How GetDynasty CEO Alessandro Chesser grew to $50K revenue and 505 customers in 2024.

get dynasty.com if you are building a company right now and you think one day you might sell for 10 50 $100 million and have a lot of cash your biggest expense are going to be taxes you got to be thinking about a rable trust for free today or more importantly near vocable trust over time this is what the wealthiest people do to shelter a lot of those gains you can do it finally with G Dynasty comes from the brain of Alexandre Chester who thought a lot about this kind of thing as he was talking to customers building cter from 0 to 400 million bucks of AR they decided hey can't build this at cter let's take it out build it ourselves they've raised 5 Million Bucks sold 20% of the company to get going uh on their way now to scaling and getting their license so they can officially become the corporate trustee in Delaware again g dynasty.com go sign up today hey folks my guest today is alesandro Chester he's the co-founder and CEO of g dynasty.com a free and easy living trust creator for homeowners prior to Dynasty he was VP of sales at Carter where he took the company from Z to over $400 million in ARR before Carter Alexandre spent 9 years in financial services working with high net worth individuals alandre you ready to take us to the top ready to do it all right before we get into Dynasty um obviously Carta you know we have to talk about Cara quickly it's one of the most successful B2B software companies in the in the near term that I can think of and in a very unique space was there anything unique there you tested in terms of scaling the sales operation that maybe might not be a standard Playbook you know standard Playbook is you know get an AE have them hit a million dollar quota pay him 250k Allin keep a 5 to1 ratio get him enough leads with the bdrs that kind of thing yeah I think we're pretty stand for the most part I think I we were heavily focused on um you know creating channels through Venture Capital firms and law firms uh very very focused on that and we really I think the most important thing was we were trying to create a network effect right and so it kind of was inherently built into the the product because um you know for Carta that's what we did we signed on companies and we got them to move their cap table onto the system but every time we signed on a company we forced them to invite their investors into the platform which is kind of a unique thing at the time uh cap table management providers weren't actually getting investors to use the product as well um so you know we had we created this flywheel where the more companies we signed on the more investors we invited the more investors we invited the more they told their other companies to it gave them more value their portfolios got bigger and bigger in Carta and so just this flywheel of more companies met more investors more investors met more companies um and then we did something similar with the law firms it was the same thing we forced companies to invite their law firms we forced their law firms to be administrators uh they didn't want to do that initially companies were trying to cut out their law firms and trying to save legal expenses but we we knew that we had to get the law firms using the platform if we wanted the law firms to recommend us and so it was the same type of thing like your Law Firm has to be a user like you're still gonna your your Law Firm is going to become more efficient you're still going to save legal fees um but this is going to give you the the the the most out of our you know this is going to give you the most benefit from our platform it's going to get everybody looped into the same environment it's going to keep it as a source of Truth and it's going to make you more transparent and efficient going forward so unlike document signing or you know sharing a loom video where there's an inherent V coefficient built in it takes two people to get value right two people signing you guys said look we don't have it organically but we could kind of force it here and say look if you're going to bring your cap table over you got to add your VCS to verify it and your Law Firm to check the box too you guys invented that got it going and then did you create a unique experience for the VC so when they logged in they saw their portfolio companies and so you were basically building products for two sides that's right we we wanted to be you know the entire stack in the public markets you have brokerage account you have brokerage accounts right and so we wanted to be The Brokerage for the employees and the investors we also wanted to be the transfer agent and we wanted to be the central regist which is like the dtcc and the public markets all right let's get into Dynasty so first off what year did you launch what year did you write the first line of code for the platform uh two years ago exactly all right so call it 2022 time frame and what is a free fre and easy living trust creator for homeowners yeah so when we looked at the space initially we saw that it was broken every every living trust that you could get up until Dynasty existed was was paper uh you know you go to the most expensive law firm in the United States you get a stack of paper as your output or if you go to Legal Zoom Rocket Lawyer name your online trust Trader you were buying stacks of paper like you slide your credit card paay 500 bucks print out a stack of paper find a notary store in your filing cabinet now you have this massive stack of paper how do you update it what happens if you lose it and so we saw the exact same problem that we saw in Carta in the early days it was it was Paper Stock certificates the paper option agreements we digitized everything and so we we looked at we actually came up with this idea at Carta we saw this as another set of legal documents that needs to be digitized and democratized uh but we realized we weren't going to be able to build it at Carta so we left and we got a lot of the same investors to invest in us and we we kicked off the company interesting how much did you guys end up raising uh just under five million bucks okay so you call that like a seed