How Veamly CEO Emna Ghariani grew to $786.5K revenue with a 5 person team in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is emno gariani she is the ceo and co-founder of veeamly before the company emma helped emna helped launching several companies as a global director of the founder institute and built several products as part of her previous company she's a dream to change the way people communicate and kill the world of assumptions mnar are you ready to take us to the top yes absolutely nathan all right what does veeamly do and how do you make money so vimly has a priority workspace across collaboration tools that means it's a desktop app where we bring all of the collaboration collaboration tools like jira slack intercoms and desk you name it and on top of that we give the user a priority test feed of all the conversations across their tools so um yeah and we are sas platform and right now uh we are still free so we're gonna start charging uh in 2019. okay so you're pre-revenue right now yes pre-revenue okay how many free users uh right now we are testing a private beta with few companies uh about ten okay very good and um walk me through the timeline here when did you launch the company or the idea so we we started this last year um mid 2017 and we went to market like uh fall 2017 with a couple of customers testing it out and then we kind of closed it out went into a lot of product development and now um again back into soft lunch with a few companies so limitation yes how are you supporting so have you raised capital i mean how are you supporting yourself in these early stages we were mostly bootstrapped and with a few angels and also we were part of the seed accelerator the refiners okay so how much total capital in the company uh about 200k 200 okay so you're using that money to kind of you know pay your necessary bills and do all that stuff while you focus on growing well actually so just to be clear 200k with like not full capital n but like with everything like it's actually more than that that we pay the bill like we put our own money in that's the point so i'm not counting that yeah yeah got it you have 200 from outside investors and then some more from you and who else and my co-founder so microphone is ramsey he's uh my cto has more than you know he's been in software industry for many many years um and we have eight other people with us very well very okay so you have eight so you have so you have ten people total yes okay so i mean how much run would you have left you better it sounds like you have to start getting some revenue coming quickly well because we're based between here san francisco and tunisia we're not all based in san francisco okay well you still have to people don't work for free usually yeah well a lot of people actually came in really believing in the vision and worked for free including myself for a very long time uh and now we're starting to pay people and also we have capital coming in so yeah okay sorry i thought you said your pre-revenue yeah we're fundraising okay so you don't have capital coming in yes got it so so how much how much are you looking to raise right now right now raising about 500k okay and walk me through like what that sales pitch sounds like for other people that are also pre-revenue looking to raise capital this will be valuable yes absolutely so um to the investors you mean right yeah like what does it sound like so i might for example if i'm i'm going to be skeptic right now i'm not you already took in 200 grand you're still pre-revenue like why am i going to give you another 500k now because um so right now what you spend time on is redeveloping the core technology and the product and right now we developed a very big pipeline of large companies but also smaller companies and organic with organic growth so the next amount of capital we will use it really to reach product market fit to validate the different use cases we are testing out right now under operations which is def ops product and support in b2b and it will help us really get to um the true revenue so yeah okay so so five and already metrics yeah the 500 000 you're raising um if you spend that all i mean will you be post revenue or we have to raise again before you start driving real real revenue no we will be post revenue okay when do you think you'll be post revenue this year or next year yes uh early q2 and how are you how are you know big question early entrepreneurs have to figure out is pricing so how are you gonna how are you planning to price this thing so we tested a little bit right uh at the beginning we were targeting just managers so to a little bit on the high end we're charging 200 per user per month um but right now we're gonna have more of a freemium model where we're gonna have people use a part of it for free and they're gonna charge for premium features like similarity where we pull uh similar conversations from your different tools to the current conversation you're looking at okay so what what do you think the updated pricing might look like it's gonna look like uh on the upper end as a two hundred dollar the top premium part per user and at the lower end that's 20 per user i see so so how are you do you currently have a free base that you're helping you know convert you know you convert five percent of them to 20 bucks a month yep okay so what's the free sorry what is the free base today sorry if you cut off a little bit uh so i'm trying to figure out where you're getting confidence that you're going to be post revenue soon right i'm trying to that's what i'm trying to understand so how many free users do you have right now right now between the 10 we have about um around 100 okay so we're still very early we didn't really push that much in the market yes okay so you have 100 free users and how many of them are actually active in other words how many of them actually took action that you know is directly attached to value so um right now like the the ones we have they're using right on a daily basis so for us what we're optimizing for is what we call the stickiness metric which is really having them stay in the tool for four to six hours a day the idea is to be your workspace to use it on daily basis so that's why we're confident that um by beginning of q2 as we deploy more of the premium features we'll be able to really upgrade them to paid customers we also as i said earlier nathan at this stage usually startups there's no really definite answers so we tested a lot we had a lot of assumptions that were wrong and some of which were true and even in pricing like we charged um like we charged some people and then you know like then we decided to open it for free and keep it for free until you to really test for this assumption of stickiness so how's it panning out are people staying in it for four to six hours absolutely so we're having really awesome uh testers and they're liking it right now some people when we see so we saw some people get out because of some obvious instability in the platform or sometimes it's management decision uh meaning like let's say a product manager brought it in and then they're like no this is not the right time for us to have everybody use it so we had a couple of those but right now really we're seeing great adoption okay again i'm trying to really quantify how you're measuring adoption so across the hundred users right now on average how many hours per day are they spending in the tool around four okay so so you have about 400 human hours logged every day inside the platform yes because here's the thing the the vimle prioritization feed is on top but they can still access their slack and their jira and everything so they're working in these tools within me does that make sense yeah it does but but what