ANT USA Inc Revenue (2024)

[00:00] As antusa.com was launched to help retailers manage SKUs and inventory back in 1993 as an agency, he launched the SaaS platform, just call it 2019. Now today doing $200,000 a month in revenue of which 160,000 of is true recurring. The other sort of one time services that turn into recurring over time, he's serving 80 customers to help them manage again, the inventory, there are thousands of SKUs, there are millions of different combinations to make sure that [00:24] 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 his total expenses every month is just $150,000, much less than his revenue. This is the kind of founder we love. Hey, folks. My guest today is Dmitry Goykhman. He is a Queens College MIT course. Six started his company in 1992 for [00:49] 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. Dmitry, you ready to take us to the top? [01:04] >> Sure. Let's see. [01:05] Now, how did you get into this space? Were you running a retail chain, a grocery store before? [01:11] >> No. I was I was a a geek, basically, and, you know, software development, electrical engineering seemed like real work. So I kind of slid into 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 [01:39] >> know, basically slid into it sideways. It seemed like an easy way to make some money. [01:43] So what year did you write the first line of code for ant? [01:46] >> I think I wrote the first prototype in '93, but it was in it was for a custom system for a company called Wakamo Pottery. They sold a lot of Mikasa and, you know, Lion King blankets in in North Carolina and sizable then. And then we sort of, 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. [02:13] Okay. So you get going in 1993. Now was it software as a service back then? That would have been very early for SaaS. [02:20] >> No. No. No. No. It was it was all traditional sort of, you know, first custom development, then systems development, client server. We became software as a service really over the last three or four years, you know, because, you know, because the clients wanted to go that way and because they wanted to stabilize the cash flow on a subscription basis rather than on a project basis. You know, projects that, you know, starve or eat. Right? SaaS has [02:49] >> been much, much, much better for us, and I think that's definitely the way we're staying. [02:54] Okay. So you you okay. So that 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. [03:05] >> So we have we we have basically retail chain customers. You know, the the normal ones might be like Puma or Zoomies, but there are, you know, there are, you know, lots of smaller ones. There are bigger ones that are privately held. 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 [03:32] >> 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 product 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. [03:48] And so, Dmitry, what does a company like Pumi, and don't tell them specifically, but on average, what's the customer paying you per month or per year to use your technology? [03:56] >> Not about Puma, but on the average, it's from 1,000 to 5,000 a month is what we we would charge. [04:03] Okay. So would you say like maybe 3,000 a month is a fair average? [04:06] >> Let's say let's say $3 a month and then we charge something like 30 to $50,000 to stand them up basically that integration, you know, services. Mhmm. [04:15] Okay. That makes sense. So if I'm paying you $36,000 per year, so 3,000 a month plus then a 30 ks set up fee 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? [04:28] >> No. We we we price per seat, 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 a 100 x, not a 100%. [04:40] So how many seats how many seats do I am I probably paying for if I'm paying you $36 a year? [04:44] >> You might buy a couple of seats. You might buy 10 seats. You might buy 20 seats, you know, depending on on the on the buyer and plan a team that 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 $100,000,000 worth of business and buying as much as $2,030,000,000 dollars worth of inventory over the course of the year, And we [05:10] >> help them optimize in effect, you know, planning and buying, which, you know, is worth a lot of money. [05:16] Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders, but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 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 Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you connect [05:39] your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time. You can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna [06:03] get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation. Private equity firm is different. If you're gonna 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 [06:25] not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder share with us on the show. So traction 1,200,000 seed round 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna 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 [06:51] going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll 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 dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. 