round yeah we did a friends and family and then we just did a seat a few months ago I I see very cool how much was the friends and family uh friends family is about two seed R was about two and a half oh got it so all in all in you were about five total now Mo most folks preed seed especially now with compressed valuations are selling somewhere on the order of 20% of the company were you sort of in that same range uh exactly that's right 20% okay and and what makes this that's a lot of delution right so you must have a good reason to give up that Equity right what makes this so expensive to build why do you need five million bucks yeah we don't actually we have a lot of we have like three to plus years of Runway we're keeping expenses super low I think the most uh the most important reason why we wanted to raise the money is because we're becoming a licensed Trust Company in South Dakota and that's going to require us to have a minimum of million dollars on reserves it filed via a bond in addition to that there's just there's you have to get some insurance and so it's really just for getting the through the Trust Company application process and it's very specific we're doing it in South Dakota K South Dakota is the number one place for trust there's different kinds of trust there's revocable trust which we offer for free that's kind of our top of funnel Le gen engine we help you know that's what 99% of Americans need revocable trust protects you from probate Court you know because most Americans don't have a trust hundreds of billions of dollars every single year gets seized by the state governments and placed in Probate Court uh it's the biggest tax on non-general joh non- generationally Rich Americans that exist so we want to solve that problem for them that's our free product our paid product is the irrevocable trust that's the South Dakota trust product um and so we have to become a licensed Trust Company in South Dakota so that we can serve as a trustee and actually help people custody the Assets in South Dakota that gives you uh two major benefits taxes and protection uh so South Dakota has zero state income taxes zero State dividend taxes and zero State cap gains taxes in addition to that it's the number one state for asset protection so if you put your assets in a South Dakota trust it's going to protect you from divorce it's going to protect you from lawsuits it's going to protect you from creditors it's this whole full quote uh it's actually on our website it's own nothing control everything you do that with the South Dakota Trust You Don't Own the assets anymore your South Dakota trust owns then um and so that creates that layer of Separation which gives you the protection and the tax benefits so just I don't want to lose our audience because I want them to listen to you both because you're acent about building a company but also because I think a lot of my wealthy entrepreneur friends they all set up some form of a book living trust so I don't want to lose people here right give a very real example there is a Founder right now listening that is doing 2 million bucks AR they think they might sell their company for $10 million right all cash sometime over the next couple of years why is it why should they be thinking about a trust yeah so an irrevocable trust specifically let's do that so yeah so for for revocable trust it's just to make sure that your family inherits that 10 million bucks if something happens to you the irrevocable trust these why wouldn't they why wouldn't they inherit that without a trust it would have to go through the probate court system which means it's GNA it's going to get logged up in court for 18 months on average it's going to cost your family tens of thousands of dollars even if you have a will it has to be processed through probate court which means lawyers court fees and family friction because your family is going to show up to probate court and make a claim for your assets and say that they were named in your will and it ends up turning into lots of disputes and it really rips families apart the only way to avoid probate court is to create a revocable living why alandre why people are thinking why can't I just set up a will to prevent that why do I need a revocable living a trust to do that why can't a will solve that the will goes through Pro it has to be processed through probate court a will is just instructions for who you want to inherit your assets but the government will still process that will and and people have to actually show up for court and make a claim for those assets and so that process takes on average 18 months if you have a trust a trust is an actual legal entity you put everything you own in your trust your trust now owns your home it owns your investment accounts and so if something happens to you your successor trustee takes control of your trust and can do whatever you want want with your assets based on the instructions that you created yep yep makes a lot of sense okay uh so so again let's use that same exact the more specific can be I think the more people are going to sign up from this recording so why should a Founder doing 2 million of Revenue about to sell for 10 million bucks all cash why should they today if they're going to do that in a year sell set up an irrevocable trust okay so taxes and protection the first category taxes so number one if you live in a state like California and New York you're subject to enormous state taxes you know any where from 10 to 133% for income or cap gains or dividends uh if you put that those ass Sandro let's use our real example right I'm a Founder that owns 100% I sell for 10 million cash if I'm in California you think I'm going to pay about 1.3 million on that at s that's right that's right $1.3 million of that $10 million will go to the State of California for income taxes and so if you if that if those shares were held in a South Dakota trust in South Dakota there is no state taxes for income or cap gains so you save $1.3 million right out of the gate just by having your trust in South Dakota in addition to that for any Founders that are familiar with qsbs qualified small business stock treatment you get up