How Digno, Inc CEO Mahir Iskender grew Digno, Inc to $681.5K revenue and 15 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is Mahir is Kinder he's the CEO and founder of big no an advanced platform built to completely disrupt the tired and efficient employee evaluation process that we've come to know driven by Passion for human behavioral psychology Mahir developed dignity with the future of work and Minds supporting and celebrating every member of your organization all right I'm here you ready to take us to the top let's do it okay so it sounds like digno turns employee performance data into a measurable score what does that mean um so we we have been studying the the behavioral psychology of employees for a couple years and what we realized that is there's the five factors that affect the employee performance um and and Company performance altogether and those are the productivity um goal management engagement uh tenure at the company and consistency so what we do we take the data from any inputs it can be from your Erp system or from any applications that you use and we analyze it within our system based on those five factors and we produce one score making management employee management simple okay and and what are customers companies on average paying you per month to use this technology it's 59 um for base subscription but then there's a there's a seven dollar to nine dollar uh per per employee fee okay so what does that mean the average company is what buying either paying you a grand a month two grand a month approximately it's uh the average is about three to five thousand dollars okay and what does that mean how per month right yes and what does that mean that's a team size of what 100 200 300. uh yes approximately we're talking about three to five hundred people okay so your your sweet spot customer is 300 to 500. yes a sweet spot is a mid to large Enterprises Yep this is very cool okay give us the backstory when you launch the company what year we launched it actually January 2022 but um giving the back story would be going back all the way back to 2018. um I haven't told you but you know this digital was born out of my retail business you know I have um Fashion retail that I launched uh back in 2012 together with my wife and we have been managing two stores um and in 10 to 15 people in each store and as excited as we were as an entrepreneur we were signing up different applications at that time I'm going back to 2018 and I had really hard time managing this 30 people approaching 30 people um team and one day I was just sitting in front of my my FICO score or Credit Karma you know I was checking my score and I realized that how automatically they're making me to make the payments on time and you know making sure that yeah you know my balance are paid off and also making sure that I go and open another credit card so my score goes up so using that you know I I realized that we were kind of influenced or by these companies um through the psychology and and habits of pain pain on time 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 2807 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 access 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 evaluation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your founder path 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 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 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 seed round 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent 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 this 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 than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna 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 founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.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 when did you write the first line of code for digno our first line of code was last last year July okay so 20 so 2020 yes yeah in March 2020 uh when the older covets Ms was happening okay so about two years two years ago yes yes 2020 that's when I decided that this must be done because I measured so I made a fake basically digital for my employees I told them I I like them I mean this is first time actually I'm telling this to public so I told them that we have a plot we have a dashboard where we measure all your calls all your tasks completed all the communication you make with your with your colleagues and we generate one score and if your scores go down forget about the the salary increase or rewards that we had in the system if its score goes up you'll be rewarded and I put a reward to a one-week vacation to Istanbul so I said if you reach the 800 800 score this is what your reward and Magic happens within six months thirty percent um increase in sales 40 percent increase in productivity I had different age range age of employees starting using all Asana the clavia all the Shopify all the applications we had they had better Clarity to hear just sorry just to jump with this is a short show so I want to get like quick answers for me if possible so got it you eat your own dog food this is a you use it on your own employees first you write the first line of code in 2020 you get your first do you get your first customer in 2020 or is that 2021 no we launched it actually 202 upon July that's when we wrote the first code right so we worked on it until March hold on sorry I thought you just said it was a covet when covet started in 2020 is when you write the first line of code that's when we started the planning we started I got the team together got it uh yes the whole planning and then okay so first line of code 2021 and when was the first customer first customer we got in June 2022. okay okay so just a couple a couple months ago yes uh so we officially launched it at Collision Toronto um and and that's it you know I have 45 companies using it at the moment does that mean they're paying customers 45 customers and not all of them you know we have trials obviously you know how many are paying we have approximately 15 paying customers okay and walk me through that conversion cycle well how do you get someone that's trialing they convert to paid so um initially when we started obviously we launched it we sent it to all our friends Partners everyone that we know right we want to make sure that we get some people on board and they try it they test it they tell us um give us feedback so that took us from March to approximately to June we had already approximately like 20 20 users already in the system but obviously as a you know new new launch I I pay I gave them for trial like for that long because all I wanted them to give me just feedback so I can make it better and then when once we launched in July in June um 2022 we we got them converted into paying customer right and then in addition in the last yeah but how about how did you did you email all 45 and say we're shutting this off and once you start paying or how did you get 15 to start paying so I had to deal with them I said that I'm gonna give it to you approximately like for from March to we had a plan to launch it initial in May so I told them by the end of the may you like it you stay with me you don't like it thank you so much so but then I extended it another month obviously so that they already knew I was expecting them to convert and out of 20 we had approximately eight um not 18 like 17 convert the rest didn't want to continue I