How theplot.io Reached 400 Customers and $4K MRR as a Bootstrapped Side Project (Interview with Founder Adrian Thompson)

Introduction and Background

Nathan Latka

00:00Folks. My guest today is Adrian Thompson, a self described humble introvert humble introverted nerd. Again, his words, not mine. Background in motion graphics animation, worked from freelancer to studio founder, and now has developed a storyboarding application to make preproduction easier, experimenting with new ways to make money and build a life that he enjoys at theplot.io. Adrian, you're ready to take us to the top?

Adrian Thompson

00:21>> Absolutely.

Nathan Latka

00:22Alright. So tell us what the company does and and sort of who's using it? Is it b to b or b to c or something else?

Why Adrian Built a Storyboarding Tool

Adrian Thompson

00:28>> 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 the 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

00:51>> to make changes to that. And I was always studying entrepreneurship,

00:56>> and I just kind of wanted to try something. 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, and it gave me the inspiration. It kinda, you know, validated that idea. And I thought, well, if this if this and then and ironically enough, they were also a motion graphics studio. So I thought, well, if they're solving the same problem that they

01:17>> have, then my idea is actually valid, and I went ahead and started mine at the same time. So I use that, you know, as a way to encourage me rather than discourage me. So that's kind of the well, I forgot the first question you asked. I feel like I I went on a tangent there.

Nathan Latka

01:31No. 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 thirty seven, change the line here, do do do versus Yeah. What you guys do or people are familiar with frame.io as well, some others in the space,

01:50makes it so much easier, it looks like.

Adrian Thompson

01:52>> 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, being spun in circles by people that could afford to waste my time, essentially. Yeah. So I actually never got to benefit from storyboards because every agency that I worked for would just skip the process altogether because they

02:17>> 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.

Who Uses theplot.io

Nathan Latka

02:33Alright. So so let's reverse engineer. Let's talk about where the plot is today, then reverse engineer the full story. So Sure. What are customers paying on average per month today to use the tool?

Pricing Tiers and Recent Price Increase

Adrian Thompson

02:42>> We just increased prices this last month. It's been something I've been working on. So so, obviously, 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 I was excited to get your email because, like, the software is a is a side hustle of mine. This is not it's not something I've been able to focus on full time. And so

03:02>> it it honestly hasn't gotten the love it deserves. But so for a long time, it's been $10 only. $10 a month for unlimited access. Like, we didn't have tiered pricing like I like I should have a long time ago. I realized, you know, I'm leaving money on the table by not doing that. Finally, was able to get that launched just this last month. So now we have three tiers, $10 for a solo plan, 15 for a

03:24>> team plan with five collaborators per project, and then a a business plan for unlimited collaborators at 20 a month.

Customer Count and MRR

Nathan Latka

03:30That's great. And so how many paying customers today?

Adrian Thompson

03:33>> Only about 400 ish. 400, I think.

Nathan Latka

03:36About. It's a side project. That's fantastic.

Adrian Thompson

03:38>> Yeah. I mean, well, I was just taking a look at the other people I interviewed. You got some impressive candidates here. I feel like I'm gonna be, you know, hopefully the relatable

Nathan Latka

03:45guy in the You wanna know a secret between just between us us friends here, no no one You know, you can have someone on doing a $100,000,000 in revenue or publicly traded SaaS founder, and that might be inspirational, but it gets way less listens because it's not actionable. 90% of my audience is you. Okay. Yeah. So so it's gonna be very valuable. They're still trying to get their first ten, twenty, 30 customers. So 400 customers paying

04:07$10 a month. You're doing about $4,000 a month in monthly recurring revenue. Right?

Adrian Thompson

04:10>> Yeah. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

04:12Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders, but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 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 Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you connect

04:35your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time, you can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna

05:00get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation, private equity firm is different. If you're gonna 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

05:22not 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, 1,200,000 seed round, 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna 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

05:47going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll 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 dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. Alright. We're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second, but if

06:09you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link. This link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. 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. Alright. Let's jump back into the

06:36interview. You're you have become an affiliate. Big bold across the top of your website. Has that been your main growth channel?

