How ANT USA Inc Reached $2.4M ARR with 80 Enterprise Customers and Zero Sales Reps (Interview with CEO Dmitry Goykhman)

Introduction and Company Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00As antusa.com was launched to help retailers manage SKUs and inventory back in 1993 as an agency, he launched the SaaS platform, just call it 2019. Now today doing $200,000 a month in revenue of which 160,000 of is true recurring. The other sort of one time services that turn into recurring over time, he's serving 80 customers to help them manage again, the inventory, there are thousands of SKUs, there are millions of different combinations to make sure that

00:24they can keep making money like he's doing. He's profiting caught 50 ish thousand dollars per month in revenue completely bootstrapped with a team of 16. Got a great war chest 600,000 cash in the bank and his total expenses every month is just $150,000, much less than his revenue. This is the kind of founder we love. Hey, folks. My guest today is Dmitry Goykhman. He is a Queens College MIT course. Six started his company in 1992 for

00:49freedom and profit, which we love. He's bootstrapped, never took outside capital, still work for a living is very hands on. He's now building antusa.com, which is merchandise planning for retail chains. Dmitry, you ready to take us to the top?

Dmitry's Background and Path into Retail Software

Dmitry Goykhman

01:04>> Sure. Let's see.

Nathan Latka

01:05Now, how did you get into this space? Were you running a retail chain, a grocery store before?

Dmitry Goykhman

01:11>> No. I was I was a a geek, basically, and, you know, software development, electrical engineering seemed like real work. So I kind of slid into consulting for large retailers. I used to work for digital equipment, which then was, like, the size of IBM, and they had a lot of big accounts. And so I started doing that, and then at some point, I decided to jump off the career ladder and do my own thing. And, yeah, you

01:39>> know, basically slid into it sideways. It seemed like an easy way to make some money.

First Line of Code and Early History

Nathan Latka

01:43So what year did you write the first line of code for ant?

Dmitry Goykhman

01:46>> I think I wrote the first prototype in '93, but it was in it was for a custom system for a company called Wakamo Pottery. They sold a lot of Mikasa and, you know, Lion King blankets in in North Carolina and sizable then. And then we sort of, you know, five years later, we decided that it was worth, you know, doing a product. At the time, there weren't any planning systems on PCs. It was all mainframes.

Transition from Services to SaaS

Nathan Latka

02:13Okay. So you get going in 1993. Now was it software as a service back then? That would have been very early for SaaS.

Dmitry Goykhman

02:20>> No. No. No. No. It was it was all traditional sort of, you know, first custom development, then systems development, client server. We became software as a service really over the last three or four years, you know, because, you know, because the clients wanted to go that way and because they wanted to stabilize the cash flow on a subscription basis rather than on a project basis. You know, projects that, you know, starve or eat. Right? SaaS has

02:49>> been much, much, much better for us, and I think that's definitely the way we're staying.

Customer Examples and Pricing Model

Nathan Latka

02:54Okay. So you you okay. So that that's helpful context. I guess, before we dive deep into the backstory here, tell us an example of a customer that pays you today and what they're paying for.

Dmitry Goykhman

03:05>> So we have we we have basically retail chain customers. You know, the the normal ones might be like Puma or Zoomies, but there are, you know, there are, you know, lots of smaller ones. There are bigger ones that are privately held. What they pay us is to give them a you know, usually, it's a large database with a lot of sophisticated sort of vertical KPIs. Retailers happen to plan their inventory better than any other industry that

03:32>> I know of because if they don't buy, they go out of business. They don't have anything to sell, and there are literally billions of combinations of product stores over time. So we try to simplify all that, and over the years, we've developed some pretty effective business processes to help them with.

Nathan Latka

03:48And so, Dmitry, what does a company like Pumi, and don't tell them specifically, but on average, what's the customer paying you per month or per year to use your technology?

Dmitry Goykhman

03:56>> Not about Puma, but on the average, it's from 1,000 to 5,000 a month is what we we would charge.

Nathan Latka

04:03Okay. So would you say like maybe 3,000 a month is a fair average?

