How Overcast HQ CEO Philippe Brodeur grew Overcast HQ 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...