How Dolado CEO Josmar Giovanni grew Dolado to $1.1M revenue and 1.5K customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is gee fury he's the co-founder and ceo of dilato investor at norte ventures uh kobe nomo and b-hub in addition to being a board member of quiko and b-hub he co-founded levo eyewear co-founded grow and co-founded warden angels the brazilian chapter yields a bachelors of engineering degree in industrial engineering from puc rio and mba from warren business school now building dilato.com dot br which is playing in the uh enablement space for aladdin and the loud am enabling space for e-commerce sites and financial services all right you ready to the top yeah nathan so super excited to be here thanks for the invitation you bet you've got a lot going on so i mean are you really focused on the startup here or just like a side thing no i'm focused on the startup focus on the ladder but of course there are many opportunities going on in the region and suppose so i like to do side investments and help other entrepreneurs but uh but my focus and my time is more dedicated to to building the ladder so what what is it i mean it looks like it's something that we can use to like buy headphones buy chargers things like that but is there a sas play here that i'm not seeing yeah so what you're seeing when you get into the website is we focus on building a solution that helps small merchants uh buy better their inventory and also sell better online because most of the the merchants the small entrepreneurs in brazil are 100 offline and we decided to focus initially on electronics because everybody's going after the low hanging fruits which is fashion and groceries but those those segments are too competitive already so we decided to focus on electron we are the only one on the b2b marketplace space online vc backed and right that's where we saw the biggest opportunity and the sas play that we have here is the e-commerce play to help them sell online and we also about to launch a management tool to help them manage their business better so we help them buy better sell better and manage better their business so what does the average paying customer today pay monthly in terms of the sas part of the business the sas part of the business we're giving it for free because it's a way for us to it's a cac hack like we offer the e-commerce solution for them to sell to their final club for free but the moment they start using our solution and build the trust we can make a lot of money by selling them their inventory so right now like we operate like amazon amazon they have a marketplace on the site that connects uh suppliers with final custom but they also have their own line of products that they make a lot of margin on that so we're doing this on the b2b store sas today is free and we don't have penal monetizing on this front because the way you've got a great way to have a low cac and monetize on the other front so then on this let's let's build up the marketplace for a second okay so in the past 30 day well i guess let's just use the last full month which is april um how many suppliers were on the platform how many skus so right now we have around 500 skus 100 focus on the electronics we have more than 30 000 merchants registered and the market those are those are suppliers or buyers those are buyers and on the supplier side we are we now are increasing on the b2b market place uh we just have around five suppliers for now but the idea is to increase more but uh but yeah but we already there's five suppliers with 500 skus yes 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 to 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 going to 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 founderprep.com and hover over products click on get your evaluation 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 and there's 30 000 registered buyers how many of those buyers spend at least a dollar the past 30 days uh last last 30 days around one 1 500 it spend on average with us uh 120 dollars on average and uh so we've been growing fifty fifty percent month over month so this month we are spending we are increasing fifty percent this number that i just told you so fifteen hundred uh buyers right uh spending 120 bucks on average like per checkout is about 200 000 of order volume how do you make money on that 200 000 of order volume right now we have that's the beauty of what we do is we have a lot of margin so right now the gross margin uh consider the price we sell and how much we pay in terms of cogs it's 28 so it's one of the highest in in the b2b segment the b2b marketplaces so just to be clear you're making 56 000 on 200 000 of volume yes so but besides this without we also have to take out logistics we have to take out transaction costs so after taking all of this we have a contribution margin of 13 okay got it so just to be clear there's 200 000 that these buyers are purchasing from uh five suppliers and 500 skus on your platform as they put and spent 200 000 over the past 30 days you have to spend about 150 000 of that to actually buy the physical good the charger the headphones the whatever the product so that's your 28 sort of gross margin then after all your operating costs your people marketing sales whatever you're taking about 13 to the bottom line is that about right yes that's correct i see okay this makes a ton of sense so so um that would mean you know so 56 times .13 yes so that means you're doing 8 000 per month right now in terms of margin you make on the marketplace now does that include the goods that you sell directly that you own products you own and build yourself most of them most of them uh it's it's directly that the marketplace the 3p play that it's it just started last month so over 90 of what we are talking here is from ours like we buying and selling