SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Bootstrapped doing $2.4m Revenue, $600k Cash in bank, helps retailers manage inventory
02 Aug 2023
Chapter 1: How did Dimitri Goikman start his journey in the SaaS industry?
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As 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, the inventory.
There are thousands of SKUs. There are millions of different combinations to make sure that they can keep making money like he's doing. He's profiting, call it, $50,000 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 Dimitri Goikman. He is a Queens College MIT Core 6, started this company in 1992 for freedom 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. Dimitri, you ready to take us to the top?
Sure. All right. Now, how did you get into this space? Were you running a retail chain, a grocery store before?
No, I was 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 basically slid into it sideways.
It seemed like an easy way to make some money. So what year did you write the first line of code for Ant?
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Chapter 2: What led to the transition from services to SaaS for AntUSA.com?
They sold a lot of Mikasa and Lion King blankets in North Carolina. And sizable then. And then 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.
Okay, so you get going in 1993. Now, was it software as a service back then? That would have been very early for SaaS.
No, no, no. 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...
uh you know because the clients wanted to go that way and because i wanted to stabilize the cash flow on a subscription basis rather than on a project basis you know projects you know starve or eat right uh sas has been much much much better for us and i think that's definitely the way we're staying okay so you okay so 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
So we have basically retail chain customers. The better known ones might be like Puma or Zoomies, but there are lots of smaller ones. There are bigger ones that are privately held. What they pay us is to give them a... 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 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.
And so Dimitri, what does a company like Pumi, don't tell them specifically, but on average, what's the customer paying you per month or per year to use your technology?
not about Puma but on the average it's from a thousand to five thousand a month is what we charge okay so would you say like maybe three thousand a month is a fair average let's say let's say three grand a month and then we charge something like $30,000 to $50,000 to stand them up basically that integration, you know, services.
Okay, that makes that makes sense. So if I'm paying you $36,000 per year, so 3000 a month, plus then a 30k setup 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?
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Chapter 3: What does AntUSA.com offer to its retail customers?
And give me a sense of how large was your services business before you launched SaaS in 2019? Yeah.
It was larger. I would say that probably 30, 40% of our revenue was in these implementations and services. Now, given an opportunity, I would drive it to zero. It's never going to go to zero, but it's maybe 10, 15% now. I think probably 85% of our revenue is recurring services, recurring billing.
And my goal is- 80% is recurring?
Yeah.
80, 85 now, you know, I'd have to look it up. I haven't looked it up.
But the $200,000 a month number you just gave me, that's pure recurring, right?
No, that's everything.
Oh, that's all. Okay. So 80% of that is recurring, right? So, so 160,000 and there are 40, 40,000 is like one-time service stuff.
Right. But what happens is they come back to us anyway. So even the one-time service stuff, when you get well organized, they come back to it. They need more training. You bill them by, you know, for the sessions, right? They need enhancements, you're billing for that. So it's fairly predictable business flow. Yep. Even though it's not, you know, even though it's not a quarterly invoice.
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Chapter 4: How does Dimitri price his SaaS offerings?
Well, I like that you bet on yourself, right? A $500,000, $600,000 valuation if you paid $300,000 to buy out your 50% co-founder 15 years ago, and now you're doing $2.4 million 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.
I'm probably worth more, but that's not what's driving me, right? What's driving me is... You know, there's an interesting thing. I was thinking about it. This is kind of a balance that works for me. It might not work for everybody, right? You know, you've got to 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 after all these years, right? And it makes me smile most of the time.
and you know i can go back i can go to sleep and i can say you know i did a good job that's important to me right then you want to make some money so what's you know what's money like you can't take it with you but you can fund your bills you can pay your kids i have a bunch of kids they're all great kids how many kids dimitri i i got uh 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 uh
academy meeting was, what's your ideal exit? 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.
Yep. Well, I love that. Talk to me more about how you're doing that, right? So obviously a key thing about growing and scaling is without, I assume you have not raised outside capital, right? No. So bootstrapped, which we love. Does that mean you're profitable today? I'm profitable.
I've got probably about six months worth of run rate in cash because I'm actually... waiting for the sky to fall, to be honest.
Well, 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.
No, I have infinite runway.
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