Scandium Systems Inc Revenue (2024)

[00:00] Guys, launched GetScandium just four or five months ago. It's an automated testing tool. They've already got 30 paying customers doing $5 a month in revenue or 60,000 ARR. He already had an exit under his belt. AZ is his name. He's based in Nigeria. He used 45 k of his own money to help kick start this one with his cofounder and put in a bit more. They split at one fifty one forty nine, hoping to launch and [00:19] get more customers. Their first 30 customers came from a WhatsApp group of founders in Nigeria. [00:27] Hey, folks. My guest today is AZ. He's a serial founder who harmonizes his background in technology and product development to build several startups. With over ten years of experience in product management, business development, software leadership, he successfully designed, built, and scaled valuable tech driven companies out of Africa. AZ, you ready to take us to the top? [00:45] >> Yeah. How are you doing? [00:47] I'm doing well. Okay. So you're working on a company called now called getscandium.com, a no code test automation tool. Tell me a customer story of how someone's using you today. [00:58] >> Okay. So maybe I will share my own story. I literally was running a dev shop at some point, so we have to build multiple products. And, you know, when you build this product, you also want to maintain and, keep them alive. So you need a QA unit. Ideally, you want to first, explore getting humans to do testing, and, trust me, it's not sustainable. So these guys have to then start to write scripts to automate test cases. [01:25] >> Unfortunately, it's also the fact that writing scripts, using Selenium or maybe Cypress, they are tedious and not so friendly when you need to collaborate. Hence, the reason I needed to come up with a no code tool that eats collaboration across all stakeholders across the product value chain. [01:45] Okay. And what are customers paying on average per month to use your technology? [01:49] >> Come again? [01:50] What are customers paying you on average today to use scandium? [01:54] >> So, I've really $200 month on month. [01:56] 200? [01:58] >> Yep. $200. [01:59] And when did you launch the business? What year? [02:02] >> So business started January this year. First version of product was launched in April, and then we've been doing fine. The adoption rate has been quite impressive. [02:13] What's an impressive adoption rate? Can you give me hard numbers? [02:16] >> So today, we have less than a 100, about 80 plus people using the solution, and we we have quite about 30 plus paying customers. [02:27] 30 paying customers. Okay. So can I take 30 paying customers times an average of 200 per month? So you're doing about 6,000 a month right now on revenue? [02:36] >> Within 5,000 and 6,000 month on month. [02:39] That's really great. I mean, so you've basically gone from launch this year to your first five k of MRR in seven months. That's really impressive. How did you find your your 100 or 88 to a 100 users? And, Azi, what do you look for in that user base to figure out who you can convert into a paying customer? [02:55] >> Okay. So first is how do I find these customers? The the first thing is I've built startups in the past, so I'm friends with a lot of startup founders. We're in communities, so we actually we literally launch in a community. [03:10] Which one? [03:11] >> So there's a pop there's a pop popular community in Nigeria, Africa called Premier BN. Premier BN. [03:17] Premier BN? [03:18] >> Yeah. [03:19] What's the website? Preurbian.com? [03:22] >> Correct. Correct. Correct. [03:23] Okay. [03:24] >> It's popularly called pbnpbn. So [03:28] Wait. I wanna make sure get the website right. It's it's pbn.com? [03:32] >> No. Premiervn. Let me double check that for you. Premiervn.com. One sec. [03:44] I can't find it. [03:46] >> That community is so valuable. One sec. So okay. I think you're not spelling premier well. It is premiathenbn.com. I'll just drop it in the chat for you. Great. [04:00] Okay. Okay. Got it. So let me see. Okay. So, yeah, drop that in chat for me so I can open it up. So so okay. So you launched you launched in this community. It's it's a Nigeria based community full of founders and entrepreneurs? [04:14] >> Yep. It's a community of [04:16] founders. Can you drop can you drop the link in the chat, please? [04:19] >> Yeah. One sec to do that chat chat up since. [04:25] Got it. Okay. Okay. So it's [04:29] >> a community of founders and senior operators, so it's so easy for me to get a wait list from there and then explore immediately. So, again, in this part of the world, quality assurance is a is a big challenge. Not so many software engineer can actually, write scripts. So when you then bring in a tool like us, it's readily the adoption rate is just impressive. [04:52] Oh, 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 [05:15] your 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 [05:40] get 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 [06:01] not 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 [06:27] going 