How Xpovi CEO Mostafa Hisham grew Xpovi to $5M revenue and 20 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is mostafa hisham he's the co-founder and cto of expovi he graduated from arab academy for science and technology majoring in electronics and communication engineering since then he acquired multiple certificates in software engineering and ai and has several years of experience through working in companies such as ericsson and lucidia in the fields of data analytics and ai he developed xpoby relying on the latest technologies in cybersecurity and machine learning it's an enterprise robotic advisory firm all right must stop while you're ready to take us to the top sure all right so when i hear advisory i hear consulting is this a piece of software you've built or is it pure consulting yes it's actually our software it's based on the traditional concept of financial consulting which is uh what we aim to automate through expov our platform that we provide the financial modeling and business planning which usually or traditionally is done through physical contact where you try to pitch sit with an analytic or with an investment analyst where you try to show him uh illustrate your business as much as you can so he can build for you your financial model or financial business plan so it takes uh i can say to a lot of time and money that it's not always available for startups or entrepreneurs when they're founding their business because you're uh always budget efficient when you're starting and you're allocating your resources so what we're providing is we're automating uh this whole process most often sorry can you just be very specific can you tell me a customer that's paying you today and what they're paying for okay for sure yeah so our customer is paying for uh building his financial business sorry can you name a customer that's currently paying you uh okay first of all we're not a subscription based we're one time purchase okay so it's paying us it's for just uh one time payment so uh well when we can one we can name is uh tgs okay tgs and what does tgs do yes they are how do you say it uh they provide uh are you talking about the energy company energy data no no no they uh deliver uh uh grocery yeah grocery delivery shop or something like that and so and so what do they they paid you one time what did they pay you for uh they came for the business plan okay so you generate a business yes business plan tailored for them and and how do you grow the business if these people are only paying you once and then leaving i mean you have to sign up new customers every month because you're always starting from zero yes okay so uh first of all we uh we launched last month okay and the approach was is that our product uh uh can be used just for one time because we're aiming at uh startups and our idea stage startups actually okay so uh usually business plans should be used or uh must be used actually by enterprises on day to day basis because you're updating how you're operating your business but to do that we have to uh not enhance our product but to add ons a lot of stuff that will be needed for the founders to be using our product on daily basis and month to month okay so first of all we we launched with the business model of uh transactional-based one-time payment and how many have purchased the one time uh for now 20. 20. 2-0 purchased one time and that one time purchase was for how much uh 249. 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 2870 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it 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 valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different 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interview and so are any of them paying anything else or no they're all done uh no they're all done yes because they pay on the checkout after finishing the questionnaire the the concept that we've developed is that we've made around 30 questions questionnaire that is very easy to understand and answer and through these answers we instantly generate your business plan and it's instantly delivered to you where you can use it with uh also an add-on and user manual that helps you navigate this business plan because it's not uh for sure that you are uh how do you say excel efficient to navigate uh how to navigate the business plan so the deliverable is you're giving them a big excel file uh yes exactly okay and so how many of these do you think you can sell and like how much revenue do you think you can do this here okay we can sell actually a lot because uh in egypt okay with egypt at least so in egypt there is around 3.9 million enterprises from small to smes and large enterprises okay so the market is actually huge and it's growing year by year with an exceptional rate exponential rate sorry around 60k per year we're aiming at this year at serving around uh four to five hundred uh four to five hundred yes by the end of the year but that's i mean you have three people on the team that's that's too small business 500 paying 249 each is 120 000 in revenue there's three of you working at the company today that's that's not enough no we're actually three founders today okay we are three founders but we started hiring and the team is actually uh we are eight now and that's about i'm saying that's a bad thing you're only generating i know what you're saying even yeah yeah but what i want to stress it's that uh it takes time because uh we have to actually educate people about our service and how essential it is uh for you as a founder to have a good model and a good business plan model and forecast for your upcoming five years because uh if you look it up actually uh from the three top reasons that startup fails uh number three is uh not having a financial uh business model and okay yeah but i can also say every single company that has failed probably also had a financial model they just couldn't execute i just i guess i don't understand the focus on this like why would you sell a something that only happens once your maximum ltv from a customer is 250 bucks why why would you pay your energy for selling yes we're selling at a huge actual discount like if you actually want to make a business plan it will cost you thousands but we but that's the traditional way how many of us have been sold we're aiming at volume no no no i'm saying that we are automating the process if you are making uh there is no other platform that provides what we provide okay so that's why well maybe most of maybe there's a reason for that maybe it's because it's a bad business no because i think the the main reason was that it's not executable not that the business model is not like i mean let me just do this when i launched my company i never said you know what i wish i had a great business plan to make sure i don't fail never once did that cross my mind right like that is not the success indicator of a business it's can you go execute so i guess i just don't understand i don't know this is a huge need and i also don't understand what like how do you grow this because you can only sell it one time for 249 bucks okay within the next couple of months we're actually transferring to be a subscription...