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 [07:13] if you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link, this link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. 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. Alright. Let's jump back into [07:39] the interview. And it sounds like you went from services and consulting to more pure SaaS about three, four years ago in 2019, 2020 timeframe. Fast forward to today, how many customers do you have on your SaaS platform? [07:52] >> I have about 80 customers on the, you know, 80 enterprise customers. We're picking up customers fairly quickly now. [08:00] Those are 80 paying eight zero paying enterprise customers? [08:02] >> Yeah. [08:03] 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 a month in revenue? [08:10] >> Not everybody pays 3,000. Right? And some of our customers are actually we move we move them to the SaaS model, but we still charge them, you know, old style maintenance, which which actually comes out to less. We never drop a customer. [08:24] Okay. But then your average customer, though, isn't paying $3 a month like we just talked about. They're paying less. [08:29] >> Average pure SaaS customer is paying about that. Okay. The legacy customers are, you know, typically paying less, but they've been with us for many years. So some cost is very profitable for us. So Okay. Right? So, yeah, we we we you know, we're upwards of 2 to $3,000,000 now, you know, somewhat. [08:47] 230 so you're doing 230,000 a month? [08:49] >> Yeah. Well, about 200 a month right now. [08:51] 200. Well, congratulations. That's great. And give me a sense of how how large was your services business before you launched SaaS in 2019? [09:02] >> It was larger. I would say that probably 40% of our revenue was in these implementations and services. Now, you know, given given an opportunity, I would drive it to zero. It's never gonna go to zero. But it's maybe, you know, maybe 15% now. I think that probably 85% of our of our revenue is recurring services. It is recurring billing. And my goal is [09:30] Eighty percent's recurring? [09:32] >> Eighty, eighty five now. You know, it it I'd have to look it up. I haven't looked it up. [09:36] But But the $200,000 a month number you just gave me, that's pure recurring. Right? [09:39] >> No. That's everything. [09:41] Oh, that's okay. So 80 percent of that is recurring. Right? So so a 160,000 or $4,040,000 is like one time service stuff. [09:48] >> Right. But what happens is they come back to us anyway. So even the onetime service stuff, when you get well organized, they come back to they need more training. You bill them by you know, for the sessions. They need enhancements. You bill them for that. So it's it's fairly predictable business flow Yep. Even though it's not, you know, even though it's not a quarterly invoice. [10:07] So And, Dmitry, if you're at 200,000 a month today on average, where were you exactly one year ago so we can calculate a growth rate? [10:14] >> I was less than two. So [10:17] Well, that's good. [10:18] >> No. We're doing really well. I think we're we're about 20% above last year. Okay. [10:24] So maybe you're doing about a 160,000 a month Yeah. About a year ago. [10:27] >> 160, 180, depending on months. Yeah. [10:30] Okay. And so how are you driving this growth? Tell me about how you get new customers. [10:35] >> Well, there's a couple of things that are going on. I, you know, I joined SaaS Academy, Dan Dan Martell's SaaS Academy. Right? It's been basically learning all the stuff I didn't learn over the last thirty years. So that's been very helpful in terms of focusing the effort and and and the scale and looking for, you know, ideal customer profile. [10:57] >> It's good. Right? [10:58] I'm gonna write I'm gonna write up a big story on this interview. Do I have your permission to post that in the Facebook, the SaaS Academy group? [11:04] >> Yeah. You should. I mean, they're they're great guys. And, you know, I gotta I gotta tell you that I've always worked you know, I kinda built this in isolation. There was nobody to ask. There's no podcast like yours to watch. There's no SaaS Academy. You know, I learned the words like invoice, you know, when the customer ARPU. Yeah. The the customer said, send me an invoice. I'm like, what's an invoice? Right? So so, you know, the [11:28] >> ability to be able to ask and to triangulate and to see what other people are doing and where where I fall, you know, in like, I've always thought that everybody does things this way. Right? But, [11:42] >> you know, I built this business. I I was thinking about this, you know, before a podcast. If you give me a couple of minutes, I can tell you a little bit. Right? I built it for resilience to a large extent rather than for growth. Mhmm. Right? And, you know, when you when you do this for years, you learn a few lessons. One is that everybody dies. And I don't mean personally. I mean, business dies. It was [12:06] >> the year 2000 when nobody bought anything. It was the year 2008 when nobody bought anything. There was the pandemic where for a couple of months nobody paid any invoices. So you end up going through these existential