SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How They Used #1 Product Hunt Launch to Hit $20k+ MRR for Expense Management Tool inside Slack
11 Jan 2023
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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They are effectively expense management inside of Slack. They launched on Product Hunt in 2021. 500 upvotes, got their first paying customers. Today, they've got over 700 users on the platform. A couple hundred of them are paying somewhere between, call it $200 and $400 a month in revenue.
He does feel like they can break $100,000 a month in revenue this year if they are able to close this $1 million round of funding they're looking for. They closed $170,000. pre-seed round last year. I'd call it somewhere between a $3 and $5 million cap. That was on a safe note. Got 2 co-founders, a team of 7 today, and then another 2 that are part-time as they look to continue to build.
Again, not just expense management inside of Slack, but also expanding to other marketplaces and also expanding to other use cases. Hey folks, my guest today is Serge Gusev. He's a CEO and co-founder at Approveit, the number one product of the day on Product Hunt, top 10 growing workflow automation software, according to SaaSworthy.
He's a tech geek and entrepreneur, product owner and expertise with business process automation. That's what he's building up today. It helps you send approvals in Slack, MS Teams, and email. Serge, you ready to take us to the top?
Yep. Awesome.
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Chapter 2: How did Approveit achieve success on Product Hunt?
What's your most popular integration there? Bill.com, QuickBooks, something else?
Yeah, let's say QuickBooks Zero, also Jira for some IT departments to work with. But yeah.
So guys, the way to think about this basically is expense management inside of Slack and a really nice sort of UI. Serge, would you agree?
Yeah. There's also a couple of more use cases to add to it. Because we're really serious about the compliance and actually approve it versus a system of records for organizations. And now we see that a lot of companies, they adopt and first approve it for some finance-related use cases. But then as more departments get involved in those approval processes...
They're also very interested to add more use cases on top of it, such as access provisioning. What else? Like payrolls. There's candidate approvals. So there's a lot of use cases that we have around the organizations.
And for all these use cases, sort of sum this up for me. What are customers paying you per month on average to use the technology?
Yeah, I would say somewhere between $1,000 to $5,000 per year.
Okay, $1,000 to $5,000. So you're talking something like $300 per month on average, something like that?
Yep.
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Chapter 3: What challenges did Approveit face during their launches?
So yeah, the valuation is way higher.
Why do you need a bunch of money to build this tool? It doesn't feel capital intensive to me.
Yeah, it's actually more about the distribution and actually like getting the word out there. So we invest a lot of in the content and in the vacation of our users. So like prospects, how they can use the brick automation to make their processes more efficient.
Well, you can only throw so money at content creation. I mean, do you guys have a clear channel? You know, you can take $5 million and spend it to get more users.
Yeah, sure. So actually, we're trading a lot on the go-to-market strategy, just trying to figure out what works for us best. So far, we have defined some channels that can bring the desired results. The end goal is to build a billion-dollar company. So yeah.
So what's working right now? I mean, how'd you go from nothing to 700 customers or users?
Yeah, let's say the first channels was the product hunt, also search engines, just people looking for solutions like ours. Then we added some marketplaces.
Well, what specifically on the search engine though? I mean, there's a lot of nuance there. What keyword is your top keyword?
Yeah, it's like Slack approvals, Microsoft Teams approvals, finance approvals, works automation, something like that.
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Chapter 4: How does Approveit automate spend approval workflows?
Yes. Something like that.
That's awesome. All right. So you start coding back in 2021. You split it 50-50. You're seven full-time today. You raised a little bit of pre-seed money. You mentioned you're trying to raise now. How much are you looking to raise?
Yeah, we're raising the million right now.
Okay. And why? I mean, most people are saying, oh my gosh, now's a terrible time to raise. Why are you doing the opposite?
Yeah, because we believe in our product. We see the traction. We see the value. We see that the existing customers, they're willing to expand and use our product more intensively.
Well, but Serge, I mean, just to reframe my question, it has nothing to do with your product. It's the macroeconomics, right? A lot of VC funds have no money to lend because LPs are not wiring dollars. It has nothing to do with your application, right? How do you break through some of those walls?
Yeah, so still, like, if the product is good, I really believe that VCs are very happy to invest in it. It's just, you know, like, the filter is a bit like, more, you know, like, just more filtering happening on the market, but still, the projects get funded, especially in early stages.
Is there something specific about your unit economics or your conversion rates where you go, man, we're world class, we think we can still get funding right now?
Yeah, for sure. Again, go-to-market strategy and just like the way we can efficiently allocate the resources. I think that's the most important part.
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Chapter 5: What integrations does Approveit offer for expense management?
Okay, there you go. Even without raising or you would need the money from the raise to grow that fast?
Yes, we still need to raise the money, but I would say that we're on a great path and a great pace without the money as well.
And when you look at your revenue growth last 12 months without actually sharing the revenue percentage-wise, are we talking like 100% year-over-year growth, 200% year-over-year growth? Where are you at?
Yes, I would say, yeah, we grow four times, like it's 400%.
Four X. Okay, so that'd be about 300% year-over-year growth or four X year-over-year growth. Yep. All right, Serge, very good. Let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite business book?
I would say, yeah, Zero to One.
Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?
Elon Musk, I guess.
Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building a proof?
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