How Permit.io CEO Or Weis grew Permit.io to $1.5M revenue with a 14 person team in 2025.

hey folks my guest today is ore weisse the ceo and founder of permit.io and co-maintainer and author of open source opal.ac he's a serial entrepreneur who's passionate about developer tools previously founding rookout.com a leading production debugging solution and managing upwards israel's largest founders plg community before becoming a founder he worked as a lead engineer in multiple cyber security and big data companies intelligence corporations and as a consultant for the ministry of defense as a vp of r d at netline ct cyber division or you're ready to take us to the top yeah i'm excited to be here it's gonna be fun you're one of these like super smart ex-israeli defense guys huh uh well i i try my best i did get an early start so i started working with uh with software at the age of five thanks to my bigger sister and uh yeah and i got to serve in the intelligence score in the idf in 8200 and that's really kind of a really a runway for acceleration that uh basically changed my life and uh and is awesome so what years how old are you were you when you were in the idf um so i was between 18 and 2 up to 24. so i served for slightly longer than than most um and i obviously i started off just as a as a grunt and i moved my way up to be a an officer and a team lead but throughout most of my role i was very hands-on as kind of a software engineer reverse engineer etc etc so what were you doing i mean am i allowed to ask questions about what you did at 8200 yeah you can ask about everything but i'll have to kill ya so well i don't want to die so is there anything you can share with me that wouldn't get me killed just to give us a sense of what you were working on so actually it's it's been more than seven years since my service so i can be slightly more open about it but i absolutely can't go into much detail but i can tell you that worked a lot in software engineering and cyber security and i can tell you that i had the good fortune of working on projects that were critical for the security of both the state and israel and other allied nations um i worked on a lot of cases that i described in other talks as working on high stacks and high stakes uh for example i had a situation where i was required to deploy software to production but people told me you only have four attempts to get this right and if you fail people would die so not exactly see icd um and obviously a lot of stakes and i also in that specific incident i ended up running into a bug that uh kind of uh thwarted our endeavors initially and we really tore our minds to find where it is and it ended up being a vulnerability in windows itself in the operating system and i think um seven years later or so it was announced as a cve but before that it was unknown um so we both had to dive deep into the stack and also handle those high stakes and those kind of situations i think really taught me a lot about um taking software to the edge into the extreme cases and making the best out of it i mean just to be clear i believe the 1800 unit it's you guys are that's a part of the israeli intelligence corps it's also the largest and best known and really i mean this would be the unit that if i'm making this up okay but this would be the unit if another country was it was trying to launch a cyber attack on israel you're this would be the group that's trying to prevent that cyber attack not just cyber attacks so 8200 is essentially the equivalent of the nsa it's just not a civilian body it's a military entity but otherwise it's exactly the same i even got to work a bit with the nsa as part of my service uh which is cool it's very interesting to see the differences between between the two um and what's unique about 8200 is it it gets its first pick out of uh the draftees into the idf and uh it's fully independent it's structured in a way so if the entire idf the entire state of israel crumbles to dust it should still be able to function on its own and that also creates a lot of interesting mechanics within the organization 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 valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're gonna 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 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 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raise they sold 22 to their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to 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 going out right now and you're raising your seed round well 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 data set of sas valuations than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderprep.com and hover over products click on get your evaluation 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 all right let's jump back into the interview yeah certainly deterrence that would be though even if you take us out we still exist um i guess last question um if if the prime minister of israel was trying to send private communications to another country you guys would also handle things like encryption of those messages and things of that nature right that's a separate body was so that's actually a difference from the nsa the nsa is responsible both for uh securing the infrastructures and uh intelligence monitoring um uh the isnu or 8200 is only responsible for intelligence i see and can in collecting intelligence yeah just basically just collecting intelligence in a lot of different ways a lot of different spectrums a lot of different texts but just collecting intelligence which is a lot of work by itself i'm getting a sense i can't ask for you to give me an example of some intelligence you collected