How Digno Bootstrapped to $540K Revenue and 15 Paying Customers in Under a Year (Interview with CEO Mahir Iskender)

Introduction and What Digno Does

Nathan Latka

00:00Hey, folks. My guest today is Mihir Iskinder. He's the CEO and founder of digno, an advanced platform built to completely disrupt the tired inefficient employee evaluation process that we've come to know. Driven by passion for human behavioral psychology, Mihir developed digno with the future of work in mind, supporting and celebrating every member of your organization. Alright, Mihir. You ready to take us to the top? Let's do it. Okay. So it sounds like digno turns employee performance

00:22data into a measurable score. What does that mean?

Mahir Iskender

00:26>> So we we have been studying the the behavioral psychology of employees for the couple years. And what we realized is there's five factors that affect the employee performance and company performance altogether. And those are the productivity, management, engagement, 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

00:56>> those five factors. And we produce one score, making management's employee management simple.

Nathan Latka

01:03Okay. And and what are customers, companies on average, paying you per month to use this technology?

Mahir Iskender

01:08>> It's $59 for base subscription, but then there's a $7 to $9 per employee fee.

Nathan Latka

01:17Okay. So what does that mean? The average company is what? Buying either paying you a grand a month, $2,000 a month?

Mahir Iskender

01:23>> Approximately, the average is about 3,000 to $5,000

Nathan Latka

01:27Okay. And what does that mean? Per month. Right? Yes. And and what does that mean? That's a team size of what? A hundred, two hundred, 300?

Mahir Iskender

01:33>> Yes. Approximately, we're talking about three to 500 people.

Nathan Latka

01:36Okay. So your your sweet

01:38spot customer is 300 to 500?

Mahir Iskender

01:40>> Yes. Sweet spot is mid to large enterprises.

Pricing Model and Average Contract Value

Nathan Latka

01:44Yep. This is very cool. Okay, give us the backstory. When did you launch the company? What year?

Mahir Iskender

01:48>> We launched it actually January 2022. But giving the back story would be going back all the way back to 2018. I haven't told you, but, you know, this digno was born out of my retail business. You know, I have fashion retail that I launched back in 2012 together with my wife. And we have been managing two stores and 10 to 15 people in each store. And as excited as we were as an entrepreneur, we were signing

Founding Story and Retail Background

Mahir Iskender

02:18>> up different applications at that time. I'm going back to 2018 and I had a really hard time managing this 30 people, approximately 30 people team. And one day I was just sitting in front of 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, you know, my balance are paid off and also making

02:46>> sure that I go and open another credit card so that my score goes up. So using that, you know, I realized that we were kind of influenced by these companies through the psychology and habits of paying on time.

Nathan Latka

03:02Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with founders, but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 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 Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you connect your

03:25Stripe account, you see your valuation real time. You can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna get

03:50a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation. Private equity firm is different. If you're gonna 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

04:11built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder share with us on the show. So traction, 1,200,000 seed round, 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna 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

04:37out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll 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 dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. Alright. We're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second, but if you

04:59wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link. This link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. 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. Alright. Let's jump back into the interview.

05:26When did you write the first line

05:28of code for digno?

Mahir Iskender

05:29>> First line of code was last year, July.

Nathan Latka

05:32Okay.

05:33So 2020. It was

Mahir Iskender

05:36>> in March 2020 when all the COVID mess was happening.

Nathan Latka

05:41Okay, so about two years ago.

Mahir Iskender

05:43>> Yes. Yes.

05:44>> 2020. That's when I decided that this must be done because I measured. So I made a fake basically Digno for my employees. I told them I lied them. I mean, this is first time actually I'm telling this to public. So I told them that we have a dashboard where we measure all your calls, all your tasks completed, all the communication you make with colleagues, and we generate one score. And if your scores go down, forget about

06:10>> 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 score, this is what you're rewarded. And magic happens. Within six months, 30% increase in sales, 40% increase in productivity. I had different age range, age of employees starting using all Asana, the Klaviyo, all the Shopify, all the applications we

First Line of Code and Early Testing

Mahir Iskender

06:40>> had. They they had better clarity to

Nathan Latka

06:42make Here, just to sorry. Just to jump where this is a short show, so I wanna get, like, quick answers from you 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 fur do you get your first customer in 2020, or is that 2021?

Mahir Iskender

06:56>> No. We launched it actually 2021 July. That's when we wrote the first code. Right? So we worked on it until March.

Nathan Latka

07:02Hold on. Sorry. I thought you just said it was COVID when COVID started in 2020 is when you write the first line of code.

Mahir Iskender

07:07>> That's when we started the planning. We started I got the team together. Got it. Yes. The whole planning. And then

Nathan Latka

07:12Okay. So first line of code 2021. And when was the first customer?

