How Wemby CEO Alberto Fantappie grew Wemby to $102K revenue and 5 customers in 2020.

understand that tell us about the product what's it do so wenby provides online counseling and mental health coaching to employees at the moment focus on the ngos so we have a mobile app and we connect employees of organizations with a qualified counselors that speak multiple languages and have a different cultural background in order to help them in stress anxiety office issues trauma wherever they are in a very discreet and confidential way and when did you launch this so we launched this today uh we got our first client in january 2019. january 2019. okay great so you were coding and building it in 2018. yeah tell me about that first customer how did you find them so actually i was in san francisco when i found it and it was like a pretty serendipitous i have to say because before coming to san francisco on an acceleration program i launched but digital health i was hanging around in a social a social impact co-working space in madrid spain and i've seen at some point a training course of an ngo that was conceived the children that you might know is uh the largest ngo that helped children across the world and i just got in and i asked to the trainer what they were doing there and i told a little bit about what i'm doing they could connect me with uh their training and hr guy nothing happened and about five months later when i was in uh nsf i got the hr guy reaching out to me telling me hey you know like you just found out what you're doing actually we are looking for a mental health uh service and uh we were about to close the uh the survey the selection and we just hear about you from one of our employees can you do you want to get on a call so we got on the call things went really fast and we start a pilot of six months with another organization that was competing with us and they were much more established and much more well-known and eventually after six months we got selected and we got our first paying client that's great and how many customers today right now we've got five uh large clients five customers has anyone started paying back in you know early 2019 and stopped do you have any churn no zero zero percent and uh we got like uh we're expecting to close four more clients at the end of the year and in january this year we start working with the united nations which uh you know it's something that pretty good for us at the moment is that going to be a paid deal or are you donating it to them no no pay deal you don't do quick possible [Music] how did you get the deal with the united nations so uh it helped i work for the committee of the red cross so i do know quite a few people in the um and uh i just got an introduction basically to the right person took a year to uh basically going from the first email to let's try this out and pay for it interesting okay and so what does that contract look like how do you build is it based off number of seats or number of companies using it or how do you build so once again how do you charge is it based off number of seats or companies how do i charge is a is a mix between the number of users that are subscribed to the server that have access to one bit and the total number of sessions that are contracted by the company what is what's the session session is a therapy session it's a one-on-one video call with with your therapist no matter where you are and that is basically like uh the core of the service at the moment so we met you with a therapist that is the best for you to speak your language and understand your job and uh in italy as well your cultural background in the past 30 days how many sessions have you completed the past 30 days about 200 so we're doing about 200 sessions a month like since uh january 2019 we have done more than two thousand sessions okay total yeah of the two let's just focus on the last 30 days so 200 sessions across obviously five customers right so that's like 40 sessions essentially per company um and i guess each of those sessions is with different employees that accurate yeah yeah yeah correct okay so let's say like at the moment most of our sessions come from our first customer so let's say like uh 70 percent of our sessions come from our our first client and uh the others are some of them are ramping up we've got two two clients are ramping up they will start uh increase the number of sessions from september where do you find the therapists uh obviously not full-time employees of wembi right some of them are full-time employers some others are part-time and some others are contract-based i see okay how many full-time folks today at the moment we've got about five and uh and about 17 that are you know actively working for us okay so you have 17 that are sort of contract therapists that you give work based off number of session requests you have actually okay we've got about a hundred in our proximity network that already pre-selected and ready to start i imagine you guard that process very close you want only the best therapists on your platform explain to me how that works absolutely so we got to a pretty extensive selection process we got like uh two technical interviews and one a personality visit which personality we don't use personality tests we use more like the google approach like uh you know the googly er personality fit like saying uh like uh maybe personality is not like uh the right term by culture fit culture fit okay got it got it all right do you have any engineers on the team yeah like uh we got our cto advisor and we are hiring our first engineer at the moment like we are about to close the process for saying engineer full-time very cool so you have two founders you and then your cco co-founder i'm the only founder of a tough ride you're the only founder okay how are you i mean so how are you paying for people full-time salaries with this revenue on the revenues so luckily we're not based in the united states so most of the team is based in spain and uh the operations costs are a little bit lower i see have you raised any capital to build this er we raised some angel funding back in 2018 but we are doing our rounds right now and we are a little bit already advanced with some investors how much did you reach in 2018 in 2018 not much read about 50 000 was uh mostly like uh some angels and friends capital now we are going for the million so so you want to raise a million uh right now yeah pounds so say about 1.5 million dollars and and how's that going obviously everyone's a bit everything's up in the air with covid how's the race going it's going pretty well to be honest because the timing is perfect so we are a revenue making ram and profitable startup in a space that is absolutely booming at the moment and it has never been more needed that now so uh kobe gave us actually like a pretty important boost in terms of uh acknowledging the the relevancy of mental health and we get like quite a bunch of investors that are interested and we are bouncing like uh with two of them past the initial call do you have a lead investor yet no we are going for it so we start fundraising seriously like basically mid july so it has been like really a few weeks and it's summer so basically just started and we already got like uh about three funds which we are doing due diligence with interesting how do you so so one of the biggest assets that any founder can have is the ability to tell a story a vision of where you're going because if you raise 1.5 million today at whatever evaluation and you're only doing a hundred thousand bucks an arr obviously that's a super high multiple that you're going to try and get but if people believe your story like your team does and your customers do you can obviously raise and not get super deluded so help me understand what valuation will you target and what vision are you putting in front of these vcs to get that valuation yeah so we are targeted like a valuation between three to five million pounds and uh the the story that goes behind is really like i want to become the global psychology service platform and today there is nothing like that out there and uh we really want to get like uh a psychology to the next level and psychology is a very fairly young science there and it says that it's just starting to be adopted mainstream and technology has been starting tapping into it just in the past four or five years so the opportunity is literally massive and uh and a lot of things needs to get done yet doesn't exist you cannot imagine it and i mean people have tried this sort of before sort of a marketplace of therapists why has it not worked because like uh we tried marketplace approach at the very beginning and scaling a marketplace requires a lot of money and you lose control of the quality of the service that is provided so at the moment we are not a marketplace we uh we are service provider and as we mentioned before we we deeply control the quality of the service that we we give that's why we have zero churn and we got referrals clients and that is probably like the key like uh the quality of the service but in the end it translates into results into reducing time of recovery into satisfaction of the users into higher employees satisfaction into higher productivity lower like people leaving are the companies so but to do this properly the quality of the service is paramount and to control the quality of the service like you need to...