to to the clients not just intermediating on the 3p marketplace yeah oh i see i see ic got it so you you started off by only selling your own line of products now you've added five suppliers and 500 skus yes so uh amazon that's just like amazon amazon 60 of what you've seen amazon it's coming from a third party but 40 it's it's amazon it's like they are buying from someone else and they have it in their inventory some of them has amazon brand on it and selling directly so it's a mix of 1p and 3p this is exactly what we're doing here i see got it so so you're right now doing a run rate in terms of your gross margin right of something or sorry you're i guess how do you calculate your revenue you don't want to use just total transaction volume going through your platform right yeah so right now that's the way we because it's still marginal the way we do 3p on the 3p on the marketplace side it should be take rate times gmv but the gmv as i told you like it's still very small because we just started so most all of our revenue comes from the 1p play the direct like a regular e-commerce so the way we calculate revenue is is in terms of arr and well i so right now if you analyze uh the numbers that i told you it's gonna be something around two million dollars in arr and one annualized and in terms of gross revenue it's uh gross revenue twenty eight percent and contribution margin after you take all the cost is thirteen percent yeah so it's about five hundred thousand dollars of gross run rate after cost of goods sold yes exactly yeah yeah that makes sense interesting um i guess i still don't understand so who who like name a company that's go that's using dollato to buy headphones and chargers yeah so we are talking here about not any kind of company we're talking about very small uh retailers that has usually one store and we're not going after the retailer the low-hanging fruit asset the retailer that is located in sao paulo in mexico city no not this guy i'm talking about the guy who is in a city with less than 100 000 people so it's like a gas station that needs to put more headphones and check out okay exactly but usually i'm talking about small electronic store but gas station that has convenience store it's also part of the the retailer that is buying from but more everyone i was gonna say everyone in my audience has probably been to a gas station on a road trip and seen at the checkout they have like a station to buy your iphone charger that you left at home you are the one that is supplying the charger yes exactly especially the one in the middle of nowhere when you're in the middle of the road in a city that have very few people and you stop there yes that's the kind of retailer that we're talking here interesting okay so will you ever move so you're sort of using this marketplace and selling it because it's a way to get these folks into your ecosystem this gas station you're not charging for the software right now i imagine at some point though you will you will want to do only software because the margin's way higher right yes yes but the point is it's a mistake if i go after the sas right now because now what i want is data first of all data the moment i know how much they are buying from us i have a very good idea of how much they are selling and this kind of merchant this kind of small retailer it's very hard for you to get the data on how much they sell that's why giving credit for this segment is super hard because nobody has the actual data but the moment i know how much he's selling online the moment i know how much he's buying the moment i have all the data of the transactions that are going the real data then i can provide financial services credits payments charge assess fee for the use of the platform but everything needs to happen step by step if i decided to do everything now uh it's not going to work yeah that makes sense that makes sense i get to vision understand where you're going now have you bootstrapped this or did you decide to raise capital we bootstrapped in the beginning but like right after we we we started we were approached by by some funds like gfc global founders and then valor capital which is one of the top funds here from us invest in brazil now we have eight funds on the cap table angels from all over the world like partners from light speed industry what was the last round how much was it the last round we just announced two months ago was a 10 million dollar round that was led by valor capital and we brought like six six funds a long time is that your series a would you say yes my series okay and then what was before that did you close around last year in 2021 yeah yeah we we we closed the round last year uh now in 2020 that was a seed round of two two million dollars okay and anything before that or no no okay so you raised 12 million to date now most people in their series a are selling between 10 and 15 of the business were you in that same range yes yeah okay so you're like 90 million pre-money evaluation something like that no less than that we i can disclose you the numbers but we were diluted 15 to be precise so we are alongside the lines of like more like a 60 more like a 60 million value yes still that's a fairly high i mean that's a look it depends on how you define revenue if you're able to convince your investors to count your 2.4 million as your revenue versus your take rate of half a million run rate the multiple looks a little more rational but if you look at a half million run rate it's 120x multiple do you get nervous about growing in an evaluation no the point is the way in my market in the b2b marketplace you the multiple is according to the arr in terms of revenue so if you look in terms of er and the point is as i told you we yeah sas revenue will get 100x multiplier and that's six you know that's two months ago for the market