How Overcast HQ CEO Philippe Brodeur grew to $1.2M revenue and 200 customers in 2022.

hey folks my guest today is philip brodeur he fell in love with video by making it as easy to manage as word documents through his current company overcast hq that's overcast hq dot com before that he did it spent over 20 years for iconic with iconic creators like the bbc and disney now does it for businesses that innovate around marketing and product development philip you ready to take us to the top i certainly am nathan all right so just to be clear you're not an agency right this is a software technology you built this is a piece of technology we are not an agency it's a good question though because people often think that we are an agency but no it's technology it's sas uh you can either buy it online or get a managed version for us who's buying it and what are they paying for how are they using it well it's a you know cova changed everything right so we built a media asset management or video asset management or video content management platform what does that mean it's it was built for businesses um and it's much like what a librarian would use you know so only a few people would use it because it was a a big heavy platform and and you know fairly complicated to use kind of like a digital asset management platform which is generally used by a few people so um what happened was during covid uh we've got this little uh viral thing that goes on in it where where you can invite a collaborator to come in and and and start accessing content well during covert what happened was uh people started to to share it around and and our interactions on the site uh grew uh 13x in 2020 like 13x so and the number of users grew almost five times so what happened was uh all of a sudden people started to understand well hey i can actually manage video in the cloud it's very difficult to manage large files on premise but imagine in the cloud well that's a different thing right and and and and we may just be clear you're not an on-prem solution right it's all in the cloud 100 cloud cloud native it's all um yeah it's it's serverless and it's and it's it's a modular um microservices architecture so you know i don't want to talk too much about it technology but basically we're making it possible for people to manage video the way that you manage word documents if you think back well you're probably a little bit younger than i am but my i remember back in the 90s my father he had a secretarial pool in his office that's not that long ago right a secretarial pool yeah i feel i have no i have no idea what the hell that is uh but it sounds like something i don't want uh i think my audience though knows this space well i mean we had the frame crew on recently like a lot of them use frame dot i o it sounds like you were sort of playing in the same space right yeah so we are very much playing in the same in in the same space i think there's a uh there's a couple major differences like so for one we get compared to frame i o a lot right yep um frame i o are a multi-tenanted sas what does that mean it's frame i o when you buy frame i o you buy frame i o right and it's part of your sas stack when you buy overcast we're a white label version okay so what we're doing is we're integrating with your with your tech stack already and we're and we're moving into the background okay so we're not we're not the ones we're we're not saying that you know this is this is our brand up front we're actually helping to manage all the all the big content why is that important for you by eliminating your brand you reduce your ability to drive word of mouth and freemium and sort of new you know cac arbitrage sign ups why did you make that decision well intel inside right like you don't have to you don't know every went out to buy intel right but intel inside really works and and i think it works for video as well help me understand these folks that are using you what are they paying on average per month to use the technology yeah so they they pay they pay a per user price and then they pay a uh a usage price as well so it's never really that easy to to understand i suppose on the low end uh we do sell at about 500 a month 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 gonna get 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 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 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 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 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 but that's really a self start as a sas product it's very easy to get up and running and that would be for a small team of maybe 10 people right but then we're we're selling right up to you know twenty thousand thirty thousand a month as well um and that's we're going into enterprise and what are we doing there so imagine imagine you're a unilever well phil just be clear is that the spectrum lowest is sort of 500 a month and your biggest customers paying 30k a month yep okay got it and how many just paint the picture of the big picture someone paying you 30 000 bucks a month how many people are on the team and how are you measuring usage [Music] uh so how many people on the team got 20 people on the team at the moment and in terms of measuring usage you know in terms of uh like the amount of content well yeah that's exactly what i'm asking is how do you quantify is it number of videos number of storage space number of minutes processed what's the metric so uh all of the above in fact uh so we look at we look at interactions so uh we've got comments uh annotations we've got video processing we've got um sharing uh we've got downloading we've got reformatting isn't that complex of philip to track like don't you have a key metric that is the most important one and that is what usage and pricing is tied to uh so it's it is a calculator you're right it is complicated um and you know we do we do a customer deployed solution with aws so what that means is that uh we can with the with larger companies and this is really key actually with larger companies they can do um uh they probably already have an account with aws right they probably already have their content stored there so we can deploy on top of their storage to bring your own storage module right uh uh model so so when you say you know what is what is the key metric yeah and that in that in that case it's a license fee right it's the number of people that are using it right and and and in fact all the hosting and all the and all the uh all the storage is