SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1716 $60k/mo Live Event SaaS Company Virus Survival Plans
05 Apr 2020
Chapter 1: What is Prism.fm and how did it originate?
Prism FM serving the event industry and live event industry. They've scaled nicely over the past three, four years, now doing about $50,000, $60,000 a month in revenue. They'd raised 2.7 million bucks. They had about 19 on the team.
He's now back down to 16 and stopped on new hiring, now burning about less than $100,000 per month with more than 12 months of runway in the bank to ride out the virus and hopefully emerge stronger on the other side, but not waiting for that to be happy as he focuses on meditating and spending time with his kid here, Cyrus. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Matt Ford.
He makes great software for promoters in the form of his company, Prism FM. He launched his first music tech startup, Spotlight FM, while attending the University of Wisconsin in 2011 and has built from there. Matt, you ready to take us to the top?
Chapter 2: How did Matt Ford grow his first startup, Spotlight.fm?
Yeah, let's do it. All right. So you've got a user base. Oh, sorry. You grew Spotlight, I think, to over 250,000 users. Is Prism an updated version of Spotlight or two separate companies?
No, definitely two separate companies. So in a nutshell, Spotlight FM is a marketing platform for major promoters and record labels and music industry brands. I could give you more of a nutshell of what it is another time, but it was a good experience for me to learn how the industry works and to build some relationships. But I sold my shares in that company recently.
Chapter 3: What challenges did Prism.fm face during COVID-19?
eight years ago now. And Prism is a totally new thing.
Yep. Okay. So, so walk us through, you came on the show, I believe it was back in October of 2018. Uh, at that point you were serving, I think about 133 customers. How are these customers using you?
Um, how are you? Sorry to ask your question. Like what, what is the software doing? Just go refresher there or.
Yeah, no, no. Tell us how customers are using the platform.
Oh yeah. Yeah. So, um, Well, there's how they're normally using it. And then there's like COVID times using it.
Yeah, do both.
Yeah, no, yeah.
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Chapter 4: How are customers currently using Prism.fm's platform?
I actually was really looking forward to having this conversation during COVID so I could have a moment in time to look back on. But yeah, I mean, COVID set aside, Prism is like the sales force for the live music industry. So our customers are concert promoters, people who own venues or put on events, specifically music events or comedy events or Broadway events. And then
Also, talent agents as well. On the venue side of our business, we service everyone from small clubs, 200 capacity, lower even, all the way up to arenas that have 20,000, 30,000 people. And, um, the, the process of putting on a concert is this extremely detail oriented. So something like Salesforce or HubSpot just doesn't work all that well.
Prism was purpose built to map out the, uh, the way that someone actually puts on a live event. And that's from, from contracting all the way through settlement and counting up ticket sales and, and figuring out how much, how much you made, how much you're paying the artists and then, you know, having all the financial tools to, uh,
to make sense of your books over a quarter, over a year, or whatever it might be. Outside of financial tools, it also has a lot of time-saving automation built into it. So the people who are in charge of running the venue log into there to keep track of tasks, and the people who are marketing the event use Prism as a central place to store information. So it's really just one place.
for the concert, uh, for the concert business to kind of, to kind of work.
So fast forward now to like COVID times, right? I heart radio does the living room concert. How do you like pivot your software? So like you're serving that new use case.
Yeah. So, um, that's a great question there. Um, there's the, the, the answer is we're fully focused on optimizing for when the industry kind of, you know, Phoenix's or whatever emerges from this time. Um, you know, our,
I'm running through scenarios of, okay, if it happens in quarter three, if it happens in quarter four, it happens in quarter one of next year, making sure that we have momentum for when that happens and not going away on the other side to make sense of it.
So once again, our hypothesis is that there is an industry to serve on the other side of this and fully optimizing and keeping momentum for that when that happens. And during this time, we're taking a lot of, we're taking advantage of the downtime to really improve the products.
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Chapter 5: What strategies is Prism.fm implementing to navigate the pandemic?
Exactly. I was going to say every, all my keynotes that were like throughout the year that have now been canceled are all now saying, Nathan, can you like block off this date in October for like when we reschedule it? And like, I've had to say notice them cause they're all trying to reschedule in the same, like four, you know, three, four week window before holidays.
Yeah.
Yeah, so that's what we're seeing a lot of our customers use Prism for right now. And it was in our product roadmap to make it easier to move concerts around the platform. We went ahead and advanced those features to kind of be responsive to the crisis and do things for our customers that really matter. Another thing that we're moving forward is our financial reporting tools.
A lot of them like deeply need to understand like how much money is coming in. Like what, what is my, what is my operating expenses over the next few months and prison helps with that. So we're advancing and optimizing those.
What had you grown to Matt? So before the virus hit, how many customers were active on the platform?
Yeah. So, um, I think, you know, you said 130, I think there was some ambiguity in there. I'd have to look back, but, um, I think it was 40 like primary accounts that were booking 130 venues. Got it. Yeah, we might have one account that goes into 40 rooms or whatever, but it's quite a bit bigger now. So we have 150 unique accounts and they're going into over 1600 venues now around the country.
