How ANT USA Inc CEO Dmitry Goykhman grew 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 now you know given given an opportunity I would drive it to zero it's never going to go to zero but it's maybe you know maybe 10 15 now I think probably 85 percent of our of our revenue is recurring Services there's a recurring billing and my goal is 80 is recurring the 80 85 now you know I'd have to look it up I haven't looked it up but the 200 000 a month number you just gave me that's pure recurring right no that's everything oh that's okay so 80 of that is recurring right so so 160 000 and they're forty forty thousand is like one-time service stuff right but what happens is they come back to us anyway so even the one-time service stuff when you get well organized they come back to it they need more training you build them by you know for the sessions they need enhancements your billing for that so it's fairly predictable business flow yeah even though it's not you know like even though it's not a quarterly invoice and Dimitri 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 uh uh it was less than two so well that's good no we're doing really well I think we're we're about 20 above last year okay so maybe you're doing about 160 000 a month uh about a year ago and then 60 180 depending on months yeah okay and so how are you driving this growth tell me about how you get new customers uh well there's a couple of things that are going on uh I you know I joined uh SAS Academy Denver tells chess Academy right it's been basically learning all this stuff I didn't learn over the last 30 years so that's been very helpful in terms of focusing the effort and uh and and the scale and looking for you know ideal customer profile uh it's good right 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 SAS Academy group yeah you should I mean they're great guys and you know I gotta I gotta tell you that I've always worked you know I kind of built this in isolation there was nobody to ask there's no podcasts like yours to watch there was no SAS Academy you know I learned the words like invoice you know when the customers who yeah the customer said send me an invoice I'm like what's an invoice right so so uh you know the ability to be able to ask and to triangulate and to see what other people are doing and where where I fall I'm you know in like I've always thought that everybody does things this way right but um you know I've built this business I was thinking about this you know before a podcast if 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 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 every business dies it was the year 2000 when nobody bought anything it was the year 2008 but nobody bought anything there was the pandemic where for a couple of months nobody paid any invoices you know so um you you end up going through this existential crises and unless you can survive a crisis you're done and so I you know I kind of thought about it and you know in in retrospect I built this company first of all for resilience right because you know if you're if you're funded by risk Capital it's somebody else's money at risk you go and you feel someplace else so you succeed someplace else I didn't want to fail so I failed sequentially in the same place but it got reborn now but but you launched in 1993 were you the sole founder do you own 100 I had a I had a co-owner and I bought her out you know about 15 years ago oh well tell me more about that there's a lot of people listening with co-founders that you know maybe things have changed they want to buy them up but they don't know how to do it how do you do it I had a long difficult negotiation and then eventually just uh uh you know we went for a business valuation in the and uh and they gave us a valuation and then I I paid what was the valuation 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 no it's five six hundred grand okay the idea was like if the founder isn't in it what's the business worth very little so you got evaluation this is in 2005 you brought out your co-founder you got evaluation for 600k then what then I paid or I don't know I paid like I don't know 120 150 or 200 grand in cash honestly I don't remember and then the rest you know over time well how did you negotiate that uh like why 120 why 150 cash up front I don't remember you know I I can make it out but I don't remember well like 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 yeah we were half from happening okay so she was 50 okay right right interesting and uh you know but it worked out with with great friends and uh 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 I have been unconflicted why I like that you bet on yourself right a 500 600 000 valuation if you paid 300K to buy out your 50 co-founder 15 years ago and now you're doing 2.4 million annually I'd say it's fair to say you're worth more than six hundred thousand dollars today so I like that you bet on yourself I'm probably worth more but uh that's not what's driving me right you know what's driving me is is the ability you know this is there's an interesting thing I was thinking about it this is kind of a balance that works for me might not work for everybody right you know you know you got to 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 after all these years right and it makes me smile most of the time and you know I can go back I can go to sleep and I can say you know I did a good job that's important to me right then you want to make some money so what's you know what's money like you can't take it with you but you can fund your bills you can pay your kids I have a bunch of kids and they're all great kids how many kids Dimitri well I I got uh 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 martel's uh 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 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 bootstrap which we love does that mean you're profitable today I'm profitable I've got to probably about six months worth of run rate in in cash because I'm I'm actually waiting for the Skype to fall to be honest well what does that mean so if you're profitable you wouldn't be able to calculate six months of Runway because you'd have infinite Runway because you're profitable no I haven't finished wrong way I meant spend uh your total expenses if you have no Revenue your total what are your total expenses per month like 50 60 100K what is it 150 right now okay where do you spend most that money salaries engineering most of it is engineering we're still built as an engineering company although now this change is going to be bringing on more front end we've been you know resilience to me is this kind of a combination of product like you've got to have a good product or else what are you selling right just smoke and mirrors you got to have a reputation we have excellent reputation on our market like I I I I liken it being the vendor of Last Resort you can try Oracle and when you when you break your teeth come to us we'll solve your problem you could try somebody else when you break your teeth contest we actually do solve the problem I don't have any angry customers not a single one of them is angry no Dimitri we love that so just to be clear though so you're spending 150 000 per month in total spend if you've got six months of total of spend in your bank that means you've got about a million cash in the bank which you saved it from profits over time no no no that's not the way it works I'm keeping about 600 Grand in a kit in cash yep and the reason for that is if if Sky starts falling I'll shed some of the expenses yep yep that's a good way that's a good way to do it um you didn't answer my question about growth how do you go from 80 customers to 90 customers where are you finding them so uh we've been traditionally selling uh based on reputation price and you know in hard times people tend to flock to that well try try to be specific I mean reputation is very generic you know when a customer closes and when a customer closes it 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 uh 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 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 going to give them the software to teach the discipline using our software um I've started doing analysts briefings which we I didn't do before uh that seems to be driving you know leads I started posting sort of kind of 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 mind share if that makes sense right and uh you know I my next challenge is to go exactly from reputational selling to more willful selling I mean Dimitri on that note tell me about the team you have around you how many full-time I've got 16 people full-time how many of the 16 are engineers seven well six six are engineers and seven are QA and there's myself and a couple of customer success people any any sales reps beside yourself no I love that Dimitri 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 uh what's my favorite business uh what is it eat the big fish I think all right number two is there a CEO you're following or studying no number three what's your favorite online tool for building ads what's my favorite or like so Excel like so okay number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night seven seven and then uh situation married single okay we already have five kiddos right five kiddos married and I've been really lucky you know that's great and how old are you Dimitri I'm 16. last question something you wish you knew when you were 20 years old how to do the same things I'm doing but faster 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 to help 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 Dimitri thanks for taking us to the top my pleasure nice to talk to you one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm Central it's called Shark Tank for SAS 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 our poo CAC LTV you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every Thursday 1 p.m Central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on YouTube every day at 2 p.m Central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the Subscribe button below here on YouTube 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