How Toggle3D CEO Nima Sarshar grew Toggle3D to $22.6K revenue with a 12 person team in 2024.

guys there you have it he built it a early in 2018 first lines of code raised 2 million bucks at VC and said no I really don't like raising money I just want to build something cool let me go join someone who can do the money part for me so they went to a publicly traded company now the Tech's starting to take off they've got a great team with Dasha and Nemo working together to launch toggle 3D if you believe in the metaverse if you believe in 3D objects if you believe that the future of content is 3D and you really believe in AR toggle 3D is the pickaxe that they are going to sell to that gold miner setting themselves up for success by not spinning out into their own public traded company we'll see what happens next hey folks my guests today are Dasha and Nema they were there on the ground floor at toggle3d.com which is a 3D Studio for everyone Dasha Nema you ready to take us to the top nice to meet you absolutely nice to meet you too so Dasha real quick your head of product I believe correct yes for toggle 3D and Nema are you your founder CEO yeah yeah I mean we're incubating it inside the current place we are but yeah uh things may change but but as it is today yes so what I'm hoping to learn from you guys is there's a lot of Founders listening right now that get incubated inside of a corporation or an accelerator and they want to spin it out and there's a lot of challenges with that so how are you guys doing this like I guess let's start with when inside of the accelerator or where you're being incubated what year when was the first line of code written for toggle 3D yeah I mean uh the story is actually a little longer I had a startup company called 3d.ai the current company bought and the just the idea of in the story is that we want to make 3D content democratized and accessible because we think the world is 3D and you gotta you know your content needs to be treated especially for e-commerce and commercial stuff that was the that was the beginning of 3d.ai but what year was that though put it on timeline it was 2018. okay uh when we started but the technology there turns to the photos into 3D and there's limitations with that just with the AI and and the rest of it but I always thought that everything that's ever built is designed by someone and oftentimes in cat so what if we give the tools eventually I thought for this to really become become really uh scalable you got to give them the tools to do it so when we were bought out that was part of the Nemo what were year where you bought out to 2021 okay and did you raise money at the company before you were bought out yeah yeah how much did you raise a couple of million yeah okay so like three million something like that let's say two okay and why sell why not just keep building that company precisely because of what we're talking about because I could have gone and tried to basically get you know raise my own funding and do my own thing and I peel it but the conversation we had with Evan who's the CEO of next day who bought us the understanding was we come and we incubated here and we spend it out as its own IPO company and that's exactly what we're doing so the multiple paths you could do then that way I don't have to worry about financing there was a great team Dasha included we jumped in and we really built it up I mean but if if 3D AI that was on a tear I mean you'd already raised money you'd already raise two million bucks if it was on a tear you wouldn't have you wouldn't have sold it you would have just kept building so what happened I mean was this really like an aqua hire that you needed to sort of go in and I mean help me understand why you made that decision yeah man you're losing like a massive buyout but it was an acquire either right we all make money investors made money but um but again the point is that this somebody this needed a VC to be honest that's really with uh I guess that's what you're trying to figure out they're people who made the question from VCS was well does everything need to be 3D do you need a 3D version of a toothbrush um here you know Commerce or is it just going to be about for AR chosen tables and whatnot right and it was really hard to convince them otherwise so you needed someone who would back you play back here and already believed that and that's that's why it kind of Evan and I you know uh clicked right but now said you know I don't want to want to say metaverse or whatever now it's pretty clear that the next version of doing Commerce online is to have your products in 3D it's just not about the AR where you put the where you put like a chair in the room or whatnot really imagine you're an Alibaba seller uh that's that does B2B selling and which is something we're gonna Target with toggle as well it's like how do you present your product in a way that's that's interactive immersive people could could turn it around try it and yes AR is good you could kind of transport it across the oceans and see it in that place but even if you want to buy a toothbrush but if you want to buy a hundred thousand of them you do really want to see it in all it's 3D Glory yeah and that's exactly what's happening it was hard to convince people to do that 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 valuations 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 around 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 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 all right let's jump back into the interview just moving I want to move past the acquisition to talk about the product today and how you how you guys plan to grow it in the spin out but I believe uh I believe based on my research next tech air solutions group uh Corp because they're semi-public here they release the deal price was about 9.5 million in total share consideration is what they bought you guys for you'd raise 2 million so obviously now all that's inside one company but now you're now doing the opposite you want to spin it back out so why decision to go in and now why the decision to come back out well that's just how we create value right so you could basically I could have tried to write and I tried to race right I mean I didn't get the right terms I needed you could have raised and basically built the same product with building uh as a pop as a as a you know as a private campaign right or you just say get acquired incubated here and these things often don't work out but it is working out right now so I don't I don't I mean I've seen incubation or whatever it is a weird thing there's a reason why there's VCS and whatnot but what I learned is that there's a whole world of public markets where you could actually work with the other side of the coach to to raise money get the product out it's not that different but now we're gonna I put Poe right...