How DashThis Bootstrapped to $4.2M USD Run Rate and 2,600 Customers (Interview with CEO Antoine Paré)

Introduction and What DashThis Does

Nathan Latka

00:00Folks. My guest today is Antoine Pare. He's been building and helping businesses grow online for over a decade with digital marketing. Today, the CEO and partner at DashThis, a software helping thousands of digital marketers every day. He's also a family 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?

Antoine Paré

00:19>> Absolutely.

Nathan Latka

00:20Alright. Tell us about DashThis. Who's paying for this right now?

Antoine Paré

00:23>> Mainly marketing agencies or any marketers that needs to have good looking reports each month. And we help them to automate to automate them their marketing reporting. So yeah, we were here to to help them growing faster in a simple manner with their reporting.

Pricing and ARPU

Nathan Latka

00:40And what are they paying per month on average to use that kind of technology?

Antoine Paré

00:44>> A $135 for existing clients. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

00:47And it's always been that way or have you kind of edited and tested pricing over time?

Pricing History and Evolution Over Ten Years

Antoine Paré

00:51>> We've been we've did around, I'd I'd say, like, five to six different pricing over time. Like, we've been here for ten years, but the clients have really changed over time. Like, at the beginning, ten years ago, it was really big agencies with with data scientists, now it's every day. It's 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 ten years

Customer Count and Growth

Nathan Latka

01:15>> ago.

01:15Interesting. And so you launched in 2011. You've scaled. Marketing agencies are using how many pay you today to use the tech?

Antoine Paré

01:23>> How many clients we have? Is that is that How many clients? Yeah. Two thousand six hundred clients. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

01:302,600. Okay. That's great. And how many did you have about a year ago? Do you remember?

Antoine Paré

01:35>> I think we got like 500 to 600 clients last year.

Nathan Latka

01:41Tell me about that. How are you driving growth?

SEO as Primary Growth Driver

Antoine Paré

01:43>> SEO mainly. Like, SEO and PPC. It's really all inbound marketing.

Nathan Latka

01:51Okay. Break these down for me. A lot of people, like, they wanna do SEO. They wanna do PPC. They don't know how to do it. Let's talk about SEO first. How are what's your strategy?

Antoine Paré

02:00>> Like, ten years ago, Stephane, my my my my the founder of DashThis that was the only owner, like, really tried to do this to do this by his own. Like, created content, like, lots of content. It was really helpful. It it drive the business, like,

02:16>> and and with more revenues. And when I he hired me as a consultant, was I was specialized in in in SEO and I kind of helped him to develop more content and to really more to be more like specific in keywords and like to be more of a sniper, I'd say. And then we hired like people who were was only doing this. And we tried with a lot, we did a lot of blog posts, but it

02:41>> 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 got some tools. We we chose some keywords and we fight hard for them. And but a smaller, a really small portion of our of our SEO brings a lot of the of our of our incomes. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

03:03And it can we get a clue from that from your footer? So the keywords you really focus on are SEO reporting, social media monitoring, Facebook reporting, things like that.

Antoine Paré

03:10>> Yeah. Of course. Of course. And and now today, we're working on more more about the awareness and, like, for KPI keywords or or or or things that are not necessarily in at the bottom of the funnel, but more at the top of the funnel to be 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 to be

03:34>> working more on the top.

PPC Strategy and Customer Acquisition Cost

Nathan Latka

03:36And what about PPC? So how much do you pay to get a new $135 a month customer?

Antoine Paré

03:42>> PPC — I'd say 600 in PPC, but overall I'd say like 450 for both portions.

Nathan Latka

03:50What I don't understand.

Antoine Paré

03:52>> I mean, like, for all our clients, like, like, the CAC, the customer acquisition cost for all of our clients, like, is about, like, $450.

Nathan Latka

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06:24the interview. I see. Got it. So 450, they pay a 135. You get paid back in three to four months.

Antoine Paré

06:30>> Yeah. Mainly, yeah.

Nathan Latka

06:31I see. Where are you spending that money? Facebook, Google, somewhere else?

Antoine Paré

06:34>> Mainly Google. Interesting. How We did 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

Nathan Latka

06:43Mhmm. And do you have to constantly change the copy or can you maybe they'll stick with the same copy on Google and it's worked for a long period of time?

Antoine Paré

06:51>> 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 weeks or every month. Like, it's kind of like sprints we get, like, for a for a a few months ago, worked on that and then we worked like last year, but it's not a constant work for us.

Nathan Latka

07:08Yeah. 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 placement. So it makes sense. You're sort of going after these keywords. How much do you spend in the past thirty days on paid ads total?

Paid Ads Spend and Budget

Antoine Paré

07:22>> $50,000 Canadian.

Nathan Latka

07:24Okay. 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?

Antoine Paré

07:30>> We've been increasing our budget lately. So, yeah, we're trying it.

