How Modio LLC CEO Adrian Thompson grew Modio LLC to $156.9K revenue and 400 customers in 2023.

hey folks my guest today is adrian thompson a self-described humble introvert as humble introverted nerd again his words not mine background and motion graphics animation worked from freelancer to studio founder and now has developed a storyboarding application to make pre-production easier experimenting with new ways to make money and build a life that he enjoys at the plot dot io adrian you're ready to take to the top absolutely all right so um tell us what the company does and sort of who's using this is it b2b or b2c or something else um surprisingly a wide variety of people using it in ways that i would have never thought the reason i built it is because i actually own a motion graphics studio and in the early days i knew we had to storyboard and there just there wasn't a tool that existed so we were using apple pages templates and then eventually moving to google docs just because there was some crude form of collaboration there and it was just so tedious to make changes to that and i was always studying entrepreneurship and i just kind of wanted to try something um i never thought it would be a storyboarding tool but actually the funny thing was i had that idea and i actually saw a competitor launch um and it gave me the inspiration it kind of you know validated that idea and i thought well if this if this then and ironically enough they were also a motion graphics studio so i thought well if they're solving the same problem that they have then my idea is actually valid and i went ahead and started mine at the same time so i use that um you know as a way to encourage me rather than discourage me so that's kind of the uh well i forgot the first question you asked i feel like i went on a tangent there no no you nailed it this is a tough problem i mean we just had an event and so the the video designer sent over the five minute reel and the the best option i have to add notes is to play the video open apple notes and then say at second 37 change the line here do to do versus what you guys do or people are familiar with frame dot i o as well since there's no space it makes it so much easier it looks like exactly so frame io solved that problem for reviewing finished videos but there wasn't really an application to solve it for the storyboarding part which so my in my background i used to be a freelance animator and i got so upset um being spun in circles by people that could afford to waste my time essentially so i actually never got to benefit from storyboards because every agency that i work for would just skip the process altogether because they could afford to have me make the thing three or four times rather than having it done right the first time so that's honestly what i got so frustrated with freelancing that i studied how to start a business and and founded my studio out of that essentially i love anxiety yeah all right so so let's reverse engineer let's talk about where the plot is today and reverse engineer the full story so what are customers paying on average per month today to use the tool um we just increased prices this last month it's been something i've been working on so so obviously um this is a side project of mine and i think there's a lot to talk about here i think i have a lot to learn from you which is i was excited to get your email because um like this software is a side hustle of mine this is not something i've been able to focus on full time and um so it it honestly hasn't gotten the love it deserves but so it for a long time it's been ten dollars only um ten dollars a month for unlimited access like we didn't have tiered pricing like like i should have a long time ago i realized you know i'm leaving money on the table by not doing that um finally was able to get that launched just this last month so now we have three tiers ten dollars for a solo plan 15 for a team plan with five collaborators per project and then a business plan for unlimited collaborators at 20 a month that's great and so how many paying customers today only about four hundred ish four hundred and only about it's a side project that's been yeah yeah i mean well i was just taking a look at the other people interviewed you got some impressive candidates here i feel like i'm gonna be you know hopefully the relatable guy in the box you want to know a secret between just between us us friends here no one else you know you can have someone on doing 100 million bucks in revenue or publicly traded sas founder and that might be inspirational but it gets way less listens because it's not actionable 90 of my audience is you so so it's going to be very valuable so they're still trying to get their first 10 20 30 customers so 400 customers paying 10 bucks a month you're doing about 4 000 bucks a month in monthly recurring revenue right yeah yeah 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 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 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 well 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 you're you have become an affiliate big bold across the top of your website has that been your main growth channel no surprisingly that hasn't been very successful i i do have a couple people getting some traction and it's not something that i market so this is something that one of my biggest weaknesses is marketing and sales i'm just uh i like i know i'm a creative type i like working behind the scenes i like just not not a lot of people interaction and i and i struggle with encouraging people to you know help their or solve their problems with things that i do so um that's that's been a struggle of mine to help to help grow and i thought affiliate affiliate marketing um would be a way to go i just don't i don't push it to any channels and i don't have a big social media presence so it's kind of just the normal traffic on the website i think we have like 50 people signed up to that at the moment interesting okay so 50 affiliates that's interesting it means so then i guess the begs the question how did you get 400 customers if it's not the affiliate program so yeah yeah that's a good question um off the bat so i learned a lot about seo all of my essentially i'd say 90 to 95 of my customers are all seo so i you know in the early days i looked up what the keywords were how were people finding storyboards what were they searching um and i got on the front page of the of the term storyboard creator because that was the most trafficked word it got how did you learn that um so google's search function used to be different you know google's always changing their interface but uh through google search console you used to be able to find uh broader selection like i think now you can search one term and see how much traffic it gets but in the older versions of the google search console you could get a wider uh array of terms and see which ones got more hits but they changed that...