Prism.fm Revenue, Valuation & Funding (2024)

guys prism.fm helps event venues organized with artists and collab on all kinds of show types obviously took a hit during covet I thought Matt was going to totally die and he just had unbelievable willpower here got through it went to a low of caught 50 60 Grand a month has now scaled uh much larger than that caught over 150 200 Grand a month in Revenue 300 customers today new customers paying on average 11 000 bucks per year for the platform as he looks to scale closes 5 million series a in 2021 potentially looking at now as well we'll see what happens but he says he's very close to profitability team of 27 looking to build more payments potential payments products for the same industry hey folks my guest today is Matt Ford he's the CEO of prism.fm he's a spiritual Seeker living the good life in Austin Texas when he's not running prism or playing he's playing music and hanging with kids or enjoying nature prism uh helps unfuck the Live Events industry which we love Matt you ready to take us to the top yes yes I didn't write that did I about unfucking the live music did right that I that is verbatim don't try and put that on me um but it was it's it's been great following your story because you first came on in 2018 when you had just broke 15 000 a month in revenue and I'm going oh my God my guy Matt he's gonna have a hard time drawing kova there's no live events going on but you made it through covid with a ton of momentum I guess why don't you touch on that real quick before we get an update yeah uh yeah I mean you're saying touch on coven yeah we'll just touch on yeah how you made the company sustainable through kobed when revenues I mean flatlined or shrunk yeah I mean we had uh you know 20 2018 2019 was us getting off the ground and then we had so we had virtually let's call it 14 months in the market uh before the pandemic hit and um I know this is a little uh against your you know what you typically you know look to see an entrepreneur which is the whole bootstrap methodology but I had raised money at the end of 2019. mind-raising I just don't want I want the founders to get rich when they do it you know but yeah you had raised a million seed in 2017 and a 2.9 Million extension in 2019 right yeah and I and I know you're not like totally against uh raising money but like the timing of it was ridiculously good I mean at the end of 2019 we had a couple million dollars in the bank and I I scaled down to a bootstrap team at that moment um you know actually funny enough I'm full steam ahead profitability these days so I'm I've come around to really when are you prop were you profitable in June of this year last month uh we're we're working towards that we're not we're not quite there yet but we're we're using our Runway to get to there and and it's I could we're in a healthy place right now I'm just being completely honest with you like we're you know we're uh like I could make some Cuts tomorrow to be profitable but we have we're in a healthy place right now and have some money in the bank we're just kind of like coasting to to profitability at this point now but it's it's really right around the corner and it feels good but you know we weren't in 2019 so some funding help us get through that and it it really allowed us it allowed me to keep a team of Engineers that were working on the product and and we had a tour how many how many engineers at the time we only had like four people at the time four Engineers working on the product and I had I think maybe you know three three kind of customer success in sales people that we kept part-time uh to go into the The Trenches with our customers um so keeping development strong during that time and like you know going into the crisis with our customers it allowed us to I mean it really accelerated our impact on the industry and then on the other side of the pandemic we've you know five axed our Revenue since the the bottom of the trough we also didn't turn a lot during the pandemic which I think was a major Testament to the technology like we we went in with um let's call it 120 customers and we and we came out with of those 120 we we came out with you know I saw a hundred of them like we didn't we didn't see much churn where are you today just total customer count uh we're coming up on 300 yeah that's great so it's 60 more than when we did an interview exactly one year ago which is nice we'll touch on that here a bit more but yeah keep the story going because didn't you also raise did you raise a series a and uh 2021 July yeah yeah we raised the series a in 2021 um five million dollars and you know grew the business quite a bit um and so I think you told me you sold about 10 of the company in that round right like a 50 evaluation something like that um I can't exactly remember what I what I what I what I told you about We There Was You know there was some decent dilution in that round of funding um and um shoot I'm sorry what were you asking me well no I mean touch on that right I mean let's say you diluted more than 10 of the series a the seed round you diluted there you know maybe 15 20 I mean how do you think about just founder dilutioning and managing your position in the company yeah absolutely I mean I'm like I was saying now you know let's call it three year if you take away the pandemic we've been three years in the market we have really solid product Market fit we have negative net retention it and and we have a better understanding negative negative negative churn