Dmitry Goykhman

04:06>> Let's say let's say $3 a month and then we charge something like 30 to $50,000 to stand them up basically that integration, you know, services. Mhmm.

Nathan Latka

04:15Okay. That makes sense. So if I'm paying you $36,000 per year, so 3,000 a month plus then a 30 ks set up fee on top of that, how do you price that? Is it based off number of SKUs, number of inventory calls, API calls? How do you price?

Dmitry Goykhman

04:28>> No. We we we price per seat, and it's usually a small number of very high value users. And, you know, the the ROI on our product can be as high as a 100 x, not a 100%.

Nathan Latka

04:40So how many seats how many seats do I am I probably paying for if I'm paying you $36 a year?

Dmitry Goykhman

04:44>> You might buy a couple of seats. You might buy 10 seats. You might buy 20 seats, you know, depending on on the on the buyer and plan a team that that that you're running. But Okay. It's a fairly small number of high value viewers users. Right? So a planner could be planning as much as a $100,000,000 worth of business and buying as much as $2,030,000,000 dollars worth of inventory over the course of the year, And we

05:10>> help them optimize in effect, you know, planning and buying, which, you know, is worth a lot of money.

Nathan Latka

05:16Oh, 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

05:39your 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

06:03get 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

06:25not 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

06:51going 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. All right. We're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second. But

07:13if 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

07:39the interview. And it sounds like you went from services and consulting to more pure SaaS about three, four years ago in 2019, 2020 timeframe. Fast forward to today, how many customers do you have on your SaaS platform?

Current Customer Count and Revenue

Dmitry Goykhman

07:52>> I have about 80 customers on the, you know, 80 enterprise customers. We're picking up customers fairly quickly now.

Nathan Latka

08:00Those are 80 paying eight zero paying enterprise customers?

Dmitry Goykhman

08:02>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

08:03Oh, wow. Well, congratulate I mean, if I'm doing my math right, 80 customers times 3,000 a month. What are you doing? 240,000 a month in revenue?

Dmitry Goykhman

08:10>> Not everybody pays 3,000. Right? And some of our customers are actually we move we move them to the SaaS model, but we still charge them, you know, old style maintenance, which which actually comes out to less. We never drop a customer.

Nathan Latka

08:24Okay. But then your average customer, though, isn't paying $3 a month like we just talked about. They're paying less.

Dmitry Goykhman

08:29>> Average pure SaaS customer is paying about that. Okay. The legacy customers are, you know, typically paying less, but they've been with us for many years. So some cost is very profitable for us. So Okay. Right? So, yeah, we we we you know, we're upwards of 2 to $3,000,000 now, you know, somewhat.

Nathan Latka

08:47230 so you're doing 230,000 a month?

Dmitry Goykhman

08:49>> Yeah. Well, about 200 a month right now.

Nathan Latka

08:51200. Well, congratulations. That's great. And give me a sense of how how large was your services business before you launched SaaS in 2019?

Dmitry Goykhman

09:02>> It was larger. I would say that probably 40% of our revenue was in these implementations and services. Now, you know, given given an opportunity, I would drive it to zero. It's never gonna go to zero. But it's maybe, you know, maybe 15% now. I think that probably 85% of our of our revenue is recurring services. It is recurring billing. And my goal is

Nathan Latka

09:30Eighty percent's recurring?

Dmitry Goykhman

09:32>> Eighty, eighty five now. You know, it it I'd have to look it up. I haven't looked it up.

Nathan Latka

09:36But But the $200,000 a month number you just gave me, that's pure recurring. Right?

Dmitry Goykhman

09:39>> No. That's everything.

Nathan Latka

09:41Oh, that's okay. So 80 percent of that is recurring. Right? So so a 160,000 or $4,040,000 is like one time service stuff.

Dmitry Goykhman

09:48>> Right. But what happens is they come back to us anyway. So even the onetime service stuff, when you get well organized, they come back to they need more training. You bill them by you know, for the sessions. They need enhancements. You bill them for that. So it's it's fairly predictable business flow Yep. Even though it's not, you know, even though it's not a quarterly invoice.

