Daydream

Daydream adds $1M of ARR a month automating dental billing

Daydream uses AI to verify insurance, submit and appeal claims, and post payments for dental practices, taking 2.5 to 3.5% of every dollar it processes. CEO Shreyas Parab, 25, says the roughly 2.5-year-old company adds $1 million in net new ARR each month, has raised $11.5 million, and will finish the year above $10 million in revenue.

“Okay, sounds good. My name is Shreyas, and I'm the CEO of Daydream, and we are adding $1 million a month helping dentists automate back office tasks.”

Buy the manual service business you plan to automate

Daydream began by acquiring a dental-billing service business with less than $1M in revenue, then grew by automating the work to improve its margins. Parab says the timing was ideal because human-run service firms hit a ceiling where adding people lowers quality.

“Um, and another underrated thing is, so the way our business started was we actually went out and acquired an existing service business. So before, you know, people would be doing this work manually, right? So we actually bought this company and then we've just been improving their margin.”

Steal thisAcquire a small, manual service business in your target vertical, then grow it by automating the work and widening margins, instead of selling software to that vertical cold.

Waive fees on the first $100K you make the customer

To speed up dentist onboarding, Shaan suggests Daydream take nothing until it has recovered $100,000 for a practice and charge about 2.5% after that. Onboarding costs far less than $100K, so the offer becomes cheap acquisition that customers would be foolish to turn down.

“But basically, if you just said, we don't charge you a penny until we've made you $100,000, the first $100,000 we make you, we take nothing. And after that, we take 2.5% or something. Something like that where it's like, oh, these guys are basically saying they're going to make me an extra $100,000. And for you onboarding that person, your actual COGS is not $100,000. Your COGS to onboard a dentist is probably very, very small. And so you will just use that as your acquisition, like create an offer so good they would be stupid to turn down.”

Steal thisIf your cost to serve is low, make the first chunk of customer value free so the offer becomes a no-brainer.

AIDA, and a mailer printed with the dentist's own face

Daydream sends dentists direct mail printed with their own face, reasoning that nobody throws away a letter with their face on it. Sam calls it the best possible attention grabber, the 'A' in the AIDA copywriting framework (attention, interest, desire, action), and says the rest of the letter can still be improved.

“By the way, this, like one of the frameworks for copywriting, one of the most simple ones is AIDA, attention, interest, desire, action. This is A. You are, that's the best attention grabbing headline you could possibly have. So you're kind of doing it inadvertently, but you 100% can improve this.”

Steal thisCheck every mailer against AIDA. Open with something the recipient can't ignore, such as their own face, then build interest and desire and end with one clear action.

Find your marketing kill shot: one line in the buyer's dollars

Parab's pitch, 'improve collections by 5% and cut median time to payment to 10 days', felt clunky to him. Shaan restated it in the dentist's own terms: on a $1M practice, 5% is $50,000 of take-home pay, a one-liner juicy enough that the buyer thinks, 'if this is true, I'm interested.'

“We fight the insurance companies, and on average, we add $50,000 take-home pay for every single dentist that uses us, right? Or like on average, whatever the claim is. You want to massage that, like try to get down to like, A one-liner that's just like a marketing kill shot. It's like, if this is true, okay, I'm interested, right?”

Steal thisTurn your percentage metrics into a single dollar figure the buyer takes home, and lead with it.