Play Revenue, Valuation & Funding (2024)

As of February 2022, Play had approximately 4,500 monthly active users who had been granted full access to the product, out of 11,000 total app installs on iOS. An additional 30,000 people were on the waitlist awaiting full access. The app was placed in the App Store in Q3 2021 and operates on an invite-only basis for full access.

Play is pre-revenue as of the interview date. LaCivita said the company planned to introduce monetization in 2022 and was considering a three-tier freemium model: a free tier, a paid individual tier, and a paid organizational or team tier. Pricing conversations with active users were just beginning at the time of the interview, and no price per seat had been set. LaCivita noted the company was pursuing SOC 2 certification through Vanta in order to begin selling into enterprise accounts, where IT and legal teams were already asking about compliance.

Play is pre-revenue as of February 2022, with monetization planned for later that year. LaCivita described the intended model as freemium with three tiers, mirroring the packaging approach of other design tools in the market. The company has not yet determined the price per seat or the action threshold at which users would be willing to pay.

The primary retention metric is in-app events defined as a user adding an element to a design page within a session. In the 30 days prior to the interview, Play's 4,500 active users generated 650,000 such events, equating to approximately 150 actions per user per month, a figure the host derived and LaCivita confirmed. Cohort retention data showed that users at five, six, and seven weeks of usage were retained at an 85 percent rate, meaning they were actively creating within the product rather than simply exploring it. LaCivita tracked these cohorts in Mixpanel and conducted direct user interviews to inform product decisions.

Burn rate was estimated by the host at roughly $350,000 to $400,000 per month based on a 20-person team, and LaCivita confirmed the runway figure of approximately 24 months as of February 2022. The company was approximately 30 days into its Vanta SOC 2 certification process at the time of the interview, with LaCivita estimating a first-year budget of approximately $20,000 inclusive of auditor fees. Profitability was not discussed beyond LaCivita's acknowledgment that the company is managing a profit-and-loss statement that currently has only losses, a shift he described as a mental adjustment from running the profitable Firstborn agency.

Play had a team of 20 people as of February 2022, 12 of whom are engineers. LaCivita noted the company doubled its headcount after closing the First Round Capital seed round, which provided the capital to accelerate hiring without excessive concern about burn. The team works out of a newly signed office in New York City at least a few days per week.