SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1655 How He Got Enterprises To Pay Him $1m in ARR For Snapchat Story Creation
04 Feb 2020
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
launch content and story form faster, more efficiently across multiple platforms, and getting more views and click-throughs or swipe-throughs once it's actually live. Over 100 customers right now pushing a million bucks in terms of annual revenue just on their SaaS product. They also have consulting and customization work on top of that, along with kind of ad spend and things of that nature.
A couple million, call it two, three million bucks in terms of funding. Team of 20 in New York City in remote locations. Less than 2.5% revenue and logo churn per month. Too early to talk about expansion and other metrics like that, but again, well on their way to growing a meaningful brand here in the SaaS space. Hello, everybody. My guest today is Thomas Harding.
He's the co-founder and CEO of Mish Guru, which we'll jump into today. He helps brands tell better stories. Thomas, you ready to take us to the top?
Yeah, I am. Thanks for having me along.
You bet. All right, tell us about the company. What does the company do and how do you make money?
Cool. So we're a SaaS technology company. We've built a platform that helps brands, higher education providers, universities, marketing agencies, sports teams, Um, all kinds of people tell better Snapchat and Instagram stories.
Oh, interesting. Okay. So, so what do you do? You help them like quickly format videos, things like that. It's an editing tool or what?
Yeah, we're a software platform that lets you really easily manage all your content. So we've made the shift from the news feed to the stories feed. Uh, and that means now we've got these full screen mobile optimized pieces of that, uh, content. that need to be managed. We can help our clients publish that content. We help them measure the analytics against it.
It's a whole new style of content publishing. So there's a whole new style of key metrics we help them understand. Then as well, we help them tap into their audiences, get them sending in and receiving a bunch of user-generated content and let them use that content to tell even better stories again.
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Chapter 2: How does Mish Guru help brands create engaging stories?
We really do like to get hands on and help our customers succeed.
So is that code for like you're actually an agency, but you want to call yourself a SaaS company?
Not quite. I mean, I'm happy to share a bit of the story there. We probably look more like an agency previously, but no, we just have a dedicated customer success team that if people need a little bit more hands-on help, we'll give that. If you want to do things by yourself, we're good to kind of just let you use the software as well.
Okay. And just so we're short on time, I don't want to go down kind of every customer cohort. I mean, what is an average that a brand might pay you per month or per year? Just on the SaaS side, no consulting, no professional service.
On the SaaS side, so our fees can range anywhere between $500 a month up to $5,000 a month. Okay. On how much of our services you're using, how much of the software you're using.
So if I pay you 500 bucks a month, what is that based off of? Like number of stories I'm creating or what?
Yeah, at the moment it's broken up by features and as well just what kind of number of accounts that you're using with us. So if you just have one Instagram account or one Snapchat account, that's right down there on the bottom tier. If you don't need much support from our team, you're kind of in that category.
But if you've got multiple accounts that you're trying to manage and you want access to all of the features, all that user-generated content, the analytics that I was talking about, that's where you start to go up the tiers as well.
When were you founded?
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Chapter 3: What pricing models do brands use for Mish Guru's services?
So, so, okay. So that means you're doing over 83 grand a month and, and kind of revenue. How do you split your team's time between like here, here, here's the next sprint cycle on the SAS product, you know, go deal with this client that wants the shade of blue changed in the background of their story. Like seriously, I mean, there's so many different angles you're working here.
Yeah, yeah. And I think in terms of the platform from our end, it's starting to mature in terms of the most obvious sets of problems. And I think for us right now, what we're trying to understand is how do we go really deep with a narrower set of customers? How do we provide a really deep set of value to the customers that fit the profiles of people we know we can support?
Uh, and I, I think there's, you know, a lot of different avenues for us here. People are like stories are hard to create. And so once you've created them, you want to get them in front of as many people as possible. Um, so I mentioned there's a lot of new channels opening up to publish stories too. So there's opportunities for us there.
What's the team size today? How many people are working on it?
Yeah. So we're about 20 at the moment.
Okay. All in New York.
Nope. So we're split. We originally started in New Zealand. So we've still got half our development team down there. We've got some sales and customer success down there. We've got a team of salespeople here in New York. And then we have the rest of our development team based in Berlin.
Okay. So New York City and remote. Have you bootstrapped to date or raised capital?
Yeah, we've raised a few rounds of capital at this point. So we raised early 2015, late 2017, and then just a couple of months back as well.
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Chapter 4: How did Mish Guru evolve from a Snapchat-focused company?
I mean, are you sticky? What's your churn look like today?
Yeah, we're incredibly lucky that the customers we have with us are very passionate about our product. And for the most part, still working with a lot of the same people we started with in 2014. So we're well below market average.
What would you consider market average?
For a company our size, anything under 2.5%.
Okay, so you're below 2.5%. Revenue churn or logo churn per month?
Well, a bit of both.
Thomas, you said both? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so less than 2.5%. And I mean, so where do you pull that from? Why do you feel like that's average?
I mean, just reading market blogs, reading market information, talking to people within the space.
Do you have meaningful expansion revenue around or pricing axes that allow you to drive expansion or no, not so much?
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Chapter 5: What is the current customer base size and revenue model?
Oh, where do you start with that one? 20-year-old Tom. I think I probably just wish I understood a little bit more of the American psyche before, you know, when I was 20. So that when I got here and I haven't come from New Zealand, I could land on my feet a little, a little quicker.
As understanding American market, maybe a little earlier seems to be doing pretty well though. Mish guru, again, helping brands launch content and story form faster, more efficiently across multiple platforms and getting more views and click throughs or swipe throughs. Once it's actually live over a hundred customers right now, uh,
you know pushing a million bucks in terms of annual revenue just on their sas product they also have consulting and you know customization work on top of that along with kind of ad spend and things of that nature a couple million call it two three million bucks in terms of funding team of 20 in new york city and remote locations less than 2.5 percent revenue and logo churn per month too early to talk about expansion other metrics like that but again well on their way to growing a meaningful brand here in the sas space tom thanks so much for taking us to the top thank you