crash but your take rate's only 26 there's no way you can i mean unless these investors are stupid they're not by the way because i know valor right they're not giving you credit for 2.2 million of run rate revenue and treating that like sas revenue no definitely not because like as i told you we are not the sas part of the business is free we are b2b marketplace that also have a sas play but like the way they look at us and the investors look at us is we are b2b marketplace that has been growing consistently and to be honest with you if you look at the take rate for the b2b marketplaces here in the region it's the take rate is around four percent so we have like one of the highest margin uh even like considering contribution margin in the end is higher than the take rate that everybody else charge so and we are very opposition to be one of the largest players in the segment that's just beginning the b2b marketplace the oldest one has like two or three years so we have the best investors the team so yeah we have got together so if you're at 2.2 right now where were you exactly a year ago so we can calculate growth rate the two points when i was in terms of you had a 2.2 million run rate right now where were you exactly a year ago oh yeah go we were pre-revenue okay pre-revenue got it yeah we started utilizing yeah it's been one year exactly it's been one year that we started monetized one year i see i see very interesting and how many folks are on the team today full time 113. 113 got it and so i mean obviously the markets are downturning right now right so like what are you comfortable driving burn up to so our burden now is very well controlled so we have like more than 30 months of runway because the business still growing but first of all like more more than 50 percent sorry just to be clear 30 months of runway you just raised 10 million divided by 30 months you're saying you spend about 300 grand a month all in less than that in fact a little bit less than that so it's more than 30 months i i'm not disclosing the correct number i'm telling just it's more than 30 months so and our burn is less than than the number that you're saying yeah your net your net burn is less than 300 000 a month yes yes definitely yeah interesting um okay uh great so what do you think you have to grow the business to to go to a competitive series b so we are guiding ourselves by the milestones that you see on the napkin by i think it's an amazing way to guide the business the one that's based on 2021 but the one last year so our goal is to reach 5 million dollars in arr with a net net positive uh net positive uh revenue retention and and also like to reach forty percent gross margin as the way i told you like uh revenue minus cogs and build the best team this we already have like our sea level comes from the top uh the top market places from the region and keep going on average between 7 and 10 x compared to the revenue that we had last year so if you watch those goals i think we are yeah i think we were well positioned to do a serious thing but we don't need to do a series b in the like in the short term so we're not actually considering doing this right now yep well you're driving you'll obviously hire and drive burn up right so if you have 20 months of runway and this downturn lasts 24 months then you you have a timing issue right but you'll figure it out it'll be interesting to watch um in the meantime though let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite book favorite book in the context of what we're discussing pitch anything by warren clef genius number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh yes i think the ceo there's there are many ceos that i'm following but uh the ceo of tokopedia in indonesia is a genius i follow like all his interviews and i really like his vision the way he does number three what's your favorite online tool for building a dollato shopify 100 shopify is it's amazing number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night i need to get a hours of sleep because like i train really hard and i need to to get a good night's sleep otherwise all right well all right eight sounds good to me and what's your situation married single kids married no kids all right and how old are you 37 next week all right hey happy early birthday gee uh last question something what's something you wish you knew when you were 20 ah man i wish i could i'm a frustrated triathlete i wish it could be dedicating more time to sports but unfortunately my life as entrepreneur doesn't allow me to spend more time on this so for today's dream that i have not made it yet guys dolado.com dot brazil they help that gas station in the middle of nowhere which you've seen on a road trip before make sure they never run out of chargers that they sell at the checkout you know what i'm talking about they've got over 1500 of those gas stations is the analogy we're using that spent about 120 bucks over the past 30 days so monthly they're processing almost 200 000 bucks of gmv annualized it's 2.4 million their take rates about 26 so their gross run rate right now is about 500 000 bucks and they're also profitable they take about 13 to the bottom line now that won't stay the case here because they just raised a 10 million series a at around a 50 60 million valuation he's going to reinvest and grow through this team of 120 sorry his team of 110 people as they look to scale up past 1500 customers and now develop and get additional suppliers on the platform so they're not just selling their own products anymore but they build a really healthy marketplace we'll see what happens jeep gee thanks for taking to the top thanks nathan 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 call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder 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