SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1512 He'll Help You Build Your Own Company App Exchange
14 Sep 2019
Chapter 1: What inspired the creation of Widgetic?
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, Wix, 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. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Andre Podorak. He founded a digital agency called Vazum in 2008 after his CS graduation. He then did work for the U.S.
Navy, H&M, and Four Seasons and then stumbled upon the pain of code reusability across projects by anyone without technical skills.
Chapter 2: How does Widgetic generate revenue?
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 Wegetic. All right, Andre, are you ready to take us to the top?
All right.
Tell us about the company. So what does Widgetic 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. And we are pure SaaS play, basically. 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?
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Chapter 3: What is the vision for future app exchanges?
No, so we charge, the plan is to charge 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 platforms. So we get some revenue out of that. But we don't have yet any revenue from actual integrations with B2B platforms that we plan to sell to.
Okay, so you're basically right now kind of hustling, doing consulting work. No SaaS revenue yet?
No consulting work either. We work with Let me, for example, I'm not sure.
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Chapter 4: How does Widgetic support developers in app creation?
I think you are familiar. Maybe I know you are familiar with Webflow because you had the CEO in an interview, but there's other major players like Weebly and Wix and so forth. Right. And the big players, they already have app stores. Okay. But the small players like even Webflow or ReadyMag or
thousands of others, or Cloudflare, for example, they cannot have an app store because they don't yet have enough user they don't have enough market basically to sell the apps to.
Andrew, just to be clear, when you say App Store, the most famous example of this would be like the Salesforce App Exchange or the HubSpot App Marketplace or the Zapier kind of app integration.
Yeah, exactly. So you have similar stuff that web publishers offer to their users.
Got it. So what you're saying is you're helping companies that don't want to build their own internal Salesforce App Exchange. You're helping them build their own kind of app exchange.
Yeah.
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Chapter 5: What challenges do smaller platforms face in app development?
And we we also handle basically the developer, you know, the developer ecosystem. They don't have to find developers to build applications specifically for them because they build apps for widget and then we distribute them to a wide range of platforms, which basically means that 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 Weebly and stuff like that.
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're still building out the marketplace.
No, so it's basically the same process they would have to go through for Weebly, say, or for Wix, 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 apps on, say, ReadyMank or similar platforms, they cannot. Since there's no app store existing on either of those smaller players.
I would say right now people do API integrations using Zapier or something like that. Zapier. Yeah, yeah. That's true. Would you agree?
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Chapter 6: How does Widgetic plan to scale its business model?
No, no, sorry, 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, there's Cloudflare. I know you had the CEO as well in an interview. They made a $100 million fund. And they bought a platform called Eager to try to release such an app store. Yet we released 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 their platform because there's, you know, the old chicken and egg problem, right? So basically, that's the current state of smaller, you know, site builders, even if they would want to go through platforms like Zapier, someone has to offer the application.
They have to integrate in their, you know, in their platform. So there's not many people doing that.
Okay. So how I'm confused, how are you making money today?
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Chapter 7: What is the significance of integrations with major platforms?
Who's paying you?
All right. So as I said, we are doing things that don't scale right now. And basically the numbers we will 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 three platforms, which is Shopify, Weebly, and Wix, okay?
And we offer around, let's say, 15 applications that matter on each of those platforms. More or less on each of them, right? Because, for example, on Wix we offer only some, and then on Shopify and Weebly we offer different.
This is currently, not hypothetical in the future, right?
Yeah, yeah, this is currently, yeah. And those apps are purchased by the users of Shopify and Weebly, and they pay monthly, you know, for each application, a monthly fee, basically.
Okay, so they're paying Shopify $10 a month for an app, and that app was built by you and put in the Shopify AppExchange by you. So on $10 a month, how much do you keep and how much do you pass through to the developer?
When you say Shopify Exchange, I presume you say the App Store.
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Chapter 8: What lessons can be learned from the guest's entrepreneurial journey?
Sure, yeah.
Yeah. So, for example, Shopify gets 20% and Weebly... I think as well they get 20%. It's more or less like Apple, between 20 and 30%.
Okay, so that's $10, so they keep $2. There's $8 left. Where does the $8 go? How do you make money? How do your developers make money?
The $8 is basically what we get, right? And the same type of deal we would do with publishers, basically.
No, no, Andrea, so I get that. So how much of the $8 do you keep and how much do you pass through to your developers?
We didn't speak about the team. So the $8, 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?
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