Okay, wow. Okay, and do each of those unique accounts still pay? I think you told me the average one pays like 300, 400 bucks a month.
Yeah, yeah, somewhere around there, yeah.
Okay, so I mean, that puts your monthly revenue at somewhere like 50, 60,000 bucks a month. Is that about right?
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Chapter 6: How does Prism.fm compare to traditional event management tools?
Happens. Yeah, there he is.
Bring him in. Bring him in. He's a guitar player or a drummer?
He's a guitar player.
Nice. What's his name?
It's Osiris.
Tell him to wave. Osiris, what's up, man?
Hey, wave. Say hi. I'll be right back, sweetie, okay?
Yeah, you can mess with him. No big deal, man. I love that. So, yeah. So the reason I'm asking you this question specifically is I believe you've done most, well, no, you did raise some, you raised 2.7 million, huh?
Well, okay. Yeah. So we did. So yeah, to answer your question, like how are we keeping things going right now? Um, it was a scary moment, I would say three weeks ago and you're in Austin when South by Southwest canceled, like a lot of kind of what is going to happen with the world. Like, and I think a lot of that is still going on, but the first week was just kind of like survival mode. Like
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Chapter 7: What financial insights does Matt share about running a SaaS during a crisis?
We haven't had we haven't had a crazy amount of churn yet. We have had some people that are just like they're cut off from their revenue. So they've reached out and have asked for help.
um there's been a lot of people saying hey can we delay but uh can we delay payment or can we um you know can we cut you know can we go from a thousand dollars a month to five hundred dollars a month or a thousand dollars a month to a hundred dollars a month and we're you know proactively playing the good guy role in those situations of course so how much of the so of the 2.7 million you raise i mean how much have you been able to like basically keep in the bank to ride this out
Yeah, luckily, I mean, we closed it in December. So it was fully closed around December. So the vast majority of it.
That's December of 2019.
Yeah, it's funny. When we talked, I think there was like a series of events that happened that made me want to fix the fundamentals of the company such that we weren't as reliant on outside funding to always get to the next level and that we found more of a balanced approach between like growth and profitability.
And I think by actually focusing on profitability, it actually allowed us to grow more. Maybe there's this perception out there like if you're not spending on your socks and just focusing on growth, you're not innovating or you're not on the cutting edge. But I found that as we focused on running a tighter ship, we've innovated more and more. And this COVID situation accelerated us into that.
So I've timed the company up to the point where if we emerge from this in three months from now, which maybe that's possible, maybe that's not, we're a 15 times more fundamentally sound business with a better cash position because we adjusted from how we were spending in the past. And then not only at that moment are we in a better cash position, but into the future as well.
So that's really what my focus is on is you know, when, if this, when this emerges, having a more fundamentally sound company and, you know, also like that's outside of my control. So I'm going to run five or six scenarios into the future and like be ready to cut, you know, accordingly. And hopefully this doesn't last 17 months into the future.
I mean, at that point, at that point, there was a real situation there where I do on ice completely. Uh, I mean, publicly traded companies are going to start following the map at that point. You know, I don't know who has 17 months or 18 months.
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Chapter 8: What lessons has Matt learned about business and personal growth?
Like, hopping in on CS level stuff, you know, like not being just like hopping in on whatever I can, if we need to import data right now and there's manual clicking, like I'm willing to do it. So I'm putting so much time on myself right now that I'm that, yeah, that's really in the past. I said Elon Musk, but no, right now.
And you literally have your hands full. Uh, number three, what's your favorite online tool for building prism?
My favorite online tool. Uh, good question. Um, um,
managing virtual workforce and anything you've signed up for to help you do that?
We, we're, I mean, zoom right now is amazing. Uh, just cause we're doing all this remote stuff. Um, I'll give a shout out to Pendo. Pendo allows us to track our customer data. Um, like see who's clicking into what, and that's given us really key insight right now about like who's falling off the map that, you know, it lets us be proactive and make calls and,
And it's so detailed that we can look into every single button that's being clicked and look at all that data down to that level of granularity. So it's really impressive software. Number three, how many hours of sleep do you get every night? Sleep is key right now. So I'm trying to optimize for eight or nine. I turn my phone off at night. I meditate every day. I'm at night.
I meditate every morning. If I, I've been waking up at like four, just my mind racing. And what I do is I go and meditate and that lets me go back to sleep. So sleep's very important to me. I try to get eight or nine. It probably ends up being like six. He said, like, he wants me to call you on the phone. It's clearly not going to happen.
That's so funny. All right. And situation, married, single kiddos. We only have one kid.
No, yeah, no single, uh, one, one kid. I'm a, I'm a co-parent though. So, uh, his mom and I have been splitting time, but she's been, she's been carrying a really heavy load. So really, really appreciate her. And when I, when I have him, it's just me. So right now he's watching a lot of magic school bus, which I would, I got to still keep running the company. So it's really the only option.
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