How Data Duopoly CEO Tanuvi Ethunandan grew Data Duopoly to $43.2K revenue and 3 customers in 2023.

hey folks my guest today is tanabe ethanandan she's the co-founder and ceo of data duopoly a chartered accountant from ernst young and a cambridge university graduate economics she takes the lead on the financial and business strategy at the business they are focused on incentivizing visitors to explore tannery you ready to take us to the top yes okay what kind of visitors is this for b2b sas companies to get their visitors or in person places to get visitors who are you focused on we're focusing on any venue worldwide we primarily work with visitor attractions like theme parks museums and venues um so we worked with absolutely fantastic eden project here in the uk which receives over one million visitors for pilot test and we've now recently launched the national trust cornish tin coast partnership which covers three world heritage mining sites which is absolutely fantastic to be involved with such an exciting project and directing visitors to the least busy areas interesting so how did you get this idea were you working at one of these parks or doing financial analysis on one of them or what actually the idea came about because me and my co-founder were so tired of getting stuck in keys everyone's been there they've had an exciting day out they go to the visitor center and see the sign turn left you end up following the same set of people around the whole site when actually there's loads of space around the site but you just didn't know so we thought how could we incorporate digital to make the physical experience so much better interesting and who's paying you is it the amusement park or the historical national monument directly yeah so we charge the venues directly on a sas contract what do they pay on average per month um so really it depends on the size of the venue um so we're looking at around 30 000 pounds or medium-sized venue to even higher depending on the scale and we're also looking to work with university campuses okay when you say 30 000 pounds or about 37 000 usd is that monthly or annually that would be annually annually okay and when you say the size of the campus measured by what acres or people or what really it's a number of visitors so we would normally work with clients that have around more than 250 000 visitors and visiting every year okay interesting when did you write the first line of code for the platform so myself i'm not a technical co-founder so we actually used contractors so it was actually when we did our mvp so that was probably really early on and it was a really ugly manual prototype as many are you test it out you try and get out the kinks and when it's launched to market it looked a lot better when we had our in-house development team when was that though when did you get started on the code back in about sort of early 2019 2019 okay very cool so tell me about your first customer which who was it and how did you land them so really with the national trust tin coast they were first paying client and we actually had conversations with the project manager early on and they were really excited what we do then covert hit and really the whole world and went into lockdown and people couldn't explore at all so the world was in desperate need of a chance to go out and explore but actually understand where the busy areas are and make informed decisions of where to go next say that one more time your first customer was who the national trust cornish tin coast partnership what is that is that a national site yes it's actually a collection of three world heritage mining sites based down in cornwall geva levant and battalic and what it allows people to do is sort of explore the rich heritage of the coastline seeing how the mining took place and we direct them around seeing what the really exciting bits are in the area very interesting because that was your first customer how many customers are you serving now today so at the moment working with them we've got a really strong sales pipeline so we're also working with a local company to develop gamified trails we're also working with university campuses which is really exciting so farm at the university our first little pilot site and we're using our same technology to help students and staff navigate around the campus so i love pilots i understand the need to do that to drive paying customers national trust partnership was your first customer paying how many are paying you though today at the moment those are the only ones and we've to stop two or three so three at the moment okay got it three so this is great so how did you guys survive cobit i mean that's all you have to deal with cutting expenses i mean that's a big deal so we were actually really early on so we only incorporated in october 2019 so we were a team of two myself and my co-founder aaron morris so we kept ourselves really lean we bootstrapped the company we sort of took trains um slept from very dubious airbnbs and we went to trade shows in london the works but really we then managed to secure our first seed round of a quarter of a million pounds and that's when it changed and we did that during covert and the real reason for that was we secured our first paying client during then but actually more importantly there was actually a big need people suddenly realize they need to understand where their visitors are on site knowing that they just sold a million tickets for a day isn't enough they need to know actually where are people on site and that's where we can really help so we managed to get backing from the european space agency for our seed round also another organization in aerospace and some fantastic angel investors and that enabled us to grow our team from two to six and very shortly becoming seven which really has ramped up our sales pipeline and our sort of development capabilities which has been hugely exciting how much equity did you have to sell to raise the 275 000 yeah so for us that we had to give about 10 equity away but i would like to say we came from an incubator beforehand so they had a stake in the business at the very starting point i see so the precede folks took about 10 how much did the incubator take so they took a lot more um it was 24.9 at the beginning okay and who was that incubator so that's actually launch pad and they're based down in cornwall and really they were the people that brought evan and myself together so they took us at individuals with no business idea and they gave us a year and funded us for masters in entrepreneurship and said can you start up a business how much capital they give you if any so they didn't give us capital per se but they gave support and expertise um but really it was down to aaron and myself to do the hard work and that's where we've got to you today so tell me you and aaron own 65 today and the incubator has 25 and the pre-seat is 10. exactly about 66 between evan and myself very cool okay what a great story now you're growing today the team is six people um how are you thinking about burn i mean can you self-fund off customer revenue yet so at the moment for us actually we are using our seed money but for us we're quite lean we don't pay for office space we've sort of adapted to that hybrid working we've got some free office space at the moment in cornwall which is fantastic it means we can meet once a week but actually we work with a developer in the philippines which keeps our cost really low and he's absolutely fantastic an integral part of the team how did you find him amazing and i think covert taught us that we can how did you find how did you find him oh sorry i thought you meant how we find him with how it goes how we found him was we were advertising the role he applied and we went through an interview process where did you advertise though um on linkedin on angel list um the usual sort of hot spots but it actually came through a direct connection very interesting so he's developing can i ask what you pay him per month um yeah you can do um so for us we sort of do us all about um 2 000 pounds a month um but that is for specifics project costs i see interesting okay so six people now today um what do the six people do so we have a variety so myself i take some of the business and financial side of things my co-founder is an award-winning film director so she actually takes the lead on the product design and the ui and ux we have a sort of lead developer based in the philippines which is fantastic a full stack developer we also have two underground developers at the moment um here in cornwall one sort of a mid-level developer sort of taking charge on the back end side of things and then we also have more on the app side front end development a junior developer and we have a sales and marketing lead and the new team member hopefully joining us later this month is the junior marketing assistant willing to ramp up that sales cycle so so how much are you guys burning per month right now so at the moment it's not too bad we sort of have about one way in the bank account probably for around another eight to nine months actually okay okay that's pretty good so what's the plan then do you think of enough customers be profitable are you gonna go raise again so i think profitable with startups that's not the aim the aim is to get that customer base and get that recurring revenue up so for us at the moment it's really pushing on that sale so we're going to as many trade shows as possible so we went to the visitor attractions conference down in london we're going to the family...