Digital marketing reporting software.
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14m ·
How this Reporting Tool Bootstrapped to $4.2m ARR, 2600 Customers
SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
So 2600 customers, 135 bucks a month, means you're doing that 351,000 bucks a month right now on revenue, correct?
Yeah, US, yeah.
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Hey folks, my guest today is Antoine Paray.
He's been building and helping business grow online for over a decade with digital marketing.
Today is a CEO and partner at Dash this.
A software helping thousands of digital marketers every day.
He's also a fan man who's happy as hiking and skiing with his two kids
or traveling with them around the world.
And Juan, you ready to take us to the top?
Absolutely.
All right, tell us about Dash this, who's paying for this right now?
Mainly marketing agencies or any marketers that needs to have good looking reports each month.
And we help them to automate them, they're marketing reporting.
So yeah, we're here to help them going faster and a simple manner with their reporting.
And what are they paying for month and average to use that kind of technology?
135 dollars for existing clients.
Yep.
And it's always been that way or have you kind of edited and tested pricing over time?
We've did a round.
I say like five to six different pricing over time.
Like we've been here for 10 years.
But the clients have really changed over time.
Like at the beginning, 10 years ago it was really big agencies.
And now it's every day, it's every, everyone who has a business or has the marketing online.
So it's kind of a different crowd that we had 10 years ago.
Interesting.
And so you launched in 2011.
You've scaled marketing agencies or using how many pay you today to use the tech?
How many clients have you had?
How many clients?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Two thousand and six hundred clients.
Yeah.
Two thousand six hundred.
Okay, that's great.
Did you have about a year ago, do you remember?
I think we got like 500 to 600 clients for last year.
Tell me about that.
How are you driving growth?
SEO mainly.
Like SEO and PPC.
It's really all inbound marketing.
Okay.
Break these down for me.
A lot of people like they want to do SEO.
They wanted to PPC.
They don't know how to do it.
Let's talk about SEO first.
What's your strategy?
Like 10 years ago, Stefan, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, the funder of the edges that was the only owner,
like really tried to do this by his own.
Like he created content, like lots of content.
It was really helpful to drive the business.
Like with more revenues.
And when I, he hired me as a consultant was I was specializing in SEO.
And I kind of helped him to develop more content and to really more to be more like specific.
And keywords and like to be more of a sniper, I'd say.
And then we hired like people who were who was only doing this.
And we tried with, we did a lot of blog posts, but it wasn't all working.
So we kind of figured out that there were specific keywords we were good at.
And we like did with like everyone is doing like we, we got some tools.
We, we chosen keywords and we fight hard for them.
And then, and but a smaller, a really small portion of our, our SEO brings a lot of our, of our incomes.
Yeah.
And it can we get a clue from that from your footer.
So the keywords you really focus on our SEO reporting, social media monitoring, face book reporting, things like that.
Yeah, of course, of course.
And, and now today, we're working on more.
More about the awareness and like for KPI keywords or, or, or things that are,
and not necessarily, and at the bottom of the funnel, but more at the top of the funnel to like, because we have a lot of content for the lower part of portion of the funnel.
Like people that are highly converting.
So we have to like to, to be working more in the top.
And what about PPC, so how much do you pay to get a new 135 dollar month customer?
Uh, PPC, I'd say 600 and PPC, but overall, I'd say like, I have $450 for the both portion.
What I don't understand.
Um, I mean, like, for all our clients, like, like, the catch, the customer acquisition costs for all of our clients, like, is about like, for 150 dollars.
I see got it. So 450, they pay 135, you get paid back in three to four months.
Yeah, I see. Where are you spending that money, Facebook, Google somewhere else?
Mainly Google.
Interesting.
We did a lot of Facebook earlier, like, retargeting and stuff like that, but it worked out as much as Google did so.
And do you have to constantly change the copy or can you benefit?
It'll stick with the same copy on Google and it's worked for a long period of time.
Um, yeah, recently we worked hard on that.
So, and it helped the results are better, but I don't think we are working on that every week or every month.
Like, it's kind of like,
Sprints, we did like a for a few months ago.
We worked on that and then we worked like last year, but it's not a constant work for us.
Yeah, Facebook, marketing report, Google searches, you guys, and then overflow and then suit and then the arena in terms of all the ad placements.
So it makes sense.
