How Dedoco CEO Daphne Ng grew to $4.9M revenue with a 8 person team in 2023.

hey folks my guest today is ernie teo he's the co-founder and cto of dudaco he has a phd in economics and game theory and has taught in universities worked and worked at ibm blockchain research their company is document process management on blockchain ernie ready to take the top okay so what does document process management mean on top of blockchain right so if you look at a lot of enterprise blockchain use cases it's all about document management like supply chain related so there's a lot of document flows when it comes to blockchain consortiums and enterprise projects so what we are looking to do is to create a sense that empowers any company to be able to tap onto that feature and to be able to put documents on blockchain that are verifiable that are tested by different individuals along the business process and that allows um you know visibility across the ecosystem across different partners and counterparties and ernie what are companies paying on average to monthly to to use this technology um so they're paying about 30 uh dollars in in on average uh for individual license so that's uh a basic license for uh the basic features on our platform which includes our document signing as well as the document management on blockchain and when did you guys launch the business when did you write the first line of code um we started the business last year in march so the first lines of code was written in around june last year and we officially launched the platform in july this year very cool congratulations and how many customers are you now working with um we have about a thousand uh registered users on our sas platform but we are also working with enterprise customers so uh enterprise customers in singapore for example some financial institutions um property agencies and even government agencies are using our platform how many are paid customers um um so the enterprise users are all paid customers uh for the how many of those are there though are there a thousand um no so yeah okay so for one of our financial institution customers there are about i think 300 registered uh users within the company that's one example uh we also have our property agencies that are ernie whatever what i'm trying to do what i'm trying to understand is how many brands pay you as a customer not registered users under the brand how many individual companies pay you ah so for for brands right now i'll say around 30 to 40 okay and those 40 brands they each pay you 30 bucks a month or it's 30 dollars a month per user per brand uh so for for brands uh we have a different pricing model we go by credits so we we charge uh we sell each uh age brand credits to use under the company so um and credits can go anywhere between uh so the the standard price is about five dollars per transaction okay so five dollar and a transaction one transaction is one credit so how how many credits are these customers using on average per month on the platform well i guess around the number of a hundred yeah okay so i can take a hundred uses times five each each of these 40 brands is paying about 400 or 500 per month um yeah i guess for the bigger brands it's around 100 and there are some smaller businesses as well so on average those would be like 10 to be around 10. yeah okay so can i i mean can i take 40 customers times 100 bucks a month you guys are doing about four thousand dollars a month in revenue right now uh yes in terms of the sme customers i guess the smaller size customers but there are like the um again the prices will be on annual basis so we we we charge like a annual fee instead so those are averaging around um i think about a hundred thousand dollars so we got two or three of these larger clients for uh annual uh that pays the annual subscription okay got it so 300 000 uh you know if you look at that monthly you guys are doing like more like 30 000 bucks a month right now on revenue 360 grand a year or something like that and you've done that fairly quickly so in the past sort of 12 months where did you get these first sort of 40 50 customers um a lot of it is happening locally here in singapore but we have also expanded now to the region including malaysia um well we started off by partnering with the uh with the singapore government well because the singapore government rolled out a certificate authority for digital signing and we partnered with them to incorporate that onto our platform so that got a lot of use cases in terms of government agencies as well as property agencies because they are that interested you use this feature right and then um also because i guess it was covered so we got to talk to a lot of people who are interested to digitize their business and we provide quite an interesting value proposition because we are using blockchain and and by using blockchain we are providing a proposition where we don't store the documents of the of our customers on our on our cloud rather they provide they provide their own um document repositories which we tap onto so there's no third party that's actually hosting the documents rather we are hosting the document evidence and processes understood and so you get going have you guys bootstrapped the business or did you raise capital oh we raised taxes how much did you guys decide to raise so our last round uh we so we closed about two about 2 million u.s dollars or in our last round it was a seat round and what year was that uh this year so we closed it around the same time as so we were fundraising from the start so but we closed that round in july when we launched the platform okay so so two million dollar seed round and why did you and daphne your co-founder why did you decide that you needed to raise capital why couldn't you bootstrap um so because we thought that the um this industry is growing fairly quickly and we we want to catch the wave you know where everyone is trying to digitize that digitize their business so uh and we needed to scale fairly quickly um so we we needed to hire you know hire a bigger team and to to scale up our marketing skill our business uh business efforts right so um yeah definitely we think um fundraising in this case is quite important for us to really scale it up and what's your team size today how many folks um we have about 30 people right now three zero how many of those are engineers um about close to twenty yeah twenty and so how does this work if someone's listening right now they're currently using docusign why should they switch to doco [Music] well the main proposition here is we are we have a decentralized proposition so what that means is number one we have we treat the documents separate from the document evidence process so we can decouple that because we use blockchain to register the document hashes such that it becomes immutable and hard to tamper with right and then the second proposition is because it's decentralized um the verification process is quite different right so with docusign you need to be one of the document preparers or one of the signers to access the system to to get the document evidence or to download the certificate of signing for example right so for our case as long as you hold a copy of the signed document you can verify it uh of our verifier which is a blockchain link verifier so that that difference means that if i were to provide a document to my auditor or to a third party like a bank and they need to verify the authenticity of the document and the documentation they can do it on their own they can directly do the verification uh without trusting a piece of paper that i gave to them and how are you finding these customers is it through the partnership with the gong the singapore government uh uh we have various channels that we are working on now because uh government is one channel but uh with partnerships as well so we work with various uh system integrators to partner with them so that they can bring out solutions to the clients as well okay got it what are some of the growth channels that are really working for you like the last two customers you got what channel did they come from good luck too um [Music] i guess it's actually true ecosystem partners so like the system integrators i mentioned uh we also work with other uh partners in in in the uh like um you know in partners network basically so um the last two that we closed um one is through our actually through our vc's recommendation um so so the vc network i think is also quite uh important for us very cool what's next product wise are you going to stick to document signing or what's next actually the vision for the company is the whole realm of verifiable documents so um and that's that's very uh blockchain related as well so so like for example covet uh destination certificates these are going online through through blockchain based certificates as well and allows verifiability so we want to bring this verifiability to the business world so um that you know any business who wants uh documents they produce would be verifiable checkable um so verifiability i mean we can verify that it did come from this company and that the contents inside the document are not tampered with so that's a very important follow-up to to look at automating business process we're certainly rooting for you ernie i hope it goes well in the meantime let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book wow um favorite business book i actually i'm i'm more of the tech sites so um i will say none then number two is what you're following or studying um stripe i guess the stripe guys i think are people that we really look to um we want to be kind of like the api providers for document processes number three what's your favorite online tool for building dedaco well um i guess we use github a lot and a lot of our codes are written from scratch so um because you know it's it's a uh enterprise level system so um you know we use the usual tools like github jira et cetera number four ernie how many hours of sleep to get every night well i try to get my seven to eight hours um okay fair and what's your situation married married single kids oh i'm single okay and uh how old are you i'm 32. yeah 42. last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20 well um i guess okay so so maybe like how to do business like how to grow a business and how to actually manage people guys there you have it dudaco launched just about a year ago they're now working with 40 customers doing about 30 000 a month in revenue they want to be basically the api tool for everything related to document signing verify it on blockchain uh they've raised 2 million bucks in their seed round to growth 30 on the team so far heavy engineering with 20 folks over there ernie thanks for taking us to the top all right cheers 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 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