was you know so we we had to you know just let them go but there's no free plan right now if people aren't paying there's no way to use the tool oh we have five user free plan so um I I made it you know that's my kind of fulfillment you know and giving understood yeah so we have five users up to five users it's for free of charge forever okay got it so you can pay you you don't have to pay the six dollar base fee and you don't have to pay 79 seven to nine dollars per user per seat if you only have five people on your team it's free forever it's free forever yes how many people do you have on the free plan so we have about 10 10 people right now uh why aren't there more I mean it feels like if you're launching a collision and you've been doing this now for two and you know two years of planning there should be more than 10 people on the free plan it's because of uh my perfectionism honestly you know I've been trying to make perfect like make it better and better like every month every day and um I delayed the loan the marketing launch let's put that way um very long so until I was very comfortable and I said you know I told my team we're going we're going and let's do that but I'm here today 15 customers paying the arpu you just told me right three thousand dollars per month if I multiply those it would mean you're doing about 45 000 a month today in revenue is that accurate it's accurate yes we're we're aiming approximately 80 82 000 by the by the end of the year and where exactly one year ago you had nothing right you were pre-revenue yes yeah very cool this is great growth now have you bootstrap the company or raised capital we'll start we'll start I love that congratulations thank you thank you not that I'm from outside that's amazing should you own 100 personally um I own 90 uh and my partner in life and in the business my wife she owns 10 that's amazing okay very cool now did you guys have to put in a bunch of your own money at the start yes how much ah I know you were coming to that um we we put initially 120 000 um you know um just to we started with 9 000 and then we we had to add more and obviously um so that's how how we end up spending and where did you spend those first dollars the first dollars went to um to the development really like uh the the ideation uh did you find a firm to do that for you or you built it in-house so we first first uh we first started to do everything ourselves we created the MVP I hired like two people from Turkey um developers who helped me just put my idea together so I can see this is doable this is possible after I realized that it's really going well and it's working for my team I'm talking about the retail team I decided to hire like full stack um Team um Outsource them basically I Outsource them uh from from uh uh uh from different country how did you find them actually they found me um they they they have been bombarding me with email for over a year and I I've been watching them through Linkedin and through their website so what's the name what's the name of the contractor company that you use to find the Developers um it's a company called Excel it's based out of Pakistan can you spell it yes it's a t t k x e l x e l pixel out of Pakistan yes and they have majority of their clients are actually in the US which is interesting and they also have Offices here in Reston Virginia oh interesting so what it just for a comp what do they charge like for an hourly front-end senior react engineer it's it varies you know they have um so it starts from like 35 and up yeah yeah that's okay that's a market so so today you pay them what 10 20 grand a month total for development yes you got it yeah yeah interesting that's a good way to obviously get stuff built quickly um do you think that can scale you have one or two full-time Engineers that manage that team that tix will put together for you actually I now have four full-time Engineers that they work on for me oh wow okay how many total full-time employees I have uh full-time employees I have three marketing uh for um engineers and I have one ux UI designer plus you guys so there's ten total yeah opportunity 10 together yeah with us very cool this is a great story okay so hoping to continue to grow you've bootstrapped to date uh growing nicely how are you getting cut like how are you gonna meet your next 20 customers it's all me I'm the salesperson founder sales um yeah but how how what do you do to go on LinkedIn and search for something specific how do you find I use multiple tools you know we have um we use like similar seamless AI you know we all heard of um I use sales flow and and actually I just signed up expand your I want them to hear because I signed up through the Austin Texas conference founder founder conference you know nice there ah you found you found them down here and you signed up we love that did you have fun at the conference yes yes I participate the conference I listened all the uh you know the the CEOs and I've you know this conference actually made me super happy because I confirmed one once more time that you know the companies needed the Apple watch and I created you know yeah yeah we're trying to obviously the conference was all about as you saw getting a bunch of bootstrappers together just like you so I'm glad you enjoyed yourself and that you found the expanded team there yes and I'm coming to SAS open in March too let's go let's go yes that's open will be a lot of fun so I hope you're at 2 million in Revenue at that 2 million run right right by then hopefully on one of your stages one day I come up there and say we made ah that would be that would be amazing we'd love that all right on that on that note here let's wrap up with the famous five number one favorite Business book uh Atomic habits number two yeah go ahead sorry is there a CEO you're following or studying yes I I follow you thank you I I follow a bunch of uh CEOs but my my most favorite uh most inspired is the the Elon Musk yeah yeah number three what's your favorite online tool for building digno favorite online tool I would say uh pendo IO yeah number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night five hours that's good and what you're saying well you mentioned married any kids I have two girls one fifteen one ten that's amazing and how old are you I'm 40. 40. last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. uh actually just learn from mistakes every day you know have good habits um measure yourself and be better yourself to X every single day that's why I would have done yes big no dot IO helps you get more from your employees by A system that helps you understand what's going to make them be productive he used it on his own employees at one of his other businesses and now today digno dot IO just broke forty five thousand dollars a month in Revenue launched under a year ago all completely bootstrapped which we love today there's a team of 10 full-time and some outsourced engineering as well he's hoping to break a million dollar run right here in the next two or three months we'll see what happens I'm here thanks for taking us to the top thank you Nathan one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm Central it's called Shark 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 back-end dashboards their expenses their revenue our poo 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 2PM Central to make sure you don't miss 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