How Mish CEO Thomas Harding grew Mish 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...