How Indicio Technologies CEO Frans Andersen grew to $672.2K revenue and 12 customers in 2024.

guys in diseo.com he raised 130 000 bucks early on in the company back in 2018 2017 selling 10 of the business that investor didn't want to become CEO took him in the wrong direction and then he at front to do the hard work of raising 400 000 of more Capital at a two million evaluation spending 50 percent of that next round effectively buyout the first investor then he started cranking he got a partnership lined up they're now doing about 200 000 a year in revenue or 17 grand a month up from six thousand a month a year ago and they just closed a series well last year they closed a series they have 400 000 bucks at a 7.5 million valuation on the back of the excitement from his new partnership hey folks my guest today is Franz Anderson six years ago he worked at an oem evaluating their forecast accuracy and he realized that a simple statistical model could outperform not only the internal forecast but also forecast from International experts by at least 50 percent later on he tried to find software that applied these models suited for non-statisticians he found nothing that's when he teamed up with his friends to build the best forecasting platform for non-statisticians today his technology is applied with an automotive construction and finance companies and it's called indicio.com Franz ready to take us to the top yeah pleasure to be here you bet so why Automotive construction and finance to start and describe how they use you yep so it all started in an automotive company uh so that that's why and it creates a lot of value for them because with more accurate market and sales forecasts they can use this information to to control the whole company to adapt their Global Production prior to for example a recession so forecast it makes this better I mean I think when people think about sales and forecasting they you know things see around they think Salesforce I mean help us understand how you're different so um there's a lot of forecasting going on in in the big Enterprises today uh the majority of the forecasting is done in a planning software or in a CRM and the problem with those forecasts is that they do not consider what is happening in the market or the economy and this was really visual during the pandemic for example where a lot of the older volumes were dropping really quick while the forecasts were still pointing upwards so that that's kind of the problem with the current forecasting that yeah you price the technology right is this a flat fee and if so what's the average company paying you per month to use attack so it's yeah we're a source company so it's a subscription based uh we're charging for for the Indus industrial companies 4 000 Euros per site and all for the first site and for additional sites it's a 3 000 Euros per month um and for the financial sector it's based the pricing is based upon number of users so it's roughly to 200 000 US dollars per user per year 200 000 uh per per user per year to sorry twenty thousand yeah I'm trying to convert that okay twenty twenty thousand dollars per seat per year for the financial sector uh and and it's in our finance and Automotive those are your two biggest ones are industrial and finance yep that's that's the two biggest ones okay interesting and I guess what's the breakdown so if you look at total revenue last year what percent was Finance versus Industrial so Finance they were selling through a partnership so we signed a partnership agreement for roughly a year ago we spent the the spring to to teach their whole sales organization as well as their support and customer success and during the summer they started to hold webinars upon our technology and during August they were converting the first paying client so this is the segment that is I mean increasing exponentially because this partner has a a large Global sales organization and so I think that we're going to be a 50 50 split between finance and Industrial in a couple of months from now 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 valuations inside of your frownerpath 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 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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 and why go through a partnership model I mean and what's the sort of Kickback you've got to incentivize their sales reps to actually sell your tool do you split at 50 50 or what's the rough range of how you split the revenue yeah so we split it 50 50 which is giving a lot away but they're also taking the whole distribution so they're taking the sales uh the customer success the onboarding and the support so they have bills the customer though are you do you own the customer relationship once they sell the customer no uh they they own a customer interesting and so I mean how do you this is like you know uh you want to ride the whale until the whale sort of like bites back right how do you make sure that they keep using you long term versus someone else comes and says hey we'll give you 60 you know cancel cancel your partnership Within dco um that that's a good one our technology is so Cutting Edge so the technology actually helps them to sell their own product and services to to reach a completely new target audience so um I I think it's kind of the the opposite we are sitting with kind of the the power we've gave them an exclusive exclusivity or for one year and which is renewed on a yearly basis so we can find if you look at the total customer base today let's just look at the Industrials the customers that you own directly how many customers are paying you on the industrial side today uh there's a handful I would say so it's still early stage like a dozen yeah yeah okay something like 12 and then on the partnership side is it also like a dozen or about how many have signed up on the finance side it's it's half of that so I think roughly six clients but it's growing they're adding I don't know so you have 18 total customers six are financed 12 hour Industrials that's correct okay interesting so I guess now that we understand sort of how many customers you have and what the product does put this all in a timeline for us when did you write the first line of code for the platform um that was back in 2000 and 17. 