SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
API Integration Tool Hit $1k in MRR, Raised $150k on $1.4m Valuation
16 Sep 2021
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Our revenue is something like $1,000 per month in an affiliate partner program. You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, CAC, valuation, or other metrics, the easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool. It's like a big Excel sheet for all of these podcast interviews.
check it out right now at getlatka.com hey folks my guest today is anton viborny he's building a tool called apiway.ai it's an api integration platform and b2b software marketplace great tool he's living and building this from kiev ukraine anton are you ready to take us to the top yes uh hi nathan thank you for having me nice to meet you i'm ready
Chapter 2: What is the API integration platform APIWay.ai?
Now, your early stage, which we love, help us understand where you're at today. Do you have customers or are you pre-revenue? Yes, we have some little bit customers, but we have another business model like our competitors. And now we are focusing on
acquiring users so we provide an IP integration platform and we provide it absolutely for free and we hope that it will drive traffic to our platform and when the user connect different apps and automate their workflow we show the recommendations of other SaaS vendors for example when the user
connect Facebook leads and Google spreadsheets it means that he is launching ads and he managed leads in spreadsheets but the next logical step for automating their business it will be implementing in CRM and we say that okay you can use for example HubSpot CRM or you can use a pipe driver user clicks and we get an affiliate commission or vendor paid for it.
Chapter 3: How does APIWay.ai generate revenue from affiliate programs?
And we have some paid customers with affiliate links, but in most cases it is the users who will use our platform. So Anton, how much revenue did you do last month? Our revenue is something like $1,000 per month in an affiliate partner program. And why did you choose to get your original revenue via affiliates instead of selling customers a SaaS platform directly?
Because when we started our business two years ago, we wanted to create an integration platform in Russia and Ukraine.
Chapter 4: What challenges does APIWay.ai face in the competitive market?
But after that, we think that it's a bad market for us. And we think that, okay, we need to go to a global market, an English-speaking market. But there are strong, very strong competitors like Zapier, IntegraMod. To compete with them, it's very hard. And we started thinking how we can be different. And so we say, okay, what will be if we provide integrations for free?
Users will like us, but how we want, we need to earn money. So when we say, okay, we saw the G2Proud or Capterra websites, and we say, okay, what will be if we combine these two business models?
Chapter 5: What unique business model is APIWay.ai implementing?
So when we provide something like a free Zapier and G2Proud mix. And so right now, which affiliate pays you the most money? Who do you make the most money from? ActiveCampaign. ActiveCampaign because I was a reseller at ActiveCampaign and I know these tools and in all placement, we provide ActiveCampaign affiliate link and we have some customers.
We sell ActiveCampaign and MailerLite and Fibra because now we are focusing on email marketing, and CRM automation. So when people want to connect their Gmail to Google Spreadsheets or to Facebook leads or Power Editor on Facebook, they'll use APIWay for free. When they come and use you for free, they get introduced to new tools like Pipedrive or ActiveCampaign.
When you sign up a new customer to Pipedrive or ActiveCampaign, you get an affiliate cut back. That's how you make money today. Yes, yes, yes. But now we, one month ago, we launched our community board where people can post articles, ask questions about different software. Every software has its own sub-forum.
And we want to create something like a social network for automation experts, because I don't know any place where you can find a strong community for no-cost specialists and especially marketing automation specialists.
Chapter 6: How many customers and signups does APIWay.ai currently have?
And we want to create a place where they can publish their useful content and communicate with each other. And have you bootstrapped or did you raise capital? Yes, we raised a little bit of capital pre-seed round. It's 130k one year ago and now we want to try a seed round maybe on the end of this year or at the beginning of the next year. But I think it's bootstrap 100K.
When you raised the $150,000, what valuation did you raise at? It was 1.5 million valuation. And who was the investor or was it family and friends? Yes, it was a company called Unisender. Unisender is a Russian MailChimp. It is a leader in CISC countries in email marketing software.
So when they invested in us because they paid money for Capterra, Jitigroud and Zapier and they understand what the difference is because the cost of tracking customer acquisition cost for SaaS vendors is extremely high and we want to provide We want to reduce the customer acquisition cost for vendors. Are you doing this yourself, Anton? What is your team size today?
