How Dixa CEO Mads Fosselius grew Dixa to $23.4M revenue and 1K customers in 2024.

hey folks special edition today we're excited for this entrepreneurs always wonder what is it like selling your company and then what's it like post acquisition well we have a unique experience today with mads from dixa and eric from solvemate uh dixa recently raised a new round of capital and a big tranche of that capital was dedicated towards m a he chose to match shows to index a team chose to go acquire eric at solvent which we also have here live so guys we're gonna have fun today thanks for taking us uh thanks for joining thank you so much nathan great to be here again so mads let's work backwards and eric well then loop and solve it as we work backwards uh mads you need to obviously fund this acquisition and i think last time we spoke uh in terms of focus you were really focused on call center support desk and tickets give us an updated view of dix's product say for folks are not familiar with the website yeah definitely so dixre is a next generation customer service platform just as you you said nathan and of course we have been um changing the way customer service works and brands typically consumer brands but also b2b uh the the the last two years and we are disrupting the way you do it on a typical ticketing base basis we are doing it in a conversational way in what we call customer friendship so all the conversations across all channels we are equally strong at all channels phone email live chat messaging facebook messenger whatsapp and the list continues um and then we we use the customer data and the channels to to basically build strong bonds across all these different experiences so that's kind of the core of dixa um and and and what we're going to talk about today is how we expanded uh what we call internally at dixa the effortless trinity so i'm looking forward to talk a little bit more about that the effortless trinity eric this seems like he's holding up to a very high standard effortless trinity seems like a big call to action uh we'll loop that in here in a second pre pre series what was it what was it a series c right pretty serious and pre the acquisition of both solve mate and i can't remember the other one what was the other company acquired olivio a ai knowledge base from melbourne australia yeah back in february last year so pre both of those deals what did you grow in the customer base you just number of businesses on the platform so just around a thousand customers including both the very small ones we had in the beginning we were starting out as an smb and then gradually into to more mid market where we where we played today and even enterprise to some extent and then let's sort of reverse engineer right so to fund these deals you raised a serious c how much was that for it was 105 million dollars seriously led by general atlantic but also with all the existing investors uh chipping in on their pro rata and also a significant round for us um and also with general atlantic being a partner that is used to of course a heavy hyper or organic growth but also sometimes with an m a agenda yeah so split the 105 million down for me how much was earmarked for mna so no no specific amount was actually earmarked for m a because general atlantic and existing investors actually are able to to to allocate extra funds uh to projects like the one we've been through the double acquisition here and the extinction of soul mate specifically so the good things there's no real boundaries but around what we can use but of course every company tries to preserve the cash for the organic growth for for opportunities coming ahead but we have had opportunities where we actually been able to preserve a lot of that cash and make other facilities for um for these acquisitions 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 valuation 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 valuations inside of your frowner 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 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 raised 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 valuations 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 so i guess the only other place that 105 million could have gone if it didn't go to the balance sheet was you know you've been around since 2016 so you have early employees obviously they're going mads whenever we get some some equity here we believe in the vision but we want to go buy a house can we get someone did any of this go to secondary yes a small amount went to secondaries for as you just said uh founders some founders early employees some very the first business angels taking a little bit out for yeah for for house or apartment or for savings so a little would you under under 10 of the round fare to say yes that's fair to say okay now let's loop in product strategy m a strategy so when did you first realize you know what m a is a strategy we want to use to grow and then how did you go about finding companies like eric and sullivan i imagine you looked at a lot of them eric's obviously closed but how did what was the process like yes so so first of all the the first part of this strategy actually started one and a half years ago a little bit more discussing it with our existing board and investors and in the management teams so we know that we had some really really strong partners in the ecosystem so our approach is actually is a kind of a luxury approach because we know the companies very well of course we have several partners within knowledge base several partners within chat bot automation and so on so forth we quite early realized that we have to invest a lot into the core of our platform routing automations on the conversation side however there is some really really um core tech and talent um across the go to market angle we don't have to we we always have to remember which is difficult in an ecosystem that we um probably were able to be to to be able to build ourselves at some point maybe but it's a big maybe it's a lot of risk there's a lot of talent and leadership and we have to organically drive and time to market disrupting one of the largest service software industries in the world like the customer service industry um it's a 300 billion if you include crm and some martic you have to move very very fast and you're going to have to get the best on board both from people and a product and hopefully one day a profit side so with the levio that was actually the first um there was the first corner of our effortless trinity the the the triangle so to speak where we added knowledge and data into the play we historically we've collected a lot of data we we want to help agents customers and customers in real time and we haven't been able to do that ourselves but then we've got to let you on board we started the journey in in our own effortless trinity to make customer service effortless for customers and consumers agents and admins and of course one of the very very big and important next steps in that is the automation chatbot intelligence piece of that trinity so it's actually not a an optimistic approach it's been it's been there for a long time of course we had to have the funds and the backing to to make such a big move um for a company of at that point...