How Quabbly Technologies Inc. CEO David Ogbonna-Eze grew Quabbly Technologies Inc. to $36K revenue and 30 customers in 2021.

hey folks my guest today is david earnest he is building a tool called quabbly it's a platform that teams and businesses use to create internal applications like crms hrms etc to manage and automate their processes without writing code david are you ready to take us to the top yes sure nathan all right so tell us more about this thing and are people only using this to build internal applications are they you building external applications as well all right so um for external application that applications that's part of our long road map right so we have an api that seems uh um can pretty much use to build excellent applications on top of quality yeah but for now our product allows you build internal applications that are writing code we currently have a customer who is like piloting with our apis and who's building like a sas platform on our apis so the company just sets us on database very cool and you have a bunch of customers i think already right yeah number of customers already how many customers do you have you have about 30 customers 30 any any obvious use cases like are most of those vcs or manufacturing companies or something else yeah we have venture capitalists and companies in the agent asian banking financial services space and manufacturing companies and how do you decide to price it i mean are you you know what are they paying per month on average to use the technology okay so um um we we price on a user base like you know and basis so we have the price based on the number of users in the team using the products i'm using like the internal to use they're debuting the product um yeah we try to like make our pricing as simple as possible since we're just like early stage um yeah and both yeah um we charge a 20 per user per month on our for our most expensive plan and about how many users did these 30 customers sign up for on average teams of five 10 20. it's an average of five customers across all listen so we have an average um customer per account got it so five seats per 30 accounts about 150 seats at 20 bucks a month yeah cool that's hey congrats that's three thousand dollars a month in revenue right yeah yeah yeah where were you a year ago were you pre-revenue yeah so um we started building this about around in mid 2020 uh meteor during during like the height of kovid so instead of building this so we had some customers testing those customers have actually turned that at the moment these are like early testers they've actually turned out right now but yeah we had like customers paying to like you know test with us there and david is this your baby do you want 100 of the business uh yeah obviously i want to scale this and take it to the top but do you own 100 of the business or have you raised capital okay yeah so raise like capital um precepts and pre-proceed round um yes currently like an ongoing yeah you're currently raising precede yeah kind of rather like some months back actually i see how much were you looking to raise um 300 000 and and how did that go who did you talk to okay so we have like you know um so um a mix of like you know investors from local investors to silicon valley investors to number of folks in uk and then we've got we have like a very diverse capital that's great and so you raised 300 000 was it on a safe or a priced round save what cap did you use uh for me did that feel fair at the time did that feel fair or would you rather be you know higher or lower or something different yeah fair thing it's quite quite okay yeah how are you planning to spend the money okay basically so we did that months back right and then we used most of it like upgrade our products so um our products was basically very shitty at that point right so we used that upgrade our product and um and right now we're like you know investing a lot on our goods market set of things how are our customers finding you today what's your sort of growth channels okay so what you have like three major channels um where using implementation partners that's folks like you know who use tools you know business stuff for clients and direct sales and of course digital marketing and so when you say digital marketing what does that mean um yeah so we we do like run ads but we're not really like you know skilled up at school channel so we're really focused currently of course like i said how are folks finals right now word of mouth and implementation partners okay got it so you're scaling up with digital marketing you're spending some money on ads do you know what your attack is how much does it cost you to get a you know a 20 a month new seat okay like i said we've never really like you know i said we have three channels that we like you know looking at right but um um for so like i said we've never really like you know put down the engines on ads yet but our main channels for now are word of mouth and direct word of mother's direct sales and their implementation partners yeah but what does word of mouth mean right these people don't just magically find you and if you can't define how they found you then you can't repeat it i call that direct direct seal so we have like sales sales folks like um i myself and you know my co-founders and we like talk to people about product and you know about folks and so who do you guys reach out to to talk to what are you like what job titles are you targeting and what platforms okay so a pretty much scaling with use cases because the product is kind of wide so of course we have like a customized manufacturer and some customers manufacturing so we're really targeting customers that we have like um that customer i'm liking use cases that um but so i do customer profiles that were targets enough from the use cases that we already said in already like the customers we already have so we like just killing them use cases that we already have on board in our platform so when you see when you're targeting manufacturing folks who are you targeting what's the job title at the manufacturing company of the person okay instead of approach head of operations okay and how do you find those people is it on linkedin or somewhere else yeah link linkedin sales navigator god and you mentioned co-founders tell me more about your guys's backstory how did you guys meet and how many of you are there okay so we have three co-founders um the ctu is my friend my childhood friend while um i met the cro while we're in college and did you guys split equity evenly 33 33 three okay so i understood your spirit equally is it's like you know split equally because we started together um and while my my friend came on board while we were like you know went into the project so here's something so you you you guys put up 50 50 then maybe only give him 20 when he joined or something like that something like that nice very what are next steps for you okay so basically like you know growth so um we we like you know targeting so our goal is to get to um 100k er by despite the end of q4 this year and let's take it up from there 800 or 100 100 key error and you're at about 36 right now right yeah and what do you what do you think is the path to get there adding more customers or more seats across your 30 customers today yeah more customers basically and of course if you can like you know get an expansion revenue that'll be also but most more customers where did you go with this idea were you working a full-time job somewhere else or how did you come up with it okay awesome so week so while we were like running my running like i'm doing like our full-time jobs and my co-founder we're like software engineers sorry um yeah we used to run a mini agency so we used to like you know build internal tools for for our clients and we figured out two problems internal tools like this with fresh now means like takes a lot of time to like come up with some use but you spend like so much time and to build like a product maybe like two months three months to build an internet product internal like suits manager operations um yeah so that was the first program we noticed and number two was that no two businesses have the same same processes so you don't want to to like solve the problems of like maybe um 50 businesses was kind of like you know laying for so we wanted to build something that could solve all problems and um this so the current version of our products is the second iteration so we we tried out them some years back and it like filled it's probably like you know went back to dreamboat and you know took another good approach to build this got it so you start off as an agency your azure's a problem you built this for your own internal clients and then you said you know what this is a better business let's launch it by itself yeah sure got it very cool what's the next are you still two just two of you guys on the team or have you hired your first full-time person yet yeah we've heard office from different person how many people are on the team you have about 20 people on the team 20 yeah so we have a large engineering team um right now yeah 20 people how are you paying them okay so um i'm basing lagos nigeria and um it's it's it's pretty much so of course we have like a very like you know diverse team so um we're based in nigeria and canada but most of...