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 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 evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your founder 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 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 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...