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 we found that to be a pretty effective method it doesn't scale like i don't think this will you know work for that much longer um but it's been a perfect kind of you know slow kind of using the tool are using to do this the social listening it's all it's all built in um it's a custom thing that that i built using zapier and slack and um i mean those are really kind of the two main things and then and then i respond directly in whatever channel is so if it's so it's like this if tweet with men favorites eq greater than 300 and mention time management yeah we're looking for things that we're looking for phrases and things that they're talking about that are relevant so it's it's a pretty kind of set of custom strings that we're you know we're filtering things by with audience though right so minimum 100 likes or minimum five retweets whatever you got it you got it interesting very interesting very compelling so you're an engineer then by trade my i started my career as an engineer but that was many many many days or years ago um my background's more design and product actually ah okay interesting when did you write the first line of code or your team write the first line of code for mayday it was probably about mid 2019 i think is when we really started diving into it 2019. okay so you're still pre-revenue today which means you are either really rich and you're funding losses for a bit or you've raised capital it's i mean it's a bit of well i mean i wouldn't say i'm rich by any stress but we were we were good at um at bootstrapping and just being very very um tight with how we spent the money in the early days we did back we have raised funds um we just actually closed a um seed round so i raised a three million dollar seed round that we closed just at the end of um of of last year's right right before the holidays we closed that uh that round uh-huh and would you do a pre-seed round as well um we did a friends and family round that you could call a precede like it basically was a combination of funds from when was that some small funds here in canada and uh uh some some friends in time when was that uh i got kind of mid 2019 is what i did the first little bit we did in two tranches and then the second one was uh probably about mid 20 it's probably like yeah i was probably about mid-2020 okay and what you were talking like 500k here a million or what uh the total the total uh amount in the u.s uh was about 750 i think okay interesting and so it sounds like you're able to use your past experience as a vetted entrepreneur who sold the company to facebook right to sort of raise this money hopefully on terms that didn't dilute you too badly yeah correct like so my um you know to kind of clarify like when i was at uh tnn locks which was which was acquired by facebook i had actually left to start my um first startup just before that happened so i didn't partake in the in that like that exit um was it your company or you were an employee there i was i was a partner there so i uh john lacks and jeff the hands of the t han and lax uh were the two that founded it i joined um shortly there after they had started it so i i was there from pretty much the beginning but uh but it's definitely it was definitely their company mm-hmm and and you i mean was that the story i mean i want to get in your personal financial situation but did you make enough there where you have whatever a million two million dollar buffer you can sort of do whatever you want as as the next swing at the startup bat um no so when i left that one um i started my first startup i mean that was again entirely bootstrapped like i didn't i didn't participate in that exit whatsoever yeah i raised a bit of money and then ended up exiting on that one and sold it to a company called precision nutrition um made you know i basically made all of our existing investors and myself like whole so it wasn't like a huge liquidity event by any stretch enough that it was a good learning experience where no one walked away losing any money um coming out of that though i to be frank i had a bit of crypto but i had uh and there was a little bit of money that i had that i was able to pay basically myself while i worked through the the the little bit up front um that kind of kept me going and then uh then we raised the friends and family around to kind of do it properly all right so what's the full team size today how many people there are 13 of us i think we just hired someone actually there's another person starting on monday so i think it's going to be 14 on monday and how many engineers uh it's about half of the team is engineering a little bit more actually now and so imagine people listening going okay this guy launched in 2019 he's built start-ups before they've got 10 000 on the waitlist like what is he waiting for when's the paywall go up yeah so one of the challenging and interesting things i think about building what we're doing is so there's there's calendars that exist already right like there's an expectation of what the product can do um so the surface area is actually quite broad in terms of features and functionality we're walking this line between like what are the things that people need and um what are the unique things that are going to truly set us apart and like really like build our business and you know build our moat if you will uh and one of the things we learned early on i didn't want to build another calendar i think the world needed another calendar but when you get into time management and the things that are going on it's a really high touch thing we heard from a lot of our early users they're like wow this is really great i love what you're building here but i need to be able to see my schedule or book a meeting or change a schedule and the idea of having to jump between different products was not great so we we kind of realized that if we were going to truly achieve the things that we were setting out to achieve