How Mish CEO Thomas Harding grew to $1.3M revenue and 100 customers in 2023.

hello everybody my guest today is thomas harding he is the co-founder and ceo of mish guru which we'll jump into today he helps brands tell better stories thomas you ready to take us to the top yeah i am thanks for uh thanks for having me alone you bet all right tell us about the company what does the company do and how do you make money cool so we're a uh sas technology company we've built a platform that helps brands higher education providers universities uh marketing agencies sports teams all kinds of people tell bitter snapchat and instagram stories oh interesting okay so so what do you do you help them like quickly format videos things like that it's an editing tool or what yeah we're a software platform that lets you really easily manage all your content so we've made the shift from the news feed to the stories feed and that means now we've got these full screen mobile optimized pieces of content that need to be managed we can help our clients publish our content we help them measure the analytics against it it's a whole new style of content publishing so there's a whole new style of key metrics we help them understand and then as well we help them tap into their audiences get them sending in and receiving a bunch of user-generated content and let them use that content to tell even better stories again interesting are you i mean so what like what's a brand paying on average to use this per month are we talking 100 bucks a month or 100 000 or a thousand uh it varies it varies uh so it depends on what the needs of the client are uh we're a little bit more than just a software company we i really do like to get hands on and help our customers succeed so hold on is that code for like you're actually an agency but you want to call yourself a sas company no no not quite i mean i'm happy to share a bit of the story there we probably looked more like an agency previously but no we just have a dedicated customer success team that if people need a little bit more hands-on help we'll give that if you want to do things by yourself um we're good to kind of just let you use the software as well okay uh and just as we're short on time i don't want to go down kind of every customer cohort i mean what is an average that a brand might pay you per month or per year just on the sas side no consulting no professional service on the safe side so our fees can range anywhere between 500 a month up to 5 000 a month okay on how much of our services you're using so much of the software you're using so if i pay you 500 bucks a month what is that based off of like number of stories i'm creating or what yeah at the moment it's broken up by features and as well just what kind of number of accounts that you're using with us so if you just have one instagram account or one snapchat account that's right down there on the bottom tier if you don't need much support from our team you're kind of in that category but if you've got multiple accounts that you're trying to manage and you want access to all of the features you know all that user-generated content the analytics that i was talking about um you know that's where you start to go up the tears as well when were you founded uh founded in early 2014 so we've been going just over four and a half years now oh wait hold on so did you must have pivoted a few times because that that's before stories were created uh so stories came out at the end of 2013. did they really well i feel like i think i've only been using stories like for maybe two years or three years yeah so snapchat snapchat camera stories end of 2013 we came out early 2014 and i can tell you and we're out there pitching our software initially we're getting a lot of funny looks from people being like what is this thing uh and so you know you mentioned are we more like a marketing agency and back then we actually were because we're out there pitching the tools and we're saying hey do you want to use our tools and people saying i don't get this thing uh actually you know we want to we want to reach this audience but we don't understand this would you guys mind helping us out and so that's what we did in the beginning you know we we did everything from creative services so coming up with campaign ideas content creation um right through to executing campaigns then over time we kind of took all of our learnings here and kept feeding it back through to the product feeding it back through the product and eventually the market got to a point where it educated enough um instagram came along facebook came along all these new platforms were there and for us we did do a little bit of a pivot i'd say away from being a snapchat focus company to a stories platform but nope stewie's been here for a while and uh the way things are going i'll be here so 2014 was launch date what have you scaled to today in terms of total customers using you oh there we go we're back sorry i lost it for a second yeah no problem thomas the question was so so you launched in 2014 right and stories obviously taken off what have you scaled to today in terms of total customers using you yeah i mean we're in the hundreds of customers uh we i mean in terms of positioning i know you asked about pricing we don't uh we don't sort of service their lower end of the market um so we're a bit more focused on the the hiring brands the more professional sort of brands and universities um so working closely with a smaller handful of customers to really help them succeed so so 100 folks there you mentioned on the low end you caught 500 bucks a month earlier i mean is that can i multiply those and say you're definitely north of 50 grand a month at this point or no yeah yeah i'm happy to say that