How Dashcomb Reached $24K ARR with 10 Customers in Japan's Low-Code Market (Interview with CEO Tonny Xu)

Introduction and Company Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Guys, DashCome is a low code tool. He's got 10 paying customers that pay on average $200 per month. So he's doing 2,000 a month in revenue up from nothing a year ago because he just launched about a year ago. He's got, again, those 10 customers. He raised $500,000 in seed funding at a 2.5 ish million valuation sold under 220% of the business. His team has four folks today that are full time two contractors. He's taken a

00:22risk while his spouse helps manage the family also working a job as well. We'll see what happens. He jumped out of corporate, a publicly traded company to go on this journey. And Tony, we're rooting for you dashcomb.com. Hey folks, my guest today is Tony Hsu. He's the former CTO of C channel, which is listed on the TSC. He's got twenty plus years developing code and now working on a tool called dashcomb.com, a low code development platform.

00:48Tony, ready to take us to the top?

What Dashcomb Does and Who It Is Built For

Tonny Xu

00:50>> Yeah. Thank you. Hi everyone. Name Tony.

Nathan Latka

00:53Yeah. Great to great to have you here, Tony. So give us a quick up an overview on the platform first. Is it built for any specific niche in terms of no code or can is this for anybody?

Tonny Xu

01:03>> Yeah. It's it's mainly designed for developers and the product managers to develop internal tools for the company, for the enterprise.

Japan's SaaS Market and Top Software Companies

Nathan Latka

01:13Mhmm. Very cool. Now your your website is in Japanese. So are you based in Japan? Sure.

Tonny Xu

01:18>> Yes. Exactly.

Nathan Latka

01:19Amazing. What is the software industry like over there? A lot of SaaS founders like you or are you you the first?

Tonny Xu

01:25>> No, no, no, no, no. No way I no way that I can be the first. The SaaS industry is kind of bloomed in the past five four to five years. And there are some SaaS unicorns in Japan and some listed the public, some public SaaS companies already reached them. We said when we measure in ARR, they can reach a 100,000,000 ARR. Yep. So it's kind of close

01:55>> to Tony, name name three.

Nathan Latka

01:56What would you say are the top three software companies in Japan?

Tonny Xu

02:00>> Okay. So one is Luxu. So another one is called SmartHR. Another one is called a Kington Kington.

Nathan Latka

02:09Can you spell that one?

Tonny Xu

02:10>> K I n t o n e. Interesting. Another one is a smart HR, which is focused on HR area. And another one is a Rakus.

Nathan Latka

02:25R a k u s l. Rakusl. Very cool. Okay. So the software industry is alive and well in Japan. You're building this no code tool. I guess help me understand

Tonny Xu

02:32>> Low low code.

Nathan Latka

02:33Low code. Okay. So not no code. Okay. So you have to have some engineering background to use it then.

Tonny Xu

02:37>> Sure. Sure.

Japan's Developer Shortage and the Low-Code Opportunity

Nathan Latka

02:39Okay. What are what are engineers paying on average per month to use your platform?

Tonny Xu

02:44>> Yeah. In Japan, there is a big background or big big picture of the industry in Japan is the shortage for software engineer is extremely, extremely pain. And a lot of companies are trying to they have a lot of internal systems, have a lot of a subsystems to be developed but they can't they could not find the developer in time at least in their budget time. So we aimed to resolve that with a low code platform to

03:16>> provide a fast implementation solutions which is workable for the internal use because for internal usage you don't have to have so fancy UIs, just a standard UIs.

Pricing Structure: Developer and User Seats

Nathan Latka

03:31So Tony, what are what are folks paying for this software on average per month? What do you charge?

Tonny Xu

03:37>> Yeah. We charge for users like I mean, in USD, will be like $40 for developers per month and $10 for user, normal user per month.

Nathan Latka

03:52Okay. So if someone signs up and then they add three users, it'll be 40 plus 10 plus 10 plus 10.

Tonny Xu

03:57>> Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Nathan Latka

03:59What's the average company paying you per month? Right? Basically, number average number of users total.

Average Revenue per Customer

Tonny Xu

04:04>> Yeah. Right now, our average revenue ARR no. No. No. MRR average

04:12>> revenue from company is around $200.

