How JoyQR Reached $1.7K Revenue and 25 Paying Customers as a Side Project (Interview with CEO Dante Colombatti)

Intro and JoyQR Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Runs marketing at a 106 year old wine brand and said, you know what? We've gotta have a better version of QR codes to track attribution. He launched joyqr on the side, spent a $113,000 building the MVP. Now over the last thirty days or over the last quarter, 16,589 scans across 58 QR codes distributed across TV, billboards, transit, print media, and packaging. It's helping him grow the brand. He opened it up to everyone else to purchase now

00:21that can pay $5 a month to get access. They're doing a $140 a month right now in revenue. But again, side project, eat his own dog food. We'll see what happens next. Hey, folks. My guest today is Dante Colombatti. He's a techie, digital marketing pioneer, and marketing design director at Riboli Family Wines of San Antonio Winery. As the fourth generation of a 106 year old San Antonio Winery, LA's largest among its producing winery, he not only

00:44understands the importance of tradition but has carried on the family legacy to help catapult the iconic iconic winery to the national stage. Now on the side, he's building a QR code and bio link builder. That's a shocker there. Right? Called joyqr.com. We're gonna dive into both of them today. Dante, you ready to take us to the top?

Dante Colombatti

01:02>> Let's do it. Nathan, the SaaS legend himself. Let's take it to the top.

Origin Story: Stella Rosa and the QR Code Problem

Nathan Latka

01:06What's the connective tissue between the winery and the QR business?

Dante Colombatti

01:11>> Oh my gosh. So funny story. I run all the marketing for one of our brands that my family owns. It's called Stella Rosa Wines. And we do ton of out of home media, traditional, all types holistically, a three sixty approach. And I was trying to find a QR code that I can customize that could also be directed to a custom link and bio page. And that was where it all kinda started. I got aggravated by talking

Nathan Latka

01:39I the assume this was for labels on Stella Rosa labels?

Dante Colombatti

01:43>> No. Not just labels. Yes. On the back of labels, but, also traditional out of home media, like billboards, TV ads. And I was kinda frustrated how I just didn't want a black box that didn't fit. Know, look, we got style. You and I got style. It's all about branding and marketing. And advertising, you wanna be you wanna have opportunity to kinda have a say in that style, I think, of that of that of that whole ad

02:12>> campaign. And so having a black box there sometimes isn't isn't the prettiest thing.

Nathan Latka

02:16I wanna get people in your head though for a bit. Mean, a 106 year old winery with Stella Rosa, which everybody knows. I mean, if you guys don't know it, just read your you look in your wine thing now, you probably have Stella Rosa there. I mean, I imagine that it's that is not a small business. So you this must have been like a massive pain point for you to carve out time, go find engineers, and

02:31actually build joyqr.com.

Early Pandemic QR Code Experiment

Dante Colombatti

02:35>> Yeah. No, it was a struggle. Again, I was just getting frustrated because my team was actually kind of laughing. They're like, QR codes? That's never gonna work. And I was like, Look, I guarantee you, and this was early pandemic, I said, Look, we put a QR code on our out of home or on our TV ads. Let's just kind of use that as another leverage to understand if our consumers are sticky enough and are willing to

03:03>> scan and what do we have to lose? And lo and behold, we were probably one of the first brands to actually use QR codes during early pandemic, and believe it or not, people scan. And the more I got into it, the more I realized it was driving me crazy not to be able to customize a QR code and direct it to a place other than a single link URL.

Scan Volume and QR Code Distribution

Nathan Latka

03:27So How what's the volume like?

03:30How many QR code scans did Stella Rosa process last month, last thirty days?

Dante Colombatti

03:35>> Let me look. Did

03:40>> 60. 58.

Nathan Latka

03:42Okay. So 50 And we just 58 scans or 58 QR codes?

Dante Colombatti

03:46>> No. No. No. No. No. We did 58 QR codes, and we're at we're at

03:55>> in the last we're at 16,589.

Nathan Latka

04:01In the last thirty days.

Dante Colombatti

04:02>> In the last thirty days.

Nathan Latka

04:03And those 58 QR codes are across your billboards, TV commercials, where else?