2017. okay and um I guess walk me through how you got your first customer do you remember yeah so that was a bank and he I don't know if you read the crossing the Chatham the book of course Jeffrey Moore yep yeah talking about the Visionary people uh that you should attract in the beginning and he was a truly a Visionary he he shared our vision and he he gave us so much good feedback upon how to to create a lot of value for the end user and is he still paying today and no come on what happened he was getting a new manager uh with budget restriction um and we didn't have the partnership with the financial data vendor back then and that was he really needed that one to to get the data integrated into the platform in a smooth way so that dialogue is actually up and running now again uh to to get him as you send them and so your first user was Financial going back to Industrials for a second you mentioned 12 industrial customers how many sites do those 12 industrial customers have on your platform today so it takes roughly one to two year uh to get to get it from one site to to the next um so most of them have one site with you yeah that's correct and we have a couple that's just expanding okay so if you charge you totals earlier four thousand per site times 12 customers I mean can we can we do that math you're doing about fifty thousand dollars a month in revenue from that part of the business um not we've iterated the pricing uh over time so the pricing that I told you is the latest pricing so we have clients with the older contracts so the total revenue is roughly I would say 200 200 000 uh dollars per year right now yeah okay so 200 000 per year that means you're doing about 17 000 per month right now and what were you doing exactly one year ago up off or not even half of that okay so it's maybe like six thousand dollars a month a year ago now you're at seventeen thousand dollars a month something like that okay and I guess tell me more about the team you've been working on this since 2017 so you're now almost six years in how many folks are full-time today so we are eight people today and we are developer heavy uh this technology is yeah it's been taking forever to build how many Engineers runs uh it's uh six six engineers and do you also write code uh no not any longer I did in the beginning okay are you the only founder no uh we are three three founders Founders okay were you guys nice to each other at the beginning you split Equity evenly 33 each uh we the first two we splitted at 50 50. and the third one was coming in on uh 10 uh okay how many years late did the third one join um I think it was a year later or so okay okay so it's sort of like 40 40 you know 20 something like that you know 45 45 10 something like that right now so you've bootstrapped today you haven't sold anything to investors uh we have uh taking some Capital uh a couple of times um the first round was really rough when was that what year uh the first round could it have been two thousand 18 or seven how much did you raise then um 130 000 US Dollars and why was it rough uh we we were choosing between getting investments from a couple of business angels or one and we thought that oh it's gonna be so much easier with a contact and just just having one but he he had his own plan upon becoming the CEO of the company and trying to push us into to take more of his money and also he a part of him putting in the money you guys had to make him CEO yeah that that's what I wanted uh in the in the end we we bought him out and well how much Equity did he buy when he put in 130 Grand uh 10 I think okay so you raise it like a one 1.2 1.3 million valuation um okay it's not easy to rip somebody out right to the extent you can share I mean how did you get rid of you know effectively a Founder that put money in that wasn't working anymore so we uh we bought them out and he he was getting a good return uh I think it was 50 return or something like that if you bought him out for like two hundred thousand dollars something like that yeah I think it was something like that okay and where did you get that money from from other investors so what was what was the next round of money you raised then after him uh roughly around or a little bit more than 2 million in valuation uh what year oh I I need to look at the cap table it was one year later the 2019. yeah okay so you raise and how much did you raise uh it was a 10 dilution so 200 000. yeah okay and and a bunch of that money went to buying out the first investor basically um no that was on top uh so 200 000 plus the 200 000 for the first investor Wi-Fi using the first semester put in about 130 000. yeah yeah but we needed to buy him out to get him my question is the second 200 the 200 000 you raised in 2019 the majority of that money go towards buying up the first investor now that was added an additional uh 200 000. so you raised 400 000 and a two million valuation yeah oh I see okay got it and then have you raised any sense then yeah we have I don't have all the details of all the rounds that we have been doing the latest one was with the valuation of uh 7.5 million US Dollars was this last year yeah and how much would you raise it was even this year um it's only been four days in a year sorry 2022 yeah um we raised it was just a small round for the current investors I think it was four hundred thousand and how did you convince them to give you a 7.5 million valuation when you were doing about six thousand dollars a month in Revenue at the time due to the partnership uh potential healthy so you use the partnership right and future projections to go get a higher valuation to raise the extra money yeah that's great now is there anything looking back in terms of how you raised money is there anything you would change yeah there's a lot um so during the Christmas holiday I was watching the the playlist on Netflix I don't know if you've seen it um it's about how Spotify was founded and they did it super quick I mean compared to us and that's been taking like five years and I think to raise a bigger round in the beginning building the Dream Team of everyone that you need to both build a product but selling it and getting Partnerships that's what do you need the real experience so that's something that I would change uh well friends you've got the new partnership cranking we're excited to see what happens next we're out of time today though let's wrap up with the famous five number one favorite Business book crossing the system number two is there a CEO you're following or studying oh that's also good no not really okay number three what's your favorite online tool for building indicio public GitHub GitHub yep number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night um I just have small kids for the moment so it's not much sleep uh normally I would say seven hours but now it could be down to three So Married how many kids two kids two kids and how old are you I'm 36 36 last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. um to test to test out to start a company test out your your ideas just just do it as quick as possible don't wait for the right idea to come just do it guys in visio.com uh he raised 130 000 bucks early on in the company back in 2018 2017 selling 10 of the business that investor didn't want to become CEO took him in the wrong direction and then he had fronted to do the hard work of raising 400 000 of more capital on a two million evaluation spending 50 percent of that next round effectively buyout the first investor then he started cranking he got a partnership lined up they're now doing about 200 000 a year in revenue or 17 grand a month up from 6 000 a month a year ago and they just closed a series well last year they closed a series they have 400 000 bucks at a 7.5 million valuation on the back of the excitement from his new partnership we will see what happens next Franz thanks for taking us to the top likewise thank you so much one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm 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 shares back-end dashboards their expenses their revenue our poo CAC LTV you name it 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