Scandium Systems Inc Revenue & Valuation (2024)

guys he launched it Scandium just four or five months ago it's an automated testing tool they've already got 30 paying customers doing five grand a month in revenue or 60 000 ARR he already had an exit under his belt AZ is his name is based in Nigeria he used 45k of his own money to help kick start this one with his co-founder and put in a bit more they split it on 51.49 hoping to launch uh and get more customers their first 30 customers came from a WhatsApp group of Founders in Nigeria 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 there were 10 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 yeah how you doing 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 okay um so maybe I will share my own story I literally was running a desk 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 um ideally you want to first um 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 basis um unfortunately um it's also the fact that writing scripts I'm using selenium when we beside press um their videos are not so friendly when you need to collaborate hence the reason I needed to come up with a no code tool that it's collaboration across all stakeholders across the product value chain okay and what are customers paying on average per month to use your technology coming in what are customers paying you on average today to use Scandium so I've really 200 a month a month 200. yep and when did you launch the business what year um so um business started January this year first version of products was launched in April and then we've been doing fine the adoption rate has been quite impressive what's an impressive adoption rate can you give me hard numbers um so today we have less than 100 about 80 plus people using the solution and um we we have quite about some 30 plus paying customers 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 uh within five thousand and six thousand a month a month that's really great I mean so you've basically gone from launch this year to your first 5k of mrr in seven months that's really impressive how did you find your your 100 or 88 to 100 users and AZ what do you look for in that user base to figure out who you can convert into a paying customer okay um so first is how do I find this customers um the first thing is um I've built startups in the past so I'm friends with a lot of startup Founders and community so we actually we literally launched in a community there's a popular community in Nigeria Africa called um Premier BN Premiere Premier Premier BN yeah so what's the website for airbn.com correct correct correct okay it's probably called pbn pbn um so wait I want to make sure I get the website right it's it's pbn.com let me double check that for you premierbn.com or one sec I can't find it that Community is so valuable one sec so okay I think you're not spelling Premiere well it is p-r-e-m-i-e then bn.com I'll just drop it in the chat for you great okay okay got it so uh let me see okay so yeah drop that in the chat for me so I can open it up so okay so you launched you launched in this community it's it's a nigeria-based community full of Founders and entrepreneurs yep it's a community of um can you drop can you drop the link in the chat please yeah one sec to do that since got it okay okay so it's a community of Founders and um senior operators so it's so easy for me to get a waitlist from there and then explore immediately so again in this part of the world um Quality Assurance is a is a big challenge not so many software Engineers can actually write scripts so when you then bring in a tool like us um it's readily the adoption of it is just impressive 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 the 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 valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your founder path 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 different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when I hover over here 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 not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on YouTube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to 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 going out right now and you're raising your seed round well 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 data set of SAS valuation than what 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 evaluation 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 interesting so guys those of you interested this is a very impressive Community looks like it's p-r-e-m-i-a-b-n.com so AZ when you have this idea you launched it what in a forum there or in a slack group or how did you actually do it inside of the community okay so the community has a slack Channel but again it has about 35 different WhatsApp groups so it's a lifestyle Community for Africans um some Caribbeans white coverage so we have a group where when you're launching an idea you can actually eat it there for people to join your wait list and when you launch you can only share newsletter to them interesting so there's a WhatsApp group that is specifically for launching ideas that you posted in right how can somebody how can somebody if they're in Nigeria listening how can they post their idea in that group yes so again the the community is a paid Community um about the 100 about 250 dollars per year yeah by you yeah and it's also an invite-only community so um as an African or a Nigerian you probably have to have done stuff before you can actually get um accepted 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 okay so um first is um 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're being able to do a demo show them how it works and you know bought them um easily but going forward um again it's safe to say what we built today is at the minimal level um our test automation Works via the web for today we need to build mobile we're currently working on apis and desktop applications so we get to the point where it should be as large as having to build our own community of software testers so we don't have to then Empower these software testers to be able to use the tool and then cannot be advocated for us in their places of work interesting