Core DNA

Sam Saltis spent over 20 years building digital businesses, eventually growing a web agency in Australia to over $5 million in revenue. But he noticed a pattern: every client needed essentially the same infrastructure, and every project meant rebuilding the same platform from scratch. One day, he realized his agency had actually built a comprehensive internal platform that solved this problem—it wasn't just a service delivery tool, it was a product. The spark was recognizing that what took them years to develop internally could be packaged and sold to other agencies and enterprises globally.

Core DNA is a pre-built SaaS platform that brings together over 80 integrated applications. It allows agencies and enterprises to spin up e-commerce sites, content management systems, intranets, and franchise portals without custom development. The product includes all infrastructure, security, and delivers over 1,000 updates per year. Instead of charging based on features, Sam chose a consumption-based subscription model: customers pay between $500–$10,000 per month depending on utilization and traffic, with the company deliberately not penalizing customers for driving revenue or traffic through their sites.

After moving to the US with his family in late 2015, Sam spent six months touring six cities before landing on Boston. He chose it because it balanced access to enterprise customers (unlike Silicon Valley, where everyone wanted to buy his business), investment capital for future growth, and a genuine business community. He launched Core DNA in 2016 with zero sales team and a handful of people. Within a year, he had acquired 25 customers, all leveraged through agency partnerships—partners who referred customers and received commissions. The average customer paid $8,000/month, significantly more than Australian pricing.

Sam's bootstrapped, cash-flow-conscious approach worked remarkably well. He set a fixed monthly burn rate ($40,000) and tied hiring directly to revenue—whenever a new customer came on, he'd add sales or marketing capacity to maintain that burn rate. This discipline meant that while he was willing to lose $40k/month, his revenue growth of $500k in ARR over the first year (from $160k to $200k MRR) proved the model. Customer acquisition cost was around $16,000 per customer, but lifetime value was estimated at $380,000–$570,000+ given that customers stayed 4–5 years on average, with some relationships dating back 10–14 years. What didn't fully work initially was customer education—people still clung to the "design, build, destroy" mentality rather than understanding Core DNA's value in enabling infinite scaling without replatforming.

Core DNA now has 40 employees spread across Boston, Australia, London, and Germany. It's serving 25 pure-play SaaS customers (distinct from the agency's legacy clients) with less than 5% annual revenue churn. The company is doing $200k MRR ($2.4M ARR) and is still bootstrapped, with Sam reinvesting profits back into the business. Large enterprises like Nintendo—running 200+ websites on the platform—validate the long-term stickiness. Sam's deliberate strategy of slow, profitable growth without outside capital has positioned Core DNA as a differentiated alternative in a fragmented DXP market.