we had to build the whole thing um so that's what we did we really we started on mobile it was a kind of a companion to your calendar uh and now we've built a full it's on desktop it's on mobile um there's a lot of features and functionality that are already done but there's still a lot of stuff that we think needs to be really there before you can truly like i think make it available to everyone um so we're taking an approach that i think is very similar to like the way that like uh like superhuman went as an example yeah this is exactly i mean this is exactly superhuman email mayday calendar uh direct comparison so i mean do you have a guess of what you think the paywall might look like in a timeline on when you think you might launch it yeah we're gonna we're definitely gonna be launching later this year um i don't know if we're gonna completely remove the wall and let everyone in i think we'll probably still open up this will be a waitlist and we'll still open it up more while we continue to build stuff out but start monetizing um with what we've got uh so i mean the objective or the uh the plan is to definitely get to monetization sooner than later i don't want us to you know this is not gonna be sustainable if we just kind of keep doing you know this kind of path um but on the flip side like if you look at if i if you look at what superhuman's done they've also been very methodical about how you roll it out how you let people in just because the expectations of what the product can do is just so important like if you mess up someone's schedule like there are real world ramifications to that and we want to ensure that we don't burn those bridges with early users as well so yep yep interesting well look we'll see what happens uh certainly reading for you now are you there's a lot of ways to reverse engineer how you want your first paywall to perform one approach is to say okay what's the number one usage usage activation metric on the app stack rank every user and then say you only want one percent to pay and then you set the paywa at that usage limit so maybe it's 50 new meetings per week another is to just say we don't care if it's one percent paying that see the paywall or 20 to see the paywall anyone that adds more than three meetings per week sees the paywall so are you taking sort of a feature based approach to the paywall or like a percent of your user base approach to the paywall we've been in we've been investigating both of them i think one of the interesting things that we have in front of us is that with calendaring and scheduling tools you can create and build a habit with someone there's a routine but that happens over a period of time so we need to find what's the right kind of threshold where we can start to enable people to get value start to develop that that habit and routine and then start to pay when they're when they're they've got it kind of ingrained in their lives so we've been we've been investigating if it does make sense to have a free offering always and then you hit a certain threshold of things and it locks um we've been investigating some of the obvious uh like collaborative features might make sense to like to paywall um so that you can use the product individually but as soon as you try to do something with someone else um you know that you would have to pay for it so we're still working through what's the right place to draw that line um i don't think we've got a complete answer yet but i do know that it won't just be you have to pay to get in period so we're not going to go down the path like a superhuman like it won't be like that very cool all right jeremy we're out of time here rapid fire famous five number one last book you read oh i'm actually reading um the cold start problem uh reading right now number two is there a ceo you're following or studying oh man i mean the original i mean i'm sure everyone says steve jobs and that was kind of i would imagine the inspiration uh but you can't help but follow a bunch of them on online and just watch uh you know watch how they're all playing out number three what's your favorite online tool for building mayday besides your own uh notion everything that we do at at mayday like literally everything is in notion number four how many hours of sleep to eat every night oh you know as a company that cares deeply about how people spend their time um we work uh pretty aggressively to build a business that's sustainable and and are a staff that's sustainable so i get a good seven hours of sleep that's great and what's your situation married single kids i'm married i got two kids that's like 18 years now that's awesome how old are you i'm 42. 42 last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. um i lived in toronto uh and have lived here my entire life i probably when i was younger would have probably uh benefited from just going west and and getting into the into the silicon valley scene a lot sooner than i did later so that's probably one thing i probably would have would have told my younger self let's just go go on an adventure and see what uh what's over there guys part designer part engineer he sold companies before really cutting his teeth nothing massive in terms of finances but he knows what the process looks like now he wants to reinvent the calendar first line of code from mayday.im launched in 2019 they built up a beta list of over 10 000 using some interesting things related to who's tweeting about time management with a large following or on linkedin etc uh built up that waitlist planning to launch paywall later this year three million raised recently back in december for their seed round with their as they continue to scale with their team of 13 14 next week jeremy thanks for taking us to the top my pleasure 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 p.m 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 of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world 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