right negative churn negative turn yeah positive net retention thank you so much yeah yeah with one of our customer segments it's it's segments it's uh it's net retention of 127 and across our whole customer base it's 110 percent yeah for me it's like I was grateful to raise when you know it was kind of this pie in the sky like hey like it like we we think there's a big Market out there like let's go and find some investors that believe not as well and the sky's the limit but over time I think we've become more and more rational about how big of a market is and I'm going to use some like made up numbers here but you know in the start like let's say hey like we believe the Tam is 500 million so it's like all right sure go and raise however much we want but over time I think it's really important for an entrepreneur to get more realistic about like what the Sam is versus The Tam and what the true Tam is and you know now that we've had three years in the market like it's just quite obvious that this business should be sustainable and profitable as a default and there's always more things we want to do with innovating like we're considering adding payments onto the platform we're considering you know what what are the customers we can expand into um but if we're if we're doing that from a place where the core business is profitable then we're not having to like fundraise to you know to avoid a layoff at the same time that we're evaluating these new options like we know the default is hey we got a good group of people that love what we're doing we got a customer base that's like hooked on our product Innovation like that's the default great so now we can now we can use that you know that foundation and look to more and more ways that we can innovate and for me I'm like you know if if a fundraising opportunity emerges not out of need kind of what you were saying like you're just for the founders getting rich of it like we're finally in a place where we can like we're coming up on fundraising for opportunity versus for need and I think that's you know extremely exciting 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 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 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 round 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 evaluation 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 you've managed dilution to the extent where you still own a nice chunk of business I call it 30 to 50 right something like that yeah I own a nice chunk and you're back to your question like how do I think about it like it would be great to own a greater percentage of prism but this is I'm this is the furthest I've taken a company I I own an asset that grows directly with how much I succeed um I'm in complete control of my most valuable asset it's more than any co-founders what's that no co-founders uh I had co-founders along the way that we've uh parted ways with uh and you know mostly all in good good good grace you have to spend money is like spend money to part ways you have to buy them out or how'd that work um a little bit of it depends on the story um a couple we spent money on yeah a couple of it was more like cordial and we and they and they bought their Equity so yeah okay okay cool all right very cool talk to me about um how you've grown you've gone from 240 these are event venues buying your technology correct not the artists uh well we have the we now have event venues in the artist businesses as well using prism tell me about that yeah so it like the overall pitch of prison is uh you know the the live music industry is this like connected ecosystem of uh of people that are doing business uh to make concerts happen you have the venues and the promoters who are putting on the events and then you have talent agencies who represent the artists and their and they're booking these and they're they're uh essentially like selling the bands of these uh venues and promoters so we work with both sides of the ecosystem and that mostly helps with data transfer long story short like it if a promoter and a venue is both using prism there's a really enhanced kind of efficient show that gets planned um but if uh if you know if they're not using prism then they have to do an amazing amount of data entry so we've created this like Network effect kind of gravity uh and using the system where you if you work with three people who are using prism it's this enhanced benefit and then you go and work with someone who's not using prism it's not that you don't want to do business with them but it's like you tangibly know it's like hey like I'm just more efficient as a business but I work with someone that's using the same network as me so that's that's a big part of our strategy now have you increased pricing or is each customer still paying about 600 bucks a month we we have increased pricing quite a bit um I mean our our like month our current month ACV is obviously quite different than if you look at all of our 300 customers because we have a lot of people that were paying 100 bucks in the early days but to date today we're getting an ACV like above 11 000. okay okay very cool and just to round out Revenue growth so one year ago when you came on the show you were doing about 155 000 a month in Revenue across 240 customers where are you today well uh I can't disclose exactly what our Revenue amount is at but we're you know growing ACV strong and we're above 300 customers now so okay why can't you've always shared when you come on in