Dante Colombatti

04:08>> Yeah. TV commercials. We have out of home media, so transit, TV, print media, billboards, and

04:20>> I think I'm forgetting something, regular print. It could be flyers or whatnot. And also packaging. So we do a lot of interesting packaging for

04:31>> different Stella Rosa stuff. I'm just using Stella Rosa as the example here.

04:35>> Different packaging. Right? So seasonal packaging at Costco or whatnot. And we can actually engage our audience and drive them to contest or whatnot by the QR to a bio link page.

Nathan Latka

04:48Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS 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

05:12your Stripe 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

05:36get a 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

05:58not built 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

06:24going out 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. All right. We're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second. But

06:45if you wanna 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

07:12the interview. Of the 16,589 scans, can you track how many of them led to a sale?

Dante Colombatti

07:18>> You know what? We use a third party for that. We we do use a third party for that. But it is you know, QR codes have been around forever. Right? And it's it's nothing like it's nothing crazy, shockingly sophisticated really about them until, you know, obviously, in the last few years, you know, and Android decided to make it more the QR code scanner be accessible on your phone and through your camera. Right? And Yep. Back in

Opening JoyQR to the Public

Dante Colombatti

07:48>> the day, you're, like, downloading all these apps to try to figure out, okay, what app is gonna work with what QR count with what what QR company? But but yeah. No. Now the trackability, it's it's pretty you know, you get your your your county scans, where they're coming from, the city, the state. You can get pretty reach you can get pretty, like, granular on where they're coming from, time breaks, type of type of system breakdowns, you

08:15>> know, the the the typical stuff.

Nathan Latka

08:18You've got a lot of creatives. I mean, you know, it's Stella time billboards in Colorado, taste magic billboards, celebrate your party during elections when, you you know, it's celebration with beautiful women. You've you've got them all.

Dante Colombatti

08:31>> So We we are gonna we're gonna we're gonna have at the next SaaS conference, we're we're promoting it. We just gave out the new brandy with the artist brandy. We're gonna I gotta I gotta gotta hook you up.

Nathan Latka

08:42I I would love and I would love that, man.

Dante Colombatti

08:44>> As long as you have a QR code in your back in the back of the stage. Okay?

Nathan Latka

08:48Done. Done. This this is interesting. So just to be clear, is the QR code Joyqr, are you the only customer, or have you opened up for other people to pay for it?

Pricing Tiers and Launch Timeline

Dante Colombatti

08:57>> Yeah. So I have so our first, like technically, our first line of code was in in May of of twenty twenty one. And then we created this kind of beta MVP thing in April '22. And I had been using it with with during that time for our brands. And then I opened it up and put some silly financial model behind it, like, totally underpriced the thing. And

Nathan Latka

09:29How much were you charging?

Dante Colombatti

09:31>> Like, a dollar 99 a month and $3.99 a month for the pro version. So there's a freemium. It's a freemium version. Then there's the the plus for $1.99, and then there was the pro for $3.99.

Nathan Latka

09:44I mean, godly genius. I mean, you you might as well just be free. Right?

Dante Colombatti

09:48>> I I you know, at that time, MVP, buddy. Just trying to get it out there and see what happens, man. Yeah. Yeah. But, yeah, we had a few a few people, like, just randomly be able to find it through probably my brands and and and signed up. And now as of August, which about five months or so ago, we've actually put out new features and now it's officially launched five months ago.

Nathan Latka

10:13And you've got $5 a month now, $13 a month. Is that the most expensive plan? 13 a month?

Dante Colombatti

10:19>> Yeah. That's the most we do have a between us, we have an enterprise version for, hopefully, agencies in the future, which we don't really have a financial. It's more kind of broken down depending on what they're kinda looking for. But we hope to get to that that point because I think this is a really great tool because of the analytics and and how you can organize and manage your campaigns most importantly. Like, as you know, Stella Rosa

10:41>> has we have 20 campaigns just for that one brand. And be able to organize your QR codes, organize your bio pages, cross reference which a b which which advertisement worked. Right? Which one worked the most? Was sticky enough? And you can you can compare that through our dashboard. So it's super easy to do that.

Nathan Latka

11:01Makes tons of sense. How much money did you spend building it?

How Much It Cost to Build

Dante Colombatti

11:04>> Yeah. I spent today, I spent about my phone's here. $113,000.

Nathan Latka

11:11And what's that broken down as? Where to where to go?