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. Alright. We're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second, but if [06:49] 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 the [07:15] interview. Interesting. So guys, those of you is a very impressive community. It looks like it's premiabn.com. So, Az, when you had this idea, you launched it, what, in a forum there or in a Slack group or how did you do actually do it inside of the community? [07:32] >> Okay. So the community has a Slack channel, again, it has about 35 different WhatsApp groups. So it's a lifestyle community for Africans, some Caribbeans, a whole lot wide coverage. So we have a group where when you're launching an idea, you can actually eat it there for people to join your waitlist, and when you launch, you can always share a newsletter to them. [07:54] Interesting. So there's a WhatsApp group that is specifically for launching ideas that you posted in? [07:58] >> Correct. Correct. [07:59] How can somebody how can somebody if they're in Nigeria listening, how can they post their idea in that group? [08:05] >> So again, the the the community is a paid community, and How much? About [08:12] >> 100 about about $250. [08:16] Per year? [08:16] >> Yeah. [08:17] >> Per year. Yep. And it's also an invite only community. So as an African or a Nigerian, you probably have to have done stuff before you can actually get accepted. [08:28] I see. Okay. So you get your first users from the WhatsApp group, and then what they sign up to the website. You see them all signing up on your back end dashboards. You get excited. What do you know they have to do to increase the likelihood that they start paying you in the future? [08:42] >> Okay. So first is immediately after getting sign ups and the rest of them, so we have my business team then reach out and then do a kind of consultative sales to ensure that we have been able to do a demo, show them how it works, and then onboard them easily. But going forward, again, it's safe to say what we'll build today is at the minimal level. Test automation works via the web for today. We need to [09:08] >> build mobile. We're currently working on APIs and desktop applications. So we get to the point where it would be as large as having to build our own community of software testers, so we then have to then empower these software testers to be able to use the tool and then can now be advocates for us in their places of work. [09:27] Interesting. And how are you bootstrapped today? Have you raised capital? [09:32] >> To date, 100% bootstrapped. Our customers are funding our [09:36] I love that. [09:37] >> So you own a 100%. [09:38] Right? [09:39] >> Yeah. Myself and my cofounder, actually. I'm not a loan founder. [09:43] Did you guys split it fifty fifty? [09:46] >> Fifty one forty nine. [09:47] Okay. You have 51? [09:49] >> Yeah. I have [09:50] >> 51. [09:51] Yeah. [09:54] >> But then my co founder is a good guy. Super awesome guy. He's one of the best engineer in this continent, and trust me, with him, I don't necessarily have to do the ad coding part of the duties. [10:06] There's a lot of startup founders listening to this going, man, I wish I could have gotten the 51% versus a fifty fifty split. That's not an easy conversation. How did you get your cofounder to agree to let you have 51%? [10:16] >> Also, myself and my cofounder, we've dated way back 2012, so we pretty understand ourselves so well. And we we also built a startup in the past, which we sold to a bigger company in Africa. That was in 2019. So the conversation [10:32] Did you get really rich on that deal or was it like an acquihire? [10:35] >> So it was an acquihire then with some kind of tickets and all of those kind of stuff. So we decided to take a break sometime in 2022 to just chill out, we've been hustling for like ten years, and then boom, the idea came. And trust me, we had we have this very seamless and effortless connection, so having to do equity splits is never an issue. As a matter of fact, it was just to make you feel [10:56] >> like the CEO has more than the CTO, that's all. But I've just done 50. [11:00] That's amazing. Okay. So so okay. So you're cranking along, you're bootstrapped, you've got 5,000 a month in revenue, 6,000 a month in revenue. How many are full time on the team today? [11:09] >> So today we have 12 full time guys, about seven engineers, and then five business guys. [11:15] So how I guess, do you fund their salary if you're only doing 5,000 a month in revenue? [11:19] >> Okay. So recall I said we are bootstrapped. So myself and my guy has again, we have some box in the bag in the bank that we can actually use to just bootstrap stuff. [11:28] Oh, I see. [11:29] >> So the [11:29] idea for [11:30] >> us the idea for us is to ensure that we are properly validated before we go to the venture capital markets. [11:38] How much, Azzy, how much of your own money have you put in the company? [11:41] >> So so far, I spent about some 45 of my personal cash, 45 k into the business. [11:47] Does that make you nervous? [11:49] >> Not exactly. I I'm pretty