How we’re doubling revenue every 2 months pioneering 1-click eSim technology

Ahmad Al Fares: 00:00:00

you always have to start with the people. You know, because I mean, you, you know, people who knows you, um, or people who know you, like they, they, they'll have trust in maybe making the introduction or referring you to their contacts. So I started with my friends from, you know, my engineering school or my business school where, um, you know, they introduced me to, um, To leads in the travel space that, that were willing to listen to them to my pitch because you need to get the first meeting before anything. And this is, I think, the first hurdle you need to get through.

Upendra Varma: 00:00:33

Hello everyone. Welcome to the SaaS podcast. I'm your host, uup Mine. Today we have Al with us. Al here runs a company called Silitech. Hey Al, welcome to the show. Hey, Upendra. Hi everyone. Hello. So, uh, Al, so let's talk about your company and product first, right? So what is your company do and why do customers pay you money?

Ahmad Al Fares: 00:00:51

Sure. So we, at celltech, we help travel companies like Expedia Kayak, um, offer co-branded international cellular data plans using, uh, one-click eim technology. So we've pioneered this concept of, uh, bundling e eim with, um, you know, bookings. Like if you, you're booking a flight or a hotel, you'll be able to add a cellular data plan with. Mark at checkout, you add it to your trip and you get it as a, as a QR code that you have to scan with your device to activate it and have it ready for your trip. Uh, for the traveler, it help, it helps, uh, in saving. So like you can save up to 80% on data. So it'll help you to stay connected in destination when you travel internationally, uh, while saving 80% compared to data. All right.

Upendra Varma: 00:01:40

So, so essentially, who, who are you trying to sell this to? Is this your typical traveler? That's who's sort of going out? Is, is that who you're trying to sell your Uh, sort of,

Ahmad Al Fares: 00:01:53

so we are with a b2b, a API company. We, we sell to travel companies. Okay. Uh, we, because. You know, we believe it's easier from a customer perspective, from you ask for the customer to buy it with the flight

Upendra Varma: 00:02:08

or the hotel. Sure. So essentially you sell to travel companies like Expedia and all, and they end up obviously, uh, sort of giving that service to their travelers on their platform. Yep,

Ahmad Al Fares: 00:02:18

exactly. Because we also help them, um, you know, um, use it to do more help you like, um, um, maybe. You know, look at their offerings when you are in destination, maybe to buy in destination activity attraction or to, to minimize the friction of, uh, of, of, you know, of your trip. So when you're traveling and you're connected, you can have, you can do more obviously with Expedia or Kayak or the travel partner that is offering the service.

Upendra Varma: 00:02:46

Alright. Uh, so talk a bit about the exact software that you're trying to sell these, to sell these big companies. Right? So what exactly does it do and sort of, and what's your business model?

Ahmad Al Fares: 00:02:57

So we, we offered them an API that they can integrate with their, um, websites, mobile apps with any UI they have, um, to their customers. And, um, yeah, we, we, we make it as, um, one click. Check out, um, you know, for, for, uh, their travelers. So if you're, when you're booking the flight, or after you book a flight at, at, at the confirmation page, you'll be able to add the service exactly like you add travel insurance, one pick mark you added to your trip and you get it as a QR code. Um, so we, we sell them, so through the api, they order the em through our platform and we sell them wholesale. They. Retail after adding a markup. Um, so they make money on, on top of this as a, as a new ancillary service, or in some cases they offer it for free to the end travel to, to the traveler or the end user. Because if you're bundling, let's say a, a flight with a hotel or they have, like, you have points like through their loyalty program, they may be able to give it to you completely.

Upendra Varma: 00:03:59

Got it. All right. So, so let's talk about your, uh, customers a bit, right? So now I'm understanding these are your big travel companies. So can I, can I get a sense of how many sort of customers, uh, do you work with as of today? Yeah.

Ahmad Al Fares: 00:04:13

We, we have over, I would say, 20 partners, uh, signed in, pilot or live. Mainly the major travel companies. Um, we work, besides the OTAs, like the online travel agencies, we also work with airlines and hotels. And this is recent, but we're gaining traction there. Um, and it can be any travel company, any travel app. So if you are offering anything around travel mm-hmm. and you have international travelers, as as customers, we can help you add the EM to your.

