How Play CEO Dan LaCivita grew Play to $3.4M revenue with a 26 person team in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is dan atlas of the he's the entrepreneur ceo who's built grown and led successful teams and businesses in the digital space for over 15 years his latest venture play is transforming how teams design mobile products by letting them design build and experience their product in real time all on the medium they're designing for their phone dan you're ready to take us to the top yes thanks for having me you bet so should what's the comp here what's the analog is it sort of like web flow for mobile is it more like sort of you know like a figma for mobile yeah it's actually i would say in between the two in terms of our current state right so we're we're the first native ios design tool for teams to design prototype and share directly on their device previous to play we ran a design agency building a lot of mobile products for our clients and one of the things that we experienced with as many great design tools there are figma adobe xd sketch they're sort of a mile wide and there is not really a platform built for people designing specifically for mobile products so what we're trying to do is fill that gap and be very kind of focused in terms of product teams designing for mobile and how do we give them an input directly into what they can achieve with kind of the sandbox that apple has created and give them access to all that stuff when was uh the agency before you like spun out the sas it sounds like a software company what year was the agency at its prime i would say probably right before and during we sold uh 10 years ago so we sold to densu yeah the name of the agency was called firstborn uh and then we sold to densu it's about 10 years now so myself one of our michael who founded firstborn he left after four years after sale and then june and myself left uh after uh eight years post uh post acquisition uh we started play okay and and give me a general sense of like size so before you sold how many folks full time and like can you share sort of what revenue was back in 2010 fr at our older agency at the agency yeah yeah we were doing around 27 28 million dollars uh annual revenue about 100 people um so it was you know services based business uh so you know there you know we had some repeat clients aor clients but a lot of a lot of project-based business so every year you're kind of you're you're starting over to to refill you know the pipeline uh but going from agency world which is you know services business profitability from day one to managing sort of now you know we're pre-revenue right now so going from managing a p l to just an l has been uh you know a mental shift from from sort of a ceo perspective but um it's been a good transition and so so sort of help me understand so companies and agencies like when i've seen multiples recently but this was again 10 years ago so it's almost irrelevant but you're trading for somewhere like two to four x ebitda i don't know where your ebitda was at the agency but but what what sale price is like 50 60 80 million something like that yeah it was no i mean we never publicly disclosed it but it was a it was a it was a it was a good deal i think for for for everybody you know involved not just financially but i think we found the right uh the right parent company um to sell at least at the time when we sold the business what i'm trying to do by asking that question is get in your head as a founder right so have you now created a cache cushion for yourself back in 2012 that allows you to sort of do anything are you still sort of like eh you know have some flexibility now but i still sort of need to stay here and earn my iron out for the next three years oh yeah yeah no i i got to work so i mean we you know was able to to to have a have a bit of a safety net but no i'm i'm i'm here to work uh and and build the next next big thing that's what we're here to do yeah so you sold in 2012 when did you leave 360i or detsu uh left ensue uh it was three years ago now okay got it so left now did you guys already start writing code for this inside of densu no no we we we june left uh i left about four months after he did uh they you know june and our other there's four partners so myself michael june and eric um jun and eric kind of started together uh i finished out a few more months at firstborn then i left and then joined them 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 gonna 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 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 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 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 valuations than what you can get now inside of founderpath and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to 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 so sorry when you say partners you don't mean at the agency now you're talking about play there's four or four founders that's correct yeah sorry so say that again june eric who else michael who founded firstborn uh and then myself so we all we're the four founders uh for play very cool and did you guys just decide okay we're gonna be even and split 25 each or what how'd you have equity conversation that's always tough yeah it was it was relatively equal um we started with our own capital um so we started with a million dollars of capital uh michael put in the lion's share of capital um so that kind of got us started we're i think a good position from from that standpoint like we can hire people from day one um we weren't really like hardcore bootstrapping you know per se and then we ended up raising kind of a pre-seed round on safes and then quickly followed that up with what ended up being our seed round uh that first round lead which we weren't really looking to do but after meeting a partner there todd uh we we thought it was the right thing to do so how much was that precede round four in what year so we did both of those were um last year uh the pre-seed round we raised three million uh uh on a 15 million dollar you know post money valuation cap on the safes and we followed that up with another 6.1 uh that first round lead and did you close that like december last year or that or like closed oh yeah we closed that in april of last year oh god so that 3 million precede was like basically end of 20 right or end of 2020 or early 2021 that's right i see i see okay so the six one so help me understand that i mean obviously you still probably had a bunch of 3.1 million sitting in the bank when you did the 6.1 million um sorry sorry you said that was 6.1 on what did you get the valuation on that no we didn't we have we haven't disclosed the valuation on the on the on the sixth one but it was in the it was in the you know tens of millions i think it was it was a it was a good jump up from where we did our our pre-seed uh kind of yeah i mean most in...