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...