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...