sure that the the market is growing. Day in, day out, QA is becoming a big thing in this part of the world, so I'm just chilled and relaxed. And then for me to start doing 5 k in some like four months of lunch, I'm so relaxed. So relaxed. [12:06] That's awesome. Alright. So you put in 45,000 of your own money. Now give us some context. I mean, that like your whole net worth? Is that a 100% of your savings, or do you still keep some back as a safety net? [12:15] >> Oh, so I I still have again, I still have a backup plan. So the idea was for myself and my cofounder to put in a 100 k. How much? 100 k, $100,000. So again, but then we're we're not it's not like we stock it in bank. So as we need, we then drop the funds. So we still have some, like, six months to go before we start to maybe panic and want to raise something. [12:41] This is awesome. Well and if you and if you and if you keep growing and you don't wanna raise equity, like, wanna keep your equity, we'd love I mean, Founderpath is a nondilutive fund. So if you've got 10,000 a month in revenue, like, we can fund and give you up to $60,000, like, six x of your MRR. So if you ever wanna go that past, let let me know. [12:59] >> Okay. That that makes sense. Do do you also do you have presence in Africa? Do you have someone you do this for in Africa that I can actually have a conversation with? [13:08] Yeah. So so you'd talk directly. I'm the founder of the company. We're learning how to do these deals in new countries. So it's a $150,000,000 fund. I would work with you directly. We would figure it out together. [13:18] >> Oh, brilliant. We we could actually explore that. We could explore that. [13:22] Alright. We'll do that later. [13:23] >> You don't wanna share your equity so early in the business. You you [13:26] Yeah. That's all. I mean, I got burned in my first company. I sold equity too early, I regretted it. So now we're trying to help founders keep their equity for a longer period of time. [13:34] >> Smart. Smart. Smart. Smart. [13:36] Smart. Alright, man. So you got seven engineers, 12 on the team full time. You're cranking along. How are you gonna get your next, you know, a 100 paying customers? [13:45] >> Okay. So first is we want to keep growing incrementally at this pace pending when we have been able to pull our API tests and mobile tests. The moment we are able to do that, then the next thing is we're looking to get into a global accelerator, and the reason is quite simple, so that we can also spread our tentacles outside of just Africa. Then after the acceleration, we can just start to preach the gospel, do marketing, [14:13] >> and then target more people. So that's that's the plan. [14:16] I love that. Let's wrap up here, AZ, on the famous five. Number one, your favorite book? [14:21] >> Come again? [14:22] What's your favorite book? [14:24] >> Oh, zero to one. [14:25] Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? [14:31] >> Well, in Nigeria, yes. Can I So I keenly follow Sim Shagaya, impute you lesson? [14:41] >> Very good. [14:42] Number three, what's your favorite online tool? [14:45] >> Online tool? Google Calendar. [14:48] Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night? [14:51] >> Call me again? [14:52] How many hours of sleep? [14:55] >> Wow. I'm not proud about that, dude. I already did it before. [15:00] Oh my gosh. That's bad. What's your situation? Married, single, kids? [15:04] >> Married now. Married. [15:05] Okay. Congrats. Any kids? [15:07] >> The kids. Two. [15:09] Wow. And how old are you? [15:12] >> I'm three zero, 30. [15:14] 30 years old. Last question. [15:15] >> Something you wish you knew when you were 20. [15:18] >> Oh, what I wish I knew when I was 20. I'll say I wish I knew that you don't necessarily have to optimize to raise venture capital. [15:31] >> If I knew that, probably my first business, I wouldn't have sorted out so quick. [15:37] Mhmm. Guys, he launched GetScandium just four or five months ago. It's an automated testing tool. They've already got 30 paying customers doing $5 a month in revenue or 60,000 ARR. He already had an exit under his belt. AZ is his name. He's based in Nigeria. He used 45 k of his own money to help kick start this one with his cofounder and put in a bit more. They split at one fifty one forty nine, hoping to [15:57] launch and get more customers. Their first 30 customers came from a WhatsApp group of founders in Nigeria. Az, thanks for taking us to the top. [16:05] >> Alright. Now enjoy. Do have a great moment. Bye for now. [16:09] One 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 one [16:33] p. M. Central. Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at two p. M. 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 [16:55] an acquisition, a big fundraise, 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 [17:16] people are saying. Sign up 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, I do it so that we can all learn. We have to [17:36] counter those people. We got to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. Alright, I'll be in the comments. See you.