without giving uh giving everything away okay very good and that's again pure play sass you have a lot of obviously other revenue streams on top of this i can say we're doing over a million dollars in sas revenue okay great and we have other sources on top of that including we do ad sales we do content creation strategy everything like that too that's great so so okay so that means you're doing over 83 grand a month in kind of revenue how do you split your team's time between like here here here's the next sprint cycle on the sas product you know go deal with this client that wants the shade of blue changed in the background of their story like seriously i mean there's so many different angles you're working here yeah yeah and i i think in terms of the platform from owing that's starting to mature in terms of the most obvious sets of problems and i think for us right now what we're trying to understand is how do we go really deep with a narrower set of customers how do we provide a really deep set of value to um you know the customers that fit the profiles of people you know we know we can support uh and i i think there's you know a lot of different avenues for us here people are like stories are hard to create and so once you've created them you want to get them in front of as many people as possible um so i mentioned there's a lot of new channels opening up to publish stories too so there's opportunities for us there what's the team size today how many people are working on it yeah so we're about 20 at the moment okay on new york nope so we're a split we originally started in new zealand so we've still got uh half our development team down there we've got some sales and customer success down there we've got a team of salespeople here in new york and then we have the rest of our development team based in berlin okay so new york city and remote and have you bootstrapped today to raise capital yeah we've raised a few rounds of capital at this point so we raised early 2015 late 2017 and then just a couple months back as well so so how much have you raised a date um it's about three million dollars okay and why i mean so why did you kind of give in i mean why couldn't you figure out how to bootstrap this on kind of consulting revenue and things like that why'd you have to raise yeah i think the thing for us at that point was how quickly stories were starting to pick up speed uh so we we did bootstrap for uh all of our first year basically said we don't want to take cash we want to prove this out and then i think once we realized the way things were projecting and particularly snapchat during that early phase they were going up and to the right and we knew that if we wanted to be at the front of this market we needed to raise a bit of capital so we could build out some of that sales and marketing infrastructure ahead of uh ahead of where the market was at and be ready once it came right and what does growth look like today is just on the sas side if you're you know pushing a million bucks in ar where were you exactly a year ago um i don't know off the top of my head but uh it's been an interesting year for us i'll sort of i'll put it that way okay yeah that's not helpful right so i mean do you do you know if you're like doubling you over a year or maybe a little less than doubling or yeah uh i guess at this stage i'd prefer not to answer and uh you know you can sort of see the general context we were at today and where we sort of started four and a half years ago well everyone starts at zero and you sit here at a million today right the reason i'm the reason i'm pushing on this is because look snap i mean many people are saying snapchat's dying right because because it's being copied by many other play of other players so i mean is the business is the sas business flat and you're pivoting more towards agency revenues uh no we're fully leaning into stories right so stories have grown 842 in terms of the amount of content posted and consumed in the last two years and so while we started out as a snapchat platform we're leaning really heavily into some of these emerging spaces for stories so we recently released our instagram product uh and started to see some really fantastic traction in that space and it doesn't seem to be slowing down i mean facebook themselves you know just this year have started saying the story feed is about to take over the news feed in terms of the primary way people share and consume um and they're not as far as we can see afraid to cannibalize a lot of what they've previously set up in that news feed and we're here to support businesses who are looking to make that transition and you know that's what i mean you're probably seeing this there's a lot of pushback right now though on major brands where facebook essentially misrepresented the analytics behind these stories which is essentially video content and and the whole shift to video and basically people saying wait this is a bunch of crap right uh it's actually not shifting videos isn't happening and now you know going backwards i mean so how are you dealing with this kind of pushback and just because there's more content being created you could argue it's actually harder to break out of the noise you should create different kinds of content before stories like how do you manage all these yeah yeah so it is absolutely harder to break through the noise now more so than ever and this is why we really exist is to help our you know customers understand what is working and what isn't working like what are the types of stories that resonate with your audience how can we double down on that strategy um so you know we're really advocating that it is harder than ever and trying to be here to support through that um in terms of the you