Growth Rate and Year-over-Year Comparison

Nathan Latka

10:07So And, Dmitry, if you're at 200,000 a month today on average, where were you exactly one year ago so we can calculate a growth rate?

Dmitry Goykhman

10:14>> I was less than two. So

Nathan Latka

10:17Well, that's good.

Dmitry Goykhman

10:18>> No. We're doing really well. I think we're we're about 20% above last year. Okay.

Nathan Latka

10:24So maybe you're doing about a 160,000 a month Yeah. About a year ago.

Dmitry Goykhman

10:27>> 160, 180, depending on months. Yeah.

How ANT USA Acquires New Customers

Nathan Latka

10:30Okay. And so how are you driving this growth? Tell me about how you get new customers.

Dmitry Goykhman

10:35>> Well, there's a couple of things that are going on. I, you know, I joined SaaS Academy, Dan Dan Martell's SaaS Academy. Right? It's been basically learning all the stuff I didn't learn over the last thirty years. So that's been very helpful in terms of focusing the effort and and and the scale and looking for, you know, ideal customer profile.

10:57>> It's good. Right?

Nathan Latka

10:58I'm gonna write I'm gonna write up a big story on this interview. Do I have your permission to post that in the Facebook, the SaaS Academy group?

Dmitry Goykhman

11:04>> Yeah. You should. I mean, they're they're great guys. And, you know, I gotta I gotta tell you that I've always worked you know, I kinda built this in isolation. There was nobody to ask. There's no podcast like yours to watch. There's no SaaS Academy. You know, I learned the words like invoice, you know, when the customer ARPU. Yeah. The the customer said, send me an invoice. I'm like, what's an invoice? Right? So so, you know, the

11:28>> ability to be able to ask and to triangulate and to see what other people are doing and where where I fall, you know, in like, I've always thought that everybody does things this way. Right? But,

11:42>> you know, I built this business. I I was thinking about this, you know, before a podcast. If you give me a couple of minutes, I can tell you a little bit. Right? I built it for resilience to a large extent rather than for growth. Mhmm. Right? And, you know, when you when you do this for years, you learn a few lessons. One is that everybody dies. And I don't mean personally. I mean, business dies. It was

12:06>> the year 2000 when nobody bought anything. It was the year 2008 when nobody bought anything. There was the pandemic where for a couple of months nobody paid any invoices. So you end up going through these existential crises and unless you can survive a crisis, you're done. Mhmm. And so I, you know, I kinda thought about it in, you know, in retrospect, I built this company, first of all, for resilience. Right? Because, you know, if you're if

12:33>> you're funded by risk capital, it's somebody else's money at risk. You go on, you fail someplace else, or you succeed someplace else. I didn't wanna fail. So I failed sequentially in the same place, but it got reborn.

Co-Founder Buyout Story

Nathan Latka

12:45No. But but you launched in 1993. Were you the sole founder? Do you own a 100%?

Dmitry Goykhman

12:48>> I had a I had a co owner, and I bought her out, you know, about fifteen years ago.

Nathan Latka

12:53Oh, tell me more about that. There's a lot of people listening with co founders that, you know, maybe things have changed. They wanna buy them out, but they don't know how to do it. How'd you do it?

Dmitry Goykhman

13:00>> I had a long difficult negotiation. And then eventually just, you know, we went for a business valuation and they they gave us a valuation and I paid

Nathan Latka

13:13What was the valuation?

Dmitry Goykhman

13:15>> It wasn't I don't know. It wasn't a lot at the time. It was pre Like a million? Not even, I think. I don't know. It's $5,600. It was Okay. The idea was, like, if the founder isn't in it, what's the business worth? Very little.

Nathan Latka

13:28So you got evaluation. This is in 2005. You bought out your cofounder. You got evaluation for 600 k, then what?

Dmitry Goykhman

13:33>> Then I paid her I don't know. I paid her, like, I don't know, 120, 150, or $200 in cash. Honestly, I don't remember. And then the rest, you know, over time.

