How DashThis CEO Antoine Pare grew to $5.3M revenue and 2.6K customers in 2023.

hey folks my guest today is antoine pereira he's been building and helping businesses grow online for over a decade with digital marketing today's a ceo and partner at dash this a software helping thousands of digital marketers every day he's also a fan man who's happiest hiking and skiing with his two kids or traveling with them around the world antoine you ready to take us to the top absolutely all right tell us about dash this who's paying for this right now uh mainly marketing agencies or any marketers that needs to have uh good-looking reports each month and we help them to automate to automate them them their marketing reporting so yeah we we're here to to help them going faster in a simple manner with their reporting and what are they paying per month on average to use that kind of technology uh 135 dollars for existing clients and it's always been that way or have you kind of edited and tested pricing over time uh we've been we've did around like i say like five to six different pricing over time like we've been here for 10 years but uh the clients have really changed over time like at the beginning 10 years ago it was really big agencies with with data scientists and now it's every day it's it's it's every everyone who has a business or has to do marketing online so and it's kind of a different crowd that we had 10 years ago interesting and so you launched in 2011 uh you've scaled marketing energies are using how many pay you today to use the tech uh how many clients do we have how many clients yeah yeah 2060 is er 2 600 clients yep 2 600 okay that's great and how many did you have about a year ago do you remember i think we got like 500 to 600 clients last year tell me about that how are you driving growth seo mainly like seo and ppc that are it's really all inbound marketing okay break these down for me a lot of people like they want to do seo they wanted a ppc they don't know how to do it let's talk about seo first how what's your strategy and like 10 years ago steve and my my mother the founder of this that was the only owner like really tried to do is to do this by his own like he created content like lots of content it was really helpful it drive the business like uh uh and with more revenues and and when i he hired me as a consultant was i was specialized in in seo and i kind of helped him to develop more content and to really more to be more like specific and keywords and like to be more of a sniper i'd say and then we hired like people who were was the only who was only doing this and we tried with a lot we we did a lot of blog posts but it wasn't all working so we kind of figured out that there were specific keywords we were good at and we like did what like everyone is doing like we we we got some tools uh we we chose some keywords and we fight hard for them and and but a smaller a really small portion of our of our seo uh brings a lot of our of our incomes yeah and can we get a clue from that from your footer so the keywords you really focus on seo reporting social media monitoring facebook reporting things like that yeah of course of course and and now today we're working on more um more about their awareness and like for kpi keywords or or or things that are not necessarily in at the bottom of the funnel but more at the top of the funnel like because we have a lot of content for the lower part portion of the the funnel like people that are highly converting so we have to like to to be working more on the top and what about ppc so how much do you pay to get a new 135 dollar a month customer uh pp's i'd say 600 in ppc but overall i'd say like i have 450 for the both portion what i don't understand i mean like for all our clients like like the catch the customer acquisition cost for all of our clients like is about like 450 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 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 this year now the secret evaluation 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 frowner path 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 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 real-time valuation data points founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 to 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 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 valuations and 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 founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderprep.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 i see got it so 450 they pay 135 you get paid back in three to four months yeah mania i see where are you spending that money facebook google somewhere else mainly google interesting we did a lot of facebook earlier like retargeting and stuff like that but it didn't work out as much as google did so and do you have to constantly change the copy or can you maybe it'll stick with the same copy on google and it's worked for a long period of time um yeah recently we worked hard on that so and it helped the results are better but i don't think we are working on that every week or every month like it's kind of like sprints we get like a foreign a few months ago we worked on that and then we worked like last year but it's not a constant work for us yeah facebook marketing report google search it's you guys and then overflow and then hootsuite and then the arena in terms of all the ad placements so it makes sense you're sort of going after these keywords how much do you spend in the past 30 days on paid ads total uh 50 000 canadian okay got it that's not that's not a ton so so it's working i mean can you can you double that and double your customer base or no uh we've been increasing our budget lately so yeah we're trying it yeah interesting okay and then talking about equity you mentioned you weren't a founder but you were hired do you own equity yeah 30 okay got it so tell me how you worked out that deal there's a bunch of people listening right now that maybe want to join a sas company they want to negotiate for 30 percent like you did how'd you do it um i'd say i'd say that you really stephan really really believed in my capacity to grow the business so he gave me a good deal i'd say yeah so he owns the other other 70. yeah got it and you guys are bootstrapped absolutely i love this that's great totally bootstrap any plans to raise you want to stay bootstrapped bootstrap i love that why is it so important to you guys did you guys get burned in the past by some vcs or what no i i don't know why i it's kind of the it's in our dna like we want to do stuff we believe in and we want to be like independent yeah i love it that way for now so 2600 customers 135 bucks a month means you're doing about 351 000 bucks a month right now on revenue correct uh yeah us yeah and what were you doing because we are converting our revenues in canadian so like for now i'm like in 5.2 million dollars revenues canadian right now i see i see yeah so i'm converting to usd so if were doing 351 thousand bucks usd today what were you doing a year ago do you remember 30 like 33 less like i i'd say like yeah okay so about 200 230 000 something like that yeah yeah yeah okay that's great growth and where's is most that growth coming from adding the 600 new customers or getting old customers to buy more probably like 40 of our new incomes are coming from upgrades like upsells okay very cool and so what are you up selling i'm looking at your pricing page right now is it number of dashboards only yeah integrations are all unlimited so it's got to be dashboards yeah yeah yeah and this is the way we do things that we're kind of the only one now that doing that are doing this like every other platforms are charging for the number of clients and we are so we are so least charging for the number of dashboards so