How hype4 CEO MICHAL MALEWICZ grew hype4 to $500K revenue and 7 customers in 2021.

hello everyone my guest today is michael malvette she'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 yep perfect okay there's a lot of folks that are just great builders going from zero to one that have really started you know leaning all into this venture studio model help us understand what hype 4 is doing okay so yeah i started quite a long time ago doing designs and at some point of course it 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 others com other companies that you worked before so the goal for hype 4 was to start by client work obviously because we need 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 so we're kind of what do you mean by that but we're also building uh smaller startups like that when you say you go into education what do you mean by that uh so when i started teaching at the university i basically i started creating like a pdf versions of the classes for the students and they started asking me like uh where what book or what content like are those from and i said that i was just creating them myself so that kind of led to people asking for a book and that led to actually building the book creating the the ebook in uh 15 months and that ebook is currently revenue-wise our biggest product and our biggest sort of selling point at the moment so that's what kind of revenue has the book done sorry how much revenue has the book done uh it's currently at 170 000 in a little over a year that's great how many sales um 4 000 or something like that between three and four because we have a couple of uh external customers not from the platform so it's a little bit hard to calculate because some companies just prefer it that way where can we find this ebook what's the url uh designingui.com okay so designingui.com now keep keep going forward here with the story what's next okay so basically the book was a pretty big success a lot of the us-based universities we know that are using them we know that a class at stanford was actually being taught using the book so we went further and we started doing other things and those other things are culminating right now with my very first video course premiering tomorrow 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 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 e-book and possibly updating it so we're starting an initiative called hype for academy which is gonna be a place for both free and paid content for designers and developers alike and we're actually on like a very uh far stages of building that we're building it all in house because we have like you know designers and developers so we can actually build something that's completely accustomed to our needs sorry how many people do you guys have in house um 12 people currently how many engineers um eighty percent of them actually there's like four designs 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 sigma or envision a better version of envision uh 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 so you don't necessarily have an interest in building a sas play to upsell to your community that's about your courses and your ebooks well in a way we are because the academy is going to be not only about buying courses or ebooks from from that website but it's also going to be a pay monthly platform with a lot of content added for those paying customers well i understand the content play but are you going to build tools for folks at any point software that they can use to execute your design and development you know teachings well not not in that that sort of typical sas sense of being a design tool because there's enough design tools there already so we think that we can actually tackle it from the angle of uh helping people just to understand better to learn better and to use the tools that are already basically there what are some of your favorite tools that you recommend in your ebooks in your courses well that's a tough one because a lot of people use figma right now but i'm not a fan of figma for various reasons i work pretty fast and it just the workflow doesn't work so i work primarily in sketch and we actually built the books in sketch as well so uh that allowed us to iterate very quickly and that allowed us to actually update the books so they're like leaving ebooks with you know the industry is changing so fast that we need to constantly be on top of things and also because i kind of accidentally coined a couple of very popular design trends worldwide it kind of led to also adding these to the book because we have to be you know if i created a term called like neomorph has more glasmorphism that became popular in the design trends or the design again slower say the term uh neomorphism then pneumorphism yeah it's like a new version of skeuomorphism it was very popular in like 2020 it got uh that like thousands of people creating videos and articles on it just after i kind of coined the term and created the very first thing so we wanted to add all that content that we create and add to the community and to the industry to our own books and to our own courses basically so how many people do you have paying you a monthly fee right now for your content or is that not launched yet well that part is not launched yet but as i said we got a thousand people basically a little bit over a thousand people pre-ordered the course in three weeks so how much is the cost per month uh currently it's 35 dollars for just a standard sort of quick pre-order but it's 70 off so they'll pay 35 per month no that's gonna be just one time payment for that first edition of the course and then uh per month we're aiming between five and ten dollars between deciding on like what kind of content they will access uh in the full platform and how many of those initial thousand pre-sales for 35 bucks do you think you'll be able to convert to a five dollar a month sort of plan so you have more stable cash flows to reinvest in your ebooks and of course yeah well we do have uh more than that number of people from various different industries we have uh 15 000 people in our newsletters and in our other channels so i think that we'll be able to actually because five or ten dollars is a lot less than 35 so i think they will be able to convert at least 2 000 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 news that are 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 uh we try to purge it and obviously with like the recent apple changes it might be difficult to to see if people opened it in a short while but for now we try to purge it every few months sketch is your 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 like one other thing and from the typical like tools perspective most of my work is done in something called ia writer which is a writing tool because i'm pretty active on like medium and other writing platforms so ia writer is definitely my go-to tool and for all the videos and youtube stuff final cut so i just...