How Maynuu CEO Aaron D'Cruz grew to $72K revenue and 180 customers in 2023.

this meeting is being recorded hey folks my guest today is aaron de cruz he's an ex restaurateur of 15 years turned self-taught web developer he's now building tools for small restaurant owners at m-a-y-n-u dot com that's menu.com aaron you're ready to the top yep let's go okay so what what came first uh writing code or running a restaurant um so i started coding in 2001 but i didn't kind of i didn't go all the way because um uh you know i had to get a job and stuff so then i went into the restaurant business for 15 years um after that i sold it and then i went you know full full full on in deep dive into web development that's amazing okay so what is the tool that small restaurants are paying you for today uh so basically uh we help small restaurants make more money online uh how it works is uh restaurants can digitize can use our system to digitalize their menu and streamline the entire online ordering process so it covers everything from deliveries to takeaways to reservations as well as qr code ordering for their in-house customers oh wow and what do they pay you per month on average to use the technology um we take a percentage platform fee uh on the on every transaction so it's eight percent eight percent okay and it's eight percent across all all the restaurants yes that's right about half of that goes to strike well we don't make we don't make very much four percent goes to stripe yeah we're on that interesting okay so i guess um let's get more of the origin story here when did you launch the business what year um it launched in may 2020 in malaysia and then about six to eight months ago we decided to branch out into singapore as well so 2020 and then have you decided to bootstrap the company or raise capital uh we still found it yes bootstrapped we love that congratulations now how many how many of these restaurants are paying you today are using you so we've got about 1800 uh sign ups across two countries and in in uh well we just finished the month of may so in may how many total sales do those 1800 signups put through menu um wow i've got to check i don't have the number uh off the top of my head um what's your range what's the range what would a range be so the ticket average is about 80 dollars for restaurants yeah but i i don't have my full face yeah sorry per month no put order okay so i guess the reason i'm asking this is obviously if you charge off a percent of volume this is critical for you to understand i find it hard to believe you wouldn't know what that number is right so how do you know if the business is doing well or not so i don't know the total volume of what all the restaurants are doing but i know how much we're making so in malaysia we've uh done about uh ten thousand ringgit and in singapore it's between five to eight hundred dollars uh okay got it so you're doing 500 800 per month right now yeah that's all that's our sort of take home okay okay so i guess if i if i convert ten thousand malaysia ringgit to united states dollars it's about 2300 united states dollars per month and you're saying you keep about 25 of that so 500 600 per month no no sorry um so in singapore we're doing sorry in malaysia we're doing a average 10 000 ringgit a month and in singapore we're doing an average of five to eight hundred dollars a month 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 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thousand dollars per month across the whole business i see i see yeah okay now are all 1800 restaurants putting dollars through you right now or some of them not activated yet so i think um only about 10 are active our users and what we mean by active is they're getting daily sales so um some because our system is very flexible some of them i use it for maybe uh seasonal sales only or um you know like once a month sort of events so i counted 10 does none of that have daily active sales so 10 of 1800 is 180 restaurants you're making three thousand dollars a month right now total we could take three thousand dollars a month total divided by 180 restaurants you're doing about seventeen dollars per restaurant per month right now correct there are therapists that sounds right this is amazing how did you get 1800 signups that's a lot of restaurants um so when we first started out in malaysia we hired a sales consultant to do the work how did you find the sales consultant um i think it was a friend of a friend you know local network sort of thing how did you pay them was it a flat fee or a percent of sales or what we paid them a flat fee we paid them uh i think about 15 000 ringgit a month it was very costly so um this year onwards i actually signed up for uh growth accelerator by dan martel and we're trying out a different way to um you know grow and scale our business how did you find dan martell um he approached me on twitter ah very cool how did he approach you he runs a great business did he just dm you yeah they just dm me and what does he say what's the what's the copy uh don't remember exactly but i you know i'm on twitter quite a bit and i do the whole building public thing um a few of my tweets maybe um you know got people's attention and i think it happened from there i see i see and so uh what does what does growth i mean you you paid this person fifteen thousand ringgit which is thirty four hundred dollars united states dollars per month that's expensive what is growth accelerator by dan martel cost um it's 500 a month okay so cheaper much cheaper much cheaper and i think it it's also uh we learn things that we can take away for life like we're not just dependent on one person to do all the work so you know we learn how to put in systems that can properly run you know perpetually we do it right now how do you i mean do you anticipate using growth accelerators for a couple months because five hundred dollars against your three thousand dollars a month in total revenue is actually a big percent of your revenue that's right yeah but i think it's worth it and i've committed