How Scandium Systems Inc Reached $60K ARR and 30 Paying Customers in 5 Months (Interview with CEO Abdulazeez Ogunjobi)

Introduction and Company Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Guys, launched GetScandium just four or five months ago. It's an automated testing tool. They've already got 30 paying customers doing $5 a month in revenue or 60,000 ARR. He already had an exit under his belt. AZ is his name. He's based in Nigeria. He used 45 k of his own money to help kick start this one with his cofounder and put in a bit more. They split at one fifty one forty nine, hoping to launch and

00:19get more customers. Their first 30 customers came from a WhatsApp group of founders in Nigeria.

00:27Hey, folks. My guest today is AZ. He's a serial founder who harmonizes his background in technology and product development to build several startups. With over ten years of experience in product management, business development, software leadership, he successfully designed, built, and scaled valuable tech driven companies out of Africa. AZ, you ready to take us to the top?

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

00:45>> Yeah. How are you doing?

Nathan Latka

00:47I'm doing well. Okay. So you're working on a company called now called getscandium.com, a no code test automation tool. Tell me a customer story of how someone's using you today.

Customer Story and Product Explanation

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

00:58>> Okay. So maybe I will share my own story. I literally was running a dev shop at some point, so we have to build multiple products. And, you know, when you build this product, you also want to maintain and, keep them alive. So you need a QA unit. Ideally, you want to first, explore getting humans to do testing, and, trust me, it's not sustainable. So these guys have to then start to write scripts to automate test cases.

01:25>> Unfortunately, it's also the fact that writing scripts, using Selenium or maybe Cypress, they are tedious and not so friendly when you need to collaborate. Hence, the reason I needed to come up with a no code tool that eats collaboration across all stakeholders across the product value chain.

Pricing and Launch Timeline

Nathan Latka

01:45Okay. And what are customers paying on average per month to use your technology?

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

01:49>> Come again?

Nathan Latka

01:50What are customers paying you on average today to use scandium?

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

01:54>> So, I've really $200 month on month.

Nathan Latka

01:56200?

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

01:58>> Yep. $200.

Nathan Latka

01:59And when did you launch the business? What year?

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

02:02>> So business started January this year. First version of product was launched in April, and then we've been doing fine. The adoption rate has been quite impressive.

Nathan Latka

02:13What's an impressive adoption rate? Can you give me hard numbers?

User and Customer Numbers

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

02:16>> So today, we have less than a 100, about 80 plus people using the solution, and we we have quite about 30 plus paying customers.

Nathan Latka

02:2730 paying customers. Okay. So can I take 30 paying customers times an average of 200 per month? So you're doing about 6,000 a month right now on revenue?

How Early Customers Were Found

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

02:36>> Within 5,000 and 6,000 month on month.

Nathan Latka

02:39That's really great. I mean, so you've basically gone from launch this year to your first five k of MRR in seven months. That's really impressive. How did you find your your 100 or 88 to a 100 users? And, Azi, what do you look for in that user base to figure out who you can convert into a paying customer?

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

02:55>> Okay. So first is how do I find these customers? The the first thing is I've built startups in the past, so I'm friends with a lot of startup founders. We're in communities, so we actually we literally launch in a community.

Nathan Latka

03:10Which one?

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

03:11>> So there's a pop there's a pop popular community in Nigeria, Africa called Premier BN. Premier BN.

Nathan Latka

03:17Premier BN?

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

03:18>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

03:19What's the website? Preurbian.com?

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

03:22>> Correct. Correct. Correct.

Nathan Latka

03:23Okay.

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

03:24>> It's popularly called pbnpbn. So

Nathan Latka

03:28Wait. I wanna make sure get the website right. It's it's pbn.com?

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

03:32>> No. Premiervn. Let me double check that for you. Premiervn.com. One sec.

Nathan Latka

03:44I can't find it.

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

03:46>> That community is so valuable. One sec. So okay. I think you're not spelling premier well. It is premiathenbn.com. I'll just drop it in the chat for you. Great.

Nathan Latka

04:00Okay. Okay. Got it. So let me see. Okay. So, yeah, drop that in chat for me so I can open it up. So so okay. So you launched you launched in this community. It's it's a Nigeria based community full of founders and entrepreneurs?

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

04:14>> Yep. It's a community of

Nathan Latka

04:16founders. Can you drop can you drop the link in the chat, please?

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

04:19>> Yeah. One sec to do that chat chat up since.

Nathan Latka

04:25Got it. Okay. Okay. So it's

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

04:29>> a community of founders and senior operators, so it's so easy for me to get a wait list from there and then explore immediately. So, again, in this part of the world, quality assurance is a is a big challenge. Not so many software engineer can actually, write scripts. So when you then bring in a tool like us, it's readily the adoption rate is just impressive.

