The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 14 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Donzé: How AODocs won its first SaaS deal by trading free services
“We sold them a three years license agreement with the money they had set aside for the service. And we said, okay, look, don't worry. This product is kind of beta, but we're going to make it work. And we take your money instead of taking it for doing the servi…”
Donzé: Annual hypergrowth creates chaos; doubling every two years is much healthier
“When you double every year, Nothing is stable in the company, right? Every morning, the organization changes every day. It's very traumatizing for the employees. You can do this over a few years, but if you do this on long, long time, it's like everybody's los…”
Donzé: Running an IT services business guarantees finding a SaaS product idea
“I don't know exactly what I want to build, but I know if I talk to the customers, like for a few months, and we find a common product, we can find something. It's guaranteed.”
Donzé: Venture-backed document management competitors only target specific verticals
“All of the venture-funded competitors in the document management market, they focus on a specific vertical.”
Donzé: Legacy on-prem software must be completely rewritten to be truly cloud-native
“If they want to take their product to the cloud for real, they have to rewrite it entirely. You cannot adapt an on-prem server to the cloud, or you can put it in a virtual machine, but it's a fake cloud. It's not real new architecture.”
Donzé: Enterprise sales fail if reliant on a single internal stakeholder contact
“If you don't have three different people who tell you the same thing, you cannot believe it. So that's the hardest part about enterprise sales is how you get your spy network in place in the target company to really know what's going on. Because if you rely on…”
Donzé: Early enterprise POCs demand full project deployment before paying a cent
“That's the trade off you have for those early customers. They would, they want you to do a POC, but the POC is the entire project. And when you are at the end, say, look, Now you see it works. Oh yeah. Now I believe you. I signed the contract. So my first two,…”
Donzé: AODocs Funded Growth with Services Revenue Instead of Raising VC
“We have a few million dollars of money from the services business. We can spend it. So there was no obvious need for that.”
Donzé: Bootstrapping hurt AODocs' early enterprise visibility without funding PR
“We can communicate on signing a new customer or hiring new people, but no round of funding initially was, it was tough for us to be visible in the enterprise.”
Donzé: Google uses AODocs for data center construction plans
“Google is our customer. They use us for the construction design maintenance plans on their data center.”
Donzé: How AODocs hit $10M ARR by compounding at 40% annually
“We had about 40% growth until, until the ten million mark. So we did one million the first year, two and a half, then the next was five something, that's then seven something, then ten million.”
Donzé: AODocs acquired a cloud services firm for millions before pivoting to software
“My co-founder, so by the other person funding the company is the initial investor of things at it. So we used some of that money to start to acquire the services company on which we pivoted to so the founders of the services company left. We, the, this investo…”
Donzé: The 2022 VC downturn became a hiring boon for bootstrapped AODocs
“At the turn of the 2022 2023, when the VC funding came down, now it was really interesting for us because there's so many people out on the market. Who suddenly were an VC-funded company, who missed a round, who were available. So we benefited a lot in the las…”
Donzé: AODocs grew enterprise ACVs from $20K to multimillion-dollar annual deals
“The first crop of customers, the ACV was in the range of 20, 20 to 50. And then the year after we went up a bit. 2014, 15, we were in the range of a hundred K and the typical contract was a hundred K a year. And now today we bought that. I mean, we have our la…”