How DASS Services CEO Aaron Vidas grew DASS Services to $706.2K revenue and 8 customers in 2024.

guys had a first company raised 2 million bucks of equity learned a lot going through that shut it down now focused on Das Ser dyens services.com it's an AI training company today but launching a SAS product with Hub they call it and Das content manager they'll do half a million bucks this year combined revenue streams just launched though eight weeks ago as they look to scale in 2024 we'll see what happens next hey folks my guest today is Aaron vdas he is focus on more customers profits in time with AI is company dasen services.com Aaron you ready to take us to the top I am all right what does das mean uh well D is actually named after Romas who was a spiritual leader in the C counterculture movement in the 60s um and his ideas of uh you're not your thoughts have actually influenced me a lot so named the company after him very cool okay what's the company do can you tell you know a customer story yeah so we're an AI training company so we help midmarket tourism retail service businesses get more customers profits and time through automation so uh we work with it's actually where I am right now a luxury fishing lodge in the queen charot Islands automating their fish delivery we work with um Hop On Hop on bus Hop On Hop off bus tours uh to automate their reviews for instance uh that's a responding to reviews is a really big bug bear in the tourism business and then we also work with real estate companies so um some large property developers in Vancouver have used us to figure out where to apply AI in their business and this is everything from construction handoff to uh better estimations and then we use automation AI build those automations and then train their companies on how to use those and then do themselves and is this a software company or Services uh it's a mixture of both so we actually have four product offerings we start companies usually with what what I call the AI maximizer four weeks you've got five to 10 ideas of or instances of where to use Ai and Automation in the business we then transfer them to what we call Dash training which is basically building those High Roi automations for them and then we train them how to do it themselves if they want and then we the reoccurring or software part uh is two products one's called the Hub which is all the playbooks of how to automate and use AI in the business and then something called Das content manager which automates it's meant for professional service people uh to be able to write content in an hour gives them all the prompts that kind of thing shows them uh formats it for all the particular social networks like LinkedIn Instagram they can review it and then it automatically get scheduled boot site and Ain how many folks do you have paying for the SAS part of the business today uh we have eight on Des content manager The Hub has h four companies okay and what do you charge on average for these products per month or per year yeah so remember we're in we're in a bit of the professional service game so our AI maximizer our fee for services are between 30k and 250k Das training the projects right now we have three C active customers we're at about 41 and a half thousand a month um and then the content management system I literally launched last week uh so it has eight eight people in an agency using it so 12 total people and that's 179 a month okay so I guess $179 or $179,000 sorry $179 per user per month per user per month okay got it so what would you I mean look a lot of the most successful software companies start off as an agency so I totally understand the balance between Professional Services and launching the SAS but but I guess if you look at I mean what do you think total revenue at the combined entity the agency plus the software will be here in 2023 uh well I launched company eight weeks ago so the 20 the uh total revenue we sit will sit at probably about just over a half million dollars okay um and then the content management system is kind of the unknown one right now where we've tested it we've already got a waiting list of uh 218 people um and right now I'm just getting getting The Kinks out basically and getting testimonials for a lead page um you just watched us eight weeks ago obviously we a very interesting macroeconomic time I believe as recently as three years ago in July of 2020 your last company strategy box announced $2 million seed round what happened to that company uh unfortunately we had a series of events where um I had we had some non-payment by customers we had a deal fall through for acquisition um and it got to a point where maer economic climate was such where I was like okay well if we continue with this rate a you know the valuation exit's not going to be where any of us want to be B we also saw we had Early Access to chat GPT just because it was a data management platform and we did Ai and machine learning um I had a look at a lot of the functionality that we were building and investing in and I looked at the capability of chat GPT and I went well this business is going to be used for within a you know a couple of years if we continue on this path so I shuddered it 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 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 going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different Val 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 round 3.7 rais 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 never been a larger data set of SAS valuation 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 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 and so did did you return anything to investors or had you run out of cash at that point oh we just ran out of cash okay so you shut the company down um I guess what did you mentioned there was an acquisition offer that failed um I guess help me understand why why that failed was it you know did the VC that it looks like fuel Capital was behind or fuel Ventures was behind you guys why didn't fail I can't really go into that but uh it's say it was just a misalignment of uh a misalignment of uh the acquirer and us in their goals for the business and the capabilities of what the platform could do I mean the opportunity cost is though that that that you shut it down right so it's effectively zero dollar batner for everybody right so I guess um why not sell it and at least get something out of it even if your vision is not aligned uh I think the interesting thing I've learned about data management and large infrastructure platforms is when you're acquiring company like the build versus buy was several million dollars like if a company wants to go build the functionality that we had before um you'd be looking at 3.25 to three and a half million us just in hard labor costs and you know 9 to 12 months so that was kind of the pitch I gave some people as to say Hey listen you want to go build this exact same thing uh why don't you go do that like go do this or sorry buy us instead of that and what I continually found was well we can do it better faster cheaper uh um you know the CTO usually saying that or somebody in the Technology Group saying that to the large agency that we were talking to let's say that maybe this this could fit into when my argument was always like well I actually built it so I know the problems associated with this and I couldn't really overcome that hurdle and like you said it just becomes opportunity cost at a certain point where you're like well am I spending more time to act as my own investment banker or go build something else yeah I mean these are interesting learnings I have a very similar story I have a very similar I mean look is the use this is what happens with most companies but this is something you launched I believe in 2015 so you were working on this it wasn't like a one-year project I mean this was like eight years and you look fairly young so when did you launch the company how old were you uh when I launched the company I was thir it came out of a so I ran a Management Consulting Group for a long for a few years I had scaled it