Adrian Thompson

06:42>> No. Surprisingly, that hasn't been very successful. I I do have a couple people getting some traction, and it's it's not something that I market. So this is something that one of my biggest weaknesses is marketing and sales. I'm just I like you 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

07:05>> their problems with things that I do. So, that's that's been a struggle of mine to help to help grow, and I thought affiliate affiliate marketing, 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. It's So kind of just the normal traffic on the website. I think we have, like, 50 people signed up to that at the moment.

Nathan Latka

07:23Interesting. 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?

Adrian Thompson

07:29>> So yeah. Yeah. That's a good question. 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 what were they searching? And I got on the front page of the of the term storyboard creator because that was the most trafficked word. It got

SEO as the Primary Growth Channel

Adrian Thompson

07:52>> How did you learn that? So Google's search function used to be different. You know, Google's always changing their interface. But through Google Search Console, you used to be able to find 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 array of terms and see which ones got more hits. But they changed that, like,

08:17>> five years ago. So it's so now I think you have to search one term at a time. Or if you rank on a word, you can kind of see how those how you rank on that page. So if you're able to hit certain keywords, then you get more data. But I feel like it's gotten harder, at least in my opinion. I'm not an SEO expert, but I was really deep into it about five or six years

08:36>> ago when I was just launching.

Nathan Latka

08:39Well, let let's keep going on this path. Okay? So let let's say someone listening today also finds a keyword that they know if they win it, there's a big prize. You know it's the case for storyboard creators. So what's the next step? How do you go create content to rank for it?

Adrian Thompson

08:51>> So I it's funny as I interviewed a couple SEO people. I took some meetings just to kinda pick their brain and learn from them. I don't know if they knew I was doing that, but I kinda just wanted to learn some some tricks of the trade. And, essentially, getting the keywords I think I think, obviously, Google's evolving over time, and and ranking is constantly changing. And I don't know if anybody knows their true algorithm. But what

09:12>> I learned was getting the keyword in as much as possible, backlinks, having supporting content throughout your website that kind of redirects to one place, posting on other platforms, and obviously linking to your website is a big deal. But a lot of a lot of small tedious things, like inside of your images, there's these alt tags. You wanna make sure that you're using keywords, and those alt tags, you essentially want no space to go unwasted for keywords.

09:37>> Your your header is very important, having the keyword in it. Using it throughout your front page, very important. Embedding it in images. So that's kinda what I tried to do. Like, so I would create videos on Vimeo and YouTube and link those and use those same keywords, obviously, and link it to my homepage. And Mhmm. I was You

Nathan Latka

09:54still even though you're not focused on this today, you still rank organically in the one two three four five, fifth spot for storyboard.

Adrian Thompson

10:01>> No.

Nathan Latka

10:02Fifth or sixth depending on who what what browser you're using. But you still rank on the first page of Google for storyboard creator.

Adrian Thompson

10:09>> Right. I've noticed more competition creeping up. I was actually getting a little down on myself lately because some funny enough, some I get a lot of requests for for what what they're called sponsored posts or whatnot. And what a couple of them are from new competitors springing up, and I was like, oh, I didn't even know these guys existed. So I was like, I need to get back on my game probably because there's a lot more

10:31>> competition coming. I don't it's surprising to me because I think the storyboarding the storyboarding space is very small. It's a very niche market in my opinion. And if I knew what I knew now, I maybe wouldn't have chosen it as the thing I went all in on. So it's interesting. Well,

Nathan Latka

10:46the thing is though, it's a very storyboarding is a very interesting wedge to upsell a lot of other stuff to those same animators and design teams, etcetera, which is why, you know, Canva, you know, ranks number one for this keyword right now.

Adrian Thompson

10:58>> Right. Yep.

Nathan Latka

10:58Yep. You ever flipped the script when you got an outreach like that and said, hey, you wanna buy the whole company for a $100?

Adrian Thompson

11:04>> I've that thought's crossed my mind a lot.