so what i'm trying to say is like is the our number really a accurate measure of your value or is it really just sitting at the top of their screen while they use slack below it right now i cannot give you an exact metric in terms of how much they're spending on each tool exactly versus looking at veeamly the goal is that they look at dreamley when they start the prior the feed and then they work with it and then they're pulled back into the feed when something important shows up and they need to act on it and then they go back into their tool that's kind of like the user behavior where is the value though that that's what i'm trying to figure out where is the value that you add and how do you figure out what metric to measure that is directly attributed to the value that you're adding so the value we're adding is really saving them time meaning that usually they'll spend let's say two hours going through all their messages and comments on tickets and all pull requests and everything and then they're spending like 90 minutes instead of two hours or an hour instead of two hours so because we what really does it goes and treats everything and brings all the important stuff on top and they can still do quick actions from veeamly that goes straight to the original tools like quick replies creating tickets from them and more so your goal is to save them time yes so absolutely but so isn't it ironic that the activation metric you're measuring is four to six hours in the app it should actually be zero time in the app or one minute per day or the at least as possible if your goal is to save them time yes actually because as i said nathan like they're it's a workspace and the idea is like they're accessing all their tools in one place as well i understand i'm not i clearly understand what you're saying what i'm what i'm countering with is if you're i'm only going off what you're telling me if you're telling me that veeamly is gonna make me more productive i'm reading your website now get me out of the vicious cycle the immediate response to pressure the gmail and slack and base camp and trello i should use your app i should be in your app less time per day not more because it means i'm being more efficient no i understand what you mean there so let me clarify more when i say that it means i want them to be working out of deemly as a workspace instead of them opening multiple apps and then of course there are additional metrics that we look at like that how many replies they sent how many conversations they archived how many they start how many people they interacted with who are the people they interacted with most there are additional metrics but the first one the first goal is to keep them inside of the workspace and then to get them like to see the first feed to process it and then as they keep using it like we keep adding value with the additional features so that's maybe i should have seen that better uh on my side so that's where the four hours comes in meaning like all your management that you need to do all your communication you you open it you access all your tools and dimly with process that information faster than you would what with you opening every app separately looking at every notification not knowing what to focus on first yeah no i understand um and and after they connect all their feeds are you doing things from like a machine learning perspective where you'll say respond to this first respond to this second that kind of stuff yes so for us right now we developed an engine that's using uh nlp and deep learning that helps detect what are the top priorities for um that user in the beginning the prioritization is done based on the text so like sas tech all of that you know the system is down or bug or somebody is sick but then as they start using it um we have the system learns from them based on their behavior like who they interact with the most like if nathan for example you're my best friend or the person i talk to the most you're definitely gonna show up on top uh before somebody else yeah that that's interesting um good so when does the when when are you actually putting up the hard pricing wall when should you start seeing revenue coming in you think can you repeat please because sure yeah yeah when do you decide how do you decide this is a decision every first time founder has to make when do you actually put up a pricing will force people to pay if they want to use this thing so to be um so in the beginning when we tested right we went directly into premiums like there was just a free trial period and then they would pay for it after 30 days uh after testing that we realized that actually it's better to let them use the tool for free a little bit so like even the prioritization is better and everything to their needs and then uh really use um customer success pretty much to push them to upgrade for the premium feature and show them what they can get more out of that okay so so so when again when do you think what month do you think you're going to put up that that actually april april q2 okay beginning of q2 yes that's great and um that's good and you're trying to raise that 500k before then or after the april no right now like by april we'll be raising our c draw got it right now do you have a and is that 500k is that a convertible note or actual equity uh convertible convertible yes okay very cool and do you have people that put in the 200 are they leading that or you have to go out and get a new lead oh we have people leading that already yes that's great that's great what are they what are terms like today in the valley that you're seeing are they like is this the safe you're using safe yes absolutely okay that's great good stuff well you have to come back on and give us an update after you move this stuff forward i love talking to folks that are at your stage because you got to start somewhere right i know absolutely all right uh first question yeah yeah we're gonna wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book my favorite business book is actually an old book which is um getting to yes it's for me the bible of negotiation like it was written in the 80s and i loved that book it was driven me uh but um yeah so that's my favorite book number two is there a ceo you're following or studying right now actually multiple so i'm following um i follow a lot jason lemkin for sure in terms i know it's not to study like a startup but definitely as a ceo and what he's done uh biz dev but also a lot of um ceos closer in stage like a series all of that like matteo de front uh for example is definitely a role model to look after yep geez great number three what's your favorite online tool for building the business uh i love trello so i really do which is funny because my teacher will say jira but for it makes things so much better and easier number four how many hours of sleep to get every night around six okay six and what's your situation married single kiddos single no kids no kids okay and how old are you i'm 29 29 very good last question why do you wish your 20 year old self knew i wish i knew uh immediately that i needed to do something about communication even though i love everything i've done before but definitely my why is communication and i am so obsessed by it that i feel like we need to kill this information overload and be better at it so i wish i knew that early on because at 20 i did not know that at all invest in communication and getting better at early on says amna again founded veeamly here just this year they have a bunch of free users using the platform helping to make and streamline all of your workflows into one place you can be more efficient get more done and generally be happier every day amna thanks so much for taking us to the top thank you