Pipefy

Alessio Alianzo had already built and run a local services marketplace in Brazil. As it grew, he found himself managing the business with a patchwork of tools: a CRM for sales, JIRA for software development, and separate test management software. Dozens of processes needed multiple teams to collaborate, and nothing ensured that each process was followed step by step. That gap became the idea for Pipefy, a workflow and collaboration platform that guides people through business processes.

Alessio started building in late 2014, running on what he described as a rough early version. The team released publicly in April 2015 with a small number of signups, and the product stayed free for a long time. Pipefy positioned itself as people coordination software rather than automation like Zapier or IFTTT: its aim was to make sure everyone in a company followed the same steps when onboarding a customer, from gathering information to drafting a contract, getting it signed, and handing off to customer success. The company began charging in August 2016, priced per user per month.

A launch on Product Hunt put Pipefy among the most-voted products of the day, which brought heavy traction and led to admission into the 500 Startups accelerator. The company accumulated more than 60,000 companies on its free plan. However, converting them was difficult. Small businesses did not have processes painful enough to pay for, and only about 400 companies converted. The companies that did pay were large enterprises such as GE, Accenture, Visa, and Travelers, which the team had been told were too early to target. Late in 2016 the company shifted its focus to enterprise customers.

The free-to-paid plan failed to convert the large majority of users. The team had hoped to exceed $100,000 in MRR from the free base, but the real conversions came from enterprise accounts. Those accounts expanded over time: Accenture started with four users and grew to more than 400 inside the platform. Alessio said the company reports roughly 10% negative churn month after month, driven by expansion revenue. The sales motion also required heavy human involvement, which pushed the company to add sales and engineering staff. Customer acquisition cost was about $900 per company against an average of roughly $200 per month, which implied a payback period of about 3.8 months.

At the time of the interview, Pipefy had 33 team members, with six in San Francisco for sales and 27 in Brazil for engineering. The company had raised about $2.6 million in total, including a seed round led by investors including the founders of Zendesk, 3D Ventures, Redpoint, and Valor Capital. Monthly revenue was about $50,000, and the goal was to reach $200,000 in MRR by the end of 2017.