11:08>> I I and I when I think about that, then I I wonder if I regret not pushing hard enough before doing that. I would hate I would hate to wait too long to where the where the app is outgrown by competition. It's no longer valuable. I would hate to see it wasted. When the positives, I think, when I think that thought is like, man, I'd love to see somebody make it the best it could be. Because

11:28>> I think I I just have so many limitations, my time being one, and just kind of my know my knowledge in growing a SaaS. Like, I think I think I've done everything that I could from having no experience and trying to do it on the side. And, obviously, all being bootstrapped, like, I don't have any investors or I haven't had any coaching or help getting it set up. So it's kind of just listening to podcasts and

11:51>> reading books, like, trying to figure it out on my own.

Nathan Latka

11:54When did you write the first line of code for Plot?

Building the MVP in 2015

Adrian Thompson

11:57>> So I'm not personally not a developer. I hired a guy to create the MVP. That was in 2015. So we're almost Fascinating.

Nathan Latka

12:04So what did you how did you who was that guy? How'd you find him?

Adrian Thompson

12:08>> A friend. So I grew or I was living in the Bay Area. I knew a UI designer. I was a friend I went to church with, and he worked at a company, and he he knew many developers. He's a UI, you know, designer at this company. And he knew his friend wanted to do some freelance work. A lot a lot there's a lot of bored developers in the Bay Area at the time because they're just doing

12:30>> boring corporate stuff. And and when they hear somebody starting an MVP, they kinda wanna just do it because there's less, you know, red tape. They can kind of be creative and do their thing.

Nathan Latka

12:38So what'd you what'd you pay him to get the MVP off the ground?

MVP Cost and Bootstrapping the Business

Adrian Thompson

12:40>> 15 grand to get it off the ground.

Nathan Latka

12:42Wow. So I thought was reasonable. Yeah. Where'd you get that I mean, look. Where'd you get that money?

Adrian Thompson

12:46>> Studio. So, I mean, I've, you know, operated the studio since 2012, and I grew it.

12:52>> And I was you know, I had I I saved my money, and I I've always known I wanted to invest in something like this. This wasn't my first passive income project. Like, I my first step into, like, digital products was creating scripts for Adobe After Effects, which are just ways to automate, tasks that After Effects didn't build natively into the system. So I built I hired a a guy to create a couple of those, and that

13:14>> gave me, like, a couple like, a thousand dollars in monthly passive income. So I was able to keep stashing stuff away. Like, I would create a savings. You know, being a being a studio or or business owner of the first five years is pretty unpredictable, so I like to have cash on the side. And that's what I I decided this was the time to to do something. Take take my swing, essentially.

Nathan Latka

13:35That's right. But see, the thing is, like, you don't you can't go all in because the studio makes so much more money. Right? That's like your livelihood.

Adrian Thompson

13:41>> Exactly. I couldn't I couldn't yeah. Yeah. And I have three kids and a wife. I can't afford to do that big of a gamble. Like, starting the studio was my gamble when we were just, you know, just me and my wife. So I wasn't willing to, like, shut down my studio. But those are thoughts I've always had because how can you really do your best at something if you don't give it your full time? And that's

13:59>> kind of been my dilemma as an entrepreneur because these aren't even the only two things that I'm doing. Yeah. So my time is just split, and I just constantly feel like I'm I'm not the I'm kind of, like, leaving a lot on the table because I clearly can't be the best at four different things at the same time.

Nathan Latka

14:16Yep. Yep. Yep. Really interesting. Now if you're doing 4,000 a month today, what were you doing about a year ago? Do you remember?

