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 off of another proper company which would have been a lot harder doing that but public shareholders of this company if this is crushing it would not want it to be spun out because then oh oh so next fact is going to be the biggest shareholder of toggle so it is actually creating value for the shareholders okay but you said you did the deal because you didn't want to deal with private VCS you couldn't convince them to raise money so then that's why you join but do you feel like you now you can convince private investors give you money if you're going to need it in the future oh we are so when we're spinning out a company like toggle even if you're doing it as an IPO you still need investors and that's probably I don't understand what you mean by that what do you mean you're spinning it out as an IPO so next stick is a public company right listed on Canadian Securities Exchange so we're going to IPO a new company which basically spin out part of nextdick but it's going to be its own like public company toggle 3D listen in the same exchange and then about half or more of the shares of that company would be owned by Nextech basically I see meanwhile why go through I mean Dasha why go through all that I mean I've had folks I have friends listen on the exchange and they they tell me that they spend something up to a million a year on just admin fees of being public right you just got to check a bunch of boxes why I mean you guys aren't at 100 million bucks in Revenue I mean why go deal with all that scrutiny you want that one it's right back at you anymore there are exchanges It's a combination of things so Canadian Security is exchange has been really like they're meant for entrepreneurs they're just another think of them as another way of uh they're for the builders this is not like a NASDAQ where you literally need to do there's still admin fees though right I mean 200 300 500 Grand a year on admin stuff just because you're public and well there is there is still fees but uh there's also the opportunities you have the liquidity to start at the same time you don't have to go chase VCS every day right in theory I mean if your product is doing well so it's just another path and and right now like you really don't want to be out there in the VC land trying to chase money so I'm going to be happy like I could not have done this if it was outside with the very same technology at all it would have died Dasha let's flip back over to your the product right because yes there's the metaverse happening there are crypto worlds being invented there is VR and AR all of which you guys are selling the the pickaxe to the Gold Miner right I mean it feels like that's what this could be here what are who's paying you today is it is it Brands like you know big Proctor and Gamble Brands doing the toothbrush news example or is it more like you know the ape worlds being created in metaverse yeah so we're seeing a little bit of everything um a toggle 3D what we've done differently than what's out on the market right now is we've democratized that entire process of 3D modeling what that means is yes we're still offering this tool to experience 3D artists and manufacturers with CAD files but we've also opened up the doors for people that have never 3D modeled before but with this new rise of as we said the metaverse and these VR you know XR experiences this is a way for them to create that content something that we've been hearing a lot in the industry is the bottleneck behind all of these cool experiences is that content creation so toggle 3D opens up the doors for anybody to be able to create that content whether that means it's populated in XR scenes you're using it on your eCommerce site you're using it for B2B sales all of a sudden everybody has the opportunity to create the digital version of what they see in the physical world this is very cool and so what are you charging on average what's the average customer pay you to use the tech yeah so we're still very new as a product um we're sort of in this beta phase but the way that works pre-revenue are you pre-revenue today we're starting to see it we're starting to see it come in uh so we have well I think actually explaining the pricing plan might help answer this question a little bit because we've divided up the platform today into two major pricing plans the first one is completely free um so a lot of these disrupting Technologies we see in the market that's what helps us really reach virality is to let people have access to the platform limit the amount of access in terms of the out of projects they can create upload size you know limit some features all that good stuff but give them enough so they can try the platform ultimately fall in love with that and continue being a user that will hopefully upgrade and continue using toggle in their everyday in their everyday creation um so with that we have that upgraded plan we have the Pro Plan hold on so on the free plan real quick on the free plan how many how many creators invented at least one 3D object in toggle 3D over the past 30 days yeah oh yeah I mean I don't have it for the 30 days but since we've released it in beta end of September we have about 145 users on the platform today um and I want to say about 85 percent of them have made a 3D model and published a project that's very cool okay so 145 since uh since September 2022 83 of them were active so more than a 50 activation rate which is great as head of product this is the key thing right onboarding what do you know you've got to get a new signup to do in the first 30 days for them to become an addicted user that use you every day with their whole team yes the first thing is you have to upload a file um so you have to upload a file you have to get your object into the design scene and what's really cool about toggles we start from CAD files so ultimately we're prompting the user to upload a cad file and convert it into a web friendly format because it's not like you can just upload a cad file anywhere today no matter if it's 3D or 2D they're very heavy files a lot of these softwares won't support it the web will definitely not support it um so we are doing this conversion process where we're converting it into a web friendly format easy to use and now very easy to distribute among all these Uprising Platforms in the XR world I love this we have about three minutes left folks so so help me out here Dash real quick the paid plans what do those look like yeah so the play plans will give you everything that we have to offer today at toggle 3D all the cool features more designs and we are seeing people try it out so people try it out we're seeing people convert um Come on talk money to me what's the price 29 a month okay 29 bucks a month and that is that for unlimited objects unloaded uploading of file sizes yeah yeah unlimited designs um we do have a file size restriction of 75 megabits right now we're growing that uh so it won't be a limitation forever but right now yeah unlimited designs you can it's per seat right 29.9 percent you can export as much as you want off the platform uh we're really creating some value here that's exciting okay super cool and uh last couple questions here total team size today just working on toggle 3D how many folks Nema okay Dasha how many yeah so we have about 10 under 10. 10. okay and I guess the last question here my audience be wondering about how do you guys decide Josh how much Equity you own Nema how much Equity do you own how much is nextar keep like when you spin out how do you decide make all those decisions it's it's been done before inside next stick so we spun out pretty successfully in other company called array out of uh neck stick it created a lot of value for next shareholders it's its own thing just within it's been only like a month or two months it I think it's valued maybe at 35 million or something so there's almost a structure that is uh so Evan who's the CEO of next thing but we've been through this once and and and we're just following the same plate and what is nextar's total revenue it's public I just don't know it I honestly I don't want to say something that it's I know it's public but it's tens of millions but tens of millions okay okay yes you're spinning it out so this this is great so listen uh you guys help help my audience out if they want to go explore the product a little bit where can they find you guys online toggle3d.com toggle3d.com guys there you have it he built it early in 2018 first Line's a code raised two million bucks at VC and sending 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 wouldn't do 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 now spinning out to their own publicly traded company we'll see what happens next Dasha Nema thanks for taking us to the top thank you what the pleasure thanks 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 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