How Aida Soft CEO Joe Long grew Aida Soft to $120K revenue and 60 customers in 2022.

hey folks my guest today is joe long he's a serial entrepreneur cfo ceo ceo for various companies the secret sauce is fixing adjusting smbs for operational efficiency and building perpetual motion teams he's had four years in the air force 30 years and around silicon valley and now is focused on certain industries like manufacturing i.t staffing companies with installers who are actually in the field he does this via adasoft.net his erp software for flooring companies joe you ready to take us to the top i am all right did i get that right adasoft is your software company that's right yep all right endosoft is uh software i started building three years ago actually that's amazing okay so where did you get the idea from so 2009 i worked for a flooring company and uh i started in it early on but the flooring company had some really antiquated software 40 years old started in the 80s and i thought well we can do better than this so we built some tools with excel built some tools with access and then i left the company so i kind of let it go fast forward to 2018 2019 i found myself back with that uh same group different flooring company still using the same software so i went out looked at the right four main competitors uh in the flooring industry and it's niche so everyone built the software uh who ran a flooring company and then yeah go ahead no that's great i'm just laughing this is a great story who are the other three so called q floor who else so there's rfms role master and those two recently got bought out so they got bought out by larger companies that are packaging different uh different types of flooring coffee floors one of the independents left there's another called q floors but all of them were started by floor professionals who just needed a better software way back when so they started in the 80s in the 90s i think q4s was the most recent but all of them you know they're built on old sql databases and they've all tried to put a new front end on it didn't work out so copy floor is actually failing uh in its transaction so the inventory isn't accurate things like that so i said well i'm going to go ahead and build it now that i have the time and resources and you're an engineer are you self-taught no actually i'm not i got into the it world uh funny story back in the air force right and when i got out i found out all of my technology was outdated so i went into accounting because i could still use computers still play with excel still play with little bits of code i'm not a coder by any stretch um you know i learned cobalt fortran and basic way back when so i hope you can keep up with so joe how do you how do you get the idp bill you start coding us three years ago how do you get the mvp up right so what i am good at is building a database so i built the sql database designed it built the flows around it and then i outsourced everything so i think i mentioned uh when i emailed you that on a one-man show in terms of that everything else is contracted everything else is outsourced and i think i'm gonna keep it that way for a while i love that so how many people last month did you pay at least a dollar to do some kind of task for you and adasoft sixty six okay okay give us a little bit of flavor of what they do right so uh it's a team out of india it's a company called flexsin and ceo logistics f-l-e-x s-i-n and c-o-logistics so they've done a great job for me i just contacted and looked at the reviews way back when and uh they started working with me over time within the budget that i had yeah which was what what was the budget well it was uh about ten thousand dollars a month to begin with and then it floated up to about twenty twenty five thousand dollars a month and now we're just kind of putting icing on the cake and you know we're down to around ten thousand dollars a month all right so how much have you sunk in so far your own money uh about 320 000 oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're going to get a different valuation a vc is going to pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when i hover over here right so the teal is what a vc would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on youtube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of sas valuations than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform i hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview so how did people are going to go wait how's this guy rich already did you have some big eggs in your past or just savings or what right so throughout all this time uh from 2015 forward i actually restarted a business that i had started during the internet boom back in 98 to 2002. it was called q associates and q associates with an agency right we did staffing and consulting and the secret sauce is i do what other companies don't do well for themselves that's the small and medium-sized businesses so maybe they're really good at manufacturing maybe they're really good at installing floors but they're not really good at accounting i.t you know hr payroll so i come in i smooth those out i train people i set up teams and that's kind of the secret sauce one time and they're helping i might say well i'll force your accounting to me outsource your recharge again so you make money over there consulting right right so that business is uh more or less evaporated during tobin right because everything's staffed and uh everyone wanted the ppp money so i was able to hang on to them and get some ppp money which also helped uh to build this software that's wild also so what are they yeah oh sorry we're cutting each other off i apologize but you move back into off then once you get going you start putting it three years ago help me understand today what's the product and what are customers paying out on average per month for it right so it's an end-to-end erp system so from sales to cash right all the way through handles inventory accounting finance scheduling labor rates whole nine yards for for installer companies with installers in the field it's primarily designed for flooring right now but it can easily be applied to landscaping or you know electricians whoever has bands in the field to keep track of so the uh rate per user 169 dollars and uh you know our first customer here has about 60 users so right out of the gate uh we're you know we're in pretty good shape so wait come on you gotta explain so you gotta explain that how do you land as your first customer someone that's gonna pay you 60 seats times 170 bucks a seat or about 10 km or r i happen to be the ceo with that company so you control the budget this is insider trading right well yeah i don't get to choose whether they accept it but the fact that copyfloor is failing so badly and can't keep track of the finances it makes it really easy for me so literally copyfloor is failing across its entire customer base they've had three project managers who've left over the last 18 months lead programmer left so they've uh they're struggling so you know it's a ready-made market for me and i don't mind sharing that because i'm first to the egg when do you say when do you i mean doesn't eventually doesn't assault start growing so fast that you have to...