Revenue Plateau and Growth Experiments

Adrian Thompson

14:23>> It's been about three to 5,000 consistently for the last three to four years. So there's been really no growth. Like, our best month has been 6 or 7,000 when so because people can pay annually, so sometimes there'll be a spike of annual payments. Yep. But that's, like, been best case scenario. And that's where I've been getting a little antsy and thinking, how do I how do I kick I'm in a plateau phase. Like, how do I

14:46>> get out of how do I get to the next phase? I've tried a lot of things. I've tried hiring Facebook ad guys. I've hired two different agencies to to run Facebook ads. I've tried reaching out to, you know, influencers. I can't even get a response. I I think maybe I was aiming at too popular of influencers. I was trying to find YouTubers, you know, that 50 to a 100,000 subscriber range. I I literally couldn't get a

15:10>> response. I think I got one response, but they were booked out for the whole year. Like, they weren't taking anybody. And I got really discouraged trying that, so I gave that up. I tried getting into schools. I spent a solid year emailing schools, I think, every day just trying to get, like, a wedge into students having, you know, familiarity with the software, and maybe they'll pay for it when they get hired, you know, after school. But

15:32>> that just proved so difficult trying to get their their curriculum was so strict, and they just weren't interested in changing what they were teaching. And it was I just feel like I've hit a lot of walls in that regard trying to figure out, like, a a growth hack, so to speak. One thing that worked well is, you know, I figured what are people googling, and a lot of people that don't know about storyboard software are googling

Free Templates as a Growth Tactic

Adrian Thompson

15:54>> templates because that's the way that you'd create it before. You'd you'd look for Microsoft Word template or Adobe Photoshop template. So I created free templates, and that's a search term that I also ranked for. So we have people that'll download our templates. And then on the template itself, have advertising saying, hey, you could do this on Plot. It's easier. So that was that one that that's the only hack that I think has worked consistently well.

Nathan Latka

16:17It's very interesting, you know, how people think about growth. Because like the immediate thing I go to is, you know what? I wonder how many video editors are on Upwork. They all get frustrated with clients with how they do feedback. Like if I was growing Plot, all I would do is I would go on Upwork, I would hire every single person with video editor and their description for what they do and and give them a very

16:38small, meaningless task for pay their hourly rate. That's my CAC, but require they use Plot.

Adrian Thompson

16:45>> That's funny.

Nathan Latka

16:46Free the free version because then they're likely gonna stick with it for their second, third, fourth, fifth projects and become a customer. That's, like, how I would do it.

Adrian Thompson

16:53>> That is funny. And I actually have gotten my so clients through my studio, I have gotten them to use Plot as well. Yeah. So so I have a couple of big enterprise clients that use it because they work with me, you know, creating videos.

Nathan Latka

17:05Super interesting. Do you keep a separate set of books? Like, if someone were to buy it, could you send them a really clean p and l and balance sheet and all that stuff?

Adrian Thompson

17:12>> I could so my books are all combined at the moment for ease, but I definitely could. I track I've tracked every expense I've spent separately in a spreadsheet for Plot. Nice. And, obviously, Stripe has its own thing. So, yeah, all all the subscription data is separate on its own. Yeah. So, yeah, I could definitely sort the finances out pretty quickly.

Nathan Latka

17:29Super interest. Super super. What would the what I mean, is so if like, would you know what the number would be? Like, is it the real number is what's the number where you tell your wife tonight at dinner, then you say you walked away and she goes, I'm leaving. You should have taken that deal.

Potential Sale and Business Valuation

Adrian Thompson

17:41>> Oh, she she would be supportive either way. I think my number would have to be north of a 100,000, but I don't know. You know, I've always wondered if that's even worth it to somebody. Like, I don't know if that's, like, two or three years.

Nathan Latka

17:51Why is that the number? I mean, how long would it take you to make a $100 on this in free cash flow?

Adrian Thompson

17:55>> That's, yeah, that's the other thing I thought. I've kind of so what I've been doing is obviously reinvesting subscription revenue to my developers because I wanna improve the product. So I've I have had that thought. Like, what if I maybe just sat for a few years and collected a check and then sold it so at least I built some? Because I'm honestly about at a I'm at a breakeven point, essentially. So Yeah. If I if I

18:15>> don't hire develop or don't, you know, pay developers, I could just collect some profit for a while. Thought about that. I I guess 100 k is my number because I think that's kind of what's fair for the state of the business, and it would kind of be enough money to make me satisfied with how much time I've put into it. Mhmm. It would be I think it just because it would be hard to accept less than

18:35>> that. Otherwise, I feel like I should I should keep working at it, you know?

