How Dashcomb Inc CEO Tonny Xu grew Dashcomb Inc to $30.4K revenue and 10 customers in 2024.

guys dascom is a low code tool he's got 10 paying customers that pay on average $200 per month so he's doing 2,000 a month in Revenue up from nothing a year ago because he just launched about a year ago he's got again those 10 customers he raised 500,000 bucks in seed funding at a 2.5 is million valuations sold under two 20% of the business his team has four folks today that are full-time two contractors he's taking a risk while his spouse helps manage the family also working a job as well we'll see what happens he jumped out of corporate a publicly traded company to go on this journey and Tony we're rooting for you dc.com hey folks my guest today is Tony Shu he's the former CTO of c channel which is listed on the tsse he's got 20 plus years developing code and now working on a tool called dash.com a low code development platform Tony you ready to take us to the top yeah thank you hi everyone my name is Tony yeah great great to have you here Tony so give us a quick up an overview on the platform first is it built for any specific niche in terms of no code or can is this for anybody yeah it's um um it's mainly designed for developers and the product managers um to developer internal tools uh for the company for the Enterprise very cool now your uh your website is in Japanese so are you based in Japan sure yes exactly amazing what is the southware industry like over there a lot of SAS Founders like you or you you the first no no no no no no no way I no way that I can be the first um the Sass industry is uh kind of um uh what bloomed in the past five four to five years and there are some SAS unicorns in in Japan and some listed public some public SAS companies already reached um um um we say when we measure in ARR they can reach 100 million ARR yep so it's kind of uh close name name three what would you say are the top three software companies in Japan okay so one is um uh Lux so another one is called smart HR another one is called kingon kingon can you spell that one k i k i n t o n e interesting another one is a smart HR which is focused on HR area and another one is a luu uh r a k u s r a k l roxu very cool okay so the software industry is Alive and Well in Japan you're building this no code tool I guess help me understand low code low code okay so not no code so you have to have some engineering background to use it then huh true true okay what are what are Engineers paying on average per month to use your platform yeah um in Japan there is a big background or big um big picture of the industry in Japan is a the shortage for software engineer is extremely extremely pain and a lot of companies are trying to um they have a lot of internal systems they have a lot of subsistance to be developer but they can't they could not find the uh developer in time at least in their budget time so um we aimed to resolve that with a low code platform to provide a fast implementation uh Solutions which which is workable for the internal use because for internal usage you don't have to have so fancy uis just um just um stand that UI Tony what what are folks paying for this software on average per month what do you charge yeah we charge for users um uh like U uh I mean in USD it will be like $40 for developers per month and uh $10 for um user normal user per month okay so if someone signs up and then they add three users it'll be 40 plus 10 plus 10 plus 10 yeah yeah exactly what's the average company paying you per month right basically the average number of users total yeah right now um our average revenue uh AR no no no Mr uh average um uh revenue from uh company is around 200s okay so the average team size then is what like it's like a 15 person team using you paying you 200 bucks a month something like that um some big company some big Enterprises they um we are still small we still trying to find our product Market fit so we have some um early adapters um some big companies they they're willing to pay a higher price to support their internal deploy private deploy so our a average value is like um uh $200 per month yeah per per client but for uh the middle value um is around um is around uh 100 to 100 to 150 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 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 did 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 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 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 founder 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 of that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round we 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 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 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 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 can I ask you what your largest customer pays you today not the the customer yeah uh right now they are paying um 10 100,000 Yen which which is around $800 per month okay that's pretty good so 100 you said 100,000 Japanese Yen yes okay so that' be about at today's conversion rate that'll be about $665 us doar per month on average yeah yeah yeah exactly okay this is great and and how many total customers are you working with today so far uh we we started this company last fe uh last March okay and we are in our 19th months at Just moment but we are still trying to find the product product Market Fe in Japan right now we have more than 10 clients and we are try we're trying to reach to our first 50 50 clients that's great so 10 customers paying on average 200 per month means you're doing about $2,000 per month right now on Revenue right yes and just so we can measure growth rate