crises and unless you can survive a crisis, you're done. Mhmm. And so I, you know, I kinda thought about it in, you know, in retrospect, I built this company, first of all, for resilience. Right? Because, you know, if you're if [12:33] >> you're funded by risk capital, it's somebody else's money at risk. You go on, you fail someplace else, or you succeed someplace else. I didn't wanna fail. So I failed sequentially in the same place, but it got reborn. [12:45] No. But but you launched in 1993. Were you the sole founder? Do you own a 100%? [12:48] >> I had a I had a co owner, and I bought her out, you know, about fifteen years ago. [12:53] Oh, tell me more about that. There's a lot of people listening with co founders that, you know, maybe things have changed. They wanna buy them out, but they don't know how to do it. How'd you do it? [13:00] >> I had a long difficult negotiation. And then eventually just, you know, we went for a business valuation and they they gave us a valuation and I paid [13:13] What was the valuation? [13:15] >> It wasn't I don't know. It wasn't a lot at the time. It was pre Like a million? Not even, I think. I don't know. It's $5,600. It was Okay. The idea was, like, if the founder isn't in it, what's the business worth? Very little. [13:28] So you got evaluation. This is in 2005. You bought out your cofounder. You got evaluation for 600 k, then what? [13:33] >> Then I paid her I don't know. I paid her, like, I don't know, 120, 150, or $200 in cash. Honestly, I don't remember. And then the rest, you know, over time. [13:42] Well, how'd you negotiate that? Like, why $1.20, why $1.50 cash up front? [13:47] >> I don't remember. You know, I I I can make it up, but I don't remember. [13:50] Well, did she own a percent of the company and then the percent of that against 600,000 valuation is how you got to the payout? [13:56] >> Yeah. We were half and half. [13:57] Okay. So she was 50. Okay. Right. But Interesting. [14:01] >> And, you know, but it worked out with with great friends, and, you know, there's no there's no there's no, like, bad blood. I, you know, I don't think I'm in conflict with anybody. Have been in conflict with anybody. [14:13] Well, I like that you bet on yourself. Right? A $500, 600,000 valuation. If you paid 300 k to buy out your 50% cofounder fifteen years ago, and now you're doing 2,400,000 annually, I'd say it's fair to say you're worth more than $600,000 today. So I like that you bet on yourself. [14:25] >> I'm probably worth more, but that's not what's driving me. Right? You know, what's driving me is is the ability you know, there's a there's an interesting thing. I I was thinking about it. This is kind of a balance that works for me. It might not work for everybody. Right? You you gotta do the work that you respect. So I'm thinking, do I like what I do? I like what I do. I honestly like what I do [14:49] >> after all these years. Right? And it makes me smile most of the time. And I can go back, I can go to sleep and I can say, I did a good job. That's important to me, right? Then you want to make some money. So what's money? Like you can't take it with you, but you can fund your bills, you can pay your kids. Have a bunch of kids. They're all great kids. [15:09] How many kids, Dmitry? [15:11] >> I I got four kids of my own and one through a marriage and a bunch of grandchildren. And you know what? Somebody asked me, you know, one of the questions in the Dan Martell's academy meeting was, you know, what's your ideal exit? Right? My ideal exit is to leave as much money as possible to my progeny to give them an unfair advantage in life and to teach them what to do with it. [15:34] Yep. Well, I love that. Talk to me more about how you're doing that. Right? So so obviously, a key thing about growing and scaling this without I assume you have not raised outside capital. Right? No. So bootstrapped, which we love. Does that mean you're profitable today? [15:46] >> I'm profitable. I've got probably about six months worth of run rate in in cash because I'm I'm actually waiting for the sky to fall, to be honest. [15:57] Well, what does that mean? So if you're profitable, you wouldn't be able to calculate six months of runway because you have infinite runway because you're profitable. [16:03] >> No. I I have infinite runway. I meant spend. [16:07] Your total expenses. If you have no revenue, your total what are your total expenses per month? Like, $50.60, 100 k? [16:13] >> No. What is it? 150 right now. [16:16] Okay. Where do you spend most of that money? Salaries. Most Engineering? [16:22] >> Most of it is engineering. We're still built as an engineering company. Although now that's changing, we're gonna be bringing on more front end. Mhmm. We've been you know, resilience to me is this kind of a combination of product. Like, you gotta have a good product or else what are you selling? Right? Just smoke and mirrors. You gotta have reputation. We have excellent reputation in our market. Like, I I like it being the vendor of last resort. [16:48] >> You can try Oracle, and when you when you break your teeth, come to us. We'll solve your problem. You can try somebody else. When you break your teeth, come to us. We