and how you did it um let's see maybe i can so there's also things that are kind of um open that are as part of the unit so part of it is something called uh awesome open source intelligence so just having someone to comb the web uh searching through articles searching for information there um that's also part of the intelligence work done in that unit but that's i'd say definitely the least of it a lot of things on the other spectrum uh even if i told you you'd probably think that i'm kind of reading from a science fiction story um and yeah i probably shouldn't go into those but all right let's go into permit it is it's probably that all right fair enough and probably worse than anything i can think because that's what's required in today's world but permit.io so what are people paying you for what's the company do so it's very straightforward we allow developers to bake permissions into their products in an easy fashion in a way in a way that it's future proof so they only have to build it once they don't have to constantly rebuild it i got to that as in my previous company out i ended up rebuilding access control for our product five times in a three-year-old company oh jesus i was like that's annoying that's probably four times if not five times too many and uh and we quickly realized that this is common for basically every product you've seen these interfaces these capabilities across the space a billion times things like user management with the ability to assign roles api key management approval flows ability to ask permissions from another user audit logs the ability to see who did what within the system the ability for each of the tenants within the system to see that on their own uh and invites and impersonation and emergency access and you've seen all these things a billion times and every time you saw them some poor schlep of a developer had to build them from scratch and what we're saying is very straightforward just like you don't want to build your authentication just like you don't want to build billing just like you don't want to build a database there's no reason that you'll have to build authorization or permissions so we provide them ready out of the box you just plug them into your software as an sdk and microservice and you get interfaces on top go for yourself as a manager and developer and both for your customers they want to work with your product and unless you want to build something you don't have to this use case makes obviously tons of sense give me a sense of what you're targeting smb midmarket enterprise what's the average customer paying per month right now to use the technology so we're first of all we're doing product-led growth and bottom-up so everything is organic as people approach it so we started with open source and a lot of uh companies find us through that um and uh we target the developers themselves so it doesn't really matter if you're a developer in a tiny startup or if you're working as part of a team in a larger organization you're facing really the same pain points and you need to adopt the technology in a very similar fashion but what are they paying i totally understand the use case here but i'm curious how you monetize so we monetize through a usage-based pricing model so you pay as you go according to the amount of users that you authorize so the more users you have the more you pay and through that we really try to align with the top line of both sides so when your business business grows and caters to more customers you're probably making more money and so we can share in that win-win kind of situation so what's the typical number of seats like a new customer might like start on day one with with permit we're talking like five seats or like 5 000 seats so it really depends for so first of all it's really important to indicate that these are not seats so it's not the licenses for your developers it's for your end users it depends on how many end users you have as a as a company delivering a product and we we see everything between uh several hundreds to uh tens of thousands at the moment okay so several hundred i'm just playing with the slider on your pricing page several hundred so five thousand monthly active users would be about a grand per month yeah and uh first of all what we do have for like a thousand users some 000 monthly active users that's still within our free quota which is important to indicate and uh yeah but as you grow or as you move to other uh other tiers because you need more features uh yeah you pay according to that pricing tier and slider okay fair enough um give me more of the backstory here what year do you launch the company in so we got started uh basically a year and a half ago we bootstrapped for a year um so my co-founder and i worked in garage mode but not in a garage because i don't have a garage um and we initially started by working design partners and just delivering the sas offering to them kind of more a bit more holding then as part of the service we built we had a a micro service a component uh that synced the application with the uh sorry the authorization layer with the application itself we decided to export that as an open source project and that's what's called opel today which you mentioned kind of in the opening brief and while opal is a river young project it's not even a year old it's already being used in production in amazing companies like tesla xavier accenture and others and we have a very large community of developers in slack on what's large how many um we're getting close to 300 people on slack okay and and why is that like i mean i have a slacker with 800 people in it but 99 of them never say anything so why do you use the number and slack as a success