to $10 million in tax-free gains federally with qsps if you exceed $10 million let's say you have 20 million for a real example uh in the in the example where you you don't have an irrevocable trust you're going to pay uh you're going to pay uh you know income taxes or cap gains taxes of 40% for that second 10 million $4 million basically will go in a $20 million sale uh to taxes if federal federal taxes right federal taxes right forget State we already we already took over State and so for federal taxes if you want to save more money on federal taxes what you do is you create irrevocable trust and you gift your shares to your children or to your spouse or to your Rel your brother and each of those trusts that you create gets its own $10 million uh qsbs exemption so the founders that actually know what they're doing or they have good financial advisors sometimes they create four or five irrevocable trust they can get like 40 or $50 million worth of ta taxfree gains hey folks if we haven't met yet my name is Nathan Latka I launched and sold my first software company back in 2015 and went on to write a book about it which you guys made a Wall Street Journal bestseller purchasing over 30,000 copies thank you so much for that after the book I launched this show and went went on to create founder path.com I raised a large fund to do non-dilutive deals with B2B software Founders so far we've invested in over 400 software Founders totaling $150 million here in 2024 we're doing three to four New Deals per week so if you're looking for Capital and don't want to give up equity go sign up at founder path.com for free to get your offer all right let's jump into the interview yeah I hear folks doing this all the time uh I guess my question to you would be there's a lot of people that realize Q about qsbs and trust too late meaning they've already you know paid a 100 bucks to buy their 10,000 shares when they started the company is is it too late for somebody listening that's already been operating for two years is there some way to get these shares in a Delaware irrevocable trust or is it too late they have to wait till their next company no you can definitely do it even if the shares are exercised you can still do it that's and you can't move options into an a local trust you have to move exercise shares into an a vocal trust so you can do it you just want to create as much space between when you move it into the trust and your liquidity event that's possible and so anywhere I've seen Founders do it like six months before they sell their stock like usually anywhere from one is that a red flag will will the government come after you if you stay see that it can't be if you get audited it's like to it's the same thing as like if I were to move to Nevada and then I sell all my stock and there's like the more separation you have between how long I live in Nevada and so what's the safe amount a year I would say anything over 18 months is probably a safe amount eight 18 months and then everyone else the second thing the biggest thing I hear from entrepreneur when we're talking about this kind of thing is they say Nathan I don't want to give up control to some random person or my younger brother or my mom or my dad right so I guess help people get comfortable with that what does it mean to actually give up control so you can take advantage of any erable trust yeah and so there's uh two ways you can do it you can uh turn over the trustee services to a family member to a friend or family member they can be the trustee of your trust um which means they're the ones that are actually going to sign for any Investments or any distributions um the other way you can do it is you can assign a corporate trustee company that's what we're becoming licensed to be a corporate trustee and so when you assign a corporate trusty then you you work with them directly they custody your assets um and they actually make the trades for you and the Investments for you it's kind of a similar situation if for the public markets when you're an Insider and you're involved in insider trading like can't make the direct trades on your on your shares and so you have this like 10 b51 plan which allows you to place orders to make the trades it's the same kind of thing you set up all the instructions for the irrevocable trust and the corporate trustee is the one who's actually going to make the transactions happen so let's say you are let's say I I sign up today for dynasty in two years from now I have a liquidity event you know for I'm going make with the math E 10 million bucks and that and you are the corporate trustee right the G Dynasty is the corporate trustee I tell you behind the scenes hey I want to spend 2 million of this to go buy buy this house your the trust is going to own it but I'm going to live in it like sort of full-time part of the one of the things that I I've heard from attorneys and counsel is you can't direct the corporate trustee on where to use that money in other words I couldn't tell you to go buy the house so what's the point of having you control how will you know like what what are you going to do go buy random stuff with it how do I give you guidance on what to use that money on so when you create your local trust you create you can create a very specific instructions or you can make it very generic your Specific Instructions can say upon liquidity event buy houses in these locations and to find out which houses like you want to purchase work with this advisor and so you can appoint like your brother for example and so it's a very indirect way of controlling trust uh the other way you can do is you can make it super generic and you can just say you know all the decisions are going to be made by my adviser that I point whoever that adviser is has full discretion on anything that happens in the trust so you just want it's just creating that that uh layer of Separation like you're not going to be able to get the tax benefits if you're directly connected to it right you're not going to be able to get the asset protection like if you get divorced and they see that you're the one sticking your hands in the cookie jar like you're going to be able to lose