How ANT USA Inc CEO Dmitry Goykhman grew ANT USA Inc to $3.1M revenue and 80 customers in 2024.

guys and usa.com was launched to help retailers manage skus and inventory back in 1993 as an agency he launched the SAS platform just to call it uh 2019. now today doing 200 000 a month in revenue of which 160 000 of that is true recurring the other sort of one-time services that turn into recurring over time he's serving 80 customers helped them manage again the inventory there are thousands of skus there are millions of different combinations to make sure that they can keep making money like he's doing he's profiting caught 50-ish thousand dollars per month in Revenue completely bootstrapped with a team of 16. got a great War chest 600 000 cash in the bank and has total expenses every month is just 150 000 bucks much less than his Revenue this is the kind of founder we love hey folks my guest today is Dimitri goikman he is a queen's college MIT course six started his company in 1992 for freedom and profit which we love he's bootstrapped never took outside Capital still work for a living is very Hands-On he's now building antusa.com which is merchandise planning for retail chains Dimitri you ready to take us to the top sure all right now now how did you get into this space were you running a retail chain a grocery store before no it was uh I was a geek basically and you know a software development electrical engineering seemed like real work so I kind of slid into uh Consulting for large retailers I used to work for digital equipment which then was like the size of IBM and they had a lot of big accounts and so I started doing that and then at some point I decided to jump off the career ladder and do my own thing and yeah you know basically slid into it sideways it seemed like an easy way to make some money so what year did you write the first line of code for ant I think I wrote the first prototype in 93 but it was in uh it was for a custom system for a company called guacamole Pottery they sold a lot of Mikasa and you know Lion King blankets in in North Carolina and uh uh sizable then and then they showed up you know five years later we decided that it was worth you know doing a product at the time there weren't any planning systems on PCS it was all mainframes okay so you get going in 1993 now was it software as a service back then that would have been very early for SAS no no no no it was uh it was all uh traditional sort of you know first custom development and systems development client server we became software as a service really over the last three or four years uh you know because uh you know because the clients wanted to go that way and because I wanted to stabilize the cash flow they on a subscription basis rather than on a project basis you know projects you know starve or eat right uh SAS has been much much much better for us and I think that's definitely the way we're staying okay so you you okay so that's helpful context I guess before we dive deep into the backstory here tell us an example of a customer that pays you today and what they're paying for uh so we have we we have basically retail chain customers you know the there are no ones might be like Puma or Zoomies but they're you know there are you know lots of smaller ones the bigger ones that are privately held uh what they pay us is to give them a you know usually it's a large database with a lot of sophisticated sort of vertical kpis retailers happen to plan their inventory better than any other industry that I know of because if they don't buy they go out of business they don't have anything to sell and there are literally billions of combinations of products stores over time so we try to simplify all that and over the years we've developed some pretty effective business processes to help them with and so Dimitri what does a company like pumi don't tell them specifically but on average what's the customer paying you per month or per year to use your technology uh not about Puma but on the average it's from a thousand to five thousand a month is what we would we charge okay so would you say like maybe three thousand a month is a fair average let's say let's say three grand a month and then we charge something like Thirty to fifty thousand dollars to stand them up basically that integration you know Services okay that makes that makes sense so if I'm paying you thirty six thousand dollars per year so three thousand a month plus then a thirty case that I feel on top of that how do you price that is it based off number of skus number of inventory calls API calls how do you price no we we we price proceed and it's usually a small number of very high value users and you know the the ROI on our product can be as high as 100x not a hundred percent so how many seats how many seats do am I probably paying for if I'm paying you 36 Grand a year I might buy a couple of seats you might buy 10 seats you might buy 20 seeds you know depending on on the on the buyer and plan a team that that you're running but okay it's a fairly small number of high value viewers users right so a planner could be planning as much as a hundred million dollars worth of business and buying as much as 20 30 million dollars worth of inventory over the course of the year and we help them optimize in effect you know planning and buying which you know is worth a lot of money 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 the 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 evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're 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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 valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna 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 and it sounds like you went from services and Consulting to more pure SAS about three four years ago in 2019 2020 time frame fast forward to today how many customers do you have on your SAS platform um I have about 80 customers on the uh you know 80 80 Enterprise customers but we're picking up customers fairly quickly those are 80 paying eight zero paying Enterprise customers yeah oh wow well congratulate I mean if I'm doing my math right 80 customers times 3 000 a month what are you doing 240 000 bucks a month in Revenue not everybody pays 3 000 right and some of our customers are actually we've moved them to the SAS model but we still charge them you know old style maintenance which which actually comes out to less we never drop a customer okay but then your average customer though isn't paying three grand a month like we just talked about Bitcoin average pure sales customers paying about that okay Legacy customers you know typically paying less but they've been with us for many years so some course that's very profitable for us so okay right so yeah we we you know we're upwards over two to three million dollars now you know somewhere 230 it's you're doing 230 000 a month yeah well about 200 a month right 200 well congratulations that's great and give me a sense of how how large was your services business before you launched SAS in 2019 it was larger um I would say that probably 30 40 of our Revenue was in these implementations and services...