Upendra Varma: 00:04:48

Got it. Makes sense. And, uh, can I ask you what sort of revenue are you doing and approximately approximate ranges? Totally work. If you're comfortable with,

Ahmad Al Fares: 00:04:56

I mean, we, we, we don't share the monthly revenue. We sh we can, I can tell you like our is doubling every couple months because international travel is coming back and coming back fast. So since, since January we grew like 15 x and. Now every couple months we, whenever the new partner goes live, we kind of double our

Upendra Varma: 00:05:18

so how exactly are you pricing your APIs, for example, is it on a per traveler basis? How exactly does that work?

Ahmad Al Fares: 00:05:25

So we have our, our, our pricing is, um, divided into two. Um, Let's say two, two buckets. First, uh, you pay, you pay us a subscription, uh, because for, for accessing the api, and we have basic pro and pro plus tiers. So depending on what kind of features you want to have, uh, like for example with Pro Plus, we can brand the EIM network for you so that you can. Instead of seeing Celltech as the network name, you can see your brand. Um, and, and this will help you get mobile impressions and, and have your brand on the mind of the traveler in destination. Um, and, and on top of that, we charge you by the eem depending on how many eems you order in a given month. So we are, you know, we, we have automatic invo invoicing, uh, that you'll get our invoice with the subscription. And the eims that you ordered in a given month, and you pay us accordingly.

Upendra Varma: 00:06:22

Got it. Right. So, so, uh, got it. So let's, let's move on to your, uh, sort of, you know, growth journey so far, right? So I wanna deep dive into that. So, uh, I'm given to understand you've got these big enterprisey customers, right? So who are sort of making billions or dollars of revenue. Let's, uh, talk to me about the whole process, right? I want you to go back and just talk about how you to get that first couple of customers, right? First couple of partners, as you might call them. Yeah,

Ahmad Al Fares: 00:06:48

I mean, that's always the hardest part. Uh, you know, especially when, I mean, we, we started pre covid and, and we were, um, we basically pioneered this kind of, um, um, you know, programmable eem that can be bundled with trip. And, and we, we added, uh, like, uh, besides having building IP and patents around that, like on the customer side, it was always starting with a long journey of testing and piloting. So most of these big corporates, um, would want to make sure that the service is reliable, is secure, is um, You know, and then of course it's affordable so that they can, you know, they can, they can, it can make sense to their end traveler. Yeah. Um, so we had to go through like a lengthy process of testing, deploying. Like many, many, many partners would start with, Giving it to their employees, testing it in multiple countries before they even start with a pilot. And then when you start with a pilot, they start with a small group of travelers. They test it, get feedback, and, and I can say we, we've been always delighting the, the traveler because we, you know, we, we've done. Work on even giving you better service than roaming. Like not only cheaper by 80%, but higher quality of service in terms of speed and latest. Yeah.

Upendra Varma: 00:08:08

So, so I, I wanna, I wanna sort of understand that sales cycle that you've talked about. I can understand it might take you months or sometimes even years, right? But how, how did it work out for you during those. First couple of customers, right? So how did you manage to sort of get in there, right? So what was your background? What worked for you? How did the top of funnel work and how did you manage to sort of close it? I just want to sort of understand your journey there, because that's often the toughest, right? And especially for a novel company, sort of cracking these big deals is always going to be a very tough thing, right? So, so what was your journey like? What helped? Yeah,

Ahmad Al Fares: 00:08:40

it, you always have to start with the people. You know, because I mean, you, you know, people who knows you, um, or people who know you, like they, they, they'll have trust in maybe making the introduction or referring you to their contacts. So I started with my friends from, you know, my engineering school or my business school where, um, you know, they introduced me to, um, To leads in the travel space that, that were willing to listen to them to my pitch because you need to get the first meeting before anything. And this is, I think, the first hurdle you need to get through. So you need to, uh, to focus early on, especially early on, on people who know, who know you, which. Trust you who have done business with you and, and are willing to, uh, make the intro for you so these people can, can help you out. And once you get the intro, once you get the meeting, uh, you, you have to do the heavy lifting on, on the pitch and the product and, and, and, you know, be able to get the pilot.