Nathan Latka

04:52Oh, 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

05:15your 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

05:40get 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

06:01not 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

06:27going 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. Alright. We're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second, but if

06:49you 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 the

07:15interview. Interesting. So guys, those of you is a very impressive community. It looks like it's premiabn.com. So, Az, when you had this idea, you launched it, what, in a forum there or in a Slack group or how did you do actually do it inside of the community?

WhatsApp Group and Community Launch Strategy

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

07:32>> Okay. So the community has a Slack channel, again, it has about 35 different WhatsApp groups. So it's a lifestyle community for Africans, some Caribbeans, a whole lot wide coverage. So we have a group where when you're launching an idea, you can actually eat it there for people to join your waitlist, and when you launch, you can always share a newsletter to them.

Nathan Latka

07:54Interesting. So there's a WhatsApp group that is specifically for launching ideas that you posted in?

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

07:58>> Correct. Correct.

Nathan Latka

07:59How can somebody how can somebody if they're in Nigeria listening, how can they post their idea in that group?

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

08:05>> So again, the the the community is a paid community, and How much? About

08:12>> 100 about about $250.

08:16Per year?

08:16>> Yeah.

08:17>> Per year. Yep. And it's also an invite only community. So as an African or a Nigerian, you probably have to have done stuff before you can actually get accepted.

Converting Users to Paying Customers

Nathan Latka

08:28I see. Okay. So you get your first users from the WhatsApp group, and then what they sign up to the website. You see them all signing up on your back end dashboards. You get excited. What do you know they have to do to increase the likelihood that they start paying you in the future?

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

08:42>> Okay. So first is immediately after getting sign ups and the rest of them, so we have my business team then reach out and then do a kind of consultative sales to ensure that we have been able to do a demo, show them how it works, and then onboard them easily. But going forward, again, it's safe to say what we'll build today is at the minimal level. Test automation works via the web for today. We need to

09:08>> build mobile. We're currently working on APIs and desktop applications. So we get to the point where it would be as large as having to build our own community of software testers, so we then have to then empower these software testers to be able to use the tool and then can now be advocates for us in their places of work.

Nathan Latka

09:27Interesting. And how are you bootstrapped today? Have you raised capital?

Bootstrapped and Fully Self-Funded

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

09:32>> To date, 100% bootstrapped. Our customers are funding our

Nathan Latka

09:36I love that.

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

09:37>> So you own a 100%.

Nathan Latka

09:38Right?

Equity Split with Co-Founder

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

09:39>> Yeah. Myself and my cofounder, actually. I'm not a loan founder.

Nathan Latka

09:43Did you guys split it fifty fifty?

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

09:46>> Fifty one forty nine.

Nathan Latka

09:47Okay. You have 51?

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

09:49>> Yeah. I have

09:50>> 51.

Nathan Latka

09:51Yeah.

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

09:54>> But then my co founder is a good guy. Super awesome guy. He's one of the best engineer in this continent, and trust me, with him, I don't necessarily have to do the ad coding part of the duties.

Nathan Latka

10:06There's a lot of startup founders listening to this going, man, I wish I could have gotten the 51% versus a fifty fifty split. That's not an easy conversation. How did you get your cofounder to agree to let you have 51%?

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

10:16>> Also, myself and my cofounder, we've dated way back 2012, so we pretty understand ourselves so well. And we we also built a startup in the past, which we sold to a bigger company in Africa. That was in 2019. So the conversation

Nathan Latka

10:32Did you get really rich on that deal or was it like an acquihire?

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

10:35>> So it was an acquihire then with some kind of tickets and all of those kind of stuff. So we decided to take a break sometime in 2022 to just chill out, we've been hustling for like ten years, and then boom, the idea came. And trust me, we had we have this very seamless and effortless connection, so having to do equity splits is never an issue. As a matter of fact, it was just to make you feel

10:56>> like the CEO has more than the CTO, that's all. But I've just done 50.

Nathan Latka

11:00That's amazing. Okay. So so okay. So you're cranking along, you're bootstrapped, you've got 5,000 a month in revenue, 6,000 a month in revenue. How many are full time on the team today?

Team Size and Funding the Payroll

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

11:09>> So today we have 12 full time guys, about seven engineers, and then five business guys.

Nathan Latka

11:15So how I guess, do you fund their salary if you're only doing 5,000 a month in revenue?

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

11:19>> Okay. So recall I said we are bootstrapped. So myself and my guy has again, we have some box in the bag in the bank that we can actually use to just bootstrap stuff.

Nathan Latka

11:28Oh, I see.

11:29>> So the

11:29idea for

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

11:30>> us the idea for us is to ensure that we are properly validated before we go to the venture capital markets.

Nathan Latka

11:38How much, Azzy, how much of your own money have you put in the company?

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

11:41>> So so far, I spent about some 45 of my personal cash, 45 k into the business.

Nathan Latka

11:47Does that make you nervous?

