SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Can they convert 11k Designer Installs to Revenue, $40m+ Valuation?
14 Mar 2022
Chapter 1: What is the main focus of the podcast episode?
Yeah, yeah. So you're talking like burn as I call it 350 months, something like that, or approximately three, you know, 3 million years. So you've got like eight, you know, what 16 to 18 to 20 months of runway, something like that.
Yeah, we're about 24 months right now.
You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, CAC, valuation, or other metrics, the easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool. It's like a big Excel sheet for all of these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. Hey folks, my guest today is Dan La Savita.
He's this entrepreneur CEO who's built, grown, and led successful teams and businesses in the digital space for over 15 years. His latest venture, Play, is transforming how teams design mobile products by letting them design, build, and experience their product in real time, all on the medium they're designing for, their phone. Dan, you ready to take us to the top? Yes. Thanks for having me.
You bet. So what's the comp here? What's the analog? Is it sort of like Webflow for mobile? Or is it more like sort of, you know, like a Figma for mobile?
Yeah, it's actually, I would say, in between the two in terms of our current state, right? So we're the first native iOS design tool for teams to design, prototype, and share directly on their device. Previous to Play, we ran a design agency building a lot of mobile products for our clients. And one of the things that we experienced with as many great design tools there are,
Figma, Adobe XD, Sketch, they're sort of a mile wide. And there is not really a platform built for people designing specifically for mobile products.
So what we're trying to do is fill that gap and be very kind of focused in terms of product teams designing for mobile, and how do we give them an input directly into what they can achieve with kind of the sandbox that Apple has created and give them access to all that stuff.
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Chapter 2: How does Dan La Savita define the unique features of Play?
Yeah, it was, I mean, we, we never publicly disclosed it, but it was a, it was a, it was a, it was a good deal. I think for, for, for everybody, you know, involved, not just financially, but I think we found the right, uh, the right parent company, um, to sell at least at the time when we sold the business.
What I'm trying to do by asking that question is get in your head as a founder, right? So have you now created a cash cushion for yourself back in 2012 that allows you to sort of do anything? Are you still sort of like, eh, you know, have some flexibility now, but I still sort of need to stay here and earn my earn out for the next three years? Oh, yeah. Yeah.
No, I got to work. So, I mean, you know, I was able to have a bit of a safety net, but no, I'm here to work and build the next big thing. That's what we're here to do. Yeah.
So you sold it in 2012. When did you leave 360i or Detsu?
Uh, left Dentsu, uh, it was three years ago now.
Okay. Got it. So left Dentsu. Now, did you guys already start writing code for this inside of Dentsu? No, no, we, we, we, June left.
Uh, I left, uh, about four months after he did, uh, they, you know, June and our other, there's four partners. So myself, Michael, June and Eric, um, June and Eric kind of started together. Uh, I finished out a few more months, uh, at first born and then I left and then joined them.
Oh, so sorry. When you say partners, you don't mean at the agency now. You're talking about Play. There's four founders. That's correct. Yeah. Sorry. So say that again. June, Eric, who else?
Michael, founded Firstborn, and then myself. So we're the four founders for Play.
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Chapter 3: What challenges did Dan face transitioning from an agency to a SaaS model?
Yep. I mean, and you're getting traffic, right? Alexa score two 82. So it's not like you're getting no traffic and people are hitting the site and it looked frankly, the design can, you know, congrats. This makes sense. You're coming from agency bones, but the site looks like you guys are a much larger company in terms of revenue than what you, than what you are. So when did the paywall go up?
How are you thinking about pricing?
Yeah, I think we will introduce, I think, monetization this year, for sure. Right now, we're focused on retention and growth, obviously, from our users. I don't know if we want to reinvent the wheel when it comes to actually packaging in terms of pricing. We'll probably look to do something as other design tools in the space have done. Maybe three tiers will most likely be a freemium product.
So there'll be a free tier for starters, a paid individual tier, and then a paid tier for organizations and for teams as So that's been the focus now. We're, you know, getting our SOC 2, you know, certification going because we, you know, we're running into those conversations with companies where we've got a few designers inside of a company using it.
And then you go down and you start talking to IT and legal and, you know, are you SOC 2 compliant? And so kind of getting, you know, those processes so we can at least begin to, you know, sell up into the enterprise where we're ready.
Who are you using to get that SOC 2 done? Are you using a software or do you hire a consultant or what? We're using Vanta. Interesting. I get this question all the time and I never had a good answer. So I always ask now, I mean, have you liked Vanta to date? Yeah, we've just started.
We're about 30 days in, but to date there, the system is... The person who's doing it on our end has done this before and is like, dude, this is... amazing compared to the nightmare that you have to do this when it's on your own. So the dashboard that they provide has been really useful just in terms of tracking everything you need to do and giving you suggestions.
So it's been pretty seamless so far.
Is it super expensive?
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Chapter 4: How did the company approach fundraising and what were the amounts raised?
Really interesting. Okay. Got it. So just be clear, pre-revenue today, thinking about pricing, 4,500 sort of active folks that have installed and are using, burning 350 to grand to 400K per month with call it 18 to 24 months of runway, team of 20 right now. How many engineers?
It is 12 engineers. Oh, wow. Majority engineers, yeah.
Yeah, that's great. And this is interesting. This is like one of those products where I look at it and like, I just know if I ever asked my designers to design on a mobile app, they'd go, give me a freaking desktop, please. But you must have identified, like, what is the scenario a designer is in where they wouldn't use their desktop and they really want to design on their mobile device?
They're stuck on a subway all day or what?
Yeah.
Yeah, well, I think it's what it affords you to do that a desktop may not afford you to do. So for example... When you're designing on your phone, you're designing in the native environment. So you now get to plug into all of these native elements that iOS has to offer. So if you're designing a video player, right? All the primary design tools don't support native video.
They don't support native modals or live maps or haptics or input text fields. So what happens is designers spend all these times on their desktop designing around hacks for all of these native things that you and I and everyone else feels on our mobile product. or just prototypes, right? We're using web technologies to simulate what a native gesture feels like, a pan gesture or a pinch and zoom.
So in Play, you're using all the real native iOS gestures and controls. Now, that's not to say there won't be some sort of desktop companion to Play in the future. We currently have a web dashboard, so it allows people to drag their images, their SVGs, their custom fonts over into the dashboard.
You would think that the Play web dashboard will grow in its fidelity as a tool as we're also launching iPad. So it is not going to be solely a phone product forever. I think what we want to do is we want to use each medium and each device for its strengths instead of trying to design one thing on one device and try to make it a mile wide.
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