Nathan Latka

04:16Okay. So the average Yeah. Team size in is what? Like, it's like a 15 person team using you paying you $200 a month, something like that?

Tonny Xu

04:24>> Some big companies, big enterprises they we are still small, are still trying to find our product market fit, so we have some early adopters, some big companies they they are willing to pay a higher price to support their internal deploy, privately deploy. So our average value is like $200 per month per company per client but for the middle value is around is around 100 to a 100 to 150.

Nathan Latka

04:58Oh, 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 Founder Path. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you

05:21connect your 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 Founder Path dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company,

05:45you're gonna get 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

06:07this 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 1,200,000 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.

06:33Maybe you're going 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 Founder Path. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. All right, we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in

06:55a second, but if 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

07:21jump back into the interview.

07:23Can I ask you what your largest customer pays you today? Not that

Tonny Xu

07:26>> that's Yeah.

Nathan Latka

07:28Not a

Largest Customer and Total Customer Count

Tonny Xu

07:29>> Right now they are paying a 100,000 yen, which is around $800 per month.

Nathan Latka

07:39Okay. That's pretty good. So a 100, you said a 100,000 Japanese yen? Yes. Okay. So it'd be about 6 at today's conversion rate, that'll be about $6.65 US dollars per month on average.

Tonny Xu

07:50>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Nathan Latka

07:51Okay. This is great. And how many total customers are you working with today?

Tonny Xu

07:56>> So far we started this company last March and we are in our nineteenth month at this moment, but we are still trying to find the product market fit in Japan. Right now we have more than 10 clients and we are trying to reach to our first 50 That's

Revenue Growth from Zero to $2,000 per Month

Nathan Latka

08:15great. So 10 customers paying on average 200 per month means you're doing about $2,000 per month right now in revenue, right?

Tonny Xu

08:21>> Yes.

Nathan Latka

08:22And just so we can measure growth rate, where were you exactly one year ago? Do you remember? Were you zero?

Tonny Xu

08:27>> Yeah, one ago, one year ago it was zero.

Nathan Latka

08:31So what month did you get your first paying customer?

Tonny Xu

08:34>> First paying customer was the contract started on this February. We fixed the contract on January, but the payment was started from February.

Nathan Latka

08:47That's great. And and everyone wants to know, obviously, how people find their first paying customer. How did you find your first paying customer?

Tonny Xu

08:54>> Oh, from my friends, from my circles, just the referrals.

Nathan Latka

09:00I see. So as maybe a former boss or former employee or something like

Tonny Xu

09:03>> that? Exactly.

Finding the First Paying Customer Through Referrals

Nathan Latka

09:05So what do you think your growth channel of the future will be? How do you go from 10 customers to a 100 customers?

Tonny Xu

09:12>> Well, that is answer that we are searching for right now. We are doing some experiments. We are trying on different channels and we are also trying to figure out which one is best one for us especially measured on

Nathan Latka

09:29ROI. Testing, What are Tony?

Tonny Xu

09:32>> The first one is SEO, just inbound leads. Another one is we tried some paid sales assistance from outside but that too both of that doesn't work well at this moment but we are trying to continue to do the SEO and we trying to find some other companies to help us on the sales.

Growth Channels: SEO and Sales Experiments

Nathan Latka

10:01I see. How many folks are full time today at the company? Is it just you?

Tonny Xu

10:05>> No. At this at this moment, we have four full time members and two contractors.

Nathan Latka

10:11Okay. So six total. And are you the sole founder or do you have a co founder?

Tonny Xu

10:16>> I'm the sole I'm the sole of founders.

Nathan Latka

10:18That's awesome. So you have a you own a 100% of the company then. Right?

Tonny Xu

10:21>> We already had us fund the rise to our seed, secured our seed seed around last year. So we have some seed investors.

Nathan Latka

10:31How much did you raise in the seed?

Tonny Xu

10:35>> In Japan, because it's in Japan, we raised about

10:41>> 500,000 USD.

Nathan Latka

10:43Okay. 500,000 yuan? Okay. So 500,000 USD would be about what is that? Like, 75,000,000 Japanese yen?

Tonny Xu

10:52>> Yeah. Exactly. Around that.

Nathan Latka

10:54So 500,000 United States dollars and most folks in their seed rounds are selling 20% of their company. Were you in that same range?

