How ProDash CEO Josh Millang grew to $1.3M revenue and 30 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is josh malang he's a senior market insurance distribution leader top .01 percent producer for captive carrier and then developed a successful team before starting a retail agency in 2008. he built that agency over 12 years and later sold it for 1.5 million dollars now building producer dashboard.com joshua takes the top yeah all right what's the company and is it pure play sas it's not really we're uh you know was trying to figure out how best to describe it um you know we're a b2b really product service and consulting firm so we work with people who are independent senior market distribution in the insurance space across the country um and really try to identify the missing structures they have to leveling up their business and oftentimes it's their tech um but we also have several other products and services that really kind of enhance their business and help them really kind of grow and so what are some of those services is there anything that's close to a recurring fee um it's only all of it i'm a big big fan of recurring revenue having sold um as you mentioned my my practice and uh you know about the third of our revenues are occurring in our or not retail practice um but actually with this uh so we have our tech and we actually do white label customer service for people so we're able to um proactively and reactively manage their existing blocks of business um using their branding so people actually pay us to who are these people be specific medicare yeah sure uh these are insurance agencies insurance producers that work in the kind of retiree market across the country um and so they they pay us to proactively service their clients so we take care of retention upselling cross-selling uh we charge them a flat fee to do that and then we also do a rev share with them on any additional upsell and cross sales so we've got recurring revenue in that space we also have tied in a we found that a lot of these individuals are really solopreneurs they work out of their house they don't have any infrastructure or staff and that's why the service play is in there um but also none of them really have any branding and so we built out this kind of brand in a box thing where um we charge people to really create a brand um create kind of a one-page website help them with some point of sale materials and things like that to educate their clients on um and then one of the other things we've done that kind of spawned from that is also um really kind of a an seo play i partnered with a firm out of utah a lyft local that does a really good job of this helping these solopreneurs really create uh incoming traffic in their local markets and establish themselves in terms of their uh their prominence and relevance on like the google google map searches and things like that so that's joshua with all these products if you add up total revenue from last month where'd you come in at um last month we actually just we signed on our first uh channel partner last month um so so we actually generate about about 120 000 revenue in our first month with the channel partner uh well sorry why is the channel partner relevant to your total revenue is that your only revenue yeah no so the channel part is relevant because for about nine months we're really marketing out of our database selling uh this technology kind of talking to people about a new crm that might be a value for them that we added on the service model kind of the same story um i found that uh if we could engage with a channel partner somebody who was a wholesaler that had a lot of these people as downline downstream entities that had these agencies and producers sort of in their in their hierarchy if you will um we built out a rev share with them so that we could do a co-branded marketing campaign to them uh to their downline because their downline really needs a lot of these structures product services that kind of thing so um once we started doing that we got access to our first one that had 15 000 downline producers and we started doing webinars every couple weeks and generating a ton of traffic so uh we put 120 000 worth of revenue on the books uh just in the first month of doing that so that we're stupid okay but ignore that ignore that one channel partner you as a business selling all these products you just described over the first three minutes of this show how much revenue did you do last month 120 000. okay so so that's not just from the channel partner that's from all your lines of business yeah it's really because of that so prior to that we had about five grand a month in recurring revenue from about 50 you know customers that we had on the tech platform over the last several months we kind of had one at a time um and then we also did the same thing on the service side so we brought on about half a dozen service customers uh we're managing about 15 000 clients um but then we opened up this kind of the floodgate if you will and and made a ton of made a ton of new revenue now you're now you've seen made a ton a lot of new revenue but you said the channel partner relationship is one where it's a rev share so if you are just processing 120 grand in revenue that's not actually potentially your revenue or is it yeah so we we'll carve off about 30 of that okay got it so you've got about 35 000 in revenue from from that channel partnership right 30 carve off 35 000 revenue to them okay got it so you're how much revenue are you keeping from processing 120 grand of revenue 90 85.90 okay got it so you've got 85 or 90 000 in terms of gross revenue hitting your books from this one channel partner and why are they willing to give you such a big cut why don't they build this themselves and do it you know no one has you know so a lot of these issues um these wholesale firms really have a a different perspective because i was a you know a producer guy an agency builder guy and so i'm effectively one of the customers that they have those 15 000 customers and so um they're really good at the relationships with the companies that we do business with the insurance carriers and things like that um but they don't really dig