29 December 2024
Year-end letter, 2024
113 paying shops. AED 78M of GMV. Shipped subscriptions, the wholesaler marketplace, the AI marketing autopilot. Hired four. Lost one important customer to a personal decision. Here's the unvarnished version of year two.
The good
- 113 paying shops across UAE, KSA, Bahrain, and Oman. We started 2024 at 28.
- AED 78M of processed GMV. Triple year one.
- Shipped subscriptions, wholesaler marketplace public launch, AI marketing autopilot, smart reorder watch, AI blog generator, custom domains, and Stripe auto-billing.
- Net revenue retention sits at 118%. Shops are growing, not just renewing.
The hard
- Lost one anchor customer — a small chain in Dubai — to a personal decision by the founder to retire. Three shops, AED 1.4M ARR. Painful but unrelated to the product.
- The first AI marketing autopilot got revoked by 40% of the tenants we shipped it to in Q2. We rebuilt it in Q4 with brand-voice guardrails; the new version is sticky.
- Hired four engineers, two of them needed to be let go in months 4–5. Hiring well is the hardest thing about scaling a vertical SaaS.
The plan for 2025
- 300 paying shops
- Native iOS POS app
- Saudi Arabia formally launched (KSA tenants today are workarounds)
- A Floree-branded payments product, kept thin
- A self-serve corporate portal — buyers from the corporates buy directly, your team only handles the dispatch
Thank you to every shop owner who chose us this year. We're here for the long haul.