How hype4 CEO MICHAL MALEWICZ grew 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 used four tools if there's somebody listening right now that's building a tool like envision or mural they might be thinking about how do we build our own community they're jealous of hubspot buying the hustle they're jealous of outreach buying sales hacker right you're seeing this happen more and more where sas brands are buying communities led by characters like yourself right that put out great content if somebody like envisioned one of your favorite tools came and offered to buy the company right and have you lead everything they do that's public facing would you do that deal no it's not 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 uh wanted to actually do it on our own and to build our own thing obviously if the price was like super crazy in in a way then maybe we would even consider it but what's super crazy no i mean like crazy in terms of uh like uh 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 uh that's a tough question but probably around five or ten 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 because like for me right now it's not really about the money because i have like a couple of different income streams so i'm most 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 you know that like 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 helped is actually you know doing better which is uh in a way kind of 50 50 with the money it's like really really a cool way to go forward michael twitter wants me to ask you to break down your revenue streams so what's your number one revenue stream currently well currently it's uh the book sales course pre-orders combined with a a little bit of uh like on-demand classes done for some companies okay and then on the second part is uh the sort of hype for company revenue which is i'm not really taking a lot from there i'm just kind of just taking like a very small salary just to to sort of you know keep me going but it's not really like a huge thing but i have a couple of small style you're talking like five grand a month something like that well a little bit less than that even okay but i have a couple of even smaller revenue streams like uh every month medium pays me like fifteen hundred dollars and then uh youtube pays me a little bit more every month because the channel is growing so a lot of different like little how much from youtube like 100 bucks uh currently between six and seven wow okay so okay this is super interesting now how does hype four make money well hype force still works mostly for clients for like 80 percent of the time and so we have clients basically we've been doing this for a long time often as like a subcontractor for larger companies so we had the opportunity to work on the like big fortune 500 brands and we've done hundreds of projects literally in the last it's like a development it's like a dev shop to design plus development yeah interesting how many people work at height four twelve yeah twelve nice we have a couple of extra people around the company if we need somebody very specialized in something then they can just join in for a couple of months that's cool how much revenue do you think hype 4 will do this year total uh well that depends we're aiming for for a meal but we'll see what'd you do last year um like a little over half okay that's that's that's great so it's like your own little agency growing nicely yeah it's it's still it like has a year-over-year growth uh 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 popular dozen revenue well that depends if you're just asking how many clients have i worked personally because i don't like for hyped for how many okay so yeah for for the entire company it was uh i think seven or eight clients okay got it that makes a lot of sense very cool listen this is exciting stuff i love that you're building community so fast you've got the agency i know you don't think about it but i predict that one day you're going to build a multi-billion dollar sas company you just don't know it yet well we're building a couple of sas products in the background as i said they're not really that big yet but they are kind of uh 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 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 sas companies 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 avocado growing fast there 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 cash flow 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 the 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 beside your own books what's your favorite business book business book uh from like the recent memory i would say sell like crazy by sub recipe 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 uh well my friend daniel has a medical startup and i'm following his adventures in that area because they're growing pretty fast as well what's the name of his startup maridesk metadesk very good number four what's your favorite online tool for building a business besides your own um for uh for building the business in what way type 4 like name a tool that you guys use a ton of hype for that you really like besides envision well that's that's actually tough because like we we tried asana we tried notion and they're not really that perfect for us in like there is always either something missing or they're too slow or they're not really that well connected so i would say the one tool that doesn't really uh that does work every time is slack slack number four how many hours of sleep do you get every month um seven plus and what's your situation married single kids uh married without kids and living by the beach so whenever it's sun out i just take a break and go some surfing and whatever where what beach where are you north of poland sopot i lived in warsaw but then when the company grew a bit i just uh bought a house close to the beach i love that and how old are you 38 and a half 38 nice last question what's something you wishing you when you were 20 michael probably to know what i know now guys hyped for a combination of a massive community of designers and developers plus their own agency did half a million dollars in revenue last year hoping to break a million this year but michael has other revenue streams he sold over 170 000 of his ebook helping designers developers etc he's launching more ebooks more courses to keep growing his community they've got some internal sas stuff working but he's a little bit coy on it we'll see what happens next michael thanks for taking us to the top perfect thank you one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any 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