in and get into the retail side in terms of really client facing and that sort of thing so um they're just missing some things that that really uh have kind of always hindered them from really being that complete resource for for the producers and agencies they've got and so now really between like the vision that people have for their individual businesses having this great wholesaling relationship they have and kind of plugging us in we've really got this kind of three-legged stool situation where um we provide a lot of the missing things that this these wholesale firms really have never had i'm missing something though because if i'm a wholesale firm and i've identified a line of business that could do 80 grand a month in revenue or about a million dollar run rate i'm not going to go just give that to some to some guy i'm going to hire engineers and build it internally that's meaningful business so what do you have that is unique that makes these firms want to work with you or just build it it really is it really is nathan it's that it's that retail agency building producer experience so they have not been in clients houses educating them on their insurance and their you know retirement income planning stuff they really exclusively are in the wholesale space representing carriers and and getting people set up with their businesses so they just don't have the experience that i have and so that's really what it comes down to so i can really provide value for their downline you know agencies and producers by really being um providing the support and kind of resources and structure for them to help them grow their business in the form of this you know the product services and consultation as a business and all in 2020 how much revenue did you do uh 2020 we did by 800k okay and so where was that coming from uh because you said that you just bumped up this hundred twenty thousand dollar a month account before that's five grand a month uh great question so about five percent of that was from our revenues from our tech and service model as we're kind of building it out um the rest of it was from the recurring revenues we had from our original retail agency business and then i've kind of piece by piece sold off you know those those business lines we had a property and casualty division uh we had a medicare supplement division we had a fee based planning and uh securities division kind of sold all those off so that's really uh probably i would say 50 of the revenue was recurring revenue from our existing business five percent was from um you know the new stuff uh that we're that we're building out in protodash and the rest of it is from selling off pieces of the business so really to kind of fund this thing um we've been uh investing a ton in in infrastructure staff and also into that tech platform through our vendor so so how much recurring revenue just your recurring revenue how much recurring revenue were you doing about a year ago um a year ago right around right around before i started selling everything off we're at about 450k off our original business in an arr exactly correct okay got it so so you're looking at like thirty five thousand dollars a month in revenue and a little bit closer like 40 and it was all off of insurance recurring revenue from insurance products mainly health uh also some fee based investments we managed a couple 401k platforms um but it was really more it was all retail why sell that off i mean or maybe i mean the real question is everything has a price so what did you sell it for all it is about a million half bucks okay so what is that 3 4x multiple that feels good to you yeah and it was really it was because you know i realized that we we had what people didn't in terms of the infrastructure and the technology and the scale to actually set ourselves apart as a business a business firm um and so once i realized that i was like man we got to get after this and i kind of lost my steam in the retail side anyway in terms of you know training and developing new people and that you know as my business i did that for a dozen years i just kind of lost the heart for it um and so i was looking for something different five million go to you or did you have co-founders no no that was me it was just it was insurance agency man like a typical you know um we did a bunch of life bunch of health and uh and investments all that revenue into your pocket well and then promptly into other people's pockets but yeah so why into other people's pockets well our development firm um i poured a bunch of money into the tech platform with the development firm we've worked with how much josh how much was that you're muted we lost your audio all right you hear me now yeah where how much was that to the dev firm perfect um to the dev company probably 5 600k oh wow okay that's a lot yeah and then uh so much what's that what why was it so much um i don't know you have to call them i mean what did they build um we just we built this platform to really be an aggregator for information in the senior market in terms of client information account information uh we have a direct feed for for quoting uh so there really wasn't a a platform kind of a unified deal out there that really tied in all those different factors so as we got into it we just started adding and adding and adding all these different features and benefits and we have a pretty robust platform now so the rest of it was staff i mean staff and really in building so how many customers are you serving today so we have we have a couple things so beat on the b2b side we have customers on the b2c side we have clients so a lot of the clients that we have are clients of our customers that pay us to service them so we're managing about 15 000 clients on behalf of our customers now and total customers between the tech and the service and everything else i think we have um probably 30. okay got it so 30 customers and how are you supporting them tell me about your team how many on the team yeah so right now we have 10 people on the team i'm an assistant we have three people on our b2b sales team and their job is really to um work with the channel partners that we have to create these you know webinars and funnels