SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Husband Wife Team Goes From Almost Dead to 100 Customers
28 Jun 2021
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
It's a pretty intense thing, I'm going to tell you. But basically, right after we started Logology, my mother passed away. She had cancer. So that was like a very troubling time. And actually, that almost killed the company right away. 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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My guest today is Dagobert Renouf. He spent 12 years programming so far and then finally landed his dream tech job. He's a great team, great salary, good projects. But after three months, he started getting bored and realized that maybe it wasn't the perfect fit after all. He wanted a bigger challenge. He had no other choice than to start his own company.
He's now building a company called Logology.co. All right, Dagobert, you ready to take us to the top? Yeah, let's go. All right. Yeah. So what was the full-time job out of curiosity? What were you working on? I was an engineer. And the last full-time job, I mean, that dream job I referred to, I was responsible for engineering mobile apps for big companies.
I was working at a web development studio. In the US, I worked remotely. So that was kind of like the perfect job for me. I could work remotely from France for big projects that were in the US. You know, that was for a big TV channel, mobile project. I had lots of responsibilities, lots of autonomy. The team was great. But I still got bored out of it after a while.
But, you know, kind of like I wanted more out of this. When did you quit? That was... Three years ago now, almost. That was almost three years ago. And that was after a bit more than a year working with them.
And I always like to ask, I mean, when you quit your full-time gig and go into a side project, obviously you ideally have some cash savings to give yourself some time to launch your new project. How did you personally think about your financial situation when you quit? So basically because I was working for a US company and I was living in France.
So where I live, like the cost of living is way less expensive. So I was able to save a lot of cash during that year. So I basically just thought of like saving as much as I could during that time. And then I could use that as my runway for my startup. Yeah. And so what was that? Can I ask what was that job paying you full time before you quit?
Uh, I was already, I was like 80% of the time because I already negotiated wanting to work a bit on a side project. And I was making, I think that was, uh, five or 6,000 euros a month. Was it nervous giving that up? Uh, you know what, actually that was my last job, but that's almost my first job because before that I did freelancing for like 10 years.
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Chapter 2: What prompted Dagobert to leave his dream tech job?
So that wasn't scary, you know? So when you quit and this was in 2018, right? Yeah. When you quit, did you already know what you wanted to launch or were you not sure yet? So that was funny because I had an idea for something. I wanted to create basically kind of like WordPress, but for mobile apps, because that's what I was working on at the time.
So I thought, well, we should make a way to give people a way to create a mobile app as easy as it is to run WordPress. So that was my idea. But then I got married and with my wife during our honeymoon. She's a graphic designer and we had the idea for what we are working on now. So that's actually my co-founder. It's my wife. Oh, wow. So initially, I started with an idea.
But during the honeymoon, that was a couple months after, we just had this idea of working together on it. And I don't know why, but I think it's because we were in the US doing a road trip for this travel. And that was just so exciting. And we thought, let's do this crazy thing. And we decided in a few minutes. So yeah, so it changed everything.
And so the sort of CMS for like mobile apps, the WordPress for mobile apps, is that what eventually pivoted into Logology or did you shut that down? Oh yeah, it didn't even pivot. That was just like, I was just starting to work on it, but I didn't even do anything. So when did you launch Logology? So the first launch, we still say we're in beta, but we're still live for like, that was...
late April of last year. So that's a bit more than a year. Okay. And is it still pre-revenue or have you launched a paywall yet? We have revenue. It's not profitable in the terms that we cannot depend on it yet, but we are making money. Actually, we had a couple of sales today and we're almost at like the 100th sale. So that's pretty cool. That's exciting. Is it all sort of recurring revenue?
You have three plans, $49, $99, and $400 per month. No, it's not per month. It's actually one time because it's just like a logo for now. We might expand and add stuff on top of it to get more recurring revenue. But it's hard to find. When you buy a logo, what would you need to pay for monthly? There's not really anything. So it's more like side services that we could add. So yeah, it's one time.
100 sales. That's exciting. That's something to celebrate. So if you add it, how much revenue from the 100 sales? Well, I guess we must be at around... Because I don't have it precisely, but I think it's probably $6,000, something like that. Yeah, because we changed price multiple times. Yeah.
And so how do you... I guess the question is, between 2019 and 2020, and even right now as you're scaling, what are you doing to make sure you guys have other cash coming in while you're building your side project? So... I got, I mean, it's a pretty intense thing I'm going to tell you, but basically right after we started Logology, my mother passed away. She had cancer.
So that was like a very troubling time. And actually that almost killed the company right away because like, honestly, for months, I couldn't work really well, to be honest. And so I was, the cash was like, you know, running low and stuff like that. And so we almost thought about quitting, you know, that was just like end of 2018 and early 2019. And, and my mom was broke also.