Mahir Iskender

07:16>> First customer we got in June 2022.

Nathan Latka

07:19Okay. So just a couple a couple months ago.

Mahir Iskender

07:21>> Yes. So we officially launched it at Collision Toronto. And that's it. You know, I have 45 companies using it at the moment.

Launch at Collision Toronto and Customer Count

Nathan Latka

07:30Does that mean they're paying customers? 45 customers?

Mahir Iskender

07:32>> Not all of them. You know, we have trials obviously, you know, which is

Nathan Latka

07:36How many are paying?

Mahir Iskender

07:37>> We have approximately 15 paying customers.

Nathan Latka

07:40Okay.

07:41And walk me through that conversion cycle. How do you get someone that's trialing to convert to paid?

Mahir Iskender

07:46>> So 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, give us feedback. So that took us from March to June. We had already approximately like 20 users already in the system. But obviously, as a new new launch, I gave them for trial, like for

08:12>> that long because all I wanted them to give me just feedback so I can make it better. And then once we launched in July, in June 2022, we got them converted into paying customer. Right? And then in addition in the last

Nathan Latka

08:25But how? Did email all 45 and say we're shutting this off unless you start paying? Or how did you get 15 to start paying?

Trial to Paid Conversion Process

Mahir Iskender

08:32>> So I had to deal with them. I said that I'm going to give it to you approximately like from March to we had a plan to launch it initially 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 they already knew I was expecting them to convert. And out of 20,

08:53>> we had approximately eight, 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.

Nathan Latka

09:03But there's no free plan right now. If people aren't paying, there's no way to use the tool.

Mahir Iskender

09:08>> Oh, we have five user free plan. So I made it, you know, that's my kind of fulfillment, you know, and giving Understood. Yeah. So we have five user up to five users. It's for free of charge forever.

Nathan Latka

09:21Okay. Got it. So you can pay you you you don't have to pay the $59 base fee, you don't have to pay $7 to $9 per user per seat if you only have five people on your team. It's free forever.

Mahir Iskender

09:29>> It's free forever.

09:30>> Yes. We don't

Nathan Latka

09:31have How many people do you have on the free plan?

Mahir Iskender

09:34>> So we have about 10 people right now.

Nathan Latka

09:36Why aren't there more?

09:38I mean, it feels like if you're launching at 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.

Free Plan and Why Growth Has Been Slow

Mahir Iskender

09:44>> It's because of my perfectionism, honestly. You know, I've been trying to make perfect, like make it better and better, like every month, every day. And I delayed the launch, the marketing launch, let's put that way, 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.

Nathan Latka

10:04But I'm here today, 15 customers paying the ARPU you just told me, right? $3,000 per month. If I multiply those, it would mean you're doing about $45,000 a month today in revenue. Is that accurate?

Mahir Iskender

10:15>> It's accurate. Yes. We're aiming approximately $82,000 by the end of the year.

Revenue and Bootstrapped Funding

Nathan Latka

10:22And where exactly one year ago you had nothing, right? Were pre revenue. Yes. Yeah. Very cool. This is great growth. Now, have you bootstrapped the company or raised capital?

Mahir Iskender

10:31>> Bootstrapped. Bootstrapped.

Nathan Latka

10:32I love that. Congratulations. Thank you.

Mahir Iskender

10:35>> Thank you. Not a dime from outside.

Nathan Latka

10:36That's amazing. So do you own a 100% personally?

Ownership Structure and Personal Investment

Mahir Iskender

10:39>> I own 90% and my partner in life and in the business, my wife, she owns 10%.

Nathan Latka

10:45That'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?

Mahir Iskender

10:52>> I know you were coming to that. We put initially 120,000

11:02>> We started with $9,000 and then we had to add more. And obviously, so that's how we ended up spending.

Nathan Latka

11:08And where did you spend those first dollars?

Mahir Iskender

11:11>> The first dollars went to the development, really, like the ideation.

Nathan Latka

11:19Did you find a firm to do that for you or you built it in house?

Mahir Iskender

11:22>> So we first started to do everything ourselves. We created the MVP. I hired like two people from Turkey, 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 team, outsource them basically. I outsource them from from different country.

Nathan Latka

11:52How did you find them?

Mahir Iskender

11:54>> Actually, they found me. They have been bombarding me with email for over a year, and I've been watching them through LinkedIn and through their website.

Nathan Latka

12:03So what's the name of the contractor company that you use to find the developers?

Mahir Iskender

12:08>> It's a company called TkXel. It's based out of Pakistan.

Nathan Latka

12:12Can you spell it?