Nathan Latka

18:39Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's hard to measure opportunity cost, right, which is what effectively this is. Because it's gonna be really hard to pay get someone to take, you know, take a 100,000 divided by 4,000. Right? That's twenty five years, right, of revenue. Right? And so that's assuming it's all profit. Right? So it would be hard probably to get that. You're probably gonna stick with it and probably gonna keep doing the same thing for the

Famous Five: Books, CEOs, and Tools

Nathan Latka

18:56next ten, twenty years. But you're learning a bunch doing it, which is also valuable. Really interesting. Let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, favorite business book.

Adrian Thompson

19:07>> Man, I I love everything Seth Godin has written.

19:11>> I'd I'd say Linchpin by Seth Godin probably. Linchpin.

Nathan Latka

19:14Number two, is

19:16there a CEO you're following or studying?

Adrian Thompson

19:18>> I mean, Gary Vaynerchuk is I consume a lot of his content, it must it's gotta be him.

Nathan Latka

19:24Hey, I just had an idea. If I invite you to speak at our Founder Event in Austin in September 8 on stage, And then I basically ran a competition where people had thirty minutes to come up with the best idea they could on how they would grow the business. And then they presented five minutes each like on the things, and then you pick the winner. Then we would award like a grand or $5,000 or whatever for

19:42them to go execute that thing on The Plot. Could we and then film the, like, mini documentary. Would you be open to that?

Adrian Thompson

19:47>> Wow. Well, yeah. That'd be super interesting.

Nathan Latka

19:52Guys, if you're yeah. If you if you guys are listening to this going, I have ideas for for for Adrian. Just like email me or something. [email protected] or [email protected]. That'd be really interesting to do this live. The nice thing, Adrian, what you have here is you have something that can be sold. You have a working software product. It's just a question of distribution. Alright. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building

20:14Plot besides your own?

Adrian Thompson

20:16>> Favorite tool that has helped us build Plot?

Nathan Latka

20:19Yeah. Like, whatever you use to collaborate, communicate, sketch, you know, whatever.

Adrian Thompson

20:24>> Well, I mean, it's obviously not possible without GitHub. That's something I had to learn how to to use. I mean, Slack, honestly. Slack, use in all all of my ventures so far. It's been priceless.

Nathan Latka

20:35Alright. Number four, how many hours of sleep do get every night?

Adrian Thompson

20:38>> Actually well, that varies. But I honestly, I'm a seven to eight hour sleeper when things are going well. If I if I'm having a little bit of a season of anxiety, it'll be closer to six. I like getting up early as well.

Nathan Latka

20:50Married with three kids. And how old are you?

Adrian Thompson

20:52>> I'm turning 34 tomorrow.

Nathan Latka

20:54Ah, happy early birthday. Very cool.

Adrian Thompson

20:56>> Thank you. Thank you.

Nathan Latka

20:56Alright. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Closing Thoughts and Wrap-Up

Adrian Thompson

21:02>> Man, that's a that's a tough one. I think I I think I already knew it. Consistency and patience pays off. It's something that I've heard other people say that we're older, including Gary Vaynerchuk. I think I would just reiterate that whenever I was feeling I've I've struggled with depression, anxiety, just wanting to get things done faster, wanting to see results faster. Think reiterating that to myself would be encouraging.

Nathan Latka

21:26Guys, theplot.io launched back in 2015 because his own studio his own studio built, he was frustrated with how to get video and feedback on animations effectively from clients. He built it to manage his own work, now has 400 customers, mainly from an SEO play, which was just super genius, super targeted for our customers, about four ks in MRR today, but been basically flat the past four years. So it is consistent, but not growing. Right? It's a

21:49yin and a yang.

Adrian Thompson

21:50>> Who knows what he'll do next?

Nathan Latka

21:51Probably hang on to it, keep using himself, keep learning it. It's fun to have a side project you can dabble with and experiment on. But in the meantime, I encourage you guys to check it out. Adrian, thanks for taking us to the top.

Adrian Thompson

21:59>> Thank you, Nathan.

Nathan Latka

22:01One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM Central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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, 1PM

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23:11for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, but I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people. We

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