metric so it's not you asked for the number i said uh what i was trying to emphasize is the amount of people that are engaging with the community that are asking questions and those and you'd find uh several per day asking questions i see i see god so 300 in the group several actively engaging how many i mean isn't the right question with any open source project how many developers have contributed at least one line of code in the past 12 months no so that's definitely a good indicator but it's not necessarily the most important one because there's a difference between contributing and using and what's most important for you for me the using part i see because because that uh they using and asking for features that really teaches me on what the market needs and how the problem space looks in the details of it so for example when tesla came in and they asked for more features and capabilities to take this to production there was a shitload of information part of my french that really got us to understand how this would look in greater scales and in uh more infrastructure complexity than we necessarily see ourselves with the smaller players so how many teslas are there today how many installs so it's not it's not installed on a tesla it's part of their fleet management solutions no no no or i'm asking that's an example how many companies like tesla have installed an instance are using the open source yeah i'd say at least five that i know of but since it's open source um maybe more okay we don't have full visibility on who installs this just put the code online and anyone can take it so you're watching i think this is super smart you go from agency to open source to five like large companies like tesla's app you're installing the thing using it you're learning from that feedback loop are you still pre-revenue then today you haven't you haven't started charging yet so we've started some early revenue so we launched our sas offering as kind of open to everyone as part of our announcement of coming out of stealth a month ago ah and we now have uh almost we're getting close to a dozen customers heading to production does that mean does that mean they're paying so that means that they're a step before pay i see okay but it doesn't have basically raise your hand said i'm willing to pay for these things and you're saying okay we'll get you launched in 60 days some of them are large corporations and they already sent us through procurement i think i see it three questionnaires going through the compliance parts yeah so okay it's almost there and i'm i'm actually kind of bewildered that we were able to do that in uh a bit over a month but but so again you generate a revenue through some other things some agency work some custom work you're learning through some of some of the you know things you're signing with these things but your but your pre but your pre-sas revenue today you just launched it a month ago yeah there's very early revenue from like the uh uh design partners of course yeah this is a very smart i think a lot of folks starting out you i would say are very experienced with startups for those of you listening that are new to startups like this whole idea of going and launching an agency and then signing up design partners who are prepaying for roddick roadmap and then turning the design partners into your first sas customers is like really a smart way to build a sas business uh so or it makes sense to strategy here thank you i'd like to emphasize that the agency play is not really an agency like we don't charge them for the for the service or professional services but it is a way to interact with them uh professionally and learn from what what they need and get to product market fit and then as a follow-up to that to go to market yep now are you still boot dropping today or have you raised capital we've raised a six million seed round in july okay so last year did a six million seed um fairly large i would say fairly large cedar not even by today's standards for a pre-revenue company but your background probably i mean it makes sense why you would get that did you price that round or was that on a note it was uh completely a safe i say okay uncap safe uh no it was uh it's a capped safe but uh so how do you i guess my question to you is most most pre-seed rounds are right like at a stage you were doing it's gonna be a million dollar on a safe with a five cap you obviously didn't do a five million cap because you raised six million so how do you come up with the right idea yeah so how so what was the question sorry how do you guys come up with a cap right raising six million on a note or safe um you start by uh wetting your finger and waving it in the air and getting a gauge from that and the rest of it is negotiation like everything else in the market um so you try to get a sense of what you can get for this and then in negotiation you move a bit to the left a bit to the right and but honestly i wasn't optimizing for the evaluation i was optimizing for the players i want to work with and the types of relationships i want to have with the ongoing longer journey of the company and i even i think in some parts of it i uh um decided to opt for a lower valuation to work with people that i wanted yeah no that makes sense that's why anyone should raise all the time it should be to bring strategic partners in but most folks you know delusion is a real thing you have to manage most folks are selling you know 15 to 20 of the business in their pre-seater seat round were you sort of in that same range 50 of their business if you're doing 15 15. yeah yeah okay that's fine that's fine um i'm just i'm just i'm just curious where you sort of in that same range as everyone else right fifteen