Widgetic Revenue & Valuation (2024)

hello everyone my guest today is andre podoraki founded a digital agency called vazoom in 2008 after his cs graduation he then did work for the u.s navy h m and four seasons whilst and then stumbled upon the pain of code reusability across projects by anyone without technical skills he built an mvp back in 2015 closed the agency a year later and doubled down on what he's building today which is called widgetic all right andre are you ready to take us to the top yes ma'am all right tell us about the company so so what does widget do and how do you make money what's your revenue model sure so we are building an easy to deploy app store for web publishers uh and we are uh pure sas play basically um but we work as a marketplace right so on one side we have you know developers building these apps and then on the other we have platforms to which we distribute the apps and we charge on a monthly or yearly basis okay and who are you charging the developers or the businesses that launch the app store no so we charge um the plan is to charge the the platforms that we integrate with and then we have to split the revenue with you know the developers that are building on our platform okay so you said the plan is are you pre-revenue today we are not pre-revenue we are doing things that don't scale basically so we ourselves in order to build you know the tools for developers we act as a developer ourselves we build the tools and then we distribute those in different you know platforms so we we get some revenue out of that but we don't have uh yet any revenue from actual integrations with you know b2b platforms that we plan to sell to okay so you're you're basically right now kind of hustling doing consulting work no sas revenue yet uh no consulting work either we work with let me for example i'm not sure i think you are familiar maybe i know you are familiar with webflow because you had the ceo in an interview but um there's other major players like weebly and wigs and so forth right and the big players they already have app stores okay but the small players like even web flow or ready mag or thousands of others they they cannot or cloudflare for example they can they cannot have an app store because they don't yet have enough um you know user um they don't have enough market basically to sell the apps too just to be clear when you say app store you're the most famous example of this would be like the salesforce app exchange or the hubspot app marketplace or things like or the zapier kind of app integration except yeah exactly exactly so you have similar stuff that web publishers offer to their users okay got it so what you're saying is you're helping companies that don't want to build their own internal sales force app exchange you're helping them build their own kind of app exchange yeah and we we also handle basically the developer uh you know the developer ecosystem they don't have to find developers to build applications specifically for them because they build apps for widgetic and then we distribute them to a wide range of uh you know platforms which basically means that um they are not distributing only to say 10 000 users in total they can distribute to the same amount of users as wix has or wavelength and how so how do you convince the developers to spend their time and energy building apps for you i mean i assume you don't pay them all full-time salaries and you don't and you're still building out the marketplace no so it's it's basically uh the same the same process um they would have to go through for weebly say or for weeks right but what we do is first of all we enable the publishers to have those app stores because right now even if they would want to offer you know apps on say ready man or similar platforms they cannot since there's no no there's no app store existing uh you know on either of those smaller uh players i would say right now people do like api integrations using like zapier or something like that zapier yeah yeah that's true would you agree no that's right that was a question would you say like if they don't have your tool the best alternative is some kind of api integrations using zapier i can give you an example for example um there's cloudflare i know you had the ceo as well in an interview um they made a 100 million dollars fund and they bought a platform called eager to try to uh release such an app store yet we we release some of our apps with them and because they don't have enough users then as a developer we don't have incentives you know to keep building applications for the platform because we there's you know the old chicken and egg problem right so um basically that's the current uh that's the current state of smaller you know site builders even if they would want to go through platforms like superior someone has to offer the application they have to integrate in their you know in their um platform so there's not many people doing that okay so how i'm confused how are you making money today who's paying you all right so as i said we are doing things that don't scale right now and basically the the numbers we'll speak about are numbers that say developers building on our platform in the future could speak about right so for example we are integrated with the major the major uh three platforms which is shopify uh weebly and wix okay um and we offer around let's say 15 applications that matter on each of those um more or less on each of them right because for example on weeks we offer only some and then on shopify and we blew up we offer different this is currently not hypothetical in the future right yeah this is currently yeah and uh those apps are purchased by the users of shopify and weebly and they are they pay monthly you know for each application um a monthly fee basically okay so they're paying shopify 10 bucks a month for an app and that app was built by you and put in the shopify exchange by you so on ten dollars a month how much do you keep and how much do you pass through to the developer uh when you when you say your shopify exchange i presume you say like the app store there sure yeah yeah yeah so for example shopify gets twenty percent and weebly uh i think as well they get twenty percent it's more or less like apple between twenty and thirty percent okay so that's so ten dollars so they keep two dollars there's eight dollars left where does the eight dollars go how do you make money how do your developers make money uh the eight dollars is basically what we get right um and the same type of deal we would do with with publishers basically andre so i get that so how much of the do you keep and how much do you pass through to your developers we didn't speak about the team it's so the eight dollars uh we keep it entirely because there's no developers yet you don't have that marketplace built out yet no no these are all your own developers that you just pay full time yeah it's just the three of us founders doing this okay so do you want to get other developers building on this and if so what cut would you pay them so uh basically we would we are looking at uh doing something like um envato for example if you know where we we would have we would be in the the we would be a pure a pure platform play we would have developers building on on top of us and then we would distribute to all the other partners uh hopefully precisely on the same in the same revenue cut where we would then um split the 20 percent uh with with the the platform okay so 10 okay so a shopify user spends 10 