SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Hype4 Breaks $500k, Massive Design and Dev Community, SaaS Next?
15 Jun 2021
Chapter 1: How much revenue does Hype4 aim to generate this year?
How much revenue do you think Hype4 will do this year total? Well, that depends. We're aiming for a nil, but we'll see.
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. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Michael Malovich.
He's in design and education, building a venture studio called hype4.com. Designer since 1998. He's also a university lecturer and author. Michael, you ready to take us to the top?
Yeah, perfect.
Okay. There's a lot of folks that are just great builders going from zero to one that have really started leaning all into this venture studio model. Help us understand what hype4 is doing.
Okay, so yeah, I started quite a long time ago doing designs. And at some point, of course, obviously, after working in some agencies, you transition to figuring out that you want your own company. And at some point, obviously, you also realize that you don't want your company to be like all those other companies that you worked before.
So the goal for Hype4 was to start by client work, obviously, because we needed to get money from something. But the goal was always to start building our own things. And We started doing startups, a couple of them pretty unsuccessful, but we learned from those failures. And then we went into education and we had huge success there. What do you mean by that?
But we're also building smaller startups.
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Chapter 2: What is the story behind Hype4 and its founding?
And we also released a book for developers called Front End Unicorn. So we're starting to build a community around the company that's not really client-focused as it was, but product-focused and education-focused heavily.
Yeah. So designing UI.com is doing very well. You've now done this playbook with others like StartupBook.com and others. What are you using the audience you're building via these ebook sales and the revenue you're generating? What are you using that all to build long-term? What's the longer-term vision?
So we decided at some point that we needed a long-term goal, which wouldn't be just creating an ebook and possibly updating it. So we're starting an initiative called Hype for Academy, which is going to be a place for both free and paid content for designers and developers alike. And we're actually on a very far stages of building that.
We're building it all in-house because we have designers and developers, so we can actually build something that's completely custom to our needs.
How many people do you guys have in-house?
12 people currently. How many engineers? 80% of them, actually. There's like three or four designers currently only. So mostly engineers.
Got it. And so you're building this content course for what though? Let's say the course is a massive success. You sign up thousands of people, you make half a million dollars in revenue. What's next? I mean, do you see yourself ever building like a Mural or a Figma or a better version of Envision?
Well, not necessarily, but we do know that we can build a better version of an educational platform because I've done the Google course on Coursera and I think that this platform itself, the whole experience of it and the learning experience and the certification and everything, This can be done a lot better. And basically this is what we're doing.
So that course is basically like a test bed for all of our future educational endeavors. And also we actually sold a thousand pre-orders in like three weeks. So it kind of shows that people are really interested in that content that we're providing.
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Chapter 3: How did Michael transition from design to education?
No, that's going to be just one-time payment for that first edition of the course. And then per month, we're aiming between $5 and $10, depending on what kind of content they will access in the full platform.
And how many of those initial 1,000 pre-sales for $35 do you think you'll be able to convert to a $5 a month sort of plan? So you have more stable cash flows to reinvest in your eBooks and courses?
Well, we do have more than that number of people from various different industries. We have 15,000 people in our newsletters and in our other channels. So I think that we'll be able to actually, because $5 or $10 is a lot less than $35. So I think I will be able to convert at least 2000 people in the very initial stages, but possibly we aim for 10 to 15,000 by the end of the year. Very cool.
Yeah. You're building this beautiful community. You mentioned you have 15,000 people on your newsletter. What's the newsletter called?
Well, it's part of the newsletter and connected to the book. So it's called Designing UI. Designing. And how frequently do you send an email out? Every two weeks because we don't really want to spam those people. But we have an idea for the newsletter to not only show our own content in it, but also to show relevant content from other people, but not just links.
But instead, I kind of read those articles myself and then I write what I think about them to give like a context or perspective to people.
That's great. And when you send out an email like that, about how many people open usually?
Between 50% or 55% sometimes around that. So we try to purge it. Obviously, with the recent Apple changes, it might be difficult to see if people opened it in a short while. But for now, we try to purge it every few months. Sketch is one of your favorite tools. Any other design tools you recommend or developer tools you recommend? Well, I use Envision also quite a lot.