You're sort of going up to these keywords.
How much do you spend in the past 30 days on paid ads total?
Uh, $50,000 Canadian.
Okay, got it. That's not a ton.
So it's work.
I mean, can you can you double that and double your customer base or no?
Uh, we've been increasing our budget lately, so yeah, we're trying it.
Yeah, interesting.
Okay, and then talking about equity, you mentioned you weren't a founder but you were hired.
Do you own equity?
Yeah, 30%.
Okay, got it. So tell me how you worked out that deal.
There's a bunch of people listening right now that they'd want to join us as company.
They want to negotiate for 30% like you did. How'd you do it?
Um, I'd say, I'd say that you really,
Stefan really, really believed in my capacity to grow the business.
So he gave me a good deal, I'd say.
Yeah.
So he owns the other other 70.
Yeah.
Got it. And you guys are bootstrapped?
Absolutely.
I love this.
That's great.
Totally bootstrapped.
Any plans to raise you want to stay bootstrapped?
Uh, bootstrapped.
I love that.
Why is it so important to you guys?
Did you guys get burned to the past by some BCs or what?
No.
I don't know why.
It's kind of the, it's an RDNA.
Like we want to do stuff we believe in and we want to be like independent.
Yeah.
I love it that way for now.
So 2600 customers, 135 bucks a month means you're doing that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And what were you doing?
But.
Because we are converting our revenues in Canadian.
So like for now, I'm like in five point two million dollars revenues.
Canadian right now.
I see. I see.
Yeah. So I'm converting to USD.
So if you were doing 301,000 bucks USD today,
what were you doing a year ago, do you remember?
30 like 33% less like I say like, yeah.
Okay. So about 200, 230,000 something like that.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Okay.
That's great growth.
And where's is most that growth coming from adding the 600 new customers or getting old customers to buy more?
He probably like 40% of our new incomes are coming from a grade like up sales.
Okay.
And so what are you up selling? I'm looking at your pricing page right now.
Is it number of dashboards?
Yeah.
And integrations are all unlimited. So it's got to be dashboards.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And this is the way we do things that we're kind of the only one now that doing that are doing this.
Like every other platforms are charging for the number of clients.
And we are so we are so least charging for the number of dashboards.
So so it's kind of a simple pricing.
I think we should work on that. But for now on, it's like working for us and people are glad about that.
Because it's simple to understand and simple to use.
So yeah.
When they have the past 30 days, how many people purchased the 995 fully branded design?
It's something we sell less nowadays because we try to,
We're working on a new feature like that will let all the clients to customize their design like buy themselves like sell serve.
And we were selling as well like custom URLs and custom design and it was servicing and we didn't really like that.
If someone came to you on LinkedIn or whatever and said so on or Antoine,
I want to buy the company for $50 million all cash upfront.
Do you guys take the deal?
Honestly, I'd like to heard about this story about what we're going to do with the business because of course it would be interesting.
But we build something so.
So it's so how I could say I'm so emotional about the business and I like the people here.
So it would not only have to be a good deal.
It would have to be something a great idea that would just kill the business and and like use the full potential of this business.
How you mentioned the people there? How many folks are full time today?
32 and how many engineers?
12, 13 around the.
And flat the over year of you have made a bunch of hires.
How much have I was a team last year?
We were I say like 24 or 33 last year and we're hiring like 10 more this year.
Okay, so today 32 on the team, you said 12 engineers?
Yep.
How many sales reps?
Two.
With a quota.
Not yet.
Not yet.
Not yet.
We're trying to say like 50% self serve and 50% like sales assistant.
Mm hmm.
And what does sales assistant mean?
To me, it's someone right now who is talking to sales before buying in any manner.
So a demo call or just a question during sales cycle. So yeah, 50% or self serve 100%
Very cool. And so what do you need? I mean, do you think it or get to the point where you're testing a quota?
Or do you have to increase your price point for it to do that?
It's not clear to me, honestly, I'm not kind of a sales guy and we need to do to work on that.
Honestly, yeah, all the sales processes.
We've, I'm going to see an inbound marketing guy like the business has grown because of SEO because of inbound marketing.
And now we have to switch to sales because the company, the market is getting company.
It's a more of a competitive landscape. So yeah, we have to work more on sales.
And we're doing that this year.