paid directly by the client to aws we also work in in azure and i see okay cool so that's the rank that's the range and that's really helpful understand your pricing i am going to try and force you here though into a sweet spot so right what's a sweet i mean it's 10k sort of a month to sort of sweet spot right now or is it a lower or higher yeah so we we we try to start at 5k a month um uh we we don't we don't chase anything under that because really uh it's it's hard to make a profit on that um but yeah 10k would be it would be definitely a sweet spot did i mishear you earlier sorry i think i said 500 a month would be 10 people did you mean to say 5k or did i mishear you it's 5k a month for 10 people no it's it's it's 500 for 10 people so we have a sas product right which is which is which is built it's simply for for small for small teams right i understand that phil but you just said you don't start into under five grand a month but you're saying there's a five hundred dollar a month no explaining so okay so we we do two types of sales right we do we do hunting all right so we we hunt uh we hunt and we hunt enterprise right and that's it that starts at 5k sweet spot 10k absolutely sorry i should have asked my question differently i'm not asking necessarily about outbound i'm looking at if you look at your current customer base today whether you hunted them or they signed up freemium and upgraded themselves the current sweet spot in terms of size of account is something like 5 to 10k a month is that accurate correct okay okay okay let's build the back story out here when did you launch the tool so okay so that's one thing i don't like saying either i like calling it a platform um because it's really it's a it's a it's a big uh heavy piece of software um that's that's that's in the cloud so we actually launched in 2018 um and that was uh uh probably two years after we started coding okay so how did you fund yourself between 2016 and 2018 uh we we got grants and uh i had a good exit before that so i was able to fund myself and and our um our our original development team that's obviously a great position to be in i love obviously bootstrap founder what was your first company uh first company was uh well i had i had a couple of them one of them was hot air productions another one was uh altv another one was uh air tv i've had a number of uh video production companies is this your first sort of sass play it is it's definitely this the first um software sas play so what what what had happened was i was actually uh working for a number of other uh you know large broadcasters and telecom operators building their platforms for them it was like an intrapreneur right and then what i said well why don't i do this for myself i mean it just took me uh you know a couple of decades to get there interesting okay so how if you had to estimate how much you had to spend yourself in those two years building the mvp what would you say your total exposure was about a million okay and and looking back were you pretty efficient there or could you have done it for a quarter million uh i think no i think we were pretty efficient um i think that i think the biggest challenge was that we were early um and timing is everything so um i think that you know you look at covid uh that that's been a great uh incentive for people to start working in the cloud i mean you look at what happened to frame i o i mean obviously brilliant stuff uh uh with with what they've done uh getting it over did adobe over underpay in your opinion i think they paid a really good amount i love them i let them have a look at my my my platform as well what do you believe obviously it was public that was a 1.28 1.28 billion deal but what's your best estimate on what that multiple was oh a lot uh i i do you know what frame's revenue was or a range i i i do not i think it was around i think it was around 40 30 40. is that right i don't have any insider information but we also put it around that amount yeah so that's what i think it was but you know what they were they were growing fast and i think you know adobe what they did was they said look the collaboration in video is the future and they and they and they sat down a marker and they said this is gonna be a really valuable thing going forward right and and that's what we're saying as well is that there are very few stakeholders in the business community at the moment who actually take part in the video um in the video supply chain right it's still engineers and editors predominantly absolutely predominantly the cloud's gonna change a lot it is it is changing all that and that's and that's where we position ourselves and that's exactly where frame position themselves as well although frame much more prosumer we're much more enterprise yeah yeah i would agree with that yeah you guys are lower volume higher arpu they're higher a lower rpo higher volume uh you code from 2016 to 20 2018 first customer 2018 how many customers are now serving today so we've got uh about 200 clients at the moment and uh were doing i don't know um uh about i don't know five i think five thousand users or something like that five thousand okay and those 200 are all paying customers yes at the seven thousand at the five to ten thousand dollars so like i said before we started off at a very at a very low level and we were getting people on at a very very low price uh point um and and and and now they're and now we're it's been part all that progression happened during coven when we went into the enterprise market so is it fair to say that your average customer is paying something more like 500 or a thousand bucks a month versus like five or ten thousand bucks a month oh absolutely absolutely yeah yeah okay and that's because you started you've increased your pricing you have a bunch of early customers that pay much less yeah yeah so we went out we went out to find uh to get basically people to pay for it and use it to value it um learn from them understand what works and then go into enterprise it's a super smart strategy you know that makes tons of sense i just want to make sure i capture your story accurately here so 200 customers at an average point of 500 bucks a month would mean you're doing about 100 000 bucks a month right now in revenue is that about accurate it's very accurate yeah that's great and if so what were you about about a year ago so we can calculate growth rate so we were uh so growth rate i don't have the actual number on that but growth rate is uh about uh four four x it's just under four x four x