Upendra Varma: 00:09:36

All right. So, so I'm, I'm, I'm understanding you've got a bunch of intros with, with your, within your contacts then you then, then you sort of, you know, managed to convert that into a pilot. And what, what happened after. So what, what, what, what, what was the process like back then? So the

Ahmad Al Fares: 00:09:52

pilot has to be success for the partner to say, you know, this is interesting, and I can, I can take it to my customers to like, at scale. Because, you know, these customers, uh, I mean, classically these partners have been selling. Very classical products, like a hotel or a flight or something around travel, which has been around for like years and years. Uh, versus our product, which is like, uh, new in the space. It's like a new ancillary, they haven't, it's very heavy tech. It, it involves networks, uh, cellular networks. It involves QR codes and eem. So it's, it's heavily technical. So, um, we need to nail the pilot and make sure that the pilot is success before. We get to the next phase, which is, uh, deploying at, you know, deploying live with our customers. And, um, and yeah, we, we, we, we, we basically, um, try to make sure that the pilot is success. Like be obsessed about like, you know, yeah. The pilot and, and how it, how, how it

Upendra Varma: 00:10:52

goes. And then give, give me some data points around like, how much time does it typically take for your pilot to sort of, you know, for you to sort of demonstrate that pilot phase, right? So what's, what's, what does the average time look like?

Ahmad Al Fares: 00:11:05

So when we had no customers, when we started with the first one, it took 10 months

Upendra Varma: 00:11:10

literally. Okay. Um,

Ahmad Al Fares: 00:11:12

but, but like, you know, because so many, like most of our customer, Here, like learn about the eem technology from us. Yes. And they'll be like, what's Eem? And then you have to explain, it's a digital sim that doesn't acquire a hardware element. It's activated by QR code, blah, blah, blah. So we have like a, a learning curve that we go through with the customers, but after getting the first. Like five customers after having these solid references with live deployments. Some of them, like where we can show how it works on, on online, it's much easier now for the next one. So now it's probably, in some cases it's a pilot of few weeks versus few

Upendra Varma: 00:11:51

months. Okay. It, it now takes few, couple of months, around weeks, two months. Is that how it is? Yeah,

Ahmad Al Fares: 00:11:56

in some cases it's even, it's even shorter. Like, um, uh, you know, this morning we onboarded a travel app that literally signed our agreement on Friday. They, they, they started the onboarding Today, they wanna go live by end of the month, so, so four weeks from signature to going live. Yeah.

Upendra Varma: 00:12:14

And, and how do, how, how many touchpoints do you have, right? In term, during this, you know, uh, during this pilot phase, right? How many conversations do you have? How many meetings do you set up? So, so, uh, just give me a sense of, you know, what happens during that pilot stage, especially from your end.

Ahmad Al Fares: 00:12:32

Yeah. So, Typically you need on average, like in typical SaaS, um, or b2b, um, you know, sales you have, you have to have around five to eight touch points in terms of, uh, you know, whether meeting the same decision maker multiple times, or meeting, meeting mul, meeting multiple decision makers, uh, single times or in, in, in different, because in many cases, um, To get to live, we have to be vetted like by the technical people, firstly by the commercial product people who are gonna be like, looking at the product from a strategic perspective, how much money it can make them, what kind of engagement they can do, or mobile engagement maybe with their customers, blah, blah, blah. But then after that, you have the technical people trying to like, check it, check the, sorry, the security, the, uh, quality of service, and then the, the deployability of the api. So how, how fast they can take it to live, how it works and, and, uh, and yeah, typically you need these five to eight, let's say touchpoints or meetings and, um, that can take you to live.