Very cool. Talked to me about unit economics related to gross revenue churn the past 12 months.
What was that?
The or monthly churn is the revenue churn is at about like 3%.
Okay, monthly.
Yeah, monthly.
But does your expansion revenue fill that hole?
Yeah, of course.
Of course.
Okay, got it. So if you look at all your customers from exactly a year ago, ignore new customer signups.
All the ones just a year ago, you churn about 36% of them or about.
I'm sorry, no, I'm sorry. I know the upgrades don't necessarily ads.
It's not the equivalent as our churn.
No, that's for sure. We need our new revenues.
Yeah.
I see. I see. Okay, got it. So what's your net dollar retention today? Do you know?
No, I don't, I don't know it by heart. I'm sorry.
Okay, no, that's okay.
Very cool. This makes tons of sense.
Talk me more about product. Are you guys a stick with dashboards for our new products on the horizon?
No, it's only dashboards.
It's simple reporting.
We're not a big team. Like we're 32.
We have to fight hard on simplicity and easiness.
Like we have the major integration, the major features.
We let other people fight for the number of integrations and number of key behind anything.
That's simple tool to use and a fun tool to use with great customer happiness.
That's, that's the way we do things like we're not.
I see almost 36 integrations on your integrations page.
Integrations tend to clog up people's Trello boards, right?
They were working on integrations all day long.
How do you build so many integrations so effectively?
Um, I don't know.
We, we, we really are good with marketing people.
We're good with marketing.
Fast and we stick to marketing integrations.
And it's kind of, but doesn't that require your engineers to build the Google adwards integration
or the, you know, linked in pages integrations or SEM rush integration or no?
Of course, they're here for that.
But they're so here for maintaining these and, and, and having them, and making them simple to use.
Like if you compare like super metrics, I, as hundreds of integrations,
but they're not necessarily easy to use when you plug it to Google that is to do.
And we have a lot of people in our clients that don't necessarily know what they want
to do.
So we're, we're here to give them features that help them select the red KPIs and to use them
in a wise manner in a simple manner.
So we work on features and usability, not necessarily the number of integration.
I don't know if I'm clear here.
That does.
Guys, if you're listening around and you're a SaaS founder and you're, like,
Antoine, you're dependent on having great integrations, but you don't want to
clock up your Trello board and you don't want to pay 30 people and you don't have the,
the ability to hire 12 engineers, try Paragon.
There's a lot of startups in SaaS world using Paragon to launch an integration faster.
We've got a great deal with them for the show.
It's NathanLacka.com, Ford Sush, Paragon, P.A.R.A. G.O.N. and Antoine.
That was pretty smooth.
Wasn't it?
Yes.
Come on.
All right.
All right.
Very cool.
So, you know, economics look good.
You love being bootstrapped.
2600 customers.
How many are you going to sign up this year, you think?
Uh, I hope 600 to 700.
Yeah.
All right.
We're rooting for a man.
Let's wrap up here with the famous five.
Number one.
Favorite business book?
Uh, I'd say start with why.
Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?
Yes.
Loretate Xu.Covio here in Quebec.
It's a big business that just made an IPO.
And yes, I look at them.
Claudio.
Number three.
What's your favorite online tool for building dash this?
Um, for me, it's Hey Santa.
Yep.
Number four.
How many hours of sleep do you get every night?
Eight.
And situation.
Married single kids.
I think he said it.
Two kids.
Yeah.
I have two kids.
I'm not married.
But I'm with the same woman.
Yeah.
She's great.
Oh, amazing.
And how old are you?
Uh, 35.
Last question.
Something you wish you knew when you were 20.
Being present is the most important thing in life, though.
Enjoy the ride.
Guys, there you have a dash this launched a couple years ago called 2011.
They did about $240,000 a month and revenue a year ago.
They've now since scaled to 350,000 United States dollars per month.
They're about a 4.2 million run rate.
Again, all bootstrapped, helping 26 hundred customers get their dashboards live.
Faster, more efficiently.
Better reporting, growing mainly from SEO and paid ads with the four month CAC payback period,
spending $400,500 bucks to get a new $135 a month customer.
$30,000 a team with 12 engineers looking at hiring responsibly as they continue to bootstrapped
and grow.
Step on things.
Thanks for taking us to the top.
It was fun.
Thanks for watching.
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