Team Size and Sole Founder Journey

Tonny Xu

11:02>> Oh yeah, exactly. We are saying, we sold less than 20%, but more than 50%.

Nathan Latka

11:08Okay. So between fifteen and twenty, which means that you are, your valuation was somewhere around 2,500,000, right?

Tonny Xu

11:15>> Yes.

Nathan Latka

11:16How are you able

11:17to get that valuation? Are you a second or third time founder? How'd you convince investors to bet on you?

Tonny Xu

11:23>> Because my previous experience is, was a CTO in the public, the publicly listed company. So I guess that worked a little bit.

Nathan Latka

11:33Yep. Now you're cool, right? You don't have to wear suits anymore. You can wear a leather jacket and a white shirt.

Tonny Xu

11:41>> You know,

11:43>> it's a a painful journey. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

11:46There's a lot a lot of my listeners, you know, are married. They have a spouse and they're at a they're at a safe corporate job and they wanna quit to launch their own thing, but the spouse is like, I don't know if I want you to do that. Are you do you have a spouse and what was their feedback on you quitting corporate for a startup?

Seed Funding Round and Valuation

Tonny Xu

12:01>> Yeah. I am married and I have two kids, two young kids. And my wife is very supportive. So she's she's the gal for me, know. He's a shelter for me.

Nathan Latka

12:18That's great. So how do you balance that? Does she sort of have a corporate job while you take the risk at a startup? Or how do you balance that?

Tonny Xu

12:26>> You mean balance my current situation? Or

Nathan Latka

12:30Exactly your current situation. Right? So you're taking a big risk, you're managing a family, you have two people, is she working full time at a corporate job for consistency sake or how are you balancing all

Tonny Xu

12:38>> of that? Oh, Exactly. So she has to work in a nice company. So make some stable income for this family. So I I took the risk and we are aiming for a better future.

Nathan Latka

12:53That's great. Okay. So you raised $500,000. How much revenue do you think you can grow to spending the 500,000 that you raised?

Tonny Xu

13:03>> Since we raised the money before we started the company. Yeah, before we had any before we wrote our first line of the code. So actually right now the situation is kind of difficult for us and we are trying to balance the income and our outcome and our expenses so we can keep a low profile and still trying to attract

13:32>> some customers with

13:35>> pain, with clearly pain about the internal system.

Nathan Latka

13:39Yep. Yep. Well, we're certainly rooting for you. We're out of time here today. Let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite book, Tony?

Balancing Family and Startup Risk

Tonny Xu

13:47>> My favorite book? Okay. Hard Things.

Nathan Latka

13:51Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Tonny Xu

13:55>> Yeah. Elon Musk and Sam Altman.

Nathan Latka

13:58Number

13:59three, what's your favorite online tool for building Dashcom?

Tonny Xu

14:02>> My favorite online tool right now is GitHub.

Nathan Latka

14:06Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?

Tonny Xu

14:09>> Oh, difficult question. It's around four to six hours every night.

Nathan Latka

14:14Okay. Okay. And you said you were married with two kids. Can I ask how old you are?

Tonny Xu

14:18>> Yeah. I'm 42.

Nathan Latka

14:20Okay. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Tonny Xu

14:24>> I wish I would be able to start my first company in my twenties.

Nathan Latka

14:31Guys, Dashcomb is a low code tool. He's got 10 paying customers that pay on average $200 per month. So he's doing 2,000 a month in revenue up from nothing a year ago because he just launched about a year ago. He's got, again, those 10 customers. He raised $500,000 in seed funding at a 2.5 ish million valuation sold under 20% of the business. His team has four folks today that are full time two contractors. He's taken a

Famous Five Rapid Fire Questions

Nathan Latka

14:54risk while his spouse helps manage the family also working a job as well. We'll see what happens. He jumped out of corporate, a publicly traded company to go on this journey. And Tony, we're rooting for you -comb.com. Thanks for taking us to the top.

Tonny Xu

15:06>> Thank you very much. My honor.

Nathan Latka

15:09One 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

15:34Central. 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

15:56fundraise, 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 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

16:18up for

16:18that at nathanlakka.com/slack.

16:21In 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, but I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people. We got to push them

16:38away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. All right. I'll be in

16:43the comments. See you.