How MediaMash CEO Donna Vallario grew to $120K revenue and 1 customers in 2020.

hello everyone my guest today is donna vellario she's a digital strategist and was fortunate to be part of the team who founded the hybrid video platform mediamash.tech as the ceo the platform is geared for brands and influencers with large audiences it helps keep the audience in their universe while fostering brand development and reducing reliance on social channels donna you ready to take it to the top i am cancel culture is a real thing there are big influencers very nervous about building and investing in social media platforms that might ban them later on down the road how does your business play into this trend so we um liken it to building a house on rented land right so you're building up this whole social media platform and following and you're trying to engage your audience i mean there's nothing more important right now than engaging in audience and then the whole carpet could be pulled out from under you in a minute the platform doesn't like what you're doing um somebody says something inappropriate and also to me as a marketer you're driving all of your traffic all of your brand engagement off to someone else and they're getting their advertising um youtube's now putting ads on on your stuff whether you want them to or not so why not bring all that traffic back to your website you control the ads you control the user journey you get we we index and dynamically meta tag all the videos so youtube's like one of the largest search engines well because they have all your content so bring your content back to you and you get all the benefits there's so many benefits from doing that how do you make money are you charging influencers directly so we are selling it as a platform you buy the platform we put it on your website we give you a bucket post your video we index it meta tag it we've even added an identity resolution service so that you know who's come to the website because the cookie is going away so we're trying to help people really gain a whole foothold in their marketing and so donna what do people pay on average to get access to the platform and is it monthly a sas fee yeah so that's been a little bit of an issue for us it depends on how much video you have how many players you want if you want it to have ecom so we can't just give out like a like pricing chart um but basically it's around ten thousand dollars a month okay so you have to be a big influencer a live stream so the whole platform it has a conferencing portion like zoom sorry sorry just i've got to back up for a second so just be clear if you're charging 10 000 a month that's 120 000 acv this has these have to be big influencers for them to have budget for this sort of thing yeah it's enterprise customers and influencers with a really large audience if you don't have a large audience stay on youtube like and whenever you when did you launch the business officially we officially launched uh august 17th okay we launched the platform we're launching 20 of 2020 yeah okay got it and um you you see you haven't officially launched yet so you have no customers currently we actually had a customer last year who kind of um they put a deposit and they're helping us flesh out the platform so we're doing it to their specs and we are we have letters of intent from two more customers that we're hoping to launch february first okay got it so if you're basically pre-revenue maybe you have one person sort of pre-funding it you know based on idea i mean how are you funding the business we were so lucky through linkedin i reached out to some women who invest in women-owned companies and corrin navini got back to me and a few weeks later we had pre-seed investment it was kind of like this crazy whirlwind so how much did you end up raising so we raised uh we closed 250 receipt got it and was that on a safe or was it a priced round it was a convertible note yep yep okay very good so that's how you're funding the growth right now how many engineers do you have working for you so my cto is also one of the founders and he has about five or six people working on it right now and what's the total team size including you and your co-founder i have two co-founders a cro and a cto and then i'm like you i use a lot of freelancers yep so how many how many full-time folks do you have though just the three of us are full-time three okay got it so those five engineers are not all full-time there's one that's the co-founders they're not full-time but they're outsourced so they're not officially employees so what's the total team size of people working full-time i would say eight people yeah okay five plus three okay that's great and so i mean let me ask you a question you built an agency before this usually if someone launches a sas company on top of an agency they can get their first couple customers very fast because you just sell it to agency customers are you building the wrong products to upsell to your historical agency customers no actually it's just been a matter of getting the platform done and to where we want it um i have plans to have a whole partner program for agencies because i think it's a great fit for them right now they can um upsell this to their existing customers video is so important to brands and advertisers right now um then with the platform they can do all kinds of reporting because we get really deep analytics so it's a real value add for agencies and they're um right now look advertisers are scrambling for what they're going to do with the loss of the cookie social media is very expensive now nothing is free so by driving traffic back to your website you solve so many problems and then you really can you can have an exit uh pop up you can have ecom on your website there's so many things that you're you're doing on your website that you can't do on the social channels and also like if you're on youtube it's so distracting i was watching your videos yesterday and like the other uh videos that come up on the side i mean it's so easy to be taken off topic and then brand safety i'm getting ads for things that are your com competitors you know what i mean so it just makes so much more sense to bring everything back to your website i mean if i posted if i posted all the videos on my website i would have to hardcore market every single one of them into one of my owned assets which would be my email list by posting them on youtube and having youtube subscribers youtube brings me views as well so it's not as simple as just saying it's distracting on youtube let's put on my website i wouldn't have as many views if i put on my website right i'm not saying that not to put it on youtube but i think by starting to put it on your website then you'll get that search engine benefit and then the search engines will start sending people to your website instead of youtube but also then you change all your marketing to make sure that you're using your website link instead of sending it to youtube um talk to me about this first person that is using this what's who is the influencer it's actually a membership service called c-suite networks