How Trust Chain Global CEO Giancarlo De Lio grew Trust Chain Global to $360K revenue and 5 customers in 2022.

hey folks my guest today is john carlo de leo he's an entrepreneur and seasoned technology entrepreneur should say an investor has been successful in building companies and products across many different industries with over 20 years of experience in building he's had sea sea has held c-suite level roles acted as an advisor and an investor and his highlights include co-founding vital hub and care kit health and now trust chain global the first end-to-end transaction platform for commodities john hall are you ready to take to the top yes definitely all right so just be clear just the web 3 technology on blockchain or is it a sas play it's uh it's starting off as it started off as a sas plane we're moving into the web 3 um technology play as well okay and when did you get going when what year was the first line of code written uh so we started in september of uh 2021 okay 20 okay well you didn't spend much time as a sas company then if you're already transitioning out of that huh well no that's right so we um we started off as as a sas play um thinking that you know we're going to do a bunch of services that would be great for people in the commodities industry and realizing that um they need to grow into that and they need to change the platform really quickly after customer discovery and going through some pilots and tests and tests and we we moved from just providing certain key services and features like um kycs and aml checks to actually going full blown now to providing the full intense solution and adding our own escrow and pay net pay master services underlining the whole the entire platform but you can do that as a sas company why decide to go to web3 uh we're we're looking at what three because of the uh blockchain part of the transparency the whole the whole issue in the in this space that we're dealing with is transparency fraud uh inefficiencies and things like that and so i'll use a quick example for you um everyone knows about the ppe industry you know kovacain pp industry became a massive commodity play um in a very very short time it's already it's already grown into um you know multi-billion dollar commodity out there but the biggest issue that's happened with this has exposed a lot of issues with the process the way people have been doing businesses and transparency and fraud and the title ownership of a lot or something that's being held and how that and how that needs to be transferred over and provided to a buyer after that they purchased it there's a lot of like proxy and resellers out there who actually don't own the titles and the ownership until that title owner comes at the end and um it's all done very inefficiently but if moving into a web 3.0 blockchain kind of model then the ownership in the title will move very easily over that and it'd be tracked properly and it would be done in a digital manner versus the way that happens now okay and so help me understand some customers that are already paying you to use this or are you guys pre-revenue right now uh we just we just signed our first set of customers and we have our new book on the books you have what our revenue booked on the books 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 it 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 valuation this year now the secret evaluation 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 frowner 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 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 valuations than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to 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 okay but any any of that revenue actually being realized so do you have paying customers that already paid for a month of access or something like that yeah we have a couple right now that have already started uh paying for uh a month of access so tell me tell me those stories what are they paying for and like what are some of the industries using you so there so we have a copper deal so someone buying precious metals and they're using they're using our platform for the very first part is due diligence so our platform does uh kyc know your client and aml checks on people so a seller comes to our platform and says hey i've got um i've got this copper lot that i want to sell so i've got five tons of copper that i want to sell um i go onto our platform we verify that the seller is real we say that's a real person we do verification on their company that's great and then they have the ability to then they pay right so they sign up with their credit card and then the monthly fees and basically what they do is they get to uh create their sop standard operating process their workflow of how they want their deal to be completed and they go out there and they promote just like they do with the broker channel a buyer comes in and then they're paying just on the monthly fee they get access to all these tools that allow them to do exactly what we just did with them which was buyer comes in i can check do due diligence on them know if they're a real buyer uh anti-money laundering are there any issues do they have any fraud or cases around them um what's their ranking out there in the world like are they a legitimate business owner or a personal operator out there and then they go through our process of actually doing the deal like you know um signing we have e-signing built in so signing your nda's signing proper documents uploading your bank statements which and things like that that we can verify um all of that kind of stuff so they go through that entire process and our monthly fee allows them to manage the deal and and do due diligence and do all of those understood understoods and so what are they paying on average to use that all the things you just described so right now that's 199 a month that they they used to do that and then our second revenue model is on the our escrow and pay master services but current customers today on average are paying 200 bucks a month to use the technology yes okay got it got it and so what month did you sign up your first customer was that just in february that was just in february yeah okay god and so how many customers out today couple four or five we have five customers in total right now five okay and and so how have you found them right the precious metal example where did you find that customer well so are uh a few of us that have joined the company like myself i've been uh doing the commodities uh trading wait are you a founder i'm a founder oh god i got it okay yeah so i'm i'm my partner katrin and myself are the two founders of the company and so my background the last um 18 plus months i got into commodities and so the first of the customers that we have are through uh our internal network and then we've now been outward like one of the customers that we just signed on which is full spectrum testing was a proper full sale which was we went out we we prospected them we found them went through the entire process pitched them on the concept of the platform what you get to do why it's a good idea and so that was the one that we recently just press released on and that was like a full prospect the re the the customers that...