bucks to get the app from the shopify exchange shopify keeps two bucks you then keep another two bucks so then six dollars goes through to the end developer no it's something like this so first it's not software let's say someone that doesn't have an app so let's say ready mac yes so we offer our apps say to ready mac and then a user comes and they they pay ten dollars okay um we don't we don't um the the platforms can decide to monetize how however they want this what you just said is how shopify and weebly monetizes but for example maybe some platforms might decide look we are going to offer all the widgets for free for premium users or whatever they want to monetize it um by right and then the way we get to charge the platforms is on uh typed pricing uh system for active users i see and we call it right so so we don't we don't impose the platforms we offer the platform as a white label right our product to them so we don't impose how they should i understand they can they can monetize however the heck they want but they're going to pay you on an out and active install yeah got it okay and where are you at today what's what's the company doing today in terms of revenue so right now i can tell you how as i said the numbers for what we would what we are making as an app developer ourselves because we are um building the apps to you know to release them to the to the different platforms so we are making about 60k on weebly on annual revenue and then about uh 10k on on shopify but we just launched um less than around a year ago okay so 70 000 total across those two platforms that's for the year yeah with tweaks it's 75k annual revenue in total okay yeah so just be clear wix 60 shopify 10 70 000 total shopif so shopify 10 weebly uh weebly 65 and and the remaining would be wix okay sorry this shouldn't be this complex so how much money how much money are you making per month right now uh around eight to ten thousand okay got it and that's coming from you guys just doing the is that actually recurring revenue from active installs yes okay got it okay that makes sense so so let me see if i can summarize this and you tell me if it's accurate um you're doing stuff right now that doesn't scale which is totally fine you're hustling building these own applications you're putting them on shopify and weebly and wix their app exchanges um every you have a negotiation with them that says every time these get activated one time you pay us x amount of money all that added up right now you're making about between seven and eight thousand dollars per month um you're almost right in the sense that we are integrating with already existing app stores so shopify and weeks and weebly and about like 100 others we plan to integrate with we don't have to negotiate with them or partner with them to be in their app stores well then how do you know how much they pay i thought you said that you negotiate yeah yeah proactive install the that's that's what we plan to do with other plus with platforms we are going to you're not doing that yet yeah yeah that's the i see that's all right now you are just basically getting what they have already established an app exchange or an app store or whatever they want to call it you're essentially they view you as the developer you're just getting the developer cut and that's about eight grand per month right now yes got it in the future you'll help companies that don't have their own app exchanges launch their own app exchanges and then you'll just negotiate a proactive install payment to you every single month exactly i see okay and when did you guys launch this company what year so we we started working on it while we had the agency back in 2015 um and then you know so two years ago exactly november 2016 we started working on on the project okay and have you guys bootstrapped or raised capital blitzcraft so far bootstrap right and where is everybody based so i'm here in spain and my two co-founders are in romania and yes ah spain okay very good spain and romania and um are there just there's three of you right now or any other full-time people yeah just just the three of us okay three of you guys that's great so spain romania is 68 grand per month bootstrapped you're working with it sounds like three kind of outlets right now a year ago today how much revenue were you doing per month so we um on on weebly for example we were doing about 45k per year uh and we grew like uh 20 and on shopify that's the issue we we grew um about two like 200 or something because we we went from 3k to 10k yeah so just uh just to make this easy to compare today you're doing 8 grand per month as a company across all your different relationships a year ago today how much were you doing total per month um maybe maybe half half of that okay got it on average yeah yeah yeah i know i know you're i'm asking you to estimate here but i'm just trying to get a sense of growth rate um okay so four thousand bucks a month that's good very good so i mean how do you scale this from eight thousand bucks a month to eighty thousand dollars a month so scaling uh the current the current model we are using is easy basically we have to integrate we have to do more integrations with existing platforms for example adobe news you know wordpress and many others um so that wouldn't be necessarily our main our main uh you know problem right now what we are focused on but what we are actually interested in is um the type of applications that we build and the type of integrations that we do we only do them not for the monthly revenue we are earning but actually to build on the technology you know stack we have and then once this is enough we can go we can proceed then you know uh sell this to our potential partners good you know be it publisher those platforms good good all right andre let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book um that would be inspired by by marty kagan inspired number two is there a ceo you're following or studying tony ullwick he's the ceo of stratagen number three how many uh are sorry what's your favorite online tool for building your business yeah i've seen that you know people usually mention the the standards if i want i would say product hunt because that's where you find the best tools for building a business number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night six or seven okay and what's your situation married single kiddos i have an awesome kid and i'm i'm married and my wife is pregnant with the second oh congratulations so two two one one already another one on the way and how old are you 33 33 last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew um prioritize process over uh intuition processing over intuition so if you have to make a big decision on anything it better be based on a process than your pure integration process over intuition launched widgetic back in 2015 they started working on it 2016 full-time they're now doing eight grand per month right now they're just basically building as developers apps for shopify weebly wicks these marketplaces they get their developer cut that's how they get eight grand per month that's up from 4k per month just a year ago they're bootstrapping this their ultimate vision is to basically help companies that want to have their own app exchange launch a white label version of these app exchanges they'll then get paid on a kind of per install basis and they'll scale from their early days but they're growing we'll see what happens andre thanks for taking us to the top thanks see ya