and they have 5 000 ceos that are members so what they're doing is um uh jeffrey hazlitt he's an author as well and he does lots of linkedin lives another terrible experience in my opinion you're watching a linkedin live it's on your phone it's distracting it's always at a time when i can't really watch it so they have tons of video content they're going to put it on on their website and then also they're going to act as a partner for media mash and resell it to their members because they video and so what's your go to market how do you go from one customer to 100 customers so i think the partnership program is a big part of our go to market i have a lot of agency contacts and i think it's a great value add for them and we can do a rev share i'm trying to model it after the hubspot model i was the first one of the first hubspot users and went to inbound and i just think that their model is amazing and then we just have but donna how do you convince agencies to promote your product and sell it when you haven't promoted it or sold it that much yet either don't you have to build a base first to convince agencies to sell your product yes so we're waiting for c suite to launch so we really have a great case study so that we can then you know it's hard to sell something when it's not all together yet right i can't really show you c-suite using it now we're just starting with them so we have about a couple weeks before we can really hit it hard well how much runway have you set up for yourself you raised 250 i mean are you out of cash we're kind of at the end of our runway we're doing another round we're trying to raise 1.5 and what's the story what valuation you're gonna try and raise on so it's so hard to do evaluation right now um we you know i did the calculations so at the end of the year i think we could be at 70k um ar um mrr and then that would bring us to like a million arr for the year yeah i mean 83k mrr would be a million a million dollar run rate but i mean in order to go down this venture path that you're going down you have to sell a story that represents a cultural shift right where people can see how you're going to grow this into a billion dollar company again that's what happens when you take vc i haven't heard you tell any like macro story where you just light up where it's clear to me you're gonna do this for a decade and it's gonna be a new big billion dollar trend okay so media we're all media companies right now right everyone needs to be a media company brands need to have their own like media they need to control it they need brand safety they need to be able to tell their story consumer product brands right now are like they're having so many problems they're even being uh having competition by amazon and all the direct to consumers so even media even consumer products really need their own media brand and i like to tell the story of and i was telling the story and then it happened cbs right so you have cvs there's this huge brand are there cvs's on the west coast yeah so they have this huge audience you're always buying you know you're getting your prescriptions you're getting your cosmetics so say they have a channel and it's the cvs you know after hours for seniors and they have senior tips senior stuff what's going on for seniors and then fiber one has a commercial it's a native ad done for cvs it's not intrusive but then right there while you're watching it on on your device you can add the 501 to your cart and cvs actually just did that they're creating this whole media company so that they can control their audience and their the way they monetize their video yeah but how are they gonna go get seniors you know you know three million seniors watch fox news every night or cnn every night so fiber one can market there because there's a built-in audience how is cvs gonna convince three million seniors to tune into their show every night i mean that does just not sound interesting to me at all well you're not a senior but i mean i don't by the way i don't think my parents who are seniors would say i'm really excited about watching the cvs channel tonight i can't wait to sit down and watch cbs i mean they're watching jeopardy and wheel of fortune they need to make it interesting but also people aren't watching tv traditionally the way they used to anymore right so you're scrolling through something you go on cbs website to find something you'll find the cvs channel like people my kids never go to the tv ever they don't know what fox news is they don't know what the stations are you know what i mean they're not seniors they're not seniors they are not seniors you are correct but if i'm a senior i check on my prescription or i'm at my on my doctor's office you know i could then be directed towards the cvs website i don't think it's that much so maybe seniors so teenagers you know if they were talking about acne care and a teenager scrolling maybe they would go to the cvs website because they could put something right in their car and get it immediately well we'll see you can prove me wrong and just sign up customers and come back and brag a year later i hope you do that and in the meantime though let's wrap up your donna with the famous five number one favorite business book um it's not really a business book but i love open by andre agassi because it talks about persistence and um just being a winner number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um no not really what's your favorite online tool for building media media mash my favorite online tool i love linkedin and i use expandy it's a linkedin tool number three or four how many hours of sleep do you eat every night i get about seven or eight hours that's good and what's your situation down a married single kiddos i'm single i have two kids and uh two dogs two dogs i love that okay and can i ask how old you are i am 54. take us back to your 20 year old self what's something you wish that she knew um i wish she knew what i knew now give me something specific um i just feel like i wish she had the confidence i have now more than anything and i think that's kind of hard to get unless you've gone through 54 years of life guys there you have it donna building media mash she believes that brands should post their own video content on their own website so they can control the audience she's testing the thesis out building the sas company on top of what used to be her her agency now working on this whole time with two other co-founders they got a team of eight people total they raised 250 000 bucks about oh call it many months ago they're now out of that cash looking to raise one or close to being out raising 1.5 million bucks to keep the vision growing they've got one customer that caught 120 000 acv a pilot they're going to see if they go from one customers to ten over the next year and hopefully get up to about a million dollar run rate we will be watching donna thanks for taking us to the top thank you great to meet 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 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 whether it's 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