Bootstrapping to Exit from Saudi Arabia: Emad Daghreri, Co-Founder CEO of Autobia (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: So in the early stages, you’re doing $50K to $300K projects across two or three different types of work – the technology, the consulting, the project management, etc. How does the revenue progress in 2013-14? What kind of revenue levels did you reach?

Emad Daghreri: I’m not sure about the specific numbers, but we were always cash flow positive.

Sramana Mitra: Do you remember how long it took you to get to a million dollars in annual revenue?

Emad Daghreri: I think it was the second year. The beauty of those kinds of projects is that you propose a budget for this project that has a lot of details about how we can execute and how much that will cost since we are accounting for everything – the manpower and the technology. As a SaaS company, the first thing would be to focus on the CAC [customer acquisition cost]. However, we can cover our costs from the beginning, actually.

Sramana Mitra: You’re basically doing large enterprise deals. It’s a very different kind of business.

Emad Daghreri: Exactly. Even if there is a project that will cost us a lot of money, we have the luxury of having multiple projects aligned in the same timeline. We have shared departments inside the company. For example, the customer success and support is always combined in one small department. However, they are working with us to assist us in different projects. All the technology is central, all the project management is central, all the procurement processes are central, and all the accounting is central.

Technology was helping us scale up quickly without spending that much on hiring. Technology takes care of details that are overlapping in a lot of those projects. We had to create our technology and how we have a sort of cloud computing inside Saudi because government needs to host your applications inside Saudi. The technology team had to create Amazon Web Services-like infrastructure on top of local servers.

Sramana Mitra: Why? Amazon does not sell in Saudi?

Emad Daghreri: Not yet. Most of them started to open in Saudi in the last four years. But before that, you are on your own and you need to do your own thing to scale. We had amazing engineering teams. Engineering teams that used to be at TAM are now the CTOs and DevOps in banks and a lot of big technology names in Saudi. We are really proud of that.

Technology challenges were a thing. Back then, engineers were looking for jobs because there is not many technology companies around. I recall hiring someone who was desperate looking for a job on Twitter. I was surprised he was looking on job on Twitter because no one was hiring him at that time. That specific person now is he is a director at one of the biggest digital banks in Saudi.

But at that time, technology companies were not a thing. Technology companies started to rise in 2018 and we have all of those big rounds, the series A and B. And they started to hijack teams from the different companies to build their engineering infrastructure. But from 2012-17, it was really a blue ocean market where you can have whatever engineering want and any capacity you want.

Sramana Mitra: Well, I think the big thing that I’m hearing is that the infrastructure layer was missing, which made it very expensive to build a startup. If you don’t have the hosting capacity, which nowadays in many markets we take it for granted because of Amazon because of Microsoft Azure and you know all the cloud services if you if that layer is missing that’s a major disadvantage.

Emad Daghreri: Exactly. the APIs and the service we’re having now about was not exist, even with the government. So the infrastructure was not allowing fintech companies and any type of companies that will require those kind of API to exist in the first place. The early startups are dying at that time because the market is not ready for such a startup.

I recall that one of the company created the first delivery app for food and but they couldn’t even work because Internet and infrastructure were not ready. Digital maps did not exist at that time in Saudi. All of those challenges were around. Like there is a company called Ilm Thiqa who are handling now the infrastructure for government systems like the the work permits or the passport ecosystem and all of that.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Bootstrapping to Exit from Saudi Arabia: Emad Daghreri, Co-Founder CEO of Autobia
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