SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
He'd sell this side project for $100,000. Is that the right price?
04 Jun 2022
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of the episode?
400 customers paying 10 bucks a month, you're doing about 4,000 bucks a month in monthly recurring revenue, right? Yeah, yeah. That's fantastic. 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 Adrian Thompson, a self-described humble introvert, humble introverted nerd. Again, his words, not mine.
Background in motion graphics animation, worked from freelancer to studio founder, and now has developed a storyboarding application to make pre-production easier, experimenting with new ways to make money and build a life that he enjoys at theplot.io. Adrian, you ready to take us to the top? Absolutely. All right. So tell us what the company does and sort of who's using this.
Is it B2B or B2C or something else?
Surprisingly, a wide variety of people using it in ways that I would have never thought. The reason I built it is because I actually own a motion graphics studio. And in the early days, I knew we had the storyboard and there wasn't a tool that existed. So we were using Apple Pages templates and then eventually moving to Google Docs just because there was some crude form of collaboration there.
And it was just so tedious to make changes to that. And I was always studying entrepreneurship and I just kind of wanted to try something. I never thought it would be a storyboarding tool, but actually the funny thing was I had that idea and I actually saw a competitor launch and it gave me the inspiration to kind of, you know, validated that idea.
And I thought, well, if this, if this then, and ironically enough, they were also a motion graphic studio. So I thought, well, if they're solving the same problem that they have, then my idea is actually valid. And I went ahead and started mine at the same time. So I use that as a way to encourage me rather than discourage me. So that's kind of the... I forgot the first question you asked.
I feel like I went on a tangent there.
No, no, you nailed it. This is a tough problem. I mean, we just had an event. And so the video designer sent over the five-minute reel. And the best option I have to add notes is to play the video, open Apple Notes, and then say, at second 37... Change the line here versus what you guys do. Or people are familiar with Frame.io as well. Exactly. Makes it so much easier, it looks like.
Exactly. So Frame.io solved that problem for reviewing finished videos. But there wasn't really an application to solve it for the storyboarding part. So in my background, I used to be a freelance animator. And I got so upset being spun in circles by people that could afford to waste my time, essentially. Yeah.
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Chapter 2: How did Adrian Thompson come up with the idea for his storyboarding application?
Let's talk about where the plot is today, then reverse engineer to the full story. So what are customers paying on average per month today to use the tool?
We just increased prices this last month. It's been something I've been working on. So obviously, this is a side project of mine. And I think there's a lot to talk about here. I think I have a lot to learn from you, which I was excited to get your email because the software is a side hustle of mine. It's not something I've been able to focus on full time.
And so it honestly hasn't gotten the love it deserves. But so for a long time, it's been $10 only, $10 a month for unlimited access. We didn't have tiered pricing like I should have a long time ago. I realized I'm leaving money on the table by not doing that. Finally was able to get that launched just this last month.
So now we have three tiers, $10 for a solo plan, $15 for a team plan with five collaborators per project, and then a business plan for unlimited collaborators at $20 a month. That's great. And so how many paying customers today? Only about 400-ish. 400, I think.
Only about. It's a side project. That's fantastic.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, well, I was just taking a look at the other people we interviewed. You got some impressive candidates here. I feel like I'm going to be, you know, hopefully the relatable guy in the bottom.
You want to know a secret between just between us friends here, no one else. You know, you can have someone on doing 100 million bucks in revenue or publicly traded SaaS founder, and that might be inspirational, but it gets way less listens because it's not actionable. 90% of my audience is you. So it's going to be very valuable. So they're still trying to get their first 10, 20, 30 customers.
So 400 customers paying $10 a month, you're doing about $4,000 a month in monthly recurring revenue, right?
Yeah.
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Chapter 3: What challenges did Adrian face while developing his side project?
Because I think... I just have so many limitations, my time being one and just kind of my knowledge and growing a SaaS. Like I think I've done everything that I could from having no experience and trying to do it on the side. And obviously all being bootstrapped, like I don't have any investors or I haven't had any coaching or help getting it set up.
So it's kind of just listening to podcasts and reading books, like trying to figure it out on my own. When did you write the first line of code for Plot? So I'm personally not a developer. I hired a guy to create the MVP. That was in 2015. So we're almost... This is fascinating.
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Again, both plural founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash valuations. Who was that guy?
How'd you find him? A friend. So I grew or I was living in the Bay Area. I knew a UI designer was a friend I went to church with and he worked at a company and he knew many developers. He's a UI designer at this company and he knew his friend wanted to
do some freelance work a lot a lot there's a lot of bored developers in the bay area at the time because they're just doing boring corporate stuff and when they hear somebody starting an mvp they kind of want to just do it because there's less you know red tape they can kind of be creative and do their thing so what'd you what'd you pay him to get the mvp off 15 grand to get it off the ground wow so i thought it was reasonable yeah where'd you get that i mean look where'd you from the studio so i mean i've you know i've operated the studio since 2012 and i grew it um
I saved my money, and I've always known I wanted to invest in something like this. This wasn't my first passive income project. My first step into digital products was creating scripts for Adobe After Effects, which are just ways to automate tasks that After Effects didn't build natively into the system. So I hired a guy to create a couple of those, and that gave me...
a couple like $1,000 in monthly passive income. So I was able to keep stashing stuff away. I would create a savings. Being a studio or a business owner the first five years is pretty unpredictable. So I like to have cash on the side. And that's what I decided this was the time to do something, take my swing essentially.
