How Digital Seat Media CEO Cameron Fowler grew Digital Seat Media to $1.6M revenue and 44 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is cameron fowler he's the co-founder and ceo of digital seat media a real-time fan engagement technology platform connecting fans to brands sports teams and artists through qr codes and nfl technology you can follow along at digitalseat.com cameron you're ready to take it to the top absolutely all right so who who are you selling to assume you're selling to not the sports fan but rather the the sports team right yeah so we uh sell into the sports team or the venue itself uh so that we can install our digital seat tags and fans can engage with them interesting so i mean can you maybe name one or two or these like nfl stadiums or soccer stadiums or we run the gamut so a lot of collegiate stadiums so we have a partnership with learfield img we do oklahoma oklahoma state baylor washington the rose bowl but then we have some professional partners on the side like uh the oklahoma city thunder utah jazz that are both in the nba and we're having discussions we haven't announced it yet but we've got a major league baseball partner um that we're getting ready to install so we kind of cover all sports and walk me through that sales process to you know the baseball stadium what's that sound like what are they getting yeah so um it's you know baseball football basketball whenever we go in we are giving them the opportunity and saying look you can work with nine different vendors that do things you can work with a vendor that allows real-time trivia you can work with the vendor that does food delivery you can work with a vendor that provides enter to win and lead collection but with digital seat you can work with one company that does all of that and will take that load off you so um we go in there and we say let us install our digital seat tags on your armrests then you can pick and choose what modules you want to use to provide to fans for them to engage so we have 31 different modules to choose from so a team at any given point can say hey for this game i want to do an enter to win a sweepstakes giveaway um live game stats and the ability for fans to purchase tickets to the next game and nft sales and next game it might be completely different so that's really our value proposition is maximize that value from the seat so instead of just selling a ticket now you can collect revenues on food delivery on merchandise sales on nft sales things like that so just be clear there's like a qr code you would literally install in the seat fans are instructed to scan the qr code and once they do that the venue or the team controls what that founder sees on sorry what the attendee sees on that access code qrl that's correct so we program the tags down to the individual seat so the student section at um smu might have a completely different content experience than the people that are sitting in the 500 seats that's really the value because the brands now mercedes doesn't care about an eight-year-old kid that's watching a football game but they do care about the guys sitting in the 500 seat so now they can target that content very interesting okay and what i'm sure there's a massive range but on average what are these venues or sports teams paying per month or per year to use digital seat um it is a range it depends on the size you can have some smaller venues that are paying fifteen thousand dollars a year twenty thousand dollars a year and you can have some big ones that are paying six figures it depends on the number of seats and then also the number of venues so um not surprisingly you have some giant venues that might only have 10 events a year and then you have some that we're working with one right now that has a hundred and i think 20 140 a year so um it's especially if they have concerts rolling through and things of that nature well that's why i asked you how you price what utility metric you price against because you don't if you did number events well if there's only one event that's hard to price against if you do number of seats well that's interesting but what if they're not all full if you do number of attendees live at the event but then what's the frequency of the events like what's the one like god lego block you build around it's an art more than a science um really it is uh looking at the numbers because obviously even if you can't go to a stadium that that says okay we seat 80 000 we go well you only have 40 000 people here so we're only going to do 40 000 seats because maybe your team gets better maybe they get worse so we have to base it on the number of seats and then we normally start with a flat number of events and say okay we know you're going to activate for 10 if you want to increase it to 20 30 50 as you grow then you can do that but let's start here oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're going to get a different valuation a vc is going to pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell a whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when i hover over here right so the teal is what a vc would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on youtube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of sas valuations than what you can get now inside of founderpath and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform i hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview so just give me just for example to make it really real for my audience i'm a 50 000 seat nfl stadium with 10 home games a year that's probably going to run me what 50 000 a year right about probably it's somewhere between 50 to 70 000 depending on what modules you're using yeah okay very interesting okay cool get put this on the timeline for me when did you guys launch the business so we met uh sullivan my co-founder and i we worked together about 13 years we came up with the idea back in 2013 2014 um because we were working on facial recognition software and consumer behavior analytics i grew up in texas big sports fan and so i said matt it's crazy that we can trigger content based on a person's face and age and gender and all this stuff but when i go to sports it's the same advertising that it's been for the last 40 years um that was in 2013. i said we can probably program something down to the armrest so you can scan it and get exclusive content so the problem was back then is that originally it was let's put nfc chips in the tags yeah and people can tap it um and let's put qr codes on top as a stop gap but way back then qr code scanning wasn't native on ios devices you still had to download an app in order to do it and so if we were going to ask them to do that you might as well ask them to download the team app um and so we waited until 2018 when when qr code scanning became natively unlocked on ios devices and on android and that's when we said hey okay we need to go and see what we can do in this market so you weren't building the tool then you weren't doing anything 2014 to 2018 you had a full-time job doing something else we were working together doing technology consulting but we we were testing tags so what we were doing was getting different printing materials learning about adhesives working with chemist and saying okay how do these tags work outside for three and four years at a time how...