Upendra Varma: 00:13:42

Okay. So this is, uh, this is still the pilot phase, right? So when, so, so I'm, so you're saying that you need, you need to sort of get waited by a bunch of people before you could say that your pilot is a success and Yep. So, uh, just a couple of things, right from your end, right? Who sort of interacts with this customer during that pilot phase? So do you have any sales reps? Do you have any engineers working with your, uh, potential customers during this pilot phase? So, so I just want to understand Yeah. In terms of man, So depending

Ahmad Al Fares: 00:14:11

on, on, depending on, let's say the, the, depending on who's, who's the touchpoint from the partner end. Um, if, if it's a product, then, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm the product guy, so I, I typically focus on, on lead these meetings or this touchpoint mm-hmm. if it's a commercial, if it's a commercial only, we have, uh, you know, our chief commercial officer or our, uh, chief marketing officer. If it's a marketing touchpoint, yeah. Then, um, we, we bring them on board and if it's a completely dev. Um, then we have, you know, our lead developer kind of pitching in and leading that touchpoint or that call. So depending on, on the touchpoint, like in many cases, um, you have. You know, you have companies that are product led, they don't focus too much on the tech stuff, so the product manager might be the leader for all these touchpoints. Mm-hmm. And on, on the flip side, you also have maybe, um, travel apps that are very technical, that are tech first. So yeah, in that case it's mainly the developer and, and the secure. Got

Upendra Varma: 00:15:20

it. So, so, so typically it's a combination of all of your people to sort of, depending upon the decision makers out there. Is that how it works?

Ahmad Al Fares: 00:15:27

Yep. Yep. I mean, you need to, uh, you need to be able to, uh, Address their concerns because every single partner has different angle, different concern. Yeah. They'll be coming from a different, a different kind of perspective to, to why they wanna deploy our technology. Got it. And, and as long as you address that, you, you, you can, you know, you can, you can got it. Close

Upendra Varma: 00:15:50

a deal and. So, so now you, you, you've ma you, you've, it, it's been couple of months you managed to sort of convince all the stakeholders. Your pilot is a huge success. Now they're willing to onboard right now. How much time does it take from that suc, you know, that point to, uh, to, you know, the, the customer going live with your product? So how, how, how tough is the onboarding process?

Ahmad Al Fares: 00:16:11

So, I mean, we. We, we make sure we, we have great dev experience we call it, because besides the ux, the user experience and, and, and you also need to have great dev experience, which is the onboarding process. We always say we have a record time of two hours, like the, the, the, the shortest time of, of a developer deploying our api. It has been two hours, but it's gonna depend on, uh, you know, on the partners how, how the partner wanna. Kind of presented or show Yeah, show the qr for example. So, um, so while the API can be deployed in two hours, the QR code, how you show the QR code when they buy, let's say when the traveler buys the service, um, can, can, can be in different formats, different UIs. So I'm, I'm, I'm partner,

Upendra Varma: 00:16:59

get a sense of how mu on an average, how much time does it take from, from that successful pilot to say go live.

Ahmad Al Fares: 00:17:06

So from two hours to two weeks, depending on the department,

Upendra Varma: 00:17:10

it's still, it's still in weeks, right? It's still in weeks. It's not months or quarter.

Ahmad Al Fares: 00:17:14

No, it's, it's in weeks because, I mean, the a, we made the API simple enough to go live into hours, literally. But it's depending on the partner, what kind of UI they wanna use in their app or website. It can take them some work on how they present the QR code and that that's up to them. Sometimes it takes a couple days, sometimes a couple weeks, but I can say the, the, the range is few hours to few weeks. Got it.

Upendra Varma: 00:17:38

And, and do you need any handholding during this? Of of, of sort of going live, especially from your engineers, because this is a, this is an engineering product, right? I mean, this is a technical API type. Not

Ahmad Al Fares: 00:17:49

much. Not much. I think once the partner allocates the dev resources, I think the, so we have an open api, like our API has, uh, a swagger spec file, which is the classical, let's say open API structure. And, um, yeah, once, um, a developer. Has that with the, with the, with the details, with the technical documentation, they can run on their own with that. Um, so it doesn't require much handholding. Uh, you know, I, it's, it, it just, the, the most time consumption phase is the pre-approval phase, I would say. Yeah.

