How Bennudata CEO Pavel Danilov grew to $1.1M revenue with a 10 person team in 2025.

Pao is building benu data they have three pilot customers currently in the Berkeley batch which invested $200,000 for 7% stake they raised 400,000 bucks in their seed round the company helps with automated Cloud Discovery backup platform he learned a lot of his first company fridge no more scaled it from 0 to 40 million bucks of Revenue but then ended up having unprofitable sort of lines of business ultimately couldn't keep up and had to sort of shut that company down learned how to liquidate which was painful but good lessons to learn we're obviously rooting for him him rooting for him here hey folks my guest today is PA Den he before co-founding Ben new data in November 2022 he's co-founder and CEO of fridge no more an ultra fast grocery delivery company they scaled that from 0 to 40 million bucks of Revenue 30 dark stores 85,000 customers in New York and Boston from 2020 to 2022 before that he worked at investment banking for eight years uh and we're excited to have them on today PA you ready to take us to the top yeah thank you for having me you bet I have to talk about the ghost kitchen stuff because we had I had many people on many people on in 2021 2022 Alex Cantor at ordermark is one that rings a bell these guys were crushing it and then all of a sudden ghost kitchen just went off a cliff and you know you know Alex basically shut the company down what happened at your company did you see any of these patterns so my business was technically speaking ghost kitchen it was a dark store so we were selling groceries and but I think the trend is similar right the market is well the economics is very hard the very operational business and lot of cost and the main problem is career career related cost so you pay them per hour and uh you it's very high so basically it's really hard to uh get to the break even um and you every time you start a new new new store it's a new market you start from zero you need to reach this break even so you you grow fast you end up with a bunch of stores making losses and only a few stores already profitable so it's hard to deal with that that without you know extra Capital injection and in 21 you know beginning 22 it changed so how much did you guys raise raise it for no more we raised around 35 million uh 35 million yeah okay and what happened you guys shut it down flash sale Big Exit no big exit uh we negotiated um exit we had a conversation with a few potential investors but then uh at the last minute they walked mhm so that's what that's what happened uh so B you didn't make any money on it you just sort of shut it down basically we shut it down yeah yeah okay well thanks for the trans thanks for the transparent people need to realize it's part of being an entrepreneur you know you got to swing the bat sometimes it doesn't work out yeah it's not just like we shut down we we shut down and then I worked for almost a year on liquidation and what oh liquidation liquidation yeah I paid all the salaries all the taxes but then I need to negot to negotiate all the suppliers and real estate so it was it was quite um a cumbersome process yeah not just like face down you walk to another business so did you was there something that you were exposed to at fridge no more that enabled you to come up with this idea for benu data are they connected in any way they only connected through one of my investors so one of my angel investors introduced me to Dimitri and Par my co-founders and been data and that's how we met and I I realized that uh I still uh I have a scar from the human um uh human intensive business with all a lot of employees so I wanted to uh build something which doesn't have a lot of uh employees just software and B2B so there's two of you two co-founders been dat three co-founders three of you guys did you just split Equity evenly at the start yeah okay good so you were very diplomatic yeah all right what's the company do so we are building automation for disaster recovery process in the cloud so the thing is the the backup is a huge business right how you back up uh your servers your uh Cloud uh resources uh it's it's automated but with the recovery how you actually bring this back up back back to life back online is very manual still and we found this opportunity that in the cloud all the cloud platforms provided all the necessary blocks the cloud um API uh Native backup basically now we are able to automate that we collect data from through API we create those plans and we can bring this like end to endend automation for for recovery so what it means when a disaster happens adops or whoever is responsible needs to push just one button and uh the whole infrastructure all like applications will be recovered in a different uh environment 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 287 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 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 valuation 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 founder paath dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're 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 realtime valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raise 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 the recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's '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 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 founder path.com products SLV valuations or if you go to founder path.