actually do solve their problem. I don't have any angry customers. Not a single one of them is angry. [17:00] No, Dmitry. We we love that. So just to be clear, though, so you're spending a $150,000 per month in total spend. If you've got six months of total spend in your bank, that means you've got about a million cash in the bank, which you saved up from profits over time. [17:11] >> I don't have no. No. No. That is not the way it works. Like, I'm keeping about $600 in a in cash. Yep. And the reason for that is if if the sky starts falling, I'll shed some of the expenses. [17:22] Yep. Yep. That's good way that's a good way to do it. You didn't answer my question about growth. How how do you go from 80 customers to 90 customers? Where are you finding them? [17:31] >> So we've been traditionally selling based on reputation, price, and, you know, in hard times, people tend to flock to that. [17:42] Well, try try to be specific. I mean, reputation is very generic. You know, when a customer closes and when a customer closes and pays you and you do a good job for them, do you send them a specific email script saying, hey, can you recommend one friend if you're happy? Like, how do you actually drive reputational inbound? [17:57] >> Sometimes I just ask them if they can recommend somebody. Sometimes they I just we basically have enough of them that they they bring people to us. I've started doing a couple of things lately that I think are really working well. We're starting to work with some college programs, so we're gonna give them the software to teach the discipline using our software. I've started doing analyst briefings, which we I didn't do before. That seems to be driving, [18:25] >> you know, leads. I started posting sort interesting things on LinkedIn more that all of a sudden, you know, I post a couple of times with, you know, in-depth, and I start getting inquiries from people that I've never heard from before. So I think for us, the driver is increasing mindshare, if that makes sense. Right? And, you know, I my next challenge is to go exactly from reputational selling to more willful selling. I mean [18:53] Dmitry, on that note, tell me about the team you have around you. How many full time? [18:57] >> I've got 16 people full time. [18:59] How many of the 16 are engineers? [19:02] >> Seven well, six six are engineers and seven are QA, and there's myself and a couple of customer success people. [19:11] Any any sales reps besides yourself? [19:14] >> No. [19:14] I love that, Dmitry. Well, hey, listen, we're out of time for today. Let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite business book? [19:22] >> What's my favorite business? What is it? Eat the big fish, I think. [19:26] Alright. Number two. Is there a CEO you're following or studying? [19:30] >> No. [19:31] Number three. What's your favorite online tool for building ant? [19:35] >> What's my favorite? Excel. [19:38] Excel? Excel. Okay. Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night? Seven. Seven. And then situation, married, single? Because we already know you have five kiddos. Right? [19:49] >> Five kiddos, married. I've been really lucky with him. [19:53] That's great. And how old are you, Dmitry? [19:55] >> I'm 60. [19:56] Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20 years old. [20:01] >> How to do the same things I'm doing but faster. [20:04] Guys, antusa.com was launched to help retailers manage SKUs and inventory back in 1993 as an agency. He launched the SaaS platform, just call it 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 to help them manage again, their inventory. There are thousands of SKUs, there are millions of different combinations to make sure [20:28] 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, his total expenses every month is just a $150,000, much less than his revenue. This is the kind of founder we love. Dmitry, thanks for taking us to the top. [20:48] >> My pleasure. Nice to talk to you. [20:51] One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. We call it deal or bust. One founder comes on, three hungry buyers. They try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards, their expenses, their revenue, ARPU CAC, LTV, you name it, they share it. And the buyers try and make a deal live. It is fun to watch every Thursday 1PM [21:16] Central. Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM Central. To make sure you don't miss any of that, make sure you click the subscribe button below here on YouTube, the big red button, and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live. I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a big [21:38] fundraise, big sale, a big profitability statement or something else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if you want to take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS founders. You want to get in there. We've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing. You can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying. Sign up [22:00] for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people. We got [22:20] to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. Alright, I'll be in the comments. See you.