so it's kind of a simple pricing i think we should work on that but for now on it's like working for us and people are glad about that because it's simple to understand and simple to use so yeah when the past 30 days how many people purchased a 995 fully branded design um it's something we sell less nowadays because we try to we're working on a new feature like that will let all the our clients to uh to customize their their their design like by themselves like self-serve and we we were selling as well like um custom urls and custom design and it was servicing and we didn't really like that so we were switching to to yeah to only paid subscription and we're kind of killing it right now but i'd say that we sold probably like five to ten a month interesting very cool okay so you're doing 4.2 million usd uh per year right now run rate wise if someone came to you on linkedin or whatever and said staphon or antoine i want to buy the company for 50 million dollars all cash up front do you guys take the deal honestly i'd like to heard about the story or about the what what are we going to do with the business because of course it would be interesting but we built something so so it's so how i could say i'm so emotional about the business and i like the people here so it would not only have to be a good deal it would have to be something a great idea that would scale the business and and and like use the full potential of this business how you mentioned the people there how many folks are full-time today 32 and how many engineers uh 12 13 around yeah and flat year over europe you made a bunch of higher how much how big was the team last year uh we were i'd say like 24 or 33 last year and we're having we're hiring like 10 more this year okay so today 32 on the team you said 12 engineers yeah how many sales reps uh two with a quota and not yet we not yet right no not yet we're trying to say we try to sell like 50 self-serve and 50 like sales assistant mm-hmm and what does sales assistant mean to me it's some someone right now who is talking to sales before buying in any manner so a demo call or just a a question during sales cycle so yeah 50 or self-serve 100 very cool and and so what do you need i mean do you think it ever gets to the point where you're testing a quota or do you have to increase your price point for it to do that it's not clear to me honestly i'm not kind of a sales guy and and we need to to to to work on that honestly yeah all the sales processes i like we've i'm an seo i'm an inbound marketing guy like the the business has grown because of seo because of inbound marketing and now we have to switch to sales because the company the the market is getting competition it's it's more of a competitive landscape so yeah we have to work more on sales and we're doing that this year very cool talk to me about unit economics related to gross revenue sure in the past 12 months what was that the our monthly churn is the the revenue churn is at about like three percent yeah okay monthly yeah monthly but does your expansion revenue fill that hole yeah of course of course okay got it so if you look at all your customers from exactly a year ago ignore new customer sign-ups all the ones just a year ago you churned about 36 percent of them or about i'm sorry no i'm sorry no no the upgrades don't necessarily uh add the it's not the equivalent as our turn now that's for sure we need our new revenues yeah i see i see okay got it so so what's your net dollar retention today do you know i don't i don't know it buyer i'm sorry okay no no that's okay um very cool this makes tons of sense talk to me more about product are you gonna stick with dashboards for all or any products on the horizon no it's only it's only dashboards like it's it's simple reporting like we're not a big team like we're 32 like we have to fight hard on simplicity and easiness like we have the major integrations the major features we let other people fight for the number of integrations and a brave kpi anything it's just a simple tool to use and a fun tool to use with great customer happiness like that's that's the way we do things like we're not i see almost 36 integrations on your integrations page integrations tend to clog up people's trello boards right they're working on integrations all day long how have you built so many integrations so effectively um i don't know we we we really are good with marketing people we're good with marketing tasks and we stick to marketing integrations and it's kind of but doesn't that require your engineers to build the google adwords integration or the you know linkedin pages integrations or semrush integration or no of course they're here for that but they're also here for maintaining these and and and having them and making them simple to use like if you compare like super metrics as hundreds of integrations but they're not necessarily easy to use when you plug it to google that studio and we have a lot of people in our clients that don't necessarily know what they want in terms of kpis so we're we're here to give them features that help them select the right kpis and to use them in a wise manner in a simple manner so we work on features and usability not necessarily the number of integration i don't know if i'm clear here that does guys if you're listening around you're a sas founder and you're like antoine you're dependent on having great integrations but you don't want to clog up your trello board and you don't want to pay 30 people and you don't have the ability to hire 12 engineers try paragon there's a lot of startups in sas world using paragon to launch integrations faster we've got a great deal with them for the show it's nathan lacka dot com forward slash paragon p-a-r-a-g-o-n that was pretty smooth wasn't it yes come on all right all right very cool so uh you know economics look good you love being in bootstrap 2600 customers how many are gonna sign up this year you think uh i hope 600 to 700 yeah all right we're rooting for you man let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite business book uh i'd say start with why number two is there a ceo you're following or studying yes louis at covio here in quebec it's a big business that just made an ipo and yes i really i look at them glabio number three what's your favorite online tool for building dash this um for me it's hey santa yep number four how many hours i sleep to get every night eight and situation married single kids i think you said had two kids yeah i have two kids i'm not married but i'm with the same woman uh since 12 years so yeah she's great oh amazing and how old are you uh 35 last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. being present is the most important thing in life so enjoy the ride guys there you have it dash this launched a couple years ago called 2011. they did about 240 000 a month in revenue a year ago they've now scaled to 350 000 united states dollars per month they're about a 4.2 million run rate again all bootstrapped helping 2600 customers get their dashboards live faster more efficiently so you can do better reporting growing mainly from seo and paid ads with a four month cac payback period spending caught 400 500 bucks to get a new 135 a month customer 32 on the team with 12 engineers looking at hiring responsibly as they continue to bootstrap and grow staphon thing or antoine thanks for taking us to the top it was fun thanks one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm 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 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 sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise 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 nathanlacka.com for 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 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 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