Equity Structure and Bootstrapping

Nathan Latka

07:34Yeah. Interesting. Okay. And then talking about equity, you mentioned you weren't a Founder, but you were hired. Do you own equity?

Antoine Paré

07:39>> Yeah. 30%.

Nathan Latka

07:41Okay. Got it. So tell me how you worked out that deal. There's a bunch of people listening now that maybe wanna join a SaaS company. They wanna negotiate for 30% like you did. How'd you do it?

Antoine Paré

07:49>> I'd say that really Stefan really, really believed in my capacity to grow the business. So he gave me a good deal, I'd say. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

07:58So he owns the other other 70?

Antoine Paré

08:00>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

08:01Got it. And you guys are bootstrapped?

Antoine Paré

08:03>> Absolutely. I

Nathan Latka

08:06love this. That's great. Totally bootstrapped. Any plans to raise or you wanna stay bootstrapped?

Antoine Paré

08:11>> Bootstrap.

Nathan Latka

08:12I love that. Why is it so important to you guys? Did you guys get burned in the past by some VCs or what?

Antoine Paré

08:17>> No. I I don't know why. I it's kind of the it's it's in our DNA. Like, we wanna do stuff we believe in, and we wanna be, like, independent.

Nathan Latka

08:27Yeah. We would love it

Antoine Paré

08:28>> that way for now.

Nathan Latka

08:29So 2600 customers, a $135 a month means you're doing about $351,000 a month right now on revenue.

Antoine Paré

08:35>> Correct? Yeah. US.

Nathan Latka

08:36Yeah. And what were you doing?

Revenue, Run Rate, and Year-Over-Year Growth

Antoine Paré

08:39>> But because because we are converting our revenues in in Canadian. So like, for now, I'm I'm like in $5,200,000 revenues Canadian right now.

Nathan Latka

08:49I see. I see. Yeah. So I'm converting to USD. So if you were doing $351,000 USD today, what were you doing a year ago? Do you remember?

Antoine Paré

08:58>> Thirty, like 33% less, like I say, like, yeah.

Nathan Latka

09:03Okay. So about $230,000, something like that.

Antoine Paré

09:08>> Yeah, yeah, it makes sense.

Upsells and Dashboard-Based Pricing

Nathan Latka

09:09Yeah. 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?

Antoine Paré

09:18>> Probably like 40% of our new incomes are coming from upgrades like upsells.

Nathan Latka

09:24Okay. Very cool. And so what are you upselling? I'm looking at your pricing page right now. Is it number of dashboards? Only — users and integrations are all unlimited. So it's gotta be dashboards.

Antoine Paré

09:33>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And and this is the way we do things that we're kind of the only one now that doing are doing this. Like, every other platforms are charging for the number of clients, and we are solely 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

09:53>> because it's simple to understand and simple to use. So yep. When they have the

Nathan Latka

09:57past thirty days, how many people purchased the $995 fully branded design?

Antoine Paré

10:03>> It's something we sell less nowadays because we try to we're working on a new feature like that will let all the the our clients to to customize their their their design, like, by themselves, like self serve. And we we we were selling as well, like, custom URLs and custom design and it was services and we didn't really like that. So we were switching to to, yeah, to only base subscription and we're kind of killing it

10:27>> right now. But I'd say that we sold probably like five to 10 a month.

Nathan Latka

10:32Interesting. Very cool. Okay. So you're doing 4,200,000 USD per year right now run rate wise. If someone came to you on LinkedIn or whatever and said, Stefan or Antoine, I want to buy the company for $50,000,000 all cash upfront. Do you guys take the deal?

Antoine Paré

10:47>> Honestly, I'd like to heard about the story or about the what what are we gonna done to do with the business because, of course, it would be interesting, but we built something so so it's so 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,

11:07>> like, use the full potential of this business.

Team Size, Engineers, and Sales Reps

Nathan Latka

11:10How you mentioned the people there. How many folks are full time today?

Antoine Paré

11:13>> 32.

Nathan Latka

11:14And how many engineers?

Antoine Paré

11:16>> Twelve, thirteen, around. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

11:18And flat year over year? Have you made a bunch of hires? How much how big was the team last year?

Antoine Paré

11:22>> We were, I'd say, like, 24 or 23 last year, and we're we're hiring, like, 10 more this year.

Nathan Latka

11:30Okay. So today, 32 on the team. You said 12 engineers? Yep. How many sales reps?

Antoine Paré

11:37>> Two.

Nathan Latka

11:38With a quota?

Antoine Paré

11:39>> Not yet. Not yet. Tried no. Not yet. We're trying to set we tried to sell, like, 50% self serve and 50%, like, sales assisted.

Nathan Latka

11:48Mhmm. And what does sales assisted mean?

Antoine Paré

11:50>> 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 a question during sales cycle. So, yeah, 50% are self serve, a 100%.

