SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Farms in Egypt To Pay This SaaS $1/mo/active Acre to Manage Seasonal Potatoe Crop Harvest
07 Dec 2022
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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 He's hoping to be able to charge $1 per acre per month, active acre per month, and also about $0.75 per day per hired employee, which would be about $3,700 per day.
Chapter 2: What is the pricing model for the SaaS managing seasonal crops?
But launching pricing next month, nothing yet. Burning $40,000 a month with a team of, call it, 27 people, 11 engineers as he looks to continue to scale and turn on that paywall. Hey folks, my guest today is Hassan Faid. He's the co-founder and CEO of ID, a B2B SaaS community that helps commercial farms source, manage, and pay their seasonal workforce.
He's also a board member at Tradeling.com, a leading UAE-based B2B e-commerce platform, and Scality, a Dubai-based startup landing and acceleration platform. Hassan, you ready to take us to the top? Let's do it. All right. So give an example of a commercial farm that might use you. Are these, you know, walnut, farmers, pineapple, what kind of farms?
Yeah. So the main crops that are grown by commercial farms here in Egypt are citrus, grapes, strawberries, potatoes, and so on and so forth. So quite similar to what you would typically find in states like Florida or California in the US.
Okay. So a potato farmer, walk me through there. Why does a potato farmer have to hire a seasonal workforce at all?
So the way that agriculture works is you have spikes and seasonality in terms of when they need workers to come into the field to either prune trees, harvest the crop, do field maintenance and so on and so forth. So the nature of that market is you cannot hire people full time. You need to bring them in on a seasonal basis.
There's 1 billion people globally that work as seasonal agriculture workers. So that's one out of every seven or eight people in the world that do this kind of work.
And so walk me through how that potato farmer, how you make money from them by helping them hire these seasonal workers.
Sure. So we offer our software that helps them put out requests for workers to come in and work on the farm. when they need them to come in. And then our software, essentially what it does is it digitizes the forms by creating digital identities for each and every plot that they have with QR codes. And we have a supervisor app that allows the field supervisor to track and register
every task that a worker does on the field and report that back to the management that are typically sitting in an office somewhere not too far, so that they can have real time visibility on everything that's happening in the field, and how the workers are performing and be able to reward and retain their top performers as well.
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Chapter 3: Who is Hassan Faid and what is his role in the agriculture tech industry?
Okay.
Wow. That's impressive. Okay. I mean, so I guess why do you have to keep waiting to charge? I mean, that sounds very valuable. Why not start charging now?
So the main thing is really to make sure that our software and our products are able to deliver the right kind of value to these farms. And it's something that we're planning on doing. I mean, the first customers that are going to start paying is next month in December. And we charge them on a per acre basis. How much? So we're starting off with a dollar an acre a month with these customers.
Plus, we're going to charge a service charge for the workers that we bring in, basically, because we do the vetting and the onboarding on the training. Um, we charge a service, a service charge. So basically it's a 5% on the overall order value that, uh, uh, that they place.
Order value though. I mean, we're not talking about objects here. We're talking order values, really the salary they're paying a seasonal worker. Exactly. Yes. So what does the average of those 5,000 hired?
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Chapter 4: What types of commercial farms are using this SaaS solution?
What's the average seasonal worker make?
Uh, a day or, uh, sure.
Yeah. A day.
So it's around, um, uh, I mean, it's around maybe $15 a day, give or take.
$15. Okay, okay. Yeah. So if you're taking 5% of that, then it's sort of $0.75 per worker per day.
Something along these lines, yes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. I mean, with $5,000 out there, though, I mean, that's $3,750 per day, right? Yeah. For you. Yeah. Yeah. It's a lot of money. I mean, if you multiply that times 30 days in a month, I mean, that means that's $112,000 a month in revenue for you.
Yeah.
Turn it on, baby.
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Chapter 5: Why do potato farmers need seasonal workers?
And we're finally at that tipping point where our technology is at a stage where it's reliable enough for these farms to be able to depend their operations on us. And we needed to get to that milestone before we start telling customers, you can start paying us for the software, essentially.
Yeah. How many farms, like individual customers, make up your 1,200 acres engaged today?
Uh, so today these are 10 farms and basically this represents around anywhere between five to 10% of their penetration of their total acreage. Yeah. Uh, so a lot of these farms were working with them in kind of like just a few plots where we're testing out the product.
Yes. You can scale this 10 times just with the current, with the current, with the current customers, right. You can go up to 12,000 engaged acres.
Exactly. And even more, some, some of them have 50, 60,000 acres and so on.
So when did you write the first line of code for the platform?
Uh, so that, that final, I mean, it, it, we, we've built quite a few, uh, platforms that we've, uh, that we've kind of like discarded, uh, over time.
I want to know when you started that first, the first one, how early?
So the very first one was in November of last year. So it was exactly a year ago.
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Chapter 6: How does the software help farmers manage their seasonal workforce?
Understood. And then obviously, if this becomes big, you want to keep as much equity as possible. Most folks are selling about 20% in pre-seed rounds these days. Is that about what you sold? Pretty much, yes. Okay. So that'd be 8 million pre-money, 10 million post?
Something along these lines, yeah.
Was it priced or you did a note? No, it was a note. So a 10 million cap, something like that?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Very cool. All right. Of the 27, full-time, how many are engineers?
So we have... uh, 11 engineers. Uh, we have, uh, nine people in product. So between, uh, uh, design and, uh, and quality and product managers and so on and so forth.
Well, we're rooting for you, man. We're out of time though. Now for today, let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, favorite business book.
Um, the hard thing about hard things.
Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?
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