up we had a lot of problems with getting data into do analysis which and I couldn't find a product that actually worked well so I started strategy box um we it was a seven-year slog and I think the biggest learning for me was I at the end of the day also just really didn't enjoy it it wasn't a strength of mine uh data management and enter and we also sold to very large Enterprises we had customers like uh Financial Service public traded financial service companies really large a global agencies used us as their kind of client reporting Suite um those are long sales 12 18 months from you know first touch to actually getting paid huge thousand step procurement processes um I know it gets headlines I know it feels sexy to do I would say to most people like you have to have the capital to be able to wait that kind of stuff out um and you have to be built for it and you want you really love it and I just frankly didn't really love it um I imagine you started feeling this and you're a pit in your stomach and you just tried to ignore it for as long as you possibly could when did you first feel this pit in your stomach and do you regret waiting as long as you did to shut it down um to be very honest now looking back on it it's probably one or two years in there was a little voice inside my head that said don't keep doing like you know basically like I would ask myself in a tough moment keep doing this and I would hear a voice and it said no and I didn't have and you have to forgive yourself you were doing the best that you could at that moment with the tools you had available to you emotionally and professionally I didn't have frankly the courage to go no this isn't working very well um even are uh raising money we actually closed a round of funding with fuel at the start of the pandemic um and we actually re was hell hell just to even get the money U like just actually physically transferring the money during a global pandemic was hard um and we started to scale we were building we had we built an amazing what I came out what was Revenue at its peak monthly Revenue at its peak monthly Revenue at its peak was uh 45 900k we had 900 we had close to 900k in AR so like 880,000 a month something like that yeah yeah yeah we and we were the problem and the thing that was the strugg I think the biggest struggle emotionally was we were always very close to cash flow positive um and I didn't run the business I didn't run the business like the traditional let's spend all the money as fast as possible I really wanted it to be a profitable profitable company because I knew that that would help us in subsequent funding rounds um sorry there's a guy walking by here um and that was probably the thing that took the greatest emotional toll toll on me was I was always so close to being cash flow positive um and we always just seemed to miss it some deal wouldn't close uh we'd have non-payment by customers we had um you know things take a lot longer than we thought I mean if you get going in 2015 and you feel that pit in your stomach two years in 2016 2017 you then go to a car round in 2019 pre pandemic and the two million round of fuel oh no sorry that was no we just we only ever did a or sorry you said seed round I thought you said SE round yeah seed 2 million seed with fuel Ventures at the beginning of the pandemic I mean at 2022 that's three years after you felt that pit in your stomach you're able to effectively force your way through getting that round done anyway but it also like drastically reduced all of your optionality to sell the company and you control the sale at even just like a 1x multiple which would have been like a million bucks or something so why did you decide to go like force your way through round knowing you weren't like really interested in the business instead of just selling it then and cutting your losses um Pride before the fall like I would just say it's pride and ego like it's really just a question of you're not listening to your intuition um and you're um hey I can see success I can see success around the Corner um and so it feels close uh but what I realized was because I was not inherently enjoying the day-to-day that was always going to be there that was always gonna be there every entrepreneur always feels like tomorrow is gonna be the day we hit the metric yeah and so I and my biggest Well my two biggest learnings out of the whole experience were you have to do something where you're enjoying the process dayto day because like life's short and it doesn't matter if you earn 150k year or you earn 150 million if you're miserable it's get out of it and the second thing would be is specifically in that company this was an Enterprise soft Enterprise SAS play and that meant I should have raised a lot more capital in our seed round and then any subsequent funding rounds just to have the cushion of hey it takes us six months 12 months 18 months to get a customer like you got a plan for that yeah yeah makes a lot of sense look you have all those lessons now you're at Das now did you wipe the cap table or do you give your fuel folks equity in the new business uh no this an entirely separate business it's uh there's no intellectual property share there's no they're just totally separate things uh fuel's game is early stage uh early stage um preed seed companies in kind of consumer and B and light B2B um and I love the guys there they're awesome but yeah it's just this is not a fit for them so Mark Pearson didn't say listen you lost two million bucks my money I'm betting on you we have a relationship Aaron I want that first check in your next business he never said that uh no actually it was more they get their investors will still get a tax a tax loss um because we were part of an investment scheme called Eis which is in the UK um so their investors will recover about half of their money um and really we're just looking forward to I'm looking forward to working with their portfolio companies and what we do now with Das all right we'll see what happens in the meantime though let's wrap up here with the famous 5 number one your favorite book uh favorite book would be the inner work by Matt sigety number two is there a CEO you're following or studying oh uh Henry Singleton number uh he's dead right yep still still good there was a what was it the outsiders I think I just read Oh yeah talk to talk one of my favorite books yeah it's always it's one of those books that's not widely talked about I'm trying to grab it quickly here of course I can't find right when I need it but it was a very good book um all right tadine in case anyone's curious a big conglomerate in the 60s and produced incredible value yeah yeah great returns uh a guy who is alive would be uh Ro um Roger I'm forgetting his last name from uh started Vista Equity Partners Robert Smith Robert sorry yeah Robert Graves Robert yeah Robert Smith sorry yeah Vista Equity number three what's your favorite online tool for building Das uh which is kind of like a zapier it's a little less wellknown much more flexible much better to use much more robust number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night uh seven to eight and situation married single kids uh part long-term partner getting married awesome exciting any kids or no no not yet all right and how old are you uh 39 last question something to wish you knew when you were 20 uh you are complete and whole as is and you can save a lot of suffering by just accept that guys had a first company raised two million bucks of equity learned a lot going through that shut it down now focused on D Ser D hyphen services.com it's an AI training company today about launching a SAS product with Hub they call it and Das content manager they'll do half a million bucks this year combined revenue streams just launched though eight weeks ago as they look to scale in 2024 we'll see what happens next Aaron thanks for taking us to the top 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 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 here on YouTube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get 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