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Chapter 3: What financial strategies did Dagobert use when starting Logology?
Because I don't know, like, I felt like I had to make it successful now. Kind of like to make her proud in a way. You know, we had a very troubled relationship at the end, but like there was this thing about, I don't know, like, so we kept going. But now my co-founder, so my wife, she's starting to take a few, you know, side gigs. But that's mostly how we run it now.
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How many years of runway did that give you when it came in? How much of your cash? Three years, three to four years, something like that. I mean, my savings when I started, I had like two years and it added like three to four years. And how do you... Well, like one of the things that I see a lot with founders that raise VC capital is it's so easy to raise money.
You see a lot of really good founders stuck in bad ideas and they feel like they can't give up that bad idea because they've raised VC. So in your case, if your mom is sort of the angel VC. That's yeah. That's kind of it. Yeah, exactly. But, but my question to you would be like, if you at some, at some point realize Logology cannot scale how you hoped it would scale,
Wouldn't your mom want you to shut it down and pivot into something new? And how do you think about that? Yeah, the way I think about it is the way we created Logology was from the years of experience working with people in the design industry, doing design services. My wife was doing that for years. So we know there's a need. So we didn't even have to validate it.
I mean, it was instantly validated. And so it's more about how can we make it successful? So it might not be able to scale. Right now we're struggling with distribution, for example, how to scale that. So we're having trouble there. But so my plan is like, Keep giving it like, you know, as long as I have ideas for like making it bigger, I keep pushing and it tends to bring results.
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Chapter 4: What was the original idea behind Logology and how did it evolve?
So I do, well, the business side and I do the coding and also the UX. So I'm basically like a product guy with engineering and she's really focused on the logos and also like the vision behind how do we make the product work? Because it's like, you know, it's a specific way to get a logo.
Like you answer questions about the values of your company and then we tell you this is the kind of logo that's right for you. So that all comes from like her work as a designer when she was consulting. So she brings that vision of like that vision for design, how to design a good logo and how, and my job is to translate that into an actual product. So it's really complimentary team.
And when you say convert into a product, are you actually doing product UI and UX like design? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cause I used to, you know, cause I freelance for so long. I used to have many different roles over, over years. And so, yeah, I can do UX too. And that's what I do on Logology. I see. So that's how you're generating extra income. It's not just the logo.
You're also doing full-fledged product like UI, UX design. No, no, no. For now, it's just a logo. That's actually the pivot idea is to do landing pages. But we're not doing that now. But what I'm saying is that when I was freelancing, before I started Logology, I used to do that as a service, yeah. I see. And it just teamsize around just the two of you, right?
Yeah, we had a third co-founder for a while. And then we had to split because we didn't work that well together. So it was good for a time. It actually helped us quite a lot because he helped us see things differently. He was more into marketing.
And also because we were like a couple, me and my wife, sometimes you just get stuck in ideas and you don't see, you know, it's hard to, I mean, it's good to have an external perspective. So he helped us with that for a while. But then it wasn't working really well. So we had to stop. How much equity did he own? We had given him 25%. But then when he left, we bought it back.
How did you negotiate the price? How much did you pay to buy it back? Well, I'm not sure I can say the price because we signed tons of contracts. So I'm not sure I can say the price. What I can say is the way we thought about the price is Honestly, the company wasn't worth anything when we did that.
So it was more in terms of like, okay, he spent a bit more than a year with us and now he's going to be left with nothing.
uh so we need to make it you know good for him that like he spent time so that we kind of like estimated kind of like a salary that he would have gotten because we had so little revenue at the time that he left that there was no way of estimating it and we wanted to keep that he kept his shares but he really didn't want that he wanted to leave and have zero percent so we just fought back you know estimated kind of like uh
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Chapter 5: When did Logology officially launch and what was its initial reception?
No kids yet. And how old are you? Uh, I'm 32. She's 40 almost. So we kind of, we kind of like had to make the choice about kids. So right now we're not having kids yet. Yeah. Okay. So you're 32. So last question here, what's something you wish you knew when you were 20? I wish I knew that. Ah, it's so funny. Such a funny question. I would say I didn't expect that, um,
I mean, even when you get older, you still feel like when you're young. So that would be the thing I would tell myself. It never stops. You always doubt. You always not really know. It's normal, so get used to it. That's what I would tell myself. Guys, be comfortable with doubt. You heard it here from Dagobert, buildinglogology.co.
He gave up a ā¬6,000 per month job back in 2018 to pursue his side projects, pivoted many times, and almost said, you know, we have to shut this down before his mom tragically passed away, but left him with a bit of capital to keep going and stick with it. He's about to pass his 100th customer, which we love, and ā¬6,000 in revenue at logology.co. Check it out.
Dagobert, thanks for taking us to the top. Yeah, thank you.