Chapter 1: What is the main focus of The Top podcast?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per talk. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination.
We just broke our 100,000 unit sold mark.
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Yesterday, you guys heard from artist Molly Han, who hit an all-time low in the early 2000s. Then she started using this clever tractic, that's a combination of trick and tactic, every morning to make 28,000 bucks per month from her sketches. You're not gonna believe what she's sketching.
Okay, Top Tribe, our guest today is Misha Mikhailian, and he is a serial entrepreneur with 22 years of experience, yet that's almost as old as I am. No offense, Misha. Anyways, he's got eight startups to date. He loves creating game-changing businesses that contribute to the evolution of humanity, and this guy is an animal. You're about to hear it in a second.
His most recent company, Intently, is a software platform that replaces online ads with inspirational images chosen by the user. Look, with over 25% of internet users using ad blocking software, the vision that Misha has for Intently is to create a new paradigm in the $150 billion online ad industry by giving users control of who advertises to them. Misha, are you ready to take us to the top?
Ow! Yes, I am, Nathan. How are you, brother? I am doing good. It's good to have you. I told you. I said I want the Misha war cry before we get started. So there it was, folks. You heard it here. Not first, but you heard it here. Misha, walk us through. Well, first off, I mean, look, we got to know each other through some mastermind groups. You're a ball of energy.
You know, I kind of took a position of let me sit like two people down for Misha so he doesn't ask me questions and intimidate me, but I can still suck up all of his cool energy and his strategy. So walk people through 22 years of experience, eight startups. What space were those startups in?
Yeah. And just so I don't date myself too much, I started when I was a teenager. So I got a very early start. How old are you now? I'm 37.
Okay. Got it. Got it.
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Chapter 2: How did Misha Mikhailian start his entrepreneurial journey?
Half of them were in the tech space. I also scaled a chain of tanning salons here in San Diego and day spas, which was a franchise business, brick and mortar, totally different type of business. You know, I have some experience in real estate. I had an investment real estate company for a while, but my passion has always been tech and tech and marketing specifically.
I've been really focused on the marketing customer acquisition side of the businesses I run.
And are they, okay, great. So are those the marketing you're doing for businesses? Are they typically like software companies? Are they physical, physical locations? Are they consumer products? What industry?
All over. I actually ran an internet marketing agency for 10 years, which I exited last year. And we had predominantly software-type businesses we were marketing for, but everything from software to information products to just major brand-type campaigns. So it was really across the board. But my core specialty and interest is in software and platforms. Got it.
creating software platforms, type of, you know, social platforms, things like that.
Hey, I got a lot of feedback in episode number 18 when I interviewed Franklin Cole. He started off as an underwear entrepreneur and then built an agency where he's like managing 40 million bucks in revenue for some consumer brands. And one of the questions people asked me was like, Nathan, how do you value an agency? You said you just exited yours last year. How much did you exit it for?
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Chapter 3: What unique solution does Intently offer in the ad industry?
And what was the multiple on like, how'd you negotiate the sale price?
Yeah, so it was, you know, the agency world, to be honest, it's really tough to get a good exit in the agency world unless you get to tremendous scale. We were just south of 5 million in revenue. And, you know, typically you get like 2 to 3x EBITDA on an agency unless you have like you know, 5, 10, 20 plus million in revenue.
And there's like a real strategic fit for some of these larger public agencies or groups. So, you know, it was a good enough exit to set me up for the next three to five years while I scale up intently. And, you know, but it's the end of the day. I don't think I'd ever do an agency business again. And I wouldn't recommend it to any entrepreneur because it's the hardest business model ever.
sell sell sell right keep your clients don't lose them you end up making a lot of other people a lot of money and you don't see very much of the glory yeah i hate that do not sign me up but hey just for the top tribe listening if you want to just you might be thinking about an agency what what misha just said was important so they were doing about five million in top line revenue in the agency world you typically can sell for two to three x ebitda
So before we've articulated that software as a service companies are exiting for like crazy multiples on top line revenue, the agency world, it's after all of your costs and everything. So EBITDA stands for earnings before interest taxes, depreciation, and amortization. It's the cash that's left over after expenses.
So not a great business model, but it sounds like Misha, you're onto the next great thing. Tell us about Intently.
Yeah, so Intently, I'm so fired up about Intently. It's basically a platform where with a simple plugin takes you like 10 seconds to set up. You can get rid of every single ad you see when you browse the internet and you replace those ads with any kind of content you want. And most
of our power users are replacing their ads with inspirational content and quotes that are specifically geared to help them connect to their goals and to connect to the person they want to show up as in the world. And it reprograms your subconscious.
So instead of seeing all these ads that are targeting you, you're basically able to advertise to yourself who you want to be and how you want to show up. And it starts to impact just how you behave and how you act and the decisions you make throughout the day. you know, when you're really being intentional about how you use Intently. So that's the core product.