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Chapter 4: What is the current pricing structure for the storyboarding tool?
I just feel like I've hit a lot of walls in that regard, trying to figure out a growth hack, so to speak. One thing that worked well is I figured, what are people Googling? And a lot of people that don't know about storyboard software are Googling templates because that's the way that you'd create it before. You'd look for a Microsoft Word template or Adobe Photoshop template.
So I created free templates. And that's a search term that I also ranked for. So we have people that will download our templates. And then on the template itself, I have advertising saying, hey, you could do this on Plot. It's easier. So that's the only hack that I think has worked consistently well.
It's very interesting how people think about growth. Because the immediate thing I go to is, you know what? I wonder how many video editors are on Upwork. They all get frustrated with clients with how they do feedback. If I was growing, probably all I would do is I would go on Upwork.
I would hire every single person with video editor in their description for what they do and give them a very small, meaningless task, pay their hourly rate. That's my CAC. But require they use Plotly... That's funny. The free version. Because then they're likely going to stick with it for their second, third, fourth, fifth projects and become a customer. That's how I would do it.
That is funny. And I actually have gotten my... So clients through my studio, I have gotten them to use Plot as well. So I have a couple of big enterprise clients that use it because they work with me creating videos.
Super interesting. Do you keep a separate set of books? If someone wanted to buy it, could you send them a really clean P&L and balance sheet and all that stuff?
I could, so my books are all combined at the moment for ease, but I definitely could. I track, I've tracked every expense I've spent separately in a spreadsheet for plot. And obviously Stripe has its own thing. So yeah, all, all the subscription data is separate on its own. So yeah, I could definitely sort the finances out pretty quickly.
Super interesting. Super, super. What would the, what, I mean, so if so, like, would you know what the number would be? Like, is it the real number is what's the number where you tell your wife tonight at dinner and then you say you walked away and she goes, I'm leaving. You should have taken that deal.
Yeah.
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Chapter 5: How does Adrian plan to grow his customer base?
Um, it would be, I think it just, because it would be hard to accept less than that. Otherwise I feel like I should, I should keep working at it, you know?
Yeah. It's hard to measure opportunity cost, which is what effectively this is because it's going to be really hard to get someone to take 100,000 divided by 4,000. That's 25 years of revenue. And that's assuming it's all profit. So it would be hard probably to get that. So you're probably going to stick with it and probably going to keep doing the same thing for the next 10, 20 years.
But you're learning a bunch doing it, which is also valuable. So really interesting. Let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, favorite business book.
Robert Leonard
And I love everything Seth Godin has written. I'd say Lynchpin by Seth Godin, probably.
Lynchpin. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? I mean, Gary Vaynerchuk, I consume a lot of his content, so it's got to be him. Hey, I just had an idea. If I invite you to speak at our founder event in Austin in September 8th on stage, and then I basically ran a competition where people had 30 minutes to come up with the best idea they could on how they would grow the business.
And then they presented five minutes each on the things, and then you picked the winner. And then we would award a grand or five grand or whatever for them to go execute that thing on Plotly. And then film the mini documentary. Would you be open to that? Wow. Wow. Yeah. That'd be super interesting.
Guys, if you're, yeah, if you, if you guys are listening, it's going, I have ideas for, for, for, uh, Adrian, uh, just like email me or something. Nathan at Nathan, like a.com or Nathan at founder path.com. That'd be really interesting to do this live. The nice thing, Adrian, what you have here is you have something that can be sold. You have a working software product.
It's just a question of distribution. Um, all right. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building plot besides your own?
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Chapter 6: How did SEO play a role in acquiring customers?
I think I already knew it. Consistency and patience pays off. It's something that I've heard other people say that were older, including Gary Vaynerchuk. I think I would just reiterate that whenever I was feeling I've struggled with depression, anxiety, just wanting to get things done faster, wanting to see results faster. I think reiterating that to myself would be encouraging.
Guys, theplot.io launched back in 2015 because his own studio, his own studio built, he was frustrated with how to get video and, you know, feedback on animations effectively from clients. He built it to manage his own work. Now has 400 customers, mainly from an SEO play, which was just super genius, super targeted 400 customers, about 4K in MRR today, but been basically flat the past four years.
So it is consistent, but not growing, right? It's a yin and a yang. Who knows what he'll do next? Probably hang on to it. Keep using it himself. Keep learning it. It's fun to have a side project you can dabble with and experiment on. But in the meantime, I encourage you guys to check it out. Adrian, thanks for taking us to the top.
Thank you, Nathan.