and how are you bootstrapped today of your race capital um sudids 100 Push drop uh customers I love that so you own 100 right yeah myself and my co-founder actually did you guys split it 50 50. um 51 49. yeah you have 51. yeah yeah [Laughter] all right but then my cookware is a good guys 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 art coding part of the duties there's a lot of startup Founders listening to this they're going man I wish I could have gotten the 51 versus a 50 50 split that's not an easy conversation how did you get your co-founder to agree to let you have 51 percent also myself 2012 so we pretty understand ourselves so well and um we we also built the start of many parts which we sold to um a bigger company in Africa that was in 2019. um so the conversation is really rich on that deal or was it like an aqua higher with some kind of ticket and all of this kind of stuff so we decided to take a break sometime in 2022 to just chill out to be hosting for like 10 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 split is never an issue as a matter of fact it was just to make you feel like to see you guys want to see you that's all but I've just done 50. that's amazing okay so so okay so you're cranking along your bootstrapped You've Got 5 000 a month in Revenue six thousand a month in Revenue how many are full-time on the team today So today we're at 12 full-time guys about um seven engineers and then five business guys so how I guess how do you fund their salary if you're only doing 5000 a month in Revenue okay so um recall I said we have bootstrapped so uh myself and my guy has again we have some books and bag in the bank that we can actually use to just put strap stuff for us the idea for us is to ensure that um we are properly validated before we go to the Venture um Capital markets how much Izzy how much of your own money have you put in the company so so far I spent about some 45 of my personal crash 25k into the business does that make you nervous not exactly I'm pretty sure that um 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 5K in some like four months of lunch um I'm so relaxed so relaxed that's awesome all right so you put in 45 000 of your own money now give us some context I mean is that like your whole net worth is that 100 of your savings or do you still keep some back as a safety net also I I still have again I still have a buckle plan so the idea was for myself and my co-founder to put in a 100K um 100K 100 000. so again but then 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 I want to raise something this is awesome uh well benefit and if you and if you keep growing and you don't want to raise Equity like you want to keep your Equity um we'd love I mean founder path is a non-dilutive fund so if you've got 10 000 a month in Revenue like we can fund and give you up to 60 000 bucks like 6X of your mrr so if you ever want to go that past let me know okay that that makes sense um do you also do you have presents in Africa do you have someone you do this for in Africa that I can actually have a conversation with yeah so so you talk directly I'm the founder of the company uh World learning how to do these deals in new countries so it's a 150 million dollar fund I would work with you directly we would figure it out together oh prenance we could actually explore that we could explore that all right you don't want to share your Equity so early in the business you essential I mean I got burned in my first company I sold Equity too early and I regretted it so now we're trying to help Founders keep their equity for a longer period of time all right man so you got seven Engineers 12 on the team full time you're cranking along um how are you gonna get your next you know 100 paying customers okay so um fast is we want to keep growing incrementally at this piece um pending when we have been able to pull our API um tests and mobile tests the moment we're able to do that then the next thing is um 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 um then after the acceleration we can then start to preach the gospel do marketing and then Target more people so that's that's the plan yeah I love that let's wrap up here AZ on the famous five number one your favorite book come again what's your favorite book oh zero to one number two is there a CEO you're following or studying um well in Nigeria yes um so um I kindly follow um Sim shagaya it builds your lesson very good number three what's your favorite online tool online so Google Calendar number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night how many hours of sleep well I'm not proud about that dude I'll be grateful oh my gosh that's fine what's your situation married single kids might know my okay congrats any kids good kids two wow and how old are you um three zero that's it 30 years old last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. oh what I wish I knew when I was 20. I'll say I wish I knew that um you didn't necessarily have to optimize to raise venture capital um if I knew that probably my first business I don't have sort it out so quick guys he launched it Scandium just four or five months ago it's an automated testing tool they've already got 30 paying customers doing five grand a month in revenue or 60 000 ARR he already had an exit under his belt AZ is his name is based in Nigeria he used 45k of his own money to help kick start this one with his co-founder and put in a bit more they split it on 51.49 hoping to launch uh 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 all right now enjoy do a great moment bye for now 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 they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every Thursday 1 p.m Central 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 SAS World whether it's 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 SAS 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 up for that at nathanlacka.com forward slash slack in the meantime I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube I'll be in the comments for the next 30 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 we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys's support all right I'll be in the comments see ya