Nathan Latka

13:42Well, how'd you negotiate that? Like, why $1.20, why $1.50 cash up front?

Dmitry Goykhman

13:47>> I don't remember. You know, I I I can make it up, but I don't remember.

Nathan Latka

13:50Well, did she own a percent of the company and then the percent of that against 600,000 valuation is how you got to the payout?

Dmitry Goykhman

13:56>> Yeah. We were half and half.

Nathan Latka

13:57Okay. So she was 50. Okay. Right. But Interesting.

Bootstrapped, Profitable, and Cash Position

Dmitry Goykhman

14:01>> And, you know, but it worked out with with great friends, and, you know, there's no there's no there's no, like, bad blood. I, you know, I don't think I'm in conflict with anybody. Have been in conflict with anybody.

Nathan Latka

14:13Well, I like that you bet on yourself. Right? A $500, 600,000 valuation. If you paid 300 k to buy out your 50% cofounder fifteen years ago, and now you're doing 2,400,000 annually, I'd say it's fair to say you're worth more than $600,000 today. So I like that you bet on yourself.

Dmitry Goykhman

14:25>> I'm probably worth more, but that's not what's driving me. Right? You know, what's driving me is is the ability you know, there's a there's an interesting thing. I I was thinking about it. This is kind of a balance that works for me. It might not work for everybody. Right? You you gotta do the work that you respect. So I'm thinking, do I like what I do? I like what I do. I honestly like what I do

14:49>> after all these years. Right? And it makes me smile most of the time. And I can go back, I can go to sleep and I can say, I did a good job. That's important to me, right? Then you want to make some money. So what's money? Like you can't take it with you, but you can fund your bills, you can pay your kids. Have a bunch of kids. They're all great kids.

Nathan Latka

15:09How many kids, Dmitry?

Dmitry Goykhman

15:11>> I I got four kids of my own and one through a marriage and a bunch of grandchildren. And you know what? Somebody asked me, you know, one of the questions in the Dan Martell's academy meeting was, you know, what's your ideal exit? Right? My ideal exit is to leave as much money as possible to my progeny to give them an unfair advantage in life and to teach them what to do with it.

Nathan Latka

15:34Yep. Well, I love that. Talk to me more about how you're doing that. Right? So so obviously, a key thing about growing and scaling this without I assume you have not raised outside capital. Right? No. So bootstrapped, which we love. Does that mean you're profitable today?

Dmitry Goykhman

15:46>> I'm profitable. I've got probably about six months worth of run rate in in cash because I'm I'm actually waiting for the sky to fall, to be honest.

Nathan Latka

15:57Well, what does that mean? So if you're profitable, you wouldn't be able to calculate six months of runway because you have infinite runway because you're profitable.

Dmitry Goykhman

16:03>> No. I I have infinite runway. I meant spend.

Nathan Latka

16:07Your total expenses. If you have no revenue, your total what are your total expenses per month? Like, $50.60, 100 k?

Dmitry Goykhman

16:13>> No. What is it? 150 right now.

Nathan Latka

16:16Okay. Where do you spend most of that money? Salaries. Most Engineering?

Dmitry Goykhman

16:22>> Most of it is engineering. We're still built as an engineering company. Although now that's changing, we're gonna be bringing on more front end. Mhmm. We've been you know, resilience to me is this kind of a combination of product. Like, you gotta have a good product or else what are you selling? Right? Just smoke and mirrors. You gotta have reputation. We have excellent reputation in our market. Like, I I like it being the vendor of last resort.

Team Composition and Engineering Focus

Dmitry Goykhman

16:48>> You can try Oracle, and when you when you break your teeth, come to us. We'll solve your problem. You can try somebody else. When you break your teeth, come to us. We actually do solve their problem. I don't have any angry customers. Not a single one of them is angry.

Nathan Latka

17:00No, Dmitry. We we love that. So just to be clear, though, so you're spending a $150,000 per month in total spend. If you've got six months of total spend in your bank, that means you've got about a million cash in the bank, which you saved up from profits over time.