Nathan Latka

12:02Very cool. And and so what do need? I mean, do you think it already gets to the point where you're testing a quota? Or do you have to increase your price point for it to do that?

Antoine Paré

12:09>> It's not clear to me, honestly. I'm not kind of a sales guy and and we need to to to to to work on that, honestly. Yeah. All the sales processes. I'm an SEO, I'm an inbound marketing guy. Business has grown because of SEO, because of inbound marketing and now we have to switch to sales because market is getting it's more of a competitive landscape. So yeah, we have to work more on sales. We're doing that this

12:34>> year.

Revenue Churn and Unit Economics

Nathan Latka

12:35Very cool. Talk to me about unit economics related to gross revenue churn the past twelve months. What was that?

Antoine Paré

12:41>> Our monthly churn is the revenue churn is at about like 3%. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

12:46Okay. Monthly?

Antoine Paré

12:47>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

12:48Monthly. But does your expansion revenue fill that hole?

Antoine Paré

12:52>> Yeah. Of course. Of course.

Nathan Latka

12:53Okay. 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% of them or Okay. About

Antoine Paré

13:02>> Well, I'm sorry. No. I'm sorry. No. No. The upgrades don't necessarily add the it's not the equivalent as our churn. No. That's for sure. We need our new revenues. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

13:10I see. I see. Okay. Got it. So so what's your net dollar retention today? Do you know?

Antoine Paré

13:14>> No. I don't I don't know it by heart. I'm sorry.

Nathan Latka

13:17Yeah. Okay. No. No. That's okay. Very cool. This makes tons of sense. Talk to me more about product. Are you guys gonna stick with dashboards, or are there any new products on the horizon?

Product Focus and Integrations

Antoine Paré

13:25>> 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 integrations, the number of KPI and everything. 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. We're

Nathan Latka

13:47>> not

13:47I 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. Have you built so many integrations so effectively?

Antoine Paré

13:58>> I don't know. We we we we we are good with marketing people. We're good with marketing tasks and we stick to marketing integrations and it's kind of

Nathan Latka

14:09But doesn't that require your engineers to build the Google AdWords integration or the, you know, LinkedIn pages integrations or SEMrush integration or no?

Antoine Paré

14:17>> Of course, they're here for that, but they're also here for maintaining these and and and and having them and and making them simple to use. Like if you compare like Supermetrics as hundreds of integrations, but they're they're not necessarily easy to use when you plug it to Google's latest to do. 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

14:39>> them features that help them select the right KPIs and to use them in a wise manner, in a simple manner. So we we work on features and usability, not necessarily on the number of integration. I don't know if I'm clear here.

Nathan Latka

14:49That does. Guys, if you're listening around and you're a SaaS 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 the SaaS world using Paragon to launch integrations faster. We've got a great deal with them for the show. It's nathanlatka.com/paragon.

New Customer Goals for 2022

Nathan Latka

15:11Antoine, that was pretty smooth, wasn't it?

Antoine Paré

15:13>> Yeah, smooth.

Nathan Latka

15:15Come on. Alright. Alright. Very cool. So unit economics look good. You love being bootstrapped. 2,600 customers. How many are gonna sign up this year, you think?

Antoine Paré

15:23>> I hope 600 to 700. Yeah.

Famous Five Rapid Fire

Nathan Latka

15:26Alright. We're rooting for you, man. Let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, favorite business book.

Antoine Paré

15:31>> I'd say start with why.

Nathan Latka

15:34Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Antoine Paré

15:37>> Yes. Louis Têtu at Coveo here in Quebec. It's a big business that just made an IPO. And yes, I really I look at them.

Nathan Latka

15:44Coveo. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building DashThis?

Antoine Paré

15:49>> For me, it's Asana.

15:51>> Yep.

Nathan Latka

15:52Number four, how many hours of sleep do get every night?

Antoine Paré

15:54>> Eight.

Nathan Latka

15:55And situation, married, single kids? I think you said you had two kids?

Antoine Paré

15:58>> Yeah. I have two kids. I'm not married, but I'm with the same woman since twelve years. So, yeah, she's great.

Nathan Latka

16:04Oh, amazing. And how old are you?

Antoine Paré

16:06>> 35.

Nathan Latka

16:07Last question. Something you wish knew when you were 20.

Antoine Paré

16:10>> Being present is the most important thing in life, though. Enjoy the ride.

Nathan Latka

16:14Guys, there you have it. DashThis launched a couple years ago, call it 2011. They did about $240,000 a month in revenue a year ago. They've now since scaled to 350,000 United States dollars per month or about a 4,200,000 run rate. Again, all bootstrapped, helping 2,600 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, call it $450 bucks

16:36to 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. Stefan, thank or Antoine, thanks for taking us to the top.

Antoine Paré

16:46>> It was fun. Thanks.

Nathan Latka

16:48One 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

17:14Central. 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

17:36fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or 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

17:58for that 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. 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 to push

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