custom work with governments there's a parent company there maybe you charge for that custom work between twenty and eighty thousand dollars for the custom work you realize there was an opportunity it sounds like to build software which is your new product future fit is that is that story line accurate if not correct it yes that is accurate okay so this is a great moment a lot of biggest sas companies are built on the top of successful agencies if you've gotten 22 of these kinds of organizations to pay you the kind of money you just told me that's a healthy agency so let me ask you when what was the moment where you realized wow we could build a software product here and potentially scale it and that's when you started future fit what year was that that was last year in 2018. and when was the agency launched uh just under two years ago okay so you got the agency going pretty fast i mean how did you close the first kind of governments and companies as like what was your first growth channel you used uh it was a mix of referrals and uh outreach from them based on what they were seeing from a content perspective from us were you though from this space and like you quit a corporate job somewhere and that's why you jumped in or i did i did quit a corporate job to uh to do this work yeah were you was that corporate uh job serving the same customer base it wasn't i had to develop a lot of the relationships from the ground up well so what were you doing prior to this uh i was uh i i was a director in a in a 30 billion dollar corporation focused around innovation okay and why i mean that sounds like a pretty sweet job why say you know what i'm going to give it all up i'm leaving i'm going to launch my own thing in 2017 why make that decision i think there in all of us there's an element of wanting to make the most of what you have with life and as someone who came here as an immigrant i had the opportunity of uh having you know brought in access to so much so many great things here in canada and it was a bit of a now or never moment to say i've always had a bit of a thought in my mind of going after this and so i made the call to leave and then from there it was just as much hustle as i could to build the organization i love that okay so what have you run the agency too how many people are there on your team we use a flexible network model so we've got a network of about a couple of dozen people as well as a core staff of uh 10. okay so core of 10 are they all based up there in canada no uh half are about about half are in canada the rest are in the us and around the world okay so really specific question here from the agency model uh how many of those folks have you actually converted to paying on your new product line or is that still is the product line still pre-revenue uh the product line is in early revenue and so we're in the product specifically future fit ai we're in on the ground with about half a dozen partners some of those are paying some of them because they're investing their own learning dollars they don't pay us but then we have an agreement with the providers who provide the learning and training where we're able to get a transaction fee off of that okay so you said six of them are kind of using it and what maybe one or two of them are actually paying for it uh directly to us and the others are making dollars available on the platform which uh we then are able to monetize through the provider because you can it's an incentive basically yeah yeah very cool so what's your goal with futurefit over the next 12 months i mean what do you want to grow it to in terms of number of customers or number of sectors you want to go into i think for us the biggest goal is to be able to hack the algorithm to match a given person with a given job there are a lot of complexities to this that goes beyond just education and experience and so things like what kind of values do you have what are your interests and so we've got a team of data scientists who are building out that algorithm to do the matchmaking between a person and an opportunity that is at the core of the product so our goal really is to have that model tested and developed in terms of numbers in marketplace we think we'll be able to end up with about a dozen uh fully signed on partners uh about a half of those will be in north america half of them will be more global um and and that that will be the goal for the next vote and wrap us out here what is the pricing model not the agency just on future fit have you figured out the pricing model yet on future fit ai specifically the pricing model as uh so in terms of pricing specifically itself or the the model and how it works what will you charge there's two people paying you or three people paying you right now per month about what are they paying per month and what are you pricing against what's the pricing access yeah so the the pricing if they're paying on a user license basis that's going to be about uh about a thousand dollars per year per user for uh for for the access side on the transaction side with learning providers it says somewhere between uh 10 to 15 percent fee that we get from the okay and the one to two that are already paying you um how many users did they sign up with in their initial kind of test uh so a group of a 500 and a group of 1500 users yeah okay so i'm gonna do math again based off numbers you just gave me you ready so 1500 users and you just said they sh you charge a thousand dollars per year per user so can i take a thousand dollars an acv times 1500 users that's a 1.5 million dollar contract so so and and what i what i shared with you is those are pilots who are running with them uh they've committed to those and we're running those but there is this is not recurring in in case you were then making the assumption that this is assumed to be recurring we're going to have to see how just be clear i'm not making assumptions you just said a thousand dollars per year i was just saying being clear that these are one year first out of the gate contract and then we'll be able to build off of them as we move forward but again is it a one for the one that has 1500 users signed up and you just set a thousand dollars per user per year is that a 1.5 million dollar contract yeah okay i just want to be i just want to make sure i'm doing that exactly accurate and there's nothing wishy-washy there there isn't the project we have with them is worth uh one and a half million dollars over the over the year that we're running running the first and they're paying that's what they're paying these aren't they're not p they're not trading services that's not like uh it's not a phantom you know it's not a phantom number up in the air this is actually the one or two people that are already paying you this is the kind of prices they're paying you yes okay very cool great all right let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book um how how to uh how to make friends and and influence them by daily you mean how to win friends and influence people yeah okay number two uh name a ceo you're following or studying [Music] uh ceo of shopify number three what is your favorite online tool for building your company uh we use quite a bit of zoho for our crm and it works quite well number four how many hours of sleep date every night somewhere between five to six and what's your situation married single kiddos okay and uh how old are you 32. last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew uh that you could take a lot more risk in your 20s than you normally do guys take risks launched a company called future fit under a big agency where he's got about 22 governments and companies working with him paying you know twenty thousand eighty thousand dollar again fees under the agency model now experimenting with the model where users will pay up to a thousand dollars per year again out of government or a company so that's a 1.5 million dollar contract if they sign up a thousand users uh aiming to hit a dozen users by the end here of 2019 team of 10 people full time in canada remote locations with another couple dozen that are on flexible schedules moodle rooting for you man thanks for taking us to the top thanks for having me