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

11:49>> Not exactly. I I'm pretty sure that the the market is growing. Day in, day out, QA is becoming a big thing in this part of the world, so I'm just chilled and relaxed. And then for me to start doing 5 k in some like four months of lunch, I'm so relaxed. So relaxed.

Nathan Latka

12:06That's awesome. Alright. So you put in 45,000 of your own money. Now give us some context. I mean, that like your whole net worth? Is that a 100% of your savings, or do you still keep some back as a safety net?

Personal Investment and Runway

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

12:15>> Oh, so I I still have again, I still have a backup plan. So the idea was for myself and my cofounder to put in a 100 k. How much? 100 k, $100,000. So again, but then we're we're not it's not like we stock it in bank. So as we need, we then drop the funds. So we still have some, like, six months to go before we start to maybe panic and want to raise something.

Nathan Latka

12:41This is awesome. Well and if you and if you and if you keep growing and you don't wanna raise equity, like, wanna keep your equity, we'd love I mean, Founderpath is a nondilutive fund. So if you've got 10,000 a month in revenue, like, we can fund and give you up to $60,000, like, six x of your MRR. So if you ever wanna go that past, let let me know.

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

12:59>> Okay. That that makes sense. Do do you also do you have presence in Africa? Do you have someone you do this for in Africa that I can actually have a conversation with?

Nathan Latka

13:08Yeah. So so you'd talk directly. I'm the founder of the company. We're learning how to do these deals in new countries. So it's a $150,000,000 fund. I would work with you directly. We would figure it out together.

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

13:18>> Oh, brilliant. We we could actually explore that. We could explore that.

Nathan Latka

13:22Alright. We'll do that later.

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

13:23>> You don't wanna share your equity so early in the business. You you

Nathan Latka

13:26Yeah. That's all. I mean, I got burned in my first company. I sold equity too early, I regretted it. So now we're trying to help founders keep their equity for a longer period of time.

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

13:34>> Smart. Smart. Smart. Smart.

Nathan Latka

13:36Smart. Alright, man. So you got seven engineers, 12 on the team full time. You're cranking along. How are you gonna get your next, you know, a 100 paying customers?

Plan to Reach 100 Paying Customers

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

13:45>> Okay. So first is we want to keep growing incrementally at this pace pending when we have been able to pull our API tests and mobile tests. The moment we are able to do that, then the next thing is we're looking to get into a global accelerator, and the reason is quite simple, so that we can also spread our tentacles outside of just Africa. Then after the acceleration, we can just start to preach the gospel, do marketing,

14:13>> and then target more people. So that's that's the plan.

Famous Five Rapid Fire Questions

Nathan Latka

14:16I love that. Let's wrap up here, AZ, on the famous five. Number one, your favorite book?

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

14:21>> Come again?

Nathan Latka

14:22What's your favorite book?

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

14:24>> Oh, zero to one.

Nathan Latka

14:25Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

14:31>> Well, in Nigeria, yes. Can I So I keenly follow Sim Shagaya, impute you lesson?

14:41>> Very good.

Nathan Latka

14:42Number three, what's your favorite online tool?

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

14:45>> Online tool? Google Calendar.

Nathan Latka

14:48Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

14:51>> Call me again?

Nathan Latka

14:52How many hours of sleep?

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

14:55>> Wow. I'm not proud about that, dude. I already did it before.

Nathan Latka

15:00Oh my gosh. That's bad. What's your situation? Married, single, kids?

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

15:04>> Married now. Married.

Nathan Latka

15:05Okay. Congrats. Any kids?

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

15:07>> The kids. Two.

Nathan Latka

15:09Wow. And how old are you?

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

15:12>> I'm three zero, 30.

Nathan Latka

15:1430 years old. Last question.

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

15:15>> Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

15:18>> Oh, what I wish I knew when I was 20. I'll say I wish I knew that you don't necessarily have to optimize to raise venture capital.

15:31>> If I knew that, probably my first business, I wouldn't have sorted out so quick.

Nathan Latka

15:37Mhmm. Guys, he launched GetScandium just four or five months ago. It's an automated testing tool. They've already got 30 paying customers doing $5 a month in revenue or 60,000 ARR. He already had an exit under his belt. AZ is his name. He's based in Nigeria. He used 45 k of his own money to help kick start this one with his cofounder and put in a bit more. They split at one fifty one forty nine, hoping to

15:57launch and get more customers. Their first 30 customers came from a WhatsApp group of founders in Nigeria. Az, thanks for taking us to the top.

Abdulazeez Ogunjobi

16:05>> Alright. Now enjoy. Do have a great moment. Bye for now.

Nathan Latka

16:09One 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 one

16:33p. M. Central. Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at two p. M. 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

16:55an acquisition, a big fundraise, 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

17:16people are saying. Sign up for 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

17:36counter those people. We got to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. Alright, I'll be in the comments. See you.