SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Docusign for Blockchain Scaling Fast, $0 to $30k MRR in 6 Months
22 Dec 2021
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
So I can take 100 uses times 5 each. Each of these 40 brands is paying about $400 or $500 per month. Yeah, I guess for the bigger brands, it's around $100. And there are some smaller businesses as well. So on average, those would be around $10. You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom.
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Hey folks, my guest today is Ernie Tao. He's the co-founder and CTO of Dodoco. He has a PhD in economics and game theory and has taught in universities and worked at IBM Blockchain Research. Their company is Document Process Management on Blockchain. Ernie, ready to take us to the top? Yeah, I'm ready. Okay. So what does Document Process Management mean on top of blockchain?
Right, so if you look at a lot of enterprise blockchain use cases, it's all about document management, like supply chain related. So there's a lot of document flows when it comes to blockchain consortiums and enterprise projects.
So what we are looking to do is to create a SaaS that empowers any company to be able to tap onto that feature and to be able to put documents on blockchain that are verifiable, that are tested by different individuals along the business process. And that allows... visibility across the ecosystem, across different partners and counterparties.
And Ernie, what are companies paying on average monthly to use this technology? So they're paying about $30 on average for an individual license. So that's a basic license for the basic features on our platform, which includes document signing as well as the
document management on blockchain and when did you guys launch the business when did you write the first line of code um we started the business last year in march so the first lines of code was written in around june last year and we officially launched the platform in july this year very cool congratulations and how many customers are you now working with um we have about a
1,000 registered users on our SaaS platform, but we are also working with enterprise customers. So enterprise customers in Singapore, for example, some financial institutions, property agencies, and even government agencies are using our platform. How many are paid customers? So the enterprise users are all paid customers for the SaaS platform. How many of those are there, though?
Are there 1,000? Yeah. No, so there are... Okay, so for one of our financial institution customers, there are about, I think, 300 registered users within the company. That's one example. We also have property agencies that... Ernie, what I'm trying to understand is how many brands pay you as a customer, not registered users under the brand. How many individual companies pay you?
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Chapter 2: What is Document Process Management on Blockchain?
And you've done that fairly quickly. So in the past 12 months, where did you get these first 40, 50 customers? A lot of it is happening locally here in Singapore, but we have also expanded now to the region, including Malaysia.
Well, we started off by partnering with the Singapore government because the Singapore government rolled out a certificate authority for digital signing and we partnered with them to incorporate that onto our platform. So that got a lot of use cases in terms of government agencies as well as property agencies because they are interested to use this feature.
And then also because I guess it was COVID, so we got to talk to a lot of people who were interested to digitize their business. And we provide quite an interesting value proposition because we are using blockchain. And by using blockchain, we are providing a proposition where we don't store the documents of our customers on our cloud.
Rather, they provide their own document repositories, which we tap onto. So there's no third party that's actually hosting the documents. Rather, we are hosting the document evidence and processes. Understood. And so you get going. Have you guys bootstrapped the business or did you raise capital? We raised capital, yeah. How much did you guys decide to raise?
So our last round, we closed about $2 million in our last round. It was a seed round. And what year was that? This year. So we closed it around the same time. So we were fundraising from the start, but we closed that round in July when we launched the platform. What credit card should I use? You guys have heard this.
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Chapter 3: How much do companies pay for this blockchain technology?
So $2 million seed round. And why did you and Daphne, your co-founder, why did you decide that you needed to raise capital? Why couldn't you bootstrap? So because we thought that this industry is growing fairly quickly and we want to catch the wave where everyone is trying to digitize their business. So, um, and we needed to scale fairly quickly.
Um, so we, we needed to hire, you know, hire a bigger team and, uh, to, to scale up our marketing skill, our business, uh, business efforts. Right. So, um, yeah, definitely we think, um, fundraising in this case is quite important for us to, to really scale it up. And what's your team size today? How many folks? Um, we have about 30 people right now. Three is your, how many of those are engineers?
Um, About close to 20. Yep. 20. And so how does this work? If someone's listening right now and they're currently using DocuSign, why should they switch to Dodoco? Well, the main proposition here is we have a decentralized proposition. So what that means is, number one, we treat the document separate from the document evidence process.
So we can decouple that because we use blockchain to register the document hashes such that it becomes immutable and hard to tamper with. And then the second proposition is because it's decentralized, the verification process is quite different.
With DocuSign, you need to be one of the document preparers or one of the signers to access the system to get the document evidence or to download the certificate of signing, for example.
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Chapter 4: When was the business launched and how many customers are there?
For our case, as long as you hold a copy of the signed document, you can verify it off our verifier, which is a blockchain link verifier. That difference means that If I were to provide a document to my auditor or to a third party, like a bank, and they need to verify the authenticity of the document and the document trail, they can do it on their own.
They can directly do the verification without trusting a piece of paper that I gave to them. And how are you finding these customers? Is it through the partnership with the Singapore government? We have various channels that we are working on now because our government is one channel, but with partnerships as well.
So we work with various system integrators to partner with them so that they can bring our solutions to their clients as well. Okay. Got it. What are some of the growth channels that are really working for you? Like the last two customers you got, what channel did they come from? The last two, um, like Yes, it's actually through ecosystem partners.
So like the system integrators I mentioned, we also work with other partners in the partners network, basically. So the last two that we closed, one is actually through our VC's recommendation. So the VC network, I think, is also quite important for us. Very cool. What's next product-wise? Are you going to stick to document signing or what's next?
Actually, the vision for the company is the whole realm of verifiable documents. And that's very blockchain-related as well. So like, for example, COVID vaccination certificates. These are going online through blockchain-based certificates as well and allows verifiability. So we want to bring this verifiability to the business world.
So, um, that, you know, any business who wants our documents to produce would be verifiable, checkable. Um, so verifiability, I mean, we can verify that it did come from this company and that the contents inside the document are not tempted with. So that's a very important follow up, uh, to, to look at automating business processes. We're certainly rooting for you, Ernie.
I hope it goes well in the meantime, let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite business book? Wow. Um, favorite business book. I actually, I'm, I'm, I'm more of the tech side. So, um, We'll say none then. Number two, is there something you're following or studying? Um, Stripe, I guess the Stripe guys, I think are people that we really look to.
Um, we want to be kind of like the API providers for document processes. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building Didaco? Well, I guess we use GitHub a lot. A lot of our code are written from scratch because it's an enterprise-level system. So we use the usual tools like GitHub, Jira, etc. Number four, Ernie, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?
Well, I try to get my seven to eight hours. Okay, fair. And what's your situation? Married, single, kids? I'm single. Okay. And how old are you? I'm 42. 42. Last question. What's something you wish you knew when you were 20? Well, I guess, okay. So maybe like how, how to do business, like how to grow a business and how to actually manage people. Yeah. Guys, there you have it.
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