How Mayday CEO Jeremy Bell grew Mayday to $1.4M revenue with a 13 person team in 2025.

hey folks my guest today is jeremy bell he's the founder and ceo of mayday previous he was the founder of wattage.io and partner at tian plus lax which is acquired by facebook also helped create the facebook portal based up in toronto jeremy you're ready to take to the top yeah thanks for having me you bet man all right what is mayday i believe you're competing in a very competitive space i think yeah so i mean if you look at it um from kind of the surface it looks like we're building you know a calendar or a scheduling tool and there's definitely a lot of products like that in the space but what we're really building is much more like an assistant um we're creating a piece of software that helps people spend time in better ways it's something that learns what your priorities are and how you spend your time and it works to ensure that your schedule and your priorities are in alignment so it's more like an assistant than it is like a just a regular calendar so what if the only rule i wanted to feed into my scheduling was i want as much blank time on my calendar as possible mayday will just cancel all my meetings for me so right now we're certainly not going to just blindly go and remove meetings from your from your schedule uh the goal is more if you think of your your calendar as something that fills up over time like if you think about a few weeks out your calendar is likely pretty pretty empty um what we're doing is building something that as new things come into your schedule is smarter about where they go it's smarter about like how and when they're scheduled how many things are being scheduled around a particular thing um so that as your schedule starts to fill up it is more in alignment and if you think of like a puzzle all the pieces are in the right place when your day starts to go a little sideways it'll automatically block out that time or try to protect it so that someone else can't take it or that you don't find yourself in a scenario where you've over committed um but as it stands right now we don't have any plans just to blank and go and like remove stuff uh because i mean people's schedules and calendars are are important right the way they spend their time the things that they've booked uh we certainly don't want to be in a scenario where we remove things that were not intended to be removed yeah i mean my biggest pimple right now with calendar is i always i basically want to optimize for as many free chunks of time chunks big chunks of 20 minutes of free time is useless because it's just context switching you know three hours of free time is valuable uh so like batching stuff is really difficult so right now we use acuity and all we do is we schedule for like an you know one hour for podcast interviews and when that hour fills we add three more slots on before or after it to batch it but it's a pain in the butt to log in every time to do that it sounds like maybe you can do that with some rule based system or something yeah like what we're building um again if you think of like a really great an assistant that assistant would have that context that kind of macro view um so there's really a few kind of parts to it um mayday is an app that you use on your phone on your desktop it's intention is to replace the calendar that you use every day um the in the cloud though is where we're doing a lot of the intelligence it's where a lot of the analysis is happening um and it's how we look at what's coming in and what's going on your schedule and we start making changes based on what we see we map out your uh we analyze like how you spent time and also who you spend time with uh we also have a feature that we call uh smart tags where you can for instance you can create like a scheduling link where you've you've created some things behind the scenes where you've tagged it essentially saying anyone who schedules something treat this meeting like this and with that smart tag you can assign rules and like budgets and buffer times and other things like that so that as you're scheduling things the times that are made available are reflecting of those rules so that you don't need to micromanage your schedule like you shouldn't have to go in and change all the different rules as your calendar fills up like a really great assistant that assistant will be doing it for you so that you can trust that when you you know give that link to someone to schedule it's taken care of understood want to spend time right yeah okay i think you guys you guys all audience understands the product now which is great uh let's dive a bit more into the sort of economics here so what is this for a consumer or a business is going to pay for 100 seats right off the bat yeah i mean the the reality is the answer is yes to both of that um we've taken a kind of bottom bottoms up approach where we're building this for individuals in the sense that managing your time is a hyper personal thing uh so you you the individual needs to want to and love to use the product as we scale i mean it's uh so much of how you spend time is with other people like the things that you schedule in your calendar often with co-workers and other people that you you know that that are either at work or business related uh so we will we have teams functionality that's coming and this will be there will be teams offering a company like offerings as well so short answer is if you want to use it individually there's an option for that uh there'll be a free option there'll be a paid option and then there'll be a teams option 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 gonna get a different valuation a vc is gonna pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're gonna do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the 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 to 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 we'll 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 what what is the average paying customer pay today well right now we're in a closed beta so no one's paying anything all right revenue how are how many folks are on the data list uh we've got we've got tens of thousands i don't know if i'm ready to share the exact number yet but i mean who cares i mean who cares right it's a beta list but what is important is how you're building it right so how are you how are you building such a big beta list what's the tactic yeah so the way we've been we've been building out the list has been it's predominantly it's been organic there's been a lot of word of mouth some of the people that are in the we do have a closed beta those that are using it are also referring co-workers and stuff that comes through that process um we also have set up a well described as like a social listening kind of program where we have some things set up uh that are looking for people who are tweeting and posting stuff on reddit and linkedin and those those messages that are talking about things that are related to what we're building um those get brought to us and then we usually respond to them um in those respective channels...