where were you exactly one year ago do you remember were you zero yeah one year ago one ago it was zero so what month did you get your first paying customer um first paying customer was uh uh the contract started on this February uh we fixed the the contract on January but the the payment was started from February that's great and and tell everyone wants to know obviously how people find their first paying customer how did you find your first paying customer oh from my friends from my Cur just a refer for I see so was maybe a former boss or former employee or something like that exactly so what do you think your growth channel of the future will be how do you go from 10 customers to 100 customers wow that is um answer that we are searching for right now we are doing some experiments we are trying on different channels and we are also trying to um figure out which one is U best one for us especially U measured on what are you testing Tony uh the first one is SEO um just um uh inbound leads another one is we we tried some paid sales assistance from outside but uh that too um that both of that doesn't work well at this moment but we are trying to continue to do the SEO and we trying to find some other companies to help us on the sales I see how many folks are fulltime today at the company is it just you no at this at this moment that we have four full-time members and two contractors okay so six total and are you the sole founder or do you have a co-founder uh I'm I'm the solo Founders that's awesome so you have you own 100% of the company then right uh we already had um uh feriz our seed secured our seed seed around last year so we have some uh seed investors how much did you raise in the seed um in Japan um because it's in Japan we raised about U uh half a million USD okay half a million U okay so half a million USD would be about what is that like 75 million Japanese Yen yeah exactly that so 500,000 United States dollars and most folks in their seed rounds are selling 20% of their company were you in that same range oh yeah exactly we are seeing we we sold less than 20% but more than 50% okay so between 15 and 20 which means that you are your valuation was somewhere around 2.5 million right yes how are you able to get that valuation are you a second or third time founder how did you convince investors to bet on you um because my previous experience is uh was a CTO in the public publicly Leist to the company so I guess that worked a little bit yep now you're cool right you don't have to wear suits anymore you can wear a leather jacket and a white [Laughter] shirt um you know it's um it's um it's it's a painful Journey yeah there's a a lot of my listeners uh you know are married they have a spouse and they're at a they're at a safe corporate job and they want to quit to launch their own thing but the spouse is like I don't know if I want you to do that are you do you have a spouse and what was their feed back on you quitting corporate for a startup yeah I I'm married and I have two kids two young kids and uh my wife is very supportive so um she's um she's um the go for me you know he's a shelter for me that's great so how do you balance that does she sort of have a corporate job while you take the risk at a startup or how do you balance that you mean balance my current situation or exact your current situation right so you're taking a big risk you're managing a family you have two people is she working full-time at a corporate job for consistency sake or how are you balancing all that oh yeah exactly so she has to work in company so uh make some stable income for this family so I I took the risk and uh we are aiming for um a better future that's great okay so you raised 500,000 bucks um how much revenue do you think you can grow to spending the 500,000 that you raised um since we raised raised the money before we started the company uh yeah before we had any uh before we wrote our first line of the code so actually uh right now the situation is kind of difficult for us and we are trying to balance the income and our outcome and our expenses so we can keep a low profile and still trying to attract some um some C clients customers with with pain was clearly pain about about the internal system yep yeah well we're certainly rooting for you we're out of time here today let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite book Tony my favorite book okay um heart of seems uh number two is there a CEO your following or studying um yeah Elon Musk and Sam Alon number three what's your favorite online tool for building first company this guys dascom is a low code tool he's got 10 paying customers that pay on average $200 per month so he's doing 2,000 a month in Revenue up from nothing a year ago because he just launched about a year ago he's got again those 10 customers he raised 500,000 bucks in seed funding at a 2.5 is million valuation sold under two 20% of the business his team has four folks today that are full-time two contractors he's taking a risk while his spouse helps manage the family also working a job as well we'll see what happens he jumped out of corporate a publicly traded company to go on this uh journey and Tony we're rooting for you dome.com thanks for taking us to the top thank you very much my honor one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1M 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 pm 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 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 Sass World whether it's an acquisition a big fund raise a big sale a big profit profitability statement or something else I don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to 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