Dante Colombatti

11:13>> It went all into

11:17>> pretty much the beginning. Went through a couple UX designers, one that didn't this didn't work out, just kind of trial and error, and then kinda finally found the right crew, the right team. And it went into UX UI and into development.

Nathan Latka

11:36Yep. How'd you find the development firm that you used?

Dante Colombatti

11:40>> So a funny story for my personal brands, I used a company called Toptal to just do our company's websites. And from there, met, kind of built a bond and a friendship after these projects were done, kept in contact with our developer, Daniel, and he lives in Slovakia. And we kind of kept this relationship going. I was in the shower one day after getting mad about this company, not being able to do this creative QR connected with

Finding the Development Team in Slovakia

Dante Colombatti

12:12>> a bio page. Would you think this company, the leader in this space, would be able would have this thing? And they gave me a little attitude, taking a shower, listening to podcast, said, fuck. What would Nathan do? He would just say, go get go create the Samsas song.

Nathan Latka

12:26You did not. You did not. You you saw him. What would Nathan do?

Dante Colombatti

12:29>> I kid you not. I have okay. This is I've been look, buddy. I've been listening since 2015, and I am an OG. I'm tech guy. Not

12:39>> Right? I'm like a I'm like a a CPG beverage advertising marketing guy. And so I was like, man, this is really neat. One day I'd love to try this out. And I'm hearing all these awesome entrepreneurs you have on your show. And I was like, what can I do one day? And after getting this email change from this one large company about how, like, oh, no. It's not gonna happen. We're not like, thank you. And just

13:01>> keep checking in. Like, I'm gonna refresh every day this company's page to see if they have this feature. I said, you know what? In my shower, was like, let's just do this. Call Daniel in Slovakia, said, hey, man. Crazy idea. Let's go for it. Went went put the baby put the baby in the in the deep end of the water and just went for it.

Nathan Latka

13:20I love I mean, the the old what I what I find myself wanting, like, when I look at your website, so what I love about your story is you built a tool for yourself. Like, that is obviously, like, the most successful founders. This is always how it starts. The flip side to this is the largest QR code companies in the world, their number one moat is SEO. Like, they free QR code builder. Like, they just freaking dominate. It's

Competitive Landscape and Growth Strategy

Nathan Latka

13:39gonna be very hard for you to displace them, but where you can win but see, you don't have this on your website. Where you could win is, say, streamline your digital marketing with joyqr specifically for wine brands, you know, and then feature your face and Stella. And then basically every wine brand uses you. But see, you might not want that because then they compete with you. So it's like this weird the balancing act.

Dante Colombatti

13:59>> I you know what? I just took some notes, so keep talking. But I honestly, I think that's a great idea. Yeah. SEO and SEM. These guys are I mean, one of the bigger competitors out there. I mean, he's like ex CEO of AOL. Right? I mean, the amount of money that they got, you know, looking at SEMrush and not that it's completely correct, but they are they are spending, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars a

Nathan Latka

14:25>> month.

14:25There's all these. There's QR code generator, MyQR code. I mean, you've heard of all these folks, but, like, they're not as beautiful as yours. They're nothing like that. They just get the job done and they rank really high on SEO because they've been around forever. I mean, by the way, my recommendation was not like that wasn't a that's I wouldn't do that if I mean my question to you is, you don't necessarily want other wine brands

14:43using this if you think it's a massive advantage for Stella.

Dante Colombatti

14:47>> No. You know what? On the contrary, man, I think this is a tool that I think every winery, brewery, brand, if you're an influencer, I think should utilize a tool like this. And I think you know, it's it's important. I think I'm not selfish. I think this is a tool that anyone can use, and it's kinda cool if other wineries use it. And and I I wouldn't I wouldn't be I wouldn't be upset about that, actually.

Paying Customers and MRR

Nathan Latka

15:13So how many paying customers today?

Dante Colombatti

15:15>> So we got a whopping twenty twenty five members and on the paid, and we have 6,700 on the free.

Nathan Latka

15:25Wow. And that's pretty to what? 25 times 60 was that $1,500 a month in revenue? That's nice.

Dante Colombatti

15:30>> Actually, no. It's so it's 20 so 25 users that we've had that are paying that actually were part of both the MVP. So there's a couple stragglers in there that hit

Nathan Latka

15:42I see. I see.