for one year sorry so one year is 500 times 12 so you've committed for six thousand dollars i see i see very good and are you putting your whole team through it or just you uh it's just me just you okay and what is your team look like today how many folks we've got uh five five okay and how many founders just you uh there's two of us that's me and there's waffik who's based in malaysia he's my partner and and how did you guys you know the equity conversation at the beginning of a company is really difficult sometimes how did you guys decide to have that conversation and split equity um i think it was um i think we're both pretty easygoing people so we just decided to keep it simple yeah which is what 50 50. i'm yeah there are a box okay do you regret that like looking you know you're two years into the company today would you do the same thing again today do i regret what splitting it 50 50 exactly no not at all so what happens when you guys disagree on something how do you work through an issue um good question um we haven't we haven't actually uh encountered that yet um i think we've you know this is not our first rodeo so um so far so far we've been on the same page about pretty much everything yeah it's very rare though that two co-founders are on the same page about everything especially as the company grows and there's more to lose right there's not a lot to lose right now you're doing three thousand a month in revenue but as you grow there may be disagreeances right so how do you break a tie how do you anticipate having that that tough that tough chat so i think uh it's probably part of my personality to kind of um give in to the other person yeah okay right nothing nothing is that um important to to you know it's not worth like um making enemies for if you know what i mean and we can always find you around things fair enough so between the growth consultant that you use to set up your initial restaurants and you learning from growth accelerator how are you getting customers today what what strategy are you using so currently the the one that works best is uh cold outreach i do a lot of uh cold dms on instagram and um but apart from that it's a lot of word of mouth referrals from people that i know my friends uh and um people that have signed on they tell other people as well so you know not nothing beats that this is a great story now of the five people folks uh how many how many uh aaron how many of them are engineers and are you an engineer uh i like to say two and a half because i'm i'm the half i'm the 0.5 self-taught self-taught right yeah that's a that's awesome that's great okay very cool and i mean what's it like in malaysia right now are there a lot of software companies popping up do you sense do you sense momentum i would say yes yep it's a developing country and so um uh they're definitely trying to model themselves after you know silicon valley we actually have a place called putrajay which we call the silicon valley of malaysia so yeah a lot a lot of very ambitious and very um talented people there and i guess last question here if you're doing about three thousand dollars a month today in revenue do you remember what you were doing exactly one year ago um one year ago i think we were doing a third of that okay so about a thousand a month so i mean let me ask you a question it sounds like you sold a restaurant business before so maybe you have some savings but you know you're building in public you're being very vulnerable you know you don't have enough revenue yet to pay yourself really a real salary so how are you buying time you know paying your living expenses while your sas company grows um so yeah you're right i do have uh some savings from the sale of the restaurant and the bakery that i used to have um i also do freelance work uh web development yeah so that's that kind of helps to pad around me i see that makes sense great well erin this is a fantastic story let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite book um losing my virginity by richard branson i was not expecting you to say that okay number number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh it's got to be dan martell of sas number three what's your favorite online tool for building menu online tool um oh it's got to be llama life shout out yep she's three hour coffee on twitter go follow her that's amazing i just we just had her on the show she did a really great interview is that how you heard about me uh yes yes yes i think you are following that dm to yeah she's awesome she's awesome uh number four how many hours of sleep do you get each night seven eight seven okay and uh and what's your situation married single kids uh i'm currently single no kids okay and how old are you sorry how old are you aaron 43 43 last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. um that's a good one have the courage to be your true self and everything will be all right in the end if it's not all right it's not the end guys there you have it from aaron start off running his own bakery and shop ended up selling that and then launching software that he would have loved to have when he had his own bakery to make it run smoother it's called menu.com they broke a thousand dollars a month in revenue a year ago now doing three thousand dollars a month in revenue they have over eighteen hundred restaurants signed up of which 180 are active meaning they do daily sales his revenue models he takes eight percent uh fee from gmb going to the platform but stripe keeps four percent so he nets caught four-ish percent on each of those sales five people on the team today they look to continue to scale he's biting his time doing freelance work and consulting on the side while the sas company grows aaron thanks for taking us to the top oh my god that was amazing nathan how do you do that 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 shares backend 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 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release 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