SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
From 1 man design team to $400k/year consulting for Accel
17 Mar 2023
Chapter 1: What valuation strategies are discussed for startups?
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Again, both plural founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash valuations. 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. He sold a bar menu for 200 bucks back when he was 16 years old.
Fast forward today, he's running a creative studio paying two grand a month in the new up and coming London art district called newgenres.studio. That's his website. Working with call it 20 customers this year, trying to double his revenue up to 800,000 bucks. We'll see if he can do it.
He's working with firms like Excel, putting on their events and doing their content marketing and other firms as they think about event organizations. Branded content also has his own application called attach.app, the easiest way to send proposals on the internet, which he's launched and building the MVP list for the waitlist for right now. We'll see what happens next.
Hey folks, my guest today is Mihai Thoma. He's a creative entrepreneur based in London as the co-founder and CEO of New Genre, a creative studio crafting brands, products, and experiences for ambitious leaders. His clients include Excel, Gravity Sketch, who we've had on the show, among others.
Apart from New Genre, he's also currently building Attached.app, the easiest way to send, review, and get proposals approved on the internet. Mihai, you're ready to take us to the top?
Yeah, definitely.
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Chapter 2: How did Mihai Thoma start his design career?
100K, 200K, something else?
The lifetime value of a project?
Sure, your biggest customer.
80K.
80K. Okay, good. So you have a couple. So what are you working with? Like 10, 20 customers per year on average, something like that?
So last year, because we established New Genres as a company in April of last year. So in one month, we're going to be turning one. Given that I've been doing this freelance a number of years beforehand and working in design for even more than that. My co-founder, he was leading a web agency beforehand. But in our first year, we actually did 44 projects. Oh, wow.
But this includes different levels. So we would do small, like, brochure websites, but we also do, you know, whole brand projects for, you know, companies like Gravity Sketch. Gravity Sketch.
Can I take 44? I mean, can I take 44 projects at 10, 15k a pop-up? I mean, you guys did, like, 400 or 500,000 bucks last year in revenue?
Approximately, yeah.
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Chapter 3: What services does New Genre offer to its clients?
both of our employees are longtime friends of ours that we worked in the past uh you know for a number of years um so the the risk is also uh lower okay that makes sense but but i mean how would you like you have four people full time right now how we decide when it's time to hire another full time or two full time i think when we have two two consecutive
really busy months when we have to work weekends and time is not there, then we know that it's time to hire more people. I think my advice for a lot of people hiring is It's not a direct proportionate game where you hire more people, you think you directly do more work, but rather sometimes it's the other way around. You hire more people, that just means more problem.
So I think it's good to bring the right amount of people for the job. Keep it as small as you can get the work done.
Of course. And then what do you guys think you'll do this year in terms of revenue? Can you double? We hope so.
So we made a lot of big changes. Actually, we just moved in a new beautiful studio. How much do you pay for the studio lease?
That's expensive. You'd think that. Come on. What's the number? I'm curious.
Okay. So we just moved in the design district in London. It's a new neighborhood. Only with architectural studios, interior designers, web agencies, animation studios. A very fertile ground for the sort of work that we do. And we have a 50 square meter studio. I'm not sure what's that in feet, maybe 500. we pay less than 2,000 pounds per month. Oh, great. That's really good.
This is what we found is way below the market rate in London. And we got very lucky because it's a new neighborhood. This was built last year. Um, and they want to create a community here and they're willing to lower the price point to, um, get a lot of, uh, these cool trendy studios in, um, and then, you know, have them for a number of years in the space. That's great.
Well, so you hope to double the revenue. So maybe go from 400,000 to $800,000, uh, this year in revenue. Um, talk to me about how many customers you think you'll work with this year. If you did 44 last year, how many this year you think? So we did 44 projects. How many customers? I would say 20 to 30. Okay. And so how many customers do you think you'll work on this year? I think fewer.
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Chapter 4: How did Mihai transition from freelance to agency work?
There were executives from Stripe, Trade Republic, and...
essentially top executives from all sort of things. Very cool. Let's wrap up here with the last five minutes. I want to talk about your application that you're building. So it's called Attach, the easiest way to send proposals on the internet. So how do you, is this doing well? Is it a side project? Does it have any users today?
this we just started it's uh it's being built um the way we it all started was we wanted to send better proposals to our clients when we uh started new genre and instead of sending pdfs and instead of sending emails um we created a internal app where we would send web pages as a proposal. So you'd have all the information, but it would be interactive and you can create a much better experience.
And additionally, you can track when a prospect opens your proposal. You can see how much time they spend on a proposal and why they didn't reply.
But I mean, there's already things like DocSend. I mean, a bunch of companies already do this. So what are you trying to do that you can't get already?
I think what we want to do is listen to all the small to medium businesses. This is targeted exclusively to service-based business and try to build all the functionality that they're missing in the rest of them. So for instance, a lot of these businesses also want to show the portfolio or show very complicated timelines. And we found that that is a sort of functionality that is missing from
like other competitors. So right now we're building it. We have great relationships with a number of investors. So March, April, when we have the MVP, very excited to show it and put it out in the world.
Very good. All right, we're out of time here. Let's wrap up Mihaly with the famous five. Number one, what's the last book that you read? Last book that I read?
That's very good. I think it was a negotiation.
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