Mahir Iskender

12:13>> Yes. It's a T K X E L.

Nathan Latka

12:17X e l. TkXel out of Pakistan.

Mahir Iskender

12:21>> And Yes. They have majority of their clients are actually in The US, which is interesting. And they also have offices here in Reston, Virginia.

Nathan Latka

12:28Oh, interesting. So what it just for a comp, what do they charge like for an hourly front end senior React engineer?

Development Team and TkXel Partnership

Mahir Iskender

12:36>> It's it varies. You know, they have so it starts from, like, $35 and up.

Nathan Latka

12:41Yeah. Yeah. That's okay. That's a market. So so today you pay them what? $10 to 20 grand a month total for development?

Mahir Iskender

12:48>> Yes. You got it. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

12:50Yeah. Interesting. That's a good way to obviously get stuff built quickly. Do you think that can scale? You have one or two full time engineers that manage that team that TkXel put together for you?

Mahir Iskender

12:58>> Actually, I now have four full time engineers that they work only for me.

Nathan Latka

13:03Oh, wow. Okay. How many total full time employees?

Mahir Iskender

13:06>> I have full time employees. I have three marketing, four engineers, and I have one UX UI designer.

Nathan Latka

13:14Plus you guys. So there's

Mahir Iskender

13:15>> 10 total. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

13:16Approximately 10 together.

Mahir Iskender

13:18>> Yeah. With us.

Nathan Latka

13:19Yeah. Very cool. This is a great story. Okay. So hoping to continue to grow. You've bootstrapped to date, growing nicely. How are you getting cut? Like, how are you gonna meet your next 20 customers?

Mahir Iskender

13:29>> It's all me. I'm the salesperson, founder of sales.

Sales Strategy and LinkedIn Outreach Tools

Nathan Latka

13:32Yeah, but how? How? What do you do? You go on LinkedIn and search for something specific? How do you find customers?

Mahir Iskender

13:35>> I use multiple tools. You know, we have we use like AI. You know, you all heard of. I use SalesFlow and and actually I just signed up Expandi.io. I want them to hear because I signed up through the Austin, Texas conference Founder Founder Conference. You know, I went there.

Nathan Latka

13:53Ah, you found you found them down here and you signed up. We love that. Did you have fun at the conference?

Mahir Iskender

13:57>> Yes. Yes. I participated in the conference. I listened to all the, you know, the CEOs. And I've, you know, this conference actually made me super happy because I confirmed once more time that, you know, the companies needed the Apple Watch and I created that, You know?

Conference Participation and Growth Plans

Nathan Latka

14:12Yeah. Yeah. We're trying to obviously, the the conference is 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 Expandi team there. Yes. And I'm coming

Mahir Iskender

14:21>> to SaaS Open in March too.

Nathan Latka

14:22Let's go. Let's go.

14:24Yeah. SaaS Open will be a lot of fun. So I hope you're at 2,000,000 in revenue at that point. 2,000,000 run rate by then.

Mahir Iskender

14:30>> Hopefully, on one of your stages one day, I'll come up there and say we made it.

Nathan Latka

14:34That 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.

Famous Five Rapid Fire Questions

Mahir Iskender

14:42>> Atomic Habits. Two is there a Yeah. Go ahead. Sorry.

Nathan Latka

14:46Is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Mahir Iskender

14:49>> Yes. I follow you. Thank you. I follow a bunch of CEOs, but my my most favorite, most inspired is the Elon Musk.

Nathan Latka

15:01Yep. Yep. Number three. What's your favorite online tool for building digno?

Mahir Iskender

15:06>> Favorite online tool? I would say pendo.io.

Nathan Latka

15:11Yep.

15:12Number four. How many hours of sleep do you get every night?

Mahir Iskender

15:15>> Five hours.

Nathan Latka

15:16That's good. And what's your well, you mentioned married. Any kids?

Mahir Iskender

15:20>> I have two girls,

15:21>> one 15, one 10.

Nathan Latka

15:22That's amazing. And how old are you?

Mahir Iskender

15:25>> I'm 40.

Nathan Latka

15:2640. Last question.

15:27Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Mahir Iskender

15:32>> Actually.

15:34>> Just learn from mistakes every day, you know, have good habits, measure yourself and be better yourself every single day.

Nathan Latka

15:43What I would have done.

Mahir Iskender

15:45>> Yes.

Nathan Latka

15:45Digno.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.io just broke $45,000 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 rate

16:07here in the next two or three months. We'll see what happens. Maher, thanks for taking us to the top. Thank you, Nathan.

16:13One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM Central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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, ARPU, CAC, LTV, you name it, they share it. And the buyers try and make a deal live. It is fun to watch every Thursday one

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