the past uh you said that you were up 6X since the recession you when you came on during the recession uh or the code but you said you're doing about 56 000 across 120 customers so can we assume your 6X 50 Grand a month uh yeah you could assume that sorry those are numbers you gave me I don't want to make a false assumption or the numbers you gave me accurate yeah there's just some strategic things happening right now that I can't like publicly be super clear about the numbers but you know growth is heading in the right direction are you selling the company uh no not yet not yet how much are you targeting in the fundraise [Laughter] uh we're we're looking to raise you're so funny we're looking to raise like uh a little bit of money basically like back to the whole profitability conversation we're we're in a place where we don't have to I'm I'm not selling a big chunk of the company we're like kind of bridging our way to profitability though well listen if I read in the news that prism does a 30 million dollar series beat in my head I just want you to know I'm gonna Hope on the back side you reserve 70 80 percent of that is secondary for yourself let's just put it that way so I appreciate it I this is not what this next round is about like during we had this you're gonna like this we had opportunities to raise a larger round of funding and we intentionally were like hey like let's dilute less right now we don't actually need it um and there's a question about can we turn that to secondary like frankly like I don't feel like I'm quite at the place where I'm I'm doing that um so you know I'm really because you're choosing to I mean have you asked for it and folks said no and you just feel like you don't have the leverage to get it right now no right now I'm more focused on growing the business yeah like I think like for me there's a clear like I'm I'm conserving the equity that I have and you know saving it for the future and um you know there's a clear like I see a clear Runway right now to get the company you know to 15 20 million in recurring revenue and it's just my own kind of calculations and willingness to hold on how long will it take you to get to a 15 run rate you think the end of this year what's going to take the end of next year um end of next year yeah yeah that's aggressive can you do that you're picking the Horizon that's curious is if we can if we can break into the payment space that's that's like the new you know yeah well what's the analysis there I mean we have a lot of listeners that have stats that are thinking about like should I add embedded Finance so like when you're thinking about should we invest in developers to add a fintech product and if so what percent of the gmv can we take like how are you modeling that how are you thinking about it well I think every opportunity is different but you know for us there's a question of like prism prism is I think we've kind of like earned the right to be involved in the payment because our customers you know the payment that would be that we would be getting in front of is the uh the payment of the venue to the van and how much of that do you already sit on do you know how much of that you've processed the past year well okay so the key word is process how if we were if we had the full Network utilizing payments it's over 800 million dollars flowing the past 12 months yes yes that's the projection for this 12 months for 2023. but what was last like if you look at history 500 million okay yeah so what your your analysis is man if we actually facilitated the payment with investing engineering to do the payment rails and stuff and you guys kept two percent to 500 million that number gets big pretty quick yeah like the the long what I was trying to say is like do we have the you know the right to be the one that you know that that does facilitate that payment and I think what we've done on the SAS front has given us what do you mean the right I don't know what you mean by that like what like can can someone just come in tomorrow and say hey we want to invent a technology for uh like a payment solution for the industry and what I'm saying is we have a more of a right to do that than someone who comes in tomorrow because we're already helping these people organize their payments and doing a payment Ledger and doing the Contracting around the payments yeah well how are they doing the payments right now like do they put it through bill.com or something who are you competing yes they they contracted in prism they schedule it in prison they track it in prison but then they go into their bank account and actually facilitate it this feels like a very natural thing for you to do right I mean that's what I'm saying that's what I mean by how we earn the right yeah so what what take rate if you process 800 million the next two months do you think you can take a two percent of five percent of 20 cut absolutely not on the 20 I mean the so this is this is this is what we've learned is like you have to ask yourself like what what propensity the market has like what are they used to so for prism like what are we offering like you know in exchange for efficiency and better organization um like okay you know but what are they doing instead right now they're sending ACH and wires and that's like anywhere from free or like 20 bucks a month to like 20 a payment so we wouldn't have the immediate opportunity to take like five percent of a payment to an artist like people would be like all right no I'm just gonna I'm gonna I'm