Upendra Varma: 00:18:26

Okay. Makes sense. Makes sense. That's where you're trying to convince them. Alright, so, so one, one last question around, you know, so, so my question is now how are you gonna scale it from let's say, 20 partners to, let's say 200 partners, right? So you've gotta scale this entire process up. And I'm trying to understand in terms of the playbook that you might have sort of created so far, right? And how exactly is that going to work? Because, uh, especially during that convincing. I'm understanding that your engineers might also have to jump in to sort of convince your stakeholders, right? So a lot of people might have to jump in, right? So now how are you gonna scale this process to sort of grow that customer account? What's in the plan? So,

Ahmad Al Fares: 00:19:03

so, so, um, I mean, obviously we continue to improve on, on the dev, um, experience on the onboarding process, even on, on, uh, because we're learning now more on how our partners are deploying, like what kind of UIs they're using to, to uh, um, kind of show it to, to their customers and which UI are converting the, the most. Yeah. Um, so now we have this data. So we eventually we we're gonna have. Code snippets, examples for our partners that are gonna help them with faster onboarding. Mm-hmm. So, um, maybe the first partner took. More than two hours, maybe. I would say 20 hours. Now we're at two, but eventually it can be a few minutes because once we know what's the standard most optimal way of deploying, not only the api, also showcasing the, showing the UI on on the partner website or app, then we can recommend it to our partner. And then in this case it can be, it can go even faster. Um, so. Our common customer is gonna have, gonna have even more informed, uh, decision than gonna be able to make more informed decisions because we're gonna tell them. If you do it this way, it's gonna convert at this much. If you do it this way, it's gonna, it's not gonna be optimal. Um, this is first and second, they're gonna have these code snippets that they can deploy so they don't have to like write code. I mean, it ultimately want this to be like couple lines of code and we can get that maybe in, in, in, in, in a year or two or something. But on top of. Our existing customers are big customers and we have so much potential for scale within them. So, so as, as we have more data on how the consumer is using it, what kind of, uh, conversion rates they're getting, how we can improve it, we can go back to existing customers and say, Hey, maybe you, you need to optimize this touchpoint with your traveler. To do it this way instead of that way to do it in booking instead of post booking, to do it, um, to do the one click instead of, uh, landing page, stuff like that. And, and, um, and I think, uh, you know, within, within our side, customers we can grow to. Massive revenues because probably we have

Upendra Varma: 00:21:19

like, so, so, so, I, I, from, from what they understand, that's, that's something that you really can't control, right? I mean, if a, if a partner on boats, it essentially, whoever, you know, whatever sort of traffic that he's got, he's essentially sort of sending it towards you already, right? Because, uh, so now how exactly can you. Expand your account because now whatever customers, whatever users that they have, they're essentially sending it to you Al already. Right. There's nothing much that you can do to sort of expand, for example, land a hundred k deal and grow it to a million. Is that something that you can do? No,

Ahmad Al Fares: 00:21:49

no. That's, that's, that's why I mentioned, um, because the way they present it and the way they, they offer it can make or break the offer. Got it. Like you have, we've seen, we've seen deployments that convert. 0.5% of the time. Oh, okay. So they, they need like 200 impressions to get one customer. Yeah. At the same time, we've seen deployments that convert 20% of the time. Yeah. So

Upendra Varma: 00:22:15

essentially it's about that conversion in that sense. Right. Exactly. It's, you're not selling or cross selling essentially. You are trying to optimize where. Partner puts it right. Something like that. Exactly

Ahmad Al Fares: 00:22:26

how they present it, where they put it, like where they put it at what stage of the trip. Like we had, we we're talking now to customers that are trying to also offer it online and they have like, uh, an attach rate of 60%. Mm-hmm. so it's massive because Yeah. It's, it's different. So we, we can, this is more like account management and, and, and now we're learning how, how to look into that. Because if you go from. Of 1% to 10% sure you can literally 10 x an account, you know, 10 x an account without much effort because that account is already signed, already live. They just need to optimize, um, you know, where they offer the, the, the

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service.