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Chapter 4: How does Intently plan to engage users and grow its platform?
That was on, that's, that was our top line. Oh, five is top line. Yeah.
So, okay. Well, we'll call it, we'll call it something more humble. We'll call it more humble. But anyways, I don't, I don't see pricing on intently. How do you charge? How do you make money?
Yeah. So, you know, right now we're funded by investors and we have multiple business. I've raised a half million in capital and I'll probably raise another million in the next quarter. And I'm looking to hit a 10 million series a early next year.
Okay. I really want to, can I dig there for a sec? Yeah. And the tribe's going, Nathan, like, just do it. Don't ask. But anyways, 500 K you want to go up to a million. Are you doing this on a convertible note or are you selling equity in the business?
I'm using a safe note, which is very similar to a convertible note. It's basically convertible equity, so it doesn't have the same legal constraints of a note, but it functions and works exactly the same way Y Combinator pioneered it, and it's been gaining a lot of traction and popularity. I think it's the best way to raise money early stage in the seed round.
Is this literally the one they have on their site, the template? Yeah. Okay, great. I will link to that in the show notes at nathanlaca.com forward slash the top 47. Misha, that note though, I mean, it still has a cap, an interest rate. I mean, all the basic things, right?
No interest rate because it's convertible equity. So they're basically buying an option. But it's still there's there's multiple versions of the safe note. The one I'm using has a cap with no discount. So I'm basically setting a cap that they'll convert at.
That's smart.
And, you know, the thing how that works is you as an investor, you get to you get to basically piggyback on all the rights and preferences that are negotiated by the series. You know, the big guys at Series A down the road. You know, which is easy. Like when you're a startup, you don't want to spend a lot of money on legal costs.
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Chapter 5: What challenges did Misha face while running his agency?
Make it as vague as you want.
Yeah, you know... We're less than 10,000 users at this point in our beta, and we're going to be going out of the gate in September with a strategy to get to over 100,000 users by the end of the year. So we're...
And real quick, Misha, before I get into my personal favorite part of the show, walk me through, what's the number one way you're driving users right now? Is it interviews like this?
We're actually not driving users right now. All our users have come to our product organically.
i made one facebook post about six months ago when we first launched this and to to a beta group and then the beta group were able to invite their friends and it just kind of took off from there so um we've been we've had a pretty steady growth rate in our beta without doing anything like we didn't even build our ui to be real you know really create a really strong reality coefficient and you know right now
We're doing a lot of interviews like this to prepare for our launch. So within six weeks, we're going to be sending out several million emails to potential users to basically activate our initial user base.
Well, look, Apple is loving the top. They're featuring it all over the place. Everybody's talking about it. So hopefully this drives you a lot of meaningful downloads. Okay, Top Tribe, I want to give you more brain juice this month, totally free. If you're loving this episode, text the word Nathan, N-A-T-H-A-N, to 33444 for your chance to win a prize on an upcoming
coming show the next prize is a pack of 14 business books valued at 250 bucks if you bought them on amazon and these books are the ones that mark zuckerberg thinks every entrepreneur must read now misha do you know what time it is what time is it dude it's time for the famous five are you ready all right all right number one misha what is your favorite business book
Oh my, I just got done reading Elon Musk's autobiography, not autobiography, but his biography. It was a fascinating book. I just, I just love the perspective of looking at just an entrepreneur who I just honor and respect so much. And just seeing how like, as entrepreneurs, we all have our like magical gifts, you know, like he has his gifts that makes him so successful.
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Chapter 6: How does Misha plan to raise capital for Intently?
Just find the mentors to help teach you the ways. I waited till I was in my late 20s to find my first mentor and I lost out on a good 10 years. I mean, that's when my career really started taking off. I got lucky early on when I was a teenager, but I had a rough time in my mid 20s. So, you know, that was what I would definitely tell myself.
Well, guys, if you want me to grill Misha more on how to build mentors, how to fundraise the tune of a million, 10 million bucks, go to the show notes at nathanlaca.com forward slash the top 47 and tell me in the comments that you want him back again when he launches intently out of beta. Now, before then, Misha, if people want to follow you online, where can they connect with you?
connect with me on LinkedIn, connect with me on Facebook. I just set up a new Twitter account at Intently CEO. So I'm happy to connect with you guys on any of those platforms.
Well, Misha, we will link to those in the show notes. So again, from meeting each other at a mastermind to building a $5 million agency, now raising millions of dollars. Thank you for taking us to the top. See you, man.
See you. Thank you.
All right, I love tomorrow's guests. So you guys have to join me in episode number 48 tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. It is with Jon Naster. Now this podcaster gets 8,000 downloads per episode and he landed a copy blogger partnership. You won't want to miss it.
This podcast is produced by Oration Recording and is sponsored by Eddy Communications and Roanoke, Virginia's Grandin CoLab, the premier workspace for entrepreneurs and growing companies.
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