the those cookies if you want to create that layer of Separation it has to be somebody else that's making the decisions yeah awesome let me give you another example here because I imagine my audience is wondering this let's say that that liquid event happens you then buy a big beautiful the trust the corporate trustee then buys a big beautiful house in Hawaii right but but I didn't tell you to do it I told my adviser and then my advisor told you to do it um wouldn't anyone and then let's say I get divorced wouldn't my spouse go oh it was wasn't his ADV look I have an email of Nathan emailing his adviser and then the adviser sent it to the corporate trustee that's why they bought the Hawaii house therefore I should get the Hawaii house I mean it doesn't matter if you're married in California well first of all if the house is in Hawaii it's not going to be able to be held in a South Dakota trust real let's say California yeah if it was stock let's say it was stock stock can be held anywhere in the proceeds of stock but if you buy real estate with it wherever the real estate sits that's where it's going to be governed in it's because it's physically it's physically exists right but you stock investment accounts crypto that's all digital that can be held anywhere and so if you have if you have a bunch of investments in South Dakota and you get divorced it doesn't matter what your your spouse says in California that's not relevant for my audience though that's not relevant for my audience because they're not going to be in South Dakota let me ask the second question which has heard which some of my wealthy friends I've heard them use their trust for in this ve what they do is they take a loan against the value in the trust and then they can use that loan however they want personally and and the interest is taxfree so for example if I had a liquidity event and and you had 10 million sitting in that trust I could show that to some bank and they might give me 40% leverage on the 10 million and give me a $4 million loan at a 4% rate personally I can then control where I spend that money and it is backed up by the trust is this something you see entrepreneurs do a lot and am I thinking about this the right way always 100% always and the other way that they do it is they don't take a loan from the trust but if the trust buys real estate they can rent they can rent to live in that real estate so they're not directly connected so for example like let's say I have my daughter I'll create an irrevocable trust for my daughter I'll use the proceeds of sale to buy a house I'll live in the house I'll pay rent that rent goes back to my daughter and the trust that I created for her and so it's a way you know you get around the taxes and and the money just goes back to my daughter for the rent yep guys audience you're probably wondering why am I not hitting alandro hard on the numbers like I usually do on all my shows it's because his actual thing that he's building I think is very valuable for entrepreneurs and a lot of people do not understand it but frankly the biggest Bill you're going to play your entire life is taxes so understanding this move right is important and alandre I guess this is part of the thesis is the fact that nobody really understands is why you're building get Dynasty so how does get Dynasty make money on all this stuff yeah so you know we have two products we have the revocable trust product and the irrevocable trust product as I mentioned revocable is for inheritance planning irrevocable trust that's for taxes and asset protection you're poting about South Dakota trust anybody you don't have to live in South Dakota to have South Dakota trust I have South Cod trust I I can move my digital assets there so all my my founder shares my previous shares at car my crypto everything's in South Dakota trust that gives me South Dakota tax treatment and so the way that we make money is we have this fly will where people we have thousands of people every single month signing up for a free revocable trust product that they put their home in it that helps them avoid probate court wait can we be specific there how many how many signed up last month in in May of 2024 just under 2000 we're doing W just under 2,000 a month right now and can you just my audience is going to love you building that weight list where are you getting that traffic from I mean how are you pump pumping that up so much uh close to 80% of our customers right now are just coming from word of mouth and organic short form videos and we're doing a lot of Partnerships as well um and so can you name an example of a partner that's driven you leads uh yeah one of the largest mortgage lenders in the US a Guaranteed Rate and so we're partnering with mortgage lenders because we really we're circling in homeowners because homeowners are the widest base of Mass Market customers that have a single problem to solve right they have to put their home in their trust that's the only way they can avoid probate court and so putting a home in a trust is actually comp like you can go to legalism and you can create a trust online but actually putting your home in it you're going to need to see an attorney because they're going to have to draft a new deed for you so the way that we're uh approaching the homeowner problem helping homeowners put their home in the trust is we're we're circling the home buying process with mortgage companies with title companies with prop tech companies so the next time you buy a home and you go to Guaranteed Rate you get a mortgage guaranteed raate is going to say do you want to put this home in a trust for free and that's that it gets embedded directly into the buying process and they tell you exactly why you want to do it your home goes straight into the trust there doesn't have to be any deed transfer Alandra where are these V so again I'm trying to reverse engineer your growth I went into ahfs I look at your site structure you're testing programmatic SEO right now how to make a living trust in state which is great you know it's early days there but you're getting referring domains you mentioned video though where are most of those videos hosted I go go on