How New Genre CEO Mihai Toma grew New Genre to $1M revenue and 20 customers in 2024.

he sold a bar menu for 200 bucks back when he was 16 years old fast forward today he's running a creative Studio paying two grand a month in the New up-and-coming London art district called newgenres dot Studio that's his website working with call out 20 customers this year trying to double his Revenue up to 800 000 bucks we'll see if he can do it he's working with firms like Excel putting on their events and doing their content marketing and other firms as they think about event organizations uh branded content also has his own application called attach dot app the easiest way to send proposals on the internet which he's launched and building the MVP list for the waitlist for right now we'll see what happens next hey folks my guest today is mihai Tomah he's a creative entrepreneur based in London as the co-founder and CEO of new genre a creative Studio crafting Brands products and experiences for ambitious leaders his clients include Excel gravity sketch who we've had on the show among others apart from new genre is also currently building attached.app the easiest way to send review and get proposals approved on the internet knee higher ready to take us to the top yeah definitely so what do you do you have your you have your feet in two buckets right now your own your own software company with attached app versus client work for other people which one do you enjoy more I think I think they're both equally important for me um the app side and the the founder aspect of It kind of Started from the design studio so I started my career as a graphic designer um branding and identity for a cyber security firm in London called tessian so I joined that company right after they they received a big funding around and I loved the aspect of scaling a business from the design side focusing on strategy focusing on Design Systems and then taking it into development so I found uh that I love doing that for other clients and then it was a point where I realized that there's all these entrepreneurs coming to me for for help um early stage you know seed before series a and I realized that I could be doing the same thing I am in the same mind frame and that's where my team and I at new genre started and so what year was that when did you land your first client first client yep first client what year first client 2014 2014. okay and so how many folks today are full-time at the agency to so for context the first client um was when I was 16. um so I was still in school when I was hustling and I I uh was doing design work for other people I remember the the first project that I had was a menu in in a in a how much did you charge for it the first client remember I was 16. I was in my bedroom I was an amateur and I think that was 200 for a bar menu and then fast forward to today how many folks are full-time at the at the agency so our team is four um so it's myself my co-founder Jack and then we have two full-time folks plus a team of Freelancers um this is our specialist that we on board based on each project and it is how many like Freelancers did you pay something last year I would say around 10 10 okay and these are people like um an animator in case a client needs animation done yes these are like New York Times illustrator um motion designers copywriters strategists um depends on the skill of the project if you know in 2014 I was uh I was the guy and I was a kid in a bedroom charging 200 dollars for uh for a menu now you know we we work with top startups um and we create strategy uh the design but also their products directly and projects what's the average package I mean I remember we had gravity sketch on um maybe it was maybe a month or two ago a really impressive product a beautiful application are people paying you five grand a month retainers and you ask them to commit to a 12 month retainer how do you structure your pricing packages no we we only have um for for clients usually we only have two ways one is fixed pricing so it's it's a meaty project usually this includes um a brand Evolution or a brand Revolution um this includes a strategy or the design system and then often people come to us for what is that price point a fixed pricing package so our minimum engagement fee is 10K so we don't touch projects less than 10K okay but on average a project is um around 30 to 50K 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 the into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out I'll 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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 around 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of 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 valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna 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 and the biggest project you worked on last year was what 100K 200k something else the lifetime like the lifetime value of a project your biggest your biggest customer eight ATK 80k okay good so so you have a couple of these so are you what are you working with like 10 20 customers per year on average something like that so last year because we established new genre as a company in April um of last year so in one month we're going to be turning one given that you know I've been doing this uh freelance a number of years beforehand uh and working in design for even more than that my co-founder he was leading uh um a web agency beforehand but in our first year we actually uh did 44 projects oh wow but this includes different different levels so we would we would do small uh small like brochure websites but we also do you know whole um brand projects for you know companies like gravity sketch gravity can I take can I take 44 I mean can I take 44 projects at 10 15 K-pop I mean you guys did like 400 that or 500 000 bucks last year in Revenue approximately yeah that's great so how do you I mean I know a lot of folks that run agencies it's always hard to decide who to hire full-time who not Tire full-time because clients sort of ebb and flow that's it's hard to predict right so how much revenue do you think you'll do this year and how do you plan ahead for staffing needs I think the design business is quite safe in terms of scaling because you only bring uh people that you need uh and you know based on uh expected uh income the way we hire um first we hire people as Freelancers we get a taste of how they work what they do both of our employees are long time friends of ours that we worked in the past uh you know for a number of years um so the the risk is also lower okay that makes sense but but I mean how would you like you have four people full time right now how would you decide when it's time to hire another full-time or two full-time I think when we have two two consecutive really busy months when we have to work weekends and and the time is you know time is not there then we know that it's time to to hire more friend someone else yeah I think I think my advice for a lot of people hiring is it's not a direct proportionate game where you know you hire more people you think you directly do more more work but rather sometimes it's um the other way around you hire more people that just means more problem so I think it's it's good to bring the right amount of people for the job keep it as small as you can get the work done of course and then what do you guys think you'll do this year in terms of Revenue can you double we hope so so we we made a lot of big changes actually we just