How Prism.fm CEO Matt Ford grew Prism.fm to $5.4M revenue and 300 customers in 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...