to twenty percent uh yeah slightly better but okay slightly so slightly better would be you raised six million and you were able to get away with selling less than sort of fifteen percent you know effectively at whatever that cap would be so the cap would be something like uh uh 20 20 million 25 million something like that yeah i'd rather not go into the full details but but yeah okay fair enough fair enough okay so where are you using that capital why do you need that much capital to build this so i'd say two reasons two main uh outlets of calling one is to get the right people and to build something for developers that is such a critical part of infrastructure and affects uh both the software development cycle and the security cluster of an organization you really need to get this top notch uh and you need to build top-notch things you need top-notch people so we we don't skimp on uh the people that we bring and how we uh connect them to the organization so that's one and that's that's basically classic and uh the other part is uh buying enough focus time so with a product-led growth motion your focus and we were actually getting luckier than we expected but in general the um the best practice is to allow yourself the time to grow organically with the market and focus on capitalization and sales only later down the funnel so how many years or months of runway did six million by you based off your projections a bit over two years a bit over two years got it and by the way my valuation math was wrong a second ago if you sold less than 15 percent it would have been something more like a six on a 40 cap but point being you brought in good strategic partners you bought yourself thinking time for two plus years it's more than just thinking time it's time to kind of adjust and learn the product market fit but also allow time to allow things to grow i'll give you an example um from another company a successful company sneak which i also happen to be a ambassador for which is a cute kind of title um sneak took about um almost a bit over two years to get to a million er which is considered slow if you look if you think classic enterprise slaves but two years later they were already a multi-billion dollar company so the hockey stick there is very steep and you know i get it we have we see stories all the time i mean sit at gitlab you could follow in his shoes right very similar patterns here so i'm not discrediting this strategy i'm just trying to understand what strategy you're pursuing it makes sense to me um how many bursts that's the point yeah growth yeah plg growth first totally understand that you want to get that five install base up to 500 000 5 million and then sort of go from there what's the team size today how many folks full time so we're now uh four 13 actually 14 um and we'll grow to around 16 immediately and that's what i'm kind of calling cruising altitude all right 16 to cruising altitude or we're exciting story here uh we're out of time but let's in the meantime wrap up with the famous five number one favorite business book um i'll give you something that's not exactly a business book but i use a lot of metaphors from it for business and it's my favorite book in general the selfish gene by richard dawkins it's a book that basically explained what life says what life is and how it's uh geared towards for to move forward and what evolution is and i constantly find uh equivalencies in both business and software development number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um i am an avid admirer of the coalition brothers at running stripe it's just astounding to see the behemoth that they were able to build number three what's your favorite online tool for building permit besides your own online tool to build permit you say just something you use yeah yeah i'd say currently um it's currently in recently it's uh github co-pilot i'm astounded not only by how good it is by delivering code but also documentation like i start to write the documentation as part of an md file and it gives recommendations for the content of the documentation that is slightly better than what i had in mind um so that's powerful on a lot of angles yup okay great number four how many hours of sleep are you getting every night i try to get at least six and sometimes i'd say i'd average at seven and what's your situation we're married single kids married uh no kids yet no kids yet alright and how old are you i'm i'll be 36 uh in july very cool happy early bro it's still got a little ways so 35 years old last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. something i wish i knew when i was 20. um that's a very good question i think um if you pace yourself you can learn a lot more things by um gradually then by running yourself forward into the wall which i've i think i've done too much guys between 18 and 24 he was cutting his teeth in the idf unit 8200 you know what that unit does he then got into some product led stuff and said you know what i hate building the same thing over and over he's now trying to solve that problem for a lot of people is right now zapier is using it tesla's using it it's called permit dot io well tremendous dot io is on top of an open open source platform that he's built which is gaining traction to buy himself time to learn and pivot appropriately they raised six million at cost somewhere around a 40 million capsule less than 15 to the business last year now 13 strong trying to go to 16 to get cruising altitude to keep building out this open source platform we will see what happens next or thanks for taking us to the top thank you was a pleasure 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 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