moved in a new beautiful studio um how much do you pay for the studio lease that's expensive you'd think that come on what's the number I'm curious okay so we just moved in the Design District in London it's a new neighborhood um only with architectural Studios interior designers web agencies and Animation Studios a very fertile ground for for the sort of work that we do and we have a uh 50 square meter Studio I'm not sure what's that in feet maybe 500 um we pay less than two thousand pounds per month oh great that's that's really good this is what we found is way below um the market rate in London and we got very lucky because it's a new neighborhood this was built last year um and they want to create a community here and they're willing to lower the price point to um get a lot of uh this cool trendy studios in um and then you know have them for a number of years in the space so that's great so you hope to double the revenue so maybe go from 400 000 to 800 000 uh this year in Revenue um talk to me about how many customers you think you'll work with this year if you did 44 last year how many this year you think so we did 44 projects um customers I would say 20 to 30. okay and so how many customers you think you'll work on this year I think fewer you'll do less but higher price yes okay now we matured as a as a studio we matured our relationships um and we're having less conversations with um small ticket clients and uh more ongoing long-term relationships with bigger clients so these are um Excel other Venture funds and what did Excel pay to do what do you work on for them so annually we would do around 80k no but like what's the actual project they have you work on is it their website or something else and not not their website this is something they wouldn't change uh as often it's not something that you do uh once a year now uh for Excel we are Excel Europe's design team uh we work on a number of projects from um conferences um events and then a lot of their thought leadership and content building uh assets what's a link I could go to to view some work you did for excel definitely you can I mean it's all over the press anything that Excel Europe did for the last years um if you see a visual there it's most likely a new genres work um one if you want to see uh was the fintech summit um 2022. so these Graphics I'm on their website right now the future of European fintech and excel's fintech Summit 2022. they've got these Graphics it says you know it's like a it's like a bar chart one billion five billion 10 billion it's like an infographic are you doing all the infographic work yeah I see or where it's like a wave and it says two thousands 2010s and today you did like the wave graphic and all that yeah and for that was also an in-person event so um it was the stage design it was like all the the marketing the landing page and invitations swag uh everything around that there's an experience uh was created by by my team very very cool well that's a lot of work um yeah I assume it went well though right yeah it went well it was a fantastic event we were in person as well it was um you know um uh monzo the fintech yeah yeah so the CEO of monzo was there there were there were Executives from from stripe um trade Republic uh and essentially uh top Executives from all sort of both you're very cool let's wrap up here with the last five minutes I want to talk about your application that you're building um so it's called attach the easiest way to send proposals on the internet so how do you is this is this doing well is it a side project does have any users today this we just started it's uh it's being built um the way we it all started was we wanted to send better proposals to our clients when we uh start a new genre and instead of sending PDFs and instead of sending emails um we created a internal app where we will send web pages as a proposal so you'd have all the information but you'll be interacted um and you can create a much better experience and additionally you can track when our Prospect opens your proposal you can see how much time they spend on a proposal and why they didn't reply uh but I mean there's already things like like Doc send I mean a bunch of companies already do this so what are you trying to do that you can't get already I think what we want to do is listen to all the small to medium businesses this is this is targeted exclusively to service based business and try to build all that functionality that they're missing in in the rest of them so for instance a lot of these businesses also want to show their portfolio or show very complicated timelines um and we found that that is a sort of functionality that is missing from uh like other competitors so right now we're building it we have great relationships with a number of investors so March April uh when we have the MVP very excited to to show it and put it out in the world very good all right we're at a time here let's wrap up mihai with the famous five number one what's the last book that you read last book that I read um that's very good I think it was a negotiation for classical never split the difference by Chris Boss number two is there a CEO you're following or studying yes this is the CEO of a design agency called Collins and his name is Leland marshmayer if I didn't butch his name number three what's your favorite online tool for building new genre I would say figma number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night I don't compromise on sleep I get eight hours it's eight and a half I don't wake up with an alarm and what's your situation married single kids I am in a relationship okay no kids yet no kids all right and it sounds like you're 25 you're 16 right in 2012 or 2014. I'm gonna be turning 25 this year ah 24 okay great last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. foreign to take life at its natural pace guys there you have it uh he sold a bar menu for 200 bucks back when he was 16 years old fast forward today he's running a creative Studio paying two grand a month in the New up-and-coming London art district uh called new genres dot Studio that's his website working with call it 20 customers this year we're trying to double his Revenue up to 800 000 bucks we'll see if he can do it he's working with firms like Excel putting on their events and doing their content marketing and other firms as they think about event organizations uh branded content also has his own application called attach dot app the easiest way to send proposal on the internet which he's launched and building the MVP list for the waitlist for right now we'll see what happens next uh uh me hi thanks for taking us to the top thank you Nathan have a lovely day one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm 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 our poo 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 p.m Central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM 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 an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else I don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack Community for B2B SAS Founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathanlacka.com forward slash slack in the meantime I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube I'll be in the comments for the next 30 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 got to push them away click the thumbs up below to count on them and know that I appreciate your guys's support all right I'll be in the comments see ya