Dmitry Goykhman

17:11>> I don't have no. No. No. That is not the way it works. Like, I'm keeping about $600 in a in cash. Yep. And the reason for that is if if the sky starts falling, I'll shed some of the expenses.

Nathan Latka

17:22Yep. Yep. That's good way that's a good way to do it. You didn't answer my question about growth. How how do you go from 80 customers to 90 customers? Where are you finding them?

Dmitry Goykhman

17:31>> So we've been traditionally selling based on reputation, price, and, you know, in hard times, people tend to flock to that.

Nathan Latka

17:42Well, try try to be specific. I mean, reputation is very generic. You know, when a customer closes and when a customer closes and pays you and you do a good job for them, do you send them a specific email script saying, hey, can you recommend one friend if you're happy? Like, how do you actually drive reputational inbound?

Dmitry Goykhman

17:57>> Sometimes I just ask them if they can recommend somebody. Sometimes they I just we basically have enough of them that they they bring people to us. I've started doing a couple of things lately that I think are really working well. We're starting to work with some college programs, so we're gonna give them the software to teach the discipline using our software. I've started doing analyst briefings, which we I didn't do before. That seems to be driving,

New Growth Tactics: LinkedIn, Analyst Briefings, College Programs

Dmitry Goykhman

18:25>> you know, leads. I started posting sort interesting things on LinkedIn more that all of a sudden, you know, I post a couple of times with, you know, in-depth, and I start getting inquiries from people that I've never heard from before. So I think for us, the driver is increasing mindshare, if that makes sense. Right? And, you know, I my next challenge is to go exactly from reputational selling to more willful selling. I mean

Nathan Latka

18:53Dmitry, on that note, tell me about the team you have around you. How many full time?

Team Breakdown and Sales Approach

Dmitry Goykhman

18:57>> I've got 16 people full time.

Nathan Latka

18:59How many of the 16 are engineers?

Dmitry Goykhman

19:02>> Seven well, six six are engineers and seven are QA, and there's myself and a couple of customer success people.

Nathan Latka

19:11Any any sales reps besides yourself?

19:14>> No.

19:14I love that, Dmitry. Well, hey, listen, we're out of time for today. Let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite business book?

Famous Five Rapid Fire Questions

Dmitry Goykhman

19:22>> What's my favorite business? What is it? Eat the big fish, I think.

Nathan Latka

19:26Alright. Number two. Is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Dmitry Goykhman

19:30>> No.

Nathan Latka

19:31Number three. What's your favorite online tool for building ant?

Dmitry Goykhman

19:35>> What's my favorite? Excel.

Nathan Latka

19:38Excel? Excel. Okay. Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night? Seven. Seven. And then situation, married, single? Because we already know you have five kiddos. Right?

Dmitry Goykhman

19:49>> Five kiddos, married. I've been really lucky with him.

Nathan Latka

19:53That's great. And how old are you, Dmitry?

Dmitry Goykhman

19:55>> I'm 60.

Nathan Latka

19:56Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20 years old.

Dmitry Goykhman

20:01>> How to do the same things I'm doing but faster.

Nathan Latka

20:04Guys, antusa.com was launched to help retailers manage SKUs and inventory back in 1993 as an agency. He launched the SaaS platform, just call it 2019. Now today doing 200,000 a month in revenue of which 160,000 of that is true recurring. The other sort of one time services that turn into recurring over time, he's serving 80 customers to help them manage again, their inventory. There are thousands of SKUs, there are millions of different combinations to make sure

20:28that they can keep making money like he's doing. He's profiting caught 50 ish thousand dollars per month in revenue, completely bootstrapped with a team of 16. Got a great war chest, 600,000 cash in the bank, his total expenses every month is just a $150,000, much less than his revenue. This is the kind of founder we love. Dmitry, thanks for taking us to the top.

Dmitry Goykhman

20:48>> My pleasure. Nice to talk to you.

Nathan Latka

20:51One 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 1PM

21:16Central. 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 SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a big

21:38fundraise, 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 people are saying. Sign up

22:00for 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 counter those people. We got

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