Gonna Save a little efficiency and go into my bank it's not worth five thousand dollars what about two percent two percent of 500 million is 10 million dollars in revenue for you this is this is what I'm getting at so for us it's like there the question is is like how you know there's a direct Revenue stream even if it's not ten percent or five percent and the Strategic mode of being the payment facilitator and getting people like in love with that solution of like not having to work with their bank account every single time and having to be more organized and streamlined that's what's exciting but yeah but there is a transactional opportunity as well the other question is how much is that 800 million you know it's you know chopped up like if you think of a POS system at a bar like that's like a bunch of five dollar to ten dollar payments so for them to take you know five percent it's like you know whatever let's call it a quarter to a dollar so that's it's a it's really easy for payments companies to take a bigger cut of a smaller transaction than a smaller cut of a bigger transaction depending on the market so that's something that we're working through right now but still there's there's a there's enough payments for it to be a very exciting opportunity for us and what two teams has today how many full-time we are at 20 uh sorry I'm like I'm trying to think 27 yeah 27. and and are you still using sort of an outsourced engineering team or is that all in-house at this point no we've never had a service engineering we've always been in-house oh okay how many engineers we have of that 27 I believe uh 17. are you built are all in Austin or they're spread out we're a little bit spread out our core team is in Austin and we have a few people in Detroit and then we have some International Engineers um that are like full-time employees it's not like a Dev shop situation very cool very cool we're rooting free man congratulations wrap up here with the uh the famous five number one your favorite book uh my favorite book of all time let's just go with the Alchemist that's a good book yeah your last one was the da Vinci bio I'm sensing a trend here all right that was really good yeah and number two is there is there a CEO you're following or studying last time you said Grime so you got to pick somebody new I think that's probably just the podcast that I listened to um I thought I I uh I'm super happy for Sam Alton and what open AI has cracked open like I think I'm not as like I'm not going for the roller coaster ride that everyone is with like I think there's an amazing amount of noise in the in the signal of what AI is but open AI is clearly like done something very important and interesting and we'll see where it goes in the future but if if it doesn't go anywhere besides what it's already done it's extremely impressive number three what's your favorite online tool for building prism my favorite online tool um lately I've been doing a lot of marketing myself and using Camtasia which is like a way to like chop up like like live recordings old school wow okay number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night I get I try to get nine that's good and still uh not married one kid what you're 34 now is that right yeah yeah um yeah I I'm in a in a relationship not married yet but that could change in the future but any more kids are still there I don't want to divulge anything on the podcast that I can't divulge but there's there's things there's things happening with the company and there's also things happening in my personal life that's very exciting it's still one kiddo or you have more at this point uh uh just just one for now but once again you know you don't want to break baby news on the podcast that's for sure uh we want uh Family First Family First all right and Matt how old how old are you 34. yeah you had to write 34. yeah all right take us home here some of you the same age so yeah I know it's perfect take us home something you wish you knew when you were 20. when I was 20. um I think just the importance of uh wherewithal and keep and and positive attitude and a willingness to persevere is is like the stimuli like to maintain a good attitude and uh you know through like challenging times like to like work that muscle and to understand it more and more guys prism.fm helps event venues organized with artists and collab on all kinds of show types obviously took a hit during covet I thought Matt was going to totally die and he just had unbelievable willpower here got through it went to a low of caught 50 60 Grand a month uh has now scaled uh much larger than that caught over 150 200 Grand a month in Revenue 300 customers today new customers paying on average 11 000 bucks per year for the platform as he looks to scale closes 5 million series a in 2021 potentially looking at now as well we'll see what happens but he says he's very close to profitability team of 27 looking to build more payments potential payments products for the same industry Matt thanks for taking us to the top thank you so much appreciate it one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm 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 our poo 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 p.m Central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM Central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the Subscribe button below here on YouTube their 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 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