Organize.app
Andrew Fan, now 34, launched his consulting agency back in 2012 at age 24, building it into a multi-million dollar business (doing "a few millions" last year) with 55 engineers. But after spending years focused solely on consulting work, he realized that building something from scratch and being fully responsible for all decisions was "much more fun than doing consulting." This realization sparked his pivot toward launching SaaS products as side projects within his holding company Upsilon.
Organize.app launched in March 2024 as one of several Slack applications Andrew's team built. The product solves a specific pain point: smaller, growing companies using Slack heavily need to visualize their organizational structure and manage basic HR features like org charts, birthdays, and PTO tracking—but they're too small for enterprise HR tools. Andrew decided to leverage Slack's marketplace as a distribution channel, reasoning that it's "a perfect place to start your bootstrap small business" because "once you release something for Slack you can get into their marketplace. Basically this is a free marketing tool for you."
Andrew's strategy was elegant: optimize for Slack marketplace search by making keywords bold in the description (org chart, birthday, work anniversary, manage PTO) and building features that would rank well. When users search for "org" related terms, Organize.app appears in the top 5-10 results. His first customers found them this way—organically through Slack search. Today, "all of your trialing customers and paid customers today have come from the Slack App Exchange."
Organize.app currently has 5 paying customers representing roughly 200 seats, generating approximately $400 MRR (charged at $1 per user annually or $1.25 monthly). Andrew credits the pricing model's growth potential to his customers' natural expansion: "If you are growing, you need to visualize your organization... revenue is growing." Only 1.5 full-time people work on Organize.app out of the 55-person holding company; the rest split time across other projects and the core consulting business. Andrew has two future models in mind: either transition to a venture studio model (taking equity in ventures he helps launch) or grow one of the SaaS products large enough to shift more of his team's focus away from consulting work.
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