okay so you're doing about twenty five thousand dollars a month a year ago yeah if you forexed where does the growth come from was it expanding those accounts up to much larger plans or was it bringing on brand new customers all together so the the growth came from uh well internally in a number of the clients right like i said that the the so the uh the actual usage of the platform uh grew very very fast in 2020 um and then the and then and then the revenues followed after that and and the revenues really followed with uh larger clients coming on board and uh and and just paying more money and i believe you've raised capital store twice 2017 seed round and then a grant in 2019. if those are accurate tell me how the grant works do you have to pay that 1.5 million euros back to the disruptive technology innovation fund or is that basically a donation no it's a donation that's amazing how do you get a donation how do you get 100 1.5 million euros of free money so it's a look it's a big project we're working with trinity college dublin on it uh and we're working with another company uh called kinesense and um and one of the things that we're developing there which is which is really exciting is a video management platform for policing so uh they probably make more content than any other vertical out there uh through cctv body worn camera dash cams etc etc and and and most of most all of that content is um is managed on premise i'll tell you one little story there's a police force in the uk that uh in 2019 made thirty to thirty two taxi rides moving content on memory stick from one place to another that's a lot that's a lot of work you're helping them solve that which we love this the 600 000 you raised which was a traditional i believe preceded on in 2017 why did you raise that capital so we so here in ireland we've got a couple of uh great opportunities one is through enterprise ireland where they where they match funding um so we we were able to raise money from angels and then and then have the enterprise ireland guys coming to match that uh which was great was it pretty standard 5 million cap convertible note that sort of thing [Music] uh it was a uh it was a convertible note uh there was no cap on it uh believe it or not and there was um and the uh and yeah that so it was that was and and then for the angel it was equity how patient can you be you know you put a million bucks into this business back three four five years ago you're just now breaking through that million dollar run rate uh do you ever get nervous oh my gosh am i gonna see that money again is this gonna work out like is is your whole life sort of on the line here or just like a small check for you yeah no it's it's absolutely a big risk um i said earlier i mentioned earlier about the timing right i you know you live and die by timing and uh and and when you have a vision that that something can that's you know that the world can be better using using technology and like i said you know radically simplifying the way we work with video in business um i you know i believe that uh everybody i spoke to believed that i just don't believe that the marketplace was ready for it um so you know i'm i you know you know yes it was it was very it's been very nerve-wracking getting to this point it's lovely being in the inflection point i'm not too sure it's any easier at this point in time because we're struggling with all those things like you know cash flow and and you know we've got to hire people to support new clients how many people are full-time today so we have 20 people 20 people and how many of those are engineers uh we got eight engineers wow any full-time sales reps and if so how many carry quota yeah we got we've got two we've got two full-time sales reps that's it um and uh no no quota no why no quota target because because we're still out there uh hunting right um and and we still don't have an absolute 100 percent uh understanding of what our vertical is so will you ever have a 100 understanding so uh i think we're getting close so um you know we look and we you know we hunt in in in we were hunting 100 in media entertainment uh for a number of years because i come from a media entertainment background i come from a broadcaster right um and and then we started looking into other verticals and that's and you know going back to your intro there uh you know we're working with drinks companies manufacturers uh we work with a cement company for a while um and now we're starting to work with the police i mean the police huge huge opportunities well we'll see what happens we're out of time though philip though for now let's wrap up with a famous five number one favorite business book my favorite business book uh four-hour work four-hour work week number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh there's a guy stuart lombard who uh who started ecobee and i think he's a pretty cool guy number three what's your favorite online tool for building overcast my favorite on uh live plan number four how many hours of sleep to eat every night not enough uh let's see i was up at my desk at five o'clock this morning i'll be working until eight o'clock tonight um that's a pretty standard day all right six seven hours okay and what's your situation married single kids married uh three kids wow and how are you how old am i yeah i'm 56 56 last question take us back to your 20 year old self what's something that you wish he knew i wish i knew how to uh take the risk to be uh to go out on my own guys there you have it coming from a guy that worked and helped build a lot of other people's companies launch his own finally in 2016 put a million bucks of his own capital into it just past 200 customers about 100 a month in revenue scaling nicely very capital efficient just 600 000 bucks raised in a pre-seed round back in 2017 and then worked to get a 1.5 million dollar a million euro grant in 2019 which is looking to scale 20 folks on the team today again helping folks basically build their own internal versions of frame.io manage their video content especially for folks like police forces philip thanks for taking us to the top nathan great talking to you have a good day one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm 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 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 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m 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 counter them and know that i appreciate your guys's support all right i'll be in the comments see ya