How Meahana CEO Matthew Archer grew Meahana to $550K revenue with a 5 person team in 2025.

guys Matt Archer launched me a call it 18 months ago September 2020 started writing code he's put in between 10,000 and 100,000 bucks of his own Capital to get this going is has two businesses using it right now with 15 seats planning start asking for money here in a couple months we'll see what happens go to market he's hoping to tap these super uh active LinkedIn groups where it's a bunch of agile user groups user folks hanging out together because then hopefully they go on and start using his digital collaborative space that they've built out hey folks my guest today is Matt Archer he's a consultant ter turned entrepreneur he was frustrated by the limits of tools available to lead collaborative working sessions with Executives at Fortune 500 companies because of that rather than accepting that status quo he's now putting a tool called Mah Mahana doio to help teams think together better Matt gr take us to the top yeah Nathan thanks for uh for having me on it's it's good to be here today you bet I always love someone that finds their own problem then builds something you're eating your own dog food obviously the challenge is can you can you get the MVP built cheaply can you get your first customer on a beta plan all those sorts of things so so explain to me where you are when did you guys write the first line of code for this platform yeah we started uh September of 20 September 22 is when we uh we actually started this whole process made our first investment our own personal money into the company um and started the process so we are little over 13 months into uh into the development how committed are you how much of your personal money have you put in so far I I put in a lot um I put in a lot I'm not going to disclose that um what I can a lot is relative though right are we talking like 10 grand or like a more than 100 Grand it's in between the two of those okay fair enough fair enough okay so a lot of money so so I mean is it true or false um if this fails uh it would be personally very very painful or no this is play money for you uh it would be personal I mean I'm uh yeah I mean look we're we're I'd love to say I'm independently wealthy that's not necessarily the case I've done well in my career um but we've got a lot writing on this y y Okay so walk me through where you're at it sounds like you're maybe pre-revenue so what signs are you getting from the market that it's worth it to keep spending your money building this thing yeah so um I mean when I say we're pre-revenue we do have uh we have people who are actually banging on our platform right now so they're actually using it for the intended purpose uh which is um to to Really Drive creative thinking Drive uh collaboration within teams uh in larger audiences and we got people using the platform today how many how many teams use it today so we have we got about 15 about 15 unique users leveraging the platform and it's been mostly a uh the intent is a sales LE model today um we found just to be very transparent it's been a little more difficult to get people to shift from uh their current kind of use case and the things that they're using today to support their collaborative discussions um and we're actually going to shift that model and that's what we're working on right now shifting it from sales Le to product Le what does that mean 15 unique users is that companies or like like there's only 15 or there's only 15 seats across two companies on the platform today there's 15 seats across two companies yeah oh I guessed right okay 15 unique seats across two companies how did you get that first company on the platform where'd you find them I mean it was through it was actually through direct Outreach so email uh connected with some um you know uh you know folks that had not known which was super encouraging to us uh they saw a gap in their business in the way that they were engaging their customer base um with the tools that they had they liked the story uh put them on a trial and um they saw value immediately nobody opens cold emails though today so you must be a very good copywriter what was the subject line on that first email I I can honestly tell you it's trying something new within uh within the collaborative space something along those lines and they picked up they saw again they had a true issue 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 your founder paath dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different valuation private Equity Firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see 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 realtime valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raise they sold 22% of 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 well go in here and look at all the 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 founder path 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 founder path.com products SLV valuations or if you go to founder path.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 what was your strategy and the content of the cold email was there a lot of text are very vague little text to Peak curiosity yeah it's just to Peak curiosity let's just get people going it was the second email that they opened um so the first one was there second one followed a couple days later and they picked up and they reached out said let's let's let's see what we can do well what was see what we can do was it a demo was it a beta sign up what was the next step yeah so the next step for us was H it was a demo so let's show we and at that point we had probably closer to an MVP um but we we showed show them what we were doing walk them through a a sequence of of of uh of activities that would support what they were doing and prototype or were you actually showing the real website we were showing the real website we had the we've again we we Advanced this platform pretty quickly back in in May when we started with some of these conversations we had a working not not even a prototype we had a working tool and a working platform that we felt comfortable enough go out and give um they saw value in it immediately and then they tested it I say they tested it they didn't just take it for a test ride internally they actually took it out and tested it with an existing client of theirs uh and they had tremendous confidence in it uh that led to them wanting to use this more okay why not why it sounds like they're great it's going nice why not ask them to pay what's taking so long to get the first paying customer uh it's not that it's it's not that we're not looking for them to pay it's that we're continuing to evolve and learning from our customers and how they're using the platform so that we can continue to advance that and as I said we're shifting from a sales LE model to a product LE model this is giving us a lot of intel on where we want to focus our time and effort but I guess how much runway have you given yourself you're spending your own money on this bad boy eventually you want it to be self- sustainable when are you going to start asking for for money I mean that's that's that's the next step that is the next step but when I mean before Halloween this you know next week or you know next year or when I mean we'd like to do it before end of year okay okay and again why...