Dante Colombatti

15:43>> The $1.99, $3.99, you know, a month. So, you know

Nathan Latka

15:46What's MRR today? $500?

Dante Colombatti

15:49>> It's a $280.

Nathan Latka

15:52I love this. This is Ground Floor, baby. I love it.

Dante Colombatti

15:56>> $140, brother.

Nathan Latka

15:57But It's $2

15:58of Stella wine

Dante Colombatti

16:00>> or $22.02 It's it's two bottles, maybe. Not even. I think it's actually less than two bottles.

Nathan Latka

16:07That's awesome. Okay. Interesting. So so so but you're building it. You're using yourself. You're eating your own dog food. It's building the value of Stella. It's also now its own side project, which is great. How many folks are full time on it right now, or is it none? Just just you and your engineers on Toptal?

Team Structure and Future Features

Dante Colombatti

16:20>> Yeah. No. So there there's no Toptal engineer anymore. The Daniel was just a buddy of mine that we kept after that contract. And so he is kind of my my right hand CTO, but we only do this on the side. I only do this on weekends, and he puts in a couple hours a week. We have one full time engineer also from Slovakia, and he is our boy, and he just rocks this thing out full time.

16:47>> And I think I got the SaaS bug, so this project's kind of almost at its completion. I think we will add a new feature for animated QRs, which I'm pretty excited about. I think we'll be one of the first to do, like, an animated QR that actually you could still scan, and it has animation to it on a you can you know, on a digital TV or whatnot. So we have that feature, and then we'll probably

17:11>> move into another fun project in SaaS and keep the team rolling. So

Famous Five: Books, Tools, and Habits

Nathan Latka

17:15Very cool, man. I love this. Alright. Let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, favorite book.

Dante Colombatti

17:21>> It would be Zero to One, Blake Masters and Peter Thiel.

Nathan Latka

17:26Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Dante Colombatti

17:31>> Yeah. Gosh. Everyone's a CEO now. I I no. Not really. I think just

Nathan Latka

17:34Number three.

Dante Colombatti

17:36>> Little bit from everybody.

Nathan Latka

17:38Before besides joy, what's your favorite online tool for building a brand?

Dante Colombatti

17:45>> It kinda sounds funny, but Skype, Bigmar. Yep.

Nathan Latka

17:49Number four. How many hours of sleep do get every night?

Dante Colombatti

17:52>> I get six to seven.

Nathan Latka

17:54That's good. In situation, married, single, kids?

Dante Colombatti

17:57>> Man, I'm I'm single, man. I heard from your last podcast, I need to get some cheese platters and go hunt up some some gathering, some parties.

Nathan Latka

18:05It doesn't feel terrible, honestly. Alright. And how old are you, Dante?

Dante Colombatti

18:08>> We're we're doing okay. I'm 37.

Nathan Latka

18:1037. Last question.

18:11Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Dante Colombatti

18:14>> 20. I would say just, you know, go with your gut. I think a lot of people overthink things with their mind and overemotionalize with their heart. Sometimes you just gotta have that little pit in your stomach and then just go all the way and don't stop.

Closing Summary

Nathan Latka

18:28Guys, he runs marketing at a 100 he runs marketing at a 106 year old wine brand and said, you know what? We've gotta have a better version of QR codes to track attribution. He launched joyqr on the side, spent a $113,000 building the MVP. Now over the last thirty days or over the last quarter, 16,589 scans across 58 QR codes distributed across TV, billboards, transit, print media, and packaging. It's helping him grow the brand. He's opened

18:50it up to everyone else to purchase now that can pay $5 a month to get access. They're doing a $140 a month right now in revenue. But again, side project, eat his own dog food. We'll see what happens next. Dante, thanks for taking us to the top.

Dante Colombatti

19:02>> Thanks, man. Have a good one.

Nathan Latka

19:04One 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, 1PM

19:29Central. Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM Central. To make sure you don't miss any of that, make sure you click the subscribe button below here on YouTube, the big red button, and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live. I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a big

19:51fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or something else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if you want to take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS founders. You want to get in there. We've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing. You can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying. Sign

20:13up for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, but I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people.

20:32We got to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. All right. I'll be in the comments. See you.