your YouTube there's 341 subscribers I do see a lot of young kids with wealthy background saying the secrets of the Rich and Famous sort of thing is that part of your go to market strategy to sort of Target Millennials that's right and YouTube is small we're much bigger in Instagram and Tik Tok so Instagram specifically if you look at our Instagram accounts just get Dynasty you're GNA find a ton of short form videos in there 16,900 followers uh a lot of short form stuff but you're working okay you're you're clearly though working through a lot of like other in other words it's you on video it's like this youngl looking guy who looks like he's my age saying I'm inheriting 10 million and retiring from IB at 25 what do I do next these are the kinds of things doing well huh that's right that's right how are you finding these influencers or or sort of micro influencers we'll call them this Market we actually outsourced uh to a Creator who does the um does the scripts for us and then they engage with a Marketplace allows us to get the actual actors it's super cheap like we can get it done for you know less than $5,000 a month get 20 25 videos a month very cool okay we get it 2,000 free signups at the top of the funnel each month coming mainly from Instagram and Tik Tok a short form videos take us down the funnel what happens next how do you get to paid so they come in they get in for the free trust um and then they they want some Advanced options or they have some questions they get on the phone with one of our customer support reps and then we upsell them into we have two paid products we have the uh more advanced feature revocable trust product for $99 a year so we're not necess we say we're pre-revenue but we we actually have about $50,000 AR and that's coming from The $99 a year product the irrevocable trust product that's in the very earliest stages right now well we get licensed we can help people create these irrevocable trusts but we're not really putting a lot of emphasis on that until we become licensed because the trustee Services that's where the big Revenue opportunity is it's gonna be who are you recommending right now for the corporate trustees since you're not licensed if I sign up today for aable bridgeford trust company and they charge $8,000 a year and given them you know hundred plus thousand dollars in revenue and I see so you'll cut them you'll cut them out once you're licensed when will that be done you think that's right we're getting licens in the next nine months we're working we're working on the application process right now working with the South Dakota legislators uh we're building our board in South Dakota and we'll be licensed in about nine months really interesting really interesting okay so so I got it so so that's why you see sort of path the revenue is effectively you know where your revenue is going to come from you're just giving it to somebody else right now once you get the license you're good to go why is it better why is it I mean you just raised a bunch of money you don't you know 9 months and startup plan is a long time to save yourself time why why don't you go buy bridge for Trust Company well first of all brid would be very they've been around forever I think a smaller one that has the that has the license yeah it actually we actually explored this with our legal council it will take longer to go through the uh acquisition process so they're going to have to do the same amount of work to verify us all our background checks like it's like becoming a bank basically it goes through the banking division um and we have to do all the L and the kyc we have to have everything over we have to do all the same stuff so there was no benefit to buying we just decided to go through the application process yeah I mean even if you're perfect history though you can't get a banking Charter right now is it similar with what you're trying to do do they purposely limit these or like how many how many new of these were given out last year for example I mean can anyone do it uh not anyone could do it I think they do like 10 a year maybe Max um how how are you gonna get in uh you know we we have connections with the state of South Dakota specifically we have like a former congressman is going to be joining our South Dakota board uh you know we're working our way through South Dakota we have connections into the governor right and so you have to and also like we have very powerful investors right Bill amman's one of our investors we have the founder of inside partner is one of our investors we have the founder of cter we got a bunch of billionaires as investors and so we're just that was the main purpose of raising Capital also in addition to uh you know satisfying the needs for the South Dakota Trust Company we need the connections that will help us uh get through the red tape over there yep that makes it ton of sense uh this is great okay uh we talked about sort of your grow growth we talked about your funding we talked about how much you sold we talked about why trusts are important what else am I missing remember my audience are mainly Founders doing between one to five million bucks of Revenue how should they be thinking about trust anything we missed yeah so like taxes and asset protection is great um but like you know you don't need to rush and do that today especially if you're not going to be selling stock for another five to ten years I would say the most important thing is for anybody who does not currently have a trust any type of trust at all use our free product you you can do it in less than five minutes in the back seat of an Uber you can do it while you're multitasking we literally have customers to do this while they're in the gym working out and we know because they go through the selfie verification at the very end of our workflow and so that's the way we designed this product to be so simple that anybody can do it while they're multitasking like do it quick get dynasty.com takes you less than five minutes if you want to see an attorney later or if you want to get our upgraded package later great you can always expand on the free one but at least having a free one is going to give you...