know metrics facebook's pushing here i i think there's kind of a few things at play i think facebook's getting a lot better at this but at the same time i think we are starting to see a shift from success being measured in terms of just number of impressions generated and more into how many engagements did this create how many conversations were started off of the back of you know us running this piece of content and for a lot of our customers you know they're really looking at those kinds of metrics as well as you know things like swipe through how many how many people are swiping up on your content linking through to your web pages you know perhaps purchasing something from your website is is the two i mean are you sticky what's your turn look like today yeah uh we're incredibly lucky that the customers we have with us um very passionate about our product and uh for the most part i'm still working with a lot of the same people we started with in 2014 so um we're well below market average what is what would you consider market average uh for a company our size you know anything under two and a half percent okay so you're below two and a half percent revenue trend or logo term per month uh thomas you said both yeah yeah yeah okay uh okay so less than 2.5 percent and i mean so where where do you pull that from why do you feel like that's average ah i mean just reading market blogs uh reading market information talking to people within the space um do you have meaningful expansion revenue around around or pricing axes that allow you to drive expansion or no not not so much yeah absolutely i mean that's been one of the exciting things about uh about the shift into instagram you know like i mentioned we price per number of accounts that you come on board with us for and a lot of people now that we opened the instagram product up saying hey really love what you've done for snapchat uh i would like a piece of that for our instagram account as well so if someone comes on and starts paying you a grand per month right and then they add on you know that's year one they like you year two you know they expand to some degree they adopt a second product on instagram or other things i mean what do those accounts typically expand to like 130 200 what are you seeing uh yeah i mean it's a mixture across the board again it depends on the the client itself so i wouldn't want to comment on a specific number okay it might be misleading well i mean expansion revenue by the way is like a key indicator of sas company growth you take the cohort that signed up a year ago you add them all together you say you lost this much revenue you added this much and you get to expansion are you just is that just something you're not tracking right now uh yeah i mean we're thinking about a lot right now um it's pretty early right we just released that instagram product about a month and a half ago okay um and we're seeing early traction on it so feeling pretty good overall um but not something we're overly stressed about as we sort of build up or their platform got you you don't have a large enough kind of cohort of data yet to really have confidence around these numbers yeah you're still just hustling in hustle mode yeah yeah basically yeah that makes sense very good all right let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book oh i have just actually finished reading from impulse impossible to inevitable uh really nice combination i think of some of the stuff aaron ross talks about unpredictable revenue um plus just some overall good guiding insights into uh you know how to how to get your product validated how to scale at a market everything like that number two is there a ceo you're following or studying oh uh there's a few um definitely i think one of the ones i look to most a guy named rod dreary runs a company sorry ryan hill rod jury uh ceo of a company called xero you're an accounting piece of software and i think he's done an incredible job of building a career path starting from some smaller companies and building his way up to a multi-billion dollar company number three what's your favorite online tool for building the company building the company i mean the obvious ones slack we're very heavy slack users um number four how many hours of sleep are you getting every night not me right now oh how many oh god uh less than six mostly okay and what's your situation married single kiddos uh i've got my girlfriend we've been together for a while oh great not married no kids no kids okay and how old are you i'm 28 28 last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew oh woody start with that one uh 20 year old tom um i think i probably just wish i understood a little bit more of the american psyche before you know when i was 20. so then when i got here and i haven't come from new zealand i could uh land on my feet a little a little quicker as understand the american market maybe a little earlier seems to be doing pretty well though mish guru again helping brands launch content and story form faster more efficiently across multiple platforms and getting more views and click-throughs or swipe throughs once it's actually live over 100 customers right now uh you know pushing a million bucks in terms of annual revenue just on their sas product they also have consulting and you know customization work on top of that along with kind of ad spend and things of that nature a couple million call up two three million bucks in terms of funding team of 20 in new york city in remote locations less than 2.5 revenue and logo churn per month too early to talk about expansion other metrics like that but again well on their way to growing a a meaningful brand here in the sas space tom thanks so much for taking us to the top thank you