So this is also one other thing. And from the typical tools perspective, most of my work is done in something called IA Writer, which is a writing tool because I'm pretty active on Medium and other writing platforms. So IA Writer is definitely my go-to tool. And for all the videos and YouTube stuff, Final Cut.
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Chapter 4: What success has the ebook achieved in terms of revenue?
They're jealous of HubSpot buying the hustle. They're jealous of Outreach buying Sales Hacker. You're seeing this happen more and more where SaaS brands are buying communities led by characters like yourself that put out great content.
If somebody like Envision, one of your favorite tools, came and offered to buy the company and have you lead everything they do that public facing, would you do that deal?
No. Why? It's not that I don't want to kind of grow it in some way, but I still prefer to be bootstrapped. And we actually had some opportunities with our other startups, with our apps that we've been doing to take investment. And we always wanted to actually do it on our own and to build our own thing. Obviously, if the price was like super crazy in a way, then maybe we would even consider it.
But what's super crazy? No, I mean like crazy in terms of like they say in the startup, that sort of kind of money that you don't really need to do much anymore.
So how much would that be for you?
Well, that's a tough question, but probably around five or 10 mil.
Okay. So if Envision said 10 million bucks, Michael, come on, join the team. Let's rock and roll. You'd have to think about that.
Yeah, because for me right now, it's not really about the money because I have a couple of different income streams. So I'm mostly focused on just doing high quality stuff. And it's actually really rewarding because a lot of the people from our community are getting jobs with our help. They're getting actually hired in this economy right now.
And it's kind of funny and also very motivating to see that somebody on the other side of the world that you help is actually doing better, which is in a way kind of 50-50 with the money. It's like really, really a cool way to go forward.
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Chapter 5: How does Hype4 plan to build a community around its products?
How much revenue do you think Hype4 will do this year total?
Well, that depends. We're aiming for a mil, but we'll see.
What did you do last year?
Like a little over half.
Okay. That's great. So it's like your own little agency growing nicely.
Yeah, it's still, it like has year over year growth of about like between 50, 40%. And this year has been like a little bit better than before for a couple of reasons, mostly my growing popularity, I guess that kind of led to more people wanting to talk to us. And also those design trends that I created led to a lot of people wanting their products done in those design trends.
So they started to ask, you know, in the source, at the source, basically.
And last year, how many clients did you work with to make the $500,000 in revenue?
Well, that depends if you're just asking how many clients have I worked personally. No, no, hype four, hype four. Okay, so for the entire company, it was, I think, seven or eight clients. Okay, got it.
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Chapter 6: What is the vision for Hype4 Academy?
I know you don't think about it, but I predict that one day you're going to build a multi-billion dollar SaaS company. You just don't know it yet.
We're building a couple of SaaS products in the background, as I said. They're not really that big yet, but they are kind of based on our needs as designers and developers. So not, as you said, like a typical design tool, but something that will be helpful for both designers and developers and freelancers. So I can't really...
I can't really say about anything about that right now because it's still like in a very early alpha, but it's really cool. And yeah, it's going to be an additional something that I want to promote. And when we launch, it's kind of, it's going to be really cool.
The highest purchasing point in any SaaS company is usually the pass off between design over to development, right? So if you're building a tool to make that, it's more easy process. There's a big opportunity there. There's plenty like Avacode. growing faster.
I bet if there's investors listening right now, you're going to hit up a bunch of them begging, going, Michael, please tell me what's the idea and how do we get involved? And you're going to say, we're bootstrapped, we're cashflow positive, and we're loving it.
Yeah, that's the whole thing. That's like, we don't have to worry about meeting somebody else's deadlines or expectations. We're just doing our own stuff and trying to innovate as well. Like, you know, with both the design trends and with the way that we're doing both the courses, the books themselves. So it's like, it's a lot different than what's typically on the market.
And I like it because that's kind of, we have the freedom to do what we want.
Michael, let's wrap up with the famous five. Besides your own books, what's your favorite business book?
business book uh from like the recent memory i would say sell like crazy by sabri suvi number two they're a ceo you're following or studying sorry is there a ceo you're following or studying um currently from a couple of local companies like my friends that are ceos at companies right here i'm mostly following them because i can then ask them direct questions and i need one of them
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