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it 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 you told me before this show your your pre-revenue today which which is great when do you think you'll have your first paying customer what's your plan so our plan to launch to release our first product uh by the year end and in q1 we will start uh acquiring customers hope to acquire 3 to five in in q1 how will you price it I mean is this the Enterprise motion is it low rpof fremium plg model I think we're going to we actually have both so we we will be um selling uh kind of inexpensive product to late stage startups through AWS Marketplace so without extra you know integration sales whatever you know process how much that be it will be 500 to 1,000 per month okay and that's that's to create recovery plans and update them regularly so have that ready in case something happens uh some disaster happens uh for midsize Enterprise we defined as our kind of second segment that's more of 3,000 a month 3,000 to 5,000 depending on the size of infrastructure and that's that's going to be more of a um uh manager service provider Channel or direct direct Channel understood good so so you're an accelerator now which accelerator did you choose to go into yeah so we P berley Sky Deck UC UC Berkeley uh it's very focused on B2B and has a what's their model they how much Capital they give you what Equity they take they they invest 200,000 okay and they want to uh get something ground 7% okay so it's similar to others okay got it so you're you're in you're in the accelerator now you said you've got a couple Pilots working tell me to the degree that you can I mean what what are these Pilots is it sort of very high touch with Enterprises one-on-one stuff or how are you ending pilot deals so yeah so we are working actually with Berkeley we working with the network of alarms of Berkeley SK alarms we are bu 17 so they've been 16 badges before us later stage um and we have currently three pilot with late stage startups they are easier to negotiate with they those customers they uh start selling to Enterprise and they get request from Enterprise to to build the disaster recovery process which they don't have at the moment or they have a very simplified one so yeah watch them saying okay you want to sell to this this Enterprise we will help you to build that process and you don't need three engineers and 12 months to actually to sit down and build that like custom solution in house we will just build for you uh the the process and it's easier we we also talk to midsize Enterprise but that's uh that's a longer conversation why aren't these paid Pilots why couldn't you get people to pay UPF front for these um I think people are not familiar with with with the product so we Still In Parallel building the product so we kind of currently in the in the mode of like half optimation half Consulting right so you build it you build it as we as you like as we do the pilots so uh by q1 we will have uh our first product released and then then we can start selling that's great that makes lots of sense how much of the $200,000 have you guys already spent building the MVP uh we actually raised 400 already so through Angels uh and we spent 150 so far so we have in the bank is that mainly on sort of salaries and stuff yeah mostly it's Engineers uh engineering team building the product and some tests on um you know marketing tests and yeah what marketing test have you run how do you think you're going to get your first 100 customers so we run some uh online marketing tests we um you know used uh know LinkedIn and um Google it's it's not very effective So Far So at the moment we're relying on Direct channels basically emailing to Berkeley Network Sky Deck Network advisors and alarms and it's been uh pretty pretty effective so far very cool well we're we're rooting for you we hope the pilot launch goes well and thanks for teasing us a little bit here with what to expect in January when you guys launch officially in the meantime though let's wrap up here with the famous 5 number one what's your favorite Business book favorite Business book uh hard things about hard things number two is there a CEO you're following or studying uh no number three what's your favorite online tool for building the business um I like softer the website builder what is it softer softer number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night uh eight and situ po are you married single kids I'm married to Kids Place my uh actually birthday my my oldest daughter birthday she's 13 Ah that's amazing how old are you I'm 41 41 last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20 years old um 20 years old I think I I wish I knew that Tech was going to that big and I know jump into that earlier than I did guys uh po Pao is building benue data they have three pilot customers currently in the Berkeley batch which invested $200,000 for 7% stake they raised 400,000 bucks in their seed round the company helps with automated Cloud Discovery backup platform he learned a lot at his first company fridge no more scaled it from 0 to 40 million bucks of Revenue but then ended up having unprofitable sort of lines of business ultimately couldn't keep up and had to sort of shut that company down learned how to liquidate which was painful but good lessons to learn we're obviously rooting for him him rooting for him here with Ben dat Pao thanks for taking us to the top Nathan thank you one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1 p.m. 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 backend 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 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 they 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 SAS for whether it's an acquisition a big fund raise a 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 SAS 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 for that at Nathan la.com slack in the meantime I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube I'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows but I do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys' support all right I'll be in the comments see you