Upendra Varma: 00:23:07

Got it. That's, that's very interesting to be honest. Alright, so let's, let's try to wrap this up, right. So, so just wanna get few data points around your company. So when did you start the company?

Ahmad Al Fares: 00:23:17

So I started the company in, like I was working on Celltech 2018 part-time I. Started full-time in summer 2019, and we got our first major pilot in March, 2020 exactly when Covid hit. Yeah. And it was, it was literally two days before the US shut down, traveled to, uh, you know, internationally. So we had. To put it on hold and, you know, keep building during covid. Uh, when, when international travel was on hold until it's back, it, it, it came back last, let's say in Q4 last year. So in Q4 last year, we started seeing traction from our partners coming back saying, Hey, we're ready now, you know, started getting the international traffic. So from Jan, We started seeing increase in, in, in, in, in interest and, and deployments and, you know, leads and funnels. So we're, we're, we can't complain about growth now. We just need to catch up with that kind

Upendra Varma: 00:24:19

of growth. And then how many folks do you have in your team as of today?

Ahmad Al Fares: 00:24:23

So between full-time and part-time, uh, with a team of. 12 people at the moment, which we're hiding, obviously. Uh, we continue to hire. And, and how many engineers? Well, so, so funny enough, till till Jan. Till Jan is here, we've been a hundred percent engineers. Like we've been a bunch of gigs, like eight engineers now since Jan. Um, we. You know, our chief commercial officer joining our chief marketing officer, our sales rep, um, you know, our outreach, um, uh, rep. So we have, so now we have a sales team, and it happened only this year because, yeah, we, before this year we didn't have the, we didn't have international traffic basically.

Upendra Varma: 00:25:09

And who, who, who bought you those first bunch of deals then without any ecls? Is it, was it you?

Ahmad Al Fares: 00:25:15

Yeah. I mean, I'm, I, I happened to be an engineer with an mba, so I did my MBA at NCI in France, and that gave me a bit of commercial skills, so it was mainly 20% of my time doing, doing sales.

Upendra Varma: 00:25:29

Got it. And, and did you raise any external funding so far?

Ahmad Al Fares: 00:25:34

Yeah, so we, we raised a couple months back, we raised our small seed. Uh, it was led by Cove Fund from South, uh, from uh, Polish County here in SoCal. And, um, uh, Cove is, um, Cove is, is backing us up to, um, basically go to Series A. We, we, we expect to go to Series A, maybe in a. Um, few months, maybe in Q3 next year. Um, and yeah, at the current pace, um, we should be easily doing it in Q3 next year. Um, and on top of Covid, we have blue startups, we have TechCo Angels, we have Hawaiian Angels. Obviously before our seed, we had a bunch of early backers as let's say, uh, angel investors and, uh, angel groups, and we are so grateful for, for their.

Upendra Varma: 00:26:29

And where you gonna invest this, this money that you've raised going forward? So what, what's

Ahmad Al Fares: 00:26:34

mainly sales? Sales mainly? Mainly growing sales. Like we, we already invested part of that in building the sales team. Mm-hmm. So my co-founder, um, rich Bratton, who's the ex VP of Kayak from their early days till their post ipo. Is basically the, uh, our chief Commercial Officer, and he is the one building our sales, our sales team. Mm-hmm. uh, and sales cap capabilities. So we're investing heavily in, in sales and marketing because we didn't have any sales of mar or let's say we, we, we just had 20% of my time for sales and marketing before January, 2022.

Upendra Varma: 00:27:11

Yeah. That, that makes a lot of sense. And that's, that's, that looks like the right way forward, so that's why I ha So typically I focus on growth stories a lot, but I've realized it, it, it was mostly ponder led sales, so I sort of moved into your conversion funnel and how it all worked for you. Yeah. So that's, that's really great. Yeah. Alright Al, thanks for taking the time to talk to me. Hope you scale, you know, cel take to much, much greater heights.

Ahmad Al Fares: 00:27:34

My pleasure man. Thank you for reaching out and it has been a pleasure talking to you man.