We have 12 team sites with me and with my co-founders, five engineers, and also I have two co-founders. They are coders, two CTOs, maybe, something like this. And other people, it is marketing. We have an event manager because we are providing online conferences and assistants who help me with other tasks. So how many founders are there, three or two? Three, three, three.
And did you split equity evenly? No, with one founder, we split 50-50. And after that, we give an option pool for third founder and he become a co-founder. I got it. So you own 50%, your other co-founder owns 50% and a third has options. Well, options, yeah, but I don't want to tell what the percent, but with one co-founder, we have equal, and the third co-founder has less.
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Chapter 7: What is the funding history of APIWay.ai?
Less than you two. Yes, yes. I see, I see. Very cool. And so what's next? You mentioned the community you're launching, you're doing a lot of events. What's the next product you're going to be pushing? Now we will not push the next product because we already created a lot of things and we will develop details. For example, we provided some features where you can post a software button.
For example, you came to our platform and make a post like in Facebook and say, who is best, for example, MailChimp and MailerLite. And these posts become online, and on this page, people can post positive and negative arguments from the different sites. So it's not just like reviews where we're reading reviews of G2 Crowd, and all these reviews are good.
So you have a page where you can see a pros and cons, for example, for MailChimp and pros and cons for ActiveCampaign. And these arguments are posted by real users. And they, in most cases, they tell a really true. And on these bottles, vendors can launch ads, for example. I see.
You mentioned the way that you get new users is by building integrations into Pipedrive's marketplace and ActiveCampaign's marketplace.
Chapter 8: What are the future plans for APIWay.ai's product development?
How many total new signups to APIWay did you get last month? We have 40, 60 signups every day. I think, how many days? I don't know. I just watch on a day. Half of the year, six months before, it was 10, 20, 30 signups per day. Now it can be 50. When we organize some conference, it can be two conference signups and the tail.
But if we don't do anything, it's 40, 50 signups per day without marketing. It's a world of mouse. And so you launched in 2019. How many total signups do you have today? Everybody? I think... More than 10,000, I think. And we have more than 1,000 active users who integrate some, we call it way, active way. For example, Facebook leads and Google speech is one way.
um people of this 1 000 people using uh this integration and they created 3 000 ways for example one user can create three four integrations i understand and which marketplace drives you the most new signups active campaign pipe drive or somebody else uh pipe drive an active campaign
Now, maybe two weeks ago, we launched HubSpot and we think that this marketplace will give to us leads in most cases. But there are some vendors, they are not very popular, but the support team sent leads to us. And it drives more traffic than marketplaces from vendors. For example, chatbot software can support Teams and these. Can you name a couple of those smaller softwares?
BotHelp, for example. BotHelp. It's a Russian chatbot software. So the Bot Helper support team sends you a lot of new users? Yes, and users ask them how we can connect Bot Help with a Pipedrive or Ambus RAM and they send links to us. Understood. And how many companies pay you at least a dollar in affiliate revenue per month right now?
I checked this information three days ago and more than 25 SaaS vendors paid to us some couple of dollars. So we provided for them, I think, 300 or 400 leads and make maybe 50 sales. But these 50 sales, it's something like website builder,
it's it's not a lot of money but for example active campaign because you can sell active campaign for 25 000 contacts and the affiliate will be more than a simple website for example understood how much capital are you guys burning per month right now Uh, I think it's, uh, 11, sometimes it's 11,000 and for 15,000, uh, because we are living in the Russia and Ukraine and we have no, so, uh,
expensive coders and something. And I think it's a good side because we have a very qualified engineers that have a normal price. So you're spending about $20,000 per month in total expenses. You have 10,000, sorry, you have 11,000 in total expenses, 1,000 in revenue. So you're burning about $10,000 per month. Well, yes, something like that. Because sometimes more.
Because, for example, we provide an online conference and we buy for some ads. And I take this money from my previous business. It is a reselling ActiveCampaign. I have some users from this. We have two revenue streams from ActiveCampaign. It's ActionAid with APUA. And reselling, it is another business. So you mentioned you're thinking about raising capital right now.
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