How MarkMe LLC CEO Toni Mumo grew to $660K revenue with a 6 person team in 2025.

guys make me icons got started with a WhatsApp group based in Kenya he's teaching folks graphic design via his application he spent a150 on Facebook ads to get his first 102 beta users 64 are still active on a daily basis he's making sure those metrics look good and then he's launching a pay wall coming up here in January for 10 bucks a month they're about $30 for a quarter uh for a 3-month period he raised $18,000 in preed funding last year is now scaling with his team of six hey folks my my guest today is Tony mumo he is working on education technology at markm icons.com Tony you ready to take us to the top I'm ready to take you to the top all right who uses Mark me icons today uh today our users are mainly beta users uh we are looking for people who are interested in uh courses like advertising photography web design and business skill set which is our first process that we launched with so we actually started uh teaching people in WhatsApp groups this was the test pilot for our concept to see whether we can use a chat room feature to educate people so we did some Facebook ads got about 100 students in our WhatsApp groups so after testing it on WhatsApp is when we saw that it is a viable product if we give it full attention and that's when we started building M me icons in 2021 December and we finally launched a beta this year so that's a bit background of what where we've gotten so far and how many beta users do you have today today we have 102 beta users and 64 active devices as of today that's great um 64 active devices how do you define an active device an active device for us is a user who at least checks one session in a day of the seven sessions that you have available so that uh ranks as a daily active user for us and it's a good metric for us to gauge the effectiveness of our classes and uh the engagement has been low since we started but we at least able to see uh people clicking on our classes what's your most popular class today to our most popular class is web design skills and this because in Kenya technology is really evolving and uh there's a lot of interest in websites in software so cess web design is the best place for someone to start their Journey especially if they don't know coding because for me codeless web design it was my first attempt to building platforms so C design is a for course in Kenya and you offer courses like talk like a boss business communication create better designs and graphic design my photos are lit so you teach people about advertising photography and you're based fully 100% in uh Kenya correct yes yes is only available in Kenya as of today so it sounds like your first version was actually just a WhatsApp group is that right yes yes that was our how did you get the first 50 people on the WhatsApp group Facebook ads uh so we have had a quite a journey before we came to uh technology we first started with video marketing and uh during the video marketing phase we really got to understand how to use Facebook ads and in Kenya Facebook ads are really really affordable for as low as 120 Shillings which is about a dollar we can run an ad so it was a platform for us to get to know how to Target people within Kenya especially in different provinces uh because Marketing in Kenya has to be really targeted depending on which Community you are addressing so during that phase we really got to understand Facebook ads so we just uh collected that uh information that we had did some Facebook ads for WhatsApp groups and that's how we've got our first 100 students on WhatsApp how much did you have to spend to get one student on WhatsApp we spent around 500 Shilling 5,000 Shillings uh during that phase so that would be at about 50 50 50 Shillings yeah 50 Shillings are user so that would be less than a dollar maybe some cents okay so maybe like a $150 per user that signed up and you were just using your own saved money to run these ads or did you raise capital I was using my salary at the time I worked for a company called Sami group as a marketer so with my salary I was able to channel that money to my company and uh that is how we got off so at least I've had the experience of an employee and right now where we are I'm able to understand my team a lot better 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 287 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 valuation 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 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of ours and this was bootstrapped from F friends and family so I met the developer when I was uh working in SAM Group uh so he took a lot of interest in our WhatsApp group classes and how they were growing and at the time uh with the money I had he was a lifesaver really and took on our Concepts and with the money that we afforded at the time we were able to to start the project at the time I didn't understand how slow it can be to build an app we how much how much did you pay him to build the app 150,000 Shillings how many USD is that that would Shillings Shillings 150,000 Shillings would be about ,000 us yes yes yes so which was uh really afford was the most affordable also as a friend so for start for us it was a perfect situation which at least got a project off the ground we saw first line of code and we were very when do you when do you plan to start charging or are are you already charging for the app uh currently we're not charging for the app we intend to start charging on 7th January uh currently there is a mobile app Awards going on in Kenya and we've been nominated uh in the best education category so we have we are using this opportunity to gain some creators for our platform uh during the beta what we learned was uh that we have a whole set of users who would like to use our feachers for their own classes and once we learn this we saw that we can uh give more uh creative ability in our platform and uh we're working on that update currently and 7th January is when we are planning to at least commercialize the how are you funding right now continuing to pay your developer friend to make updates to the application or is he working for Equity uh he's not working for Equity currently we have a venture Venture Capital investor called aex Ventures so next Ventures met us last year on September and they were able to invest 1.8 million which is about uh $18,000 if I'm not wrong on .8 million Shillings so that is the money that has kept us going up until now and they're a very crucial partner in what we do and they're really doing a good job of investing in very early technology in the country how much of that money the 18,000 USD how much of that money you still have in the bank of that we have about 500,000 in the bank okay so that that is what is 500,000 uh you have about 3,300 USD still on the bank yes that's great so how much are you going to charge when you launch the pay wall in in January the initial idea for pricing was about 45 uh 4500 Shillings for a thre Monon cost and as we are recruiting creators we're advising them to keep their classes within that price range at least for the first first few months of the product because affordability is one thing we're really trying to push for here in Kenya and 4500 Shillings is where we would like to start pricing our courses for three month duration they're starting with short courses very cool are you still getting users from Facebook apps or ads or do you have another way to get users now currently Facebook ads are currently our only marketing uh tool at the moment we are not currently running more ads we are still working on the product a little bit more so we stopped running our ads about two months into the Beta so that we focus on updating it and pushing a better product once we had gathered the information we needed and Tony is it just still two people on the team you and the engineer no no currently we are a team of six people six people what do the others do we have an analytics and and a design manager so he takes care of our statistics at the same time he's a very gifted artist he's actually the one who has produced the mne icons you can see yeah so he's the one who designs our avatars and keeps our brand alive uh the other employees are front end developer so we are currently using flatter flow to uh keep uh improve our workflow and uh we have uh me and uh he's our creative director so we to work on flatter flow which enables our work to a little bit faster uh my other team member is a chief legal officer so she's the one who connected me to a next Ventures I was able to help me negotiate uh a favorable agreement with them and then uh we have a they have an education manager so in our beta up there's something called lesson Parks lesson parks are already made content for users to consume so education manager is able to write uh got it yeah he's really good at writing so he generates such content and then we have the developer so that is that team I have right now we're rooting for you we hope the payall launch goes well in January you have beautiful artwork you got your first 100 users 64 active on a daily basis Tony let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite book The Bible number two is there a CEO you're following or studying uh maruka bug number three what's your favorite online tool for building make me icons flat FL number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night about six hours and what's your situation married single kids I um dating parents who dating no kids no kids yeah all right and how old are you I'm 25 last question what's something you wish you knew five years ago when you were 20 not everything has been to work out and this is my purpose in life and I can't fail guys make me icons got started with a WhatsApp group based in Kenya he's teaching folks graphic design via his application he spent $150 on Facebook ads to get his first 102 beta users 64 still active on a daily basis he's making sure those metrics look good and then he's launching a pay wall coming up here in January for 10 bucks a month they're about $30 for a quarter for a 3-month period he raised $118,000 in precede funding last year here is now scaling with his team of six Tony thank you for taking us to the top thank you so much as well one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1 p.m. central it's called Shark Tank for SAS we call it deal or bust one founder comes on 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