to get really qualified prospects you know on these calls with me uh and then we have a support team and their job is to basically onboard all of our tech and service and branding and all those customers that we bring in uh and then we have a b2c team which is the one that does the uh the marketing uh proactive service model for the retention upselling across how many engineers clients we have we have zero internal staff on the tech side okay got it so all outsourced and then how many of the sales reps carry a quota uh zero okay no yeah this is all we're really putting our data together right now um like i said it's about a month old and we're we're getting all of our metrics in terms of the you know people we have to get on a webinar how many show we have kind of all those numbers but i haven't really translated them into a uh you know a static number because i have no idea what it even should be how much of your own capital have you put into this business so far oh my god i mean i mean if we look at [Music] total capital i mean it's really kind of a transition business nathan from uh you know this retail business that we've sort of transitioned into this b2b firm i mean several million bucks i mean since for the last decade uh and you're the sole founder you own 100 yeah and i mean so are you burning capital today are you profitable oh no we're burning we're burning capital how much we can say how much are you burning per month yeah i mean we're taking on we've taken out a lot of debt in the last uh probably six months so how much that you know as as our revenues have gone like this and then i sold off the recurring revenue and and our spending has gone like this so um i would say probably a hundred grand a month net burner gross bottom line um i don't know what's your definition of the two after all expenses your bank is decreasing a thousand thousand dollars per month yeah got it okay and when you say you take on debt how much did you take on several hundred thousand you know to kind of to fill in the gap of that we weren't like sitting on a pile of cash or or anything like that what do you mean i thought you sold the business for 1.5 million bucks it's in like a pile of cash to me and then like i told you it went all into development it went into staff you know it wasn't like you know and it wasn't like at one time it was kind of like we sold this off to kind of cover the development costs we had here we sold that off to kind of cover the staff and the deficit that we had over there so it was kind of in and out um so it wasn't like a like an event it was more of a process yep got it and and what's it costing you to bring on a new customer cac um we're we're trying to figure that number out as well right now um you know we had we had built it when it was just tech only um we got it down to like 10 hours which is a crazy amount of time from all of our staff to bring on a tech customer but when we bring out a tech customer they're already in the bank where we can service their existing customers so if we get that account kind of tied tied in that's about 10 times as much revenue for us so um we're still thinking it's around 10 hours um we're working with our dev firm we have what's called a smart upload engine to basically take their data and really do more of an automated process of getting it into the system rather than a very automatic manual process we have now um so those are just some development issues that that are going to cost us some more money to create some efficiency gosh we'll see what happens man in the meantime let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book oh my god you know um [Music] favorite business book geez louise i would have to go with um probably relentless number two is is there a ceo you're following or studying um i'm really uh not particularly i like all of them i mean i look at like a lot of sas businesses i look at a lot of service businesses i look a lot of just growth stuff i kind of keep tabs on about everybody number three what's your favorite online tool for building a business favorite online tool for building the business i would say prodash besides your own um golly i'm really into i'm really learning a lot about go high level right now as a b2b solution for driving a lot of uh traffic through our funnels so i'm down there right now shawn and the crew there are growing like crazy you guys can search on google find my interview with sean number four how many hours of sleep are you get every night oh my god um depends on the night last night four uh night before that six night before that ten yeah uh it really depends man what's your situation josh you married single kids yeah married uh married for uh since what 2006 three kids i got a boy girl boy 12 12 nine and seven wow and how old are you uh 40. turned 40 in may okay oh nice very good and uh let's take us home here what do you wish your 20 year old self knew i'm sorry something you wish you knew when you were 20. oh my gosh um when i was 20 what did i wish when i was 20 um i would say that like you know a lot of the things that you go through are really all worth it you know at the time and even now you know the time when you go through challenges and things like that they seem insurmountable they seem overwhelming um but you just keep putting one foot in front of the other and you know and they're really all worth it you know when you look back you either either won or lost if you won you get the prize if you lost you got a lesson so it's uh you know it's all worth it guys producer dashboard.com watch out they did about 850 000 in sales last year he sold off a major part of the business which was doing 400 000 a year in arr he sold that for 1.5 million used those proceeds to invest in a new tech product and spent about 500 600 of his own capital on that dev team building up this new product now serving 30 customers doing about 85 90 000 a month in revenue just onboarding this brand new big channel partnership josh thanks for taking us to the top event man look forward talking soon 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 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 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