Attraction

Ivor and his co-founder started by building a Health Chronic Diseases app, which failed due to a critical mistake: they spent so much time building technology that they forgot to validate the actual problem. They raised only a $75K angel check, which taught them a valuable lesson—money can't buy product-market fit. "There's three things money can't buy, friendship, love and product market fit," Ivor reflected. They were solution-focused instead of problem-focused, and it didn't work.

After that failure, Ivor pivoted to solving a real pain point: industrial machinery maintenance. Every day, frontline workers in manufacturing, aerospace, and other industries face catastrophic machine failures they can't predict. Ivor built Attraction as an "industrial OS"—a combination of custom IoT hardware (called Smart Track sensors) and SaaS software for asset management and predictive maintenance. The hardware costs $100 per unit to produce, but each sensor generates $45/month in recurring revenue—a 2.5 to 4-month payback period. While they position as a SaaS company, the hardware component proved critical: "If you really nail down the hardware part, you can go to market more easily and have more successful customers that are paying more, expanding more."

Their go-to-market strategy focused on SMBs in industrial sectors—the "most unassisted" segment. They built a focused funnel through content, webinars, and courses to reach the exclusive persona of maintenance managers. The results were strong: 100 qualified leads per month with a 25-27% conversion rate from qualified lead to paying customer. Today they have 100 customers across Latin America and Brazil, with plans to scale across a total addressable market of 600,000+ companies in those regions.

The product-hardware combination proved to be their competitive moat. Customers start with 30% of their critical assets (averaging 60 sensors per customer) and expand gradually—30% more sensors every few months. This creates a natural upsell motion without customers feeling overwhelmed. The result: 70% of recent growth came from new customer acquisition, but 30% came from expansion within the existing customer base. Their churn is incredibly low at 1.5% monthly (18% annually), and their net dollar retention hit 118% over the past year—meaning the business would double in a year even with zero new customer acquisition.

In March 2024, Attraction closed a $3.7M seed round led by White Coordinator and Summit Capital, valuing the company at $15-20M. They grew from $10,000 MRR a year ago to $100,000 MRR today—a 10x expansion. With 60 team members (40 engineers), they still have 12 months of runway and are thinking about a Series A in the $10-20M range. Their biggest customers include Embraer, the aircraft manufacturer, which uses Attraction to monitor all rotational machinery in airplane production—motors, engines, compressors, pumps, turbines, generators. As Ivor puts it: "If an asset fails or breaks down, that can cost a lot of money and sometimes security issues for industries. Yeah, well, and people can die." That's the gravity of the problem they're solving.