How Verifiet CEO Farhan Afsahi grew Verifiet to $9.9K revenue and 27 customers in 2024.

verified.com it's fraud prevention in the B2B space if you're trying to do a deal with the steel manufacturer in China he'll tell you if they're legit or not same thing in the oil industry very prevalent considering what's happening with sanctions in Russia right now they're doing a business with 27 customers doing 7 800 per uh per year right now in terms of run rate Revenue each customer paying on average 24 per month with consider raising 300 000 at a three million evaluation selling it you know call it 10 of the companies look to scale he wants that credibility in the marketplace right now with this team of two uh as they launch hey folks my guest today is Farhan afsahi he's a 22 year old started his first startup when he was 18 which is a hybrid of zoom and Moodle it was called Ed Pax that now he's working on building a web hosting startup called xgrid and then sorry he did that in the meantime he learned a lot about design and software development now working on verified for the last 10 months that's v-e-r-i-f-i-e-t.com far on you ready to take to the top yeah all right what is verified so verified basically uh it's it's like stripe but for verification we provide verification apis for B2B companies that want to learn more about other companies they want to work with and get the company information like company status registration date and other data that they might need to verify uh the legitimacy of the company they want to work with so basically we're building this service for uh Enterprise type customers because because of the regulatory requirements that they need to uh uh like abide with uh like that was set forth by the government's uh and yeah that's basically Farhan what's your unique mouse trap here there's a lot of companies that sell data on other companies Zoom info bombora cognizum there's a lot of them you know a clear bit what's the Unique Piece of data that you get that nobody else gets or other people have a hard time getting so they're not a verification and fraud detection company so we're focusing on fraud prevention mostly and verification part of the job so they uh they don't they're not mostly connected to company data sources uh government data sources but we we are uh and for example you want to work for the company in China you're based in the US and you want to learn more if you can trust the company you want to work with in China uh you just enter the name in our uh program and it will give you a basic score that whether that company has any type of red flags or not so Zoom info or clearly and other types of like these type of softwares are built for sales mostly but we are building this for fraud detection and uh verification so we we are mostly providing reg Tech understand same same question though right there's a lot of people that sell data buy data from other people they package it up and your IP is actually how you package the data it's not the unique data source you get are you getting any inputs are you getting any data that you feel like is unique to verify that other people are not getting so the problem right now for for example in redtech is that uh most of the verification is take too long and also for example data implementation uh takes a lot of time for example for Enterprises to have real-time information so real getting real-time information about a company that was registered yesterday uh is a bit hard at the same time current like fraud prevention companies are focusing on e-commerce fraud uh but uh our main focus is on B2B front so we get right now we have access to over 300 data sources Farhan what's an example of B2B fraud uh so for example an example of bdb fraud is that uh you want to verify a company in China you want to buy some steel for example from a manufacturer in China there are some vendors involved in the process and you want to check if those companies are registered uh correctly if they are not impersonated by some type of scammers or fraudsters if they're not in any kind of sanctions list or uh like money laundering lists uh so basically it's part of a like due diligence that you're going to do we're providing that due diligence for you uh and yeah so for example one of the things that we've prevented is like B2B impersonation fraud uh like for example right now in the oil oil industry uh because of the Russian Ukraine War uh there's a lot of fraudulent activities happening that uh companies in uh like Ukraine and Russia and uh like UAE turkey some sort of countries like these uh in these regions uh are uh for example copying the data from a U.S company and impersonating them to as a seller or as a buyer and catching this type of impersonation is a bit hard for normal person or even 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 the 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 evaluation this year now the secret valuation 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 founder path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different valuation private Equity Firm is different if you're going to 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 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 percent of 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 valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna 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 valuations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation 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 so far on telling your pricing strategy what do customers pay on average per month to use your technology so uh right now because we're building like apis mostly uh we will charge them a per call Api per call uh so uh and also right now on the website we currently are mostly providing our services to smbs but uh that was before we're launching our public apis uh but from now on we our main focus is we is going to be on uh mostly developers and Enterprises today though what's the average customer pay you per month uh about 50 to 100 per month okay got it and um I guess tell me the story of your first customer when did you close them about a month after I started to working on verified which was when uh about nine months ago okay so launched the company in 2022 got your first customer where'd you find the first customer if uh he was a friend of my father ah okay is your is your father in defense or security or fraud uh no uh his in their Logistics uh industry yeah interesting interesting do you do you have any kind of cyber background or fraud detection background uh not much no not much okay um got it so I guess that was your first customer fast forward today how many customers are you working with so right now we have about 380 uh users out of the 380 uh about 27 are paying customers and our AR right now is at uh 700 then oh sorry uh 7 800 uh dollars per year yeah that's great yeah so so 27 folks paying 75 a month would be about 2k in mrr um you just said you know 7 800 per year but you know so maybe maybe the RP is more like 50 bucks and the mrr is more like a thousand so you're doing you know you know ten thousand dollars a year right now something like that yeah yeah I see that's great well congrats on getting this off the ground have you done it yourself or do you have a co-founder yeah I have two other people working on this uh as well uh so uh yeah we're working on building and launching every one of our apis uh every day yeah were you guys uh were you nice at the beginning you split Equity evenly or you...