Satsub Studios Company Profile (2023)

guys apple and Amazon both love my key launch gem spinner in 2009 the Apple App Store was featured it was making you know a dollar a day in terms of using it making 7K per day at its Crush at its height think of it almost like Candy Crush and then quote unquote was featured by Amazon app exchange many times he was getting 3 000 downloads per day now he's taking what he knows about gamification and he's building wordhuddle.com and also he's doing a lot of B2B stuff as well whether it's a Marketplace for folks to find help in terms of psychology and other stuff hey folks my guest today is Mike Katz's great guest today he's made games for Apple 2 games for first generation Mac games for the 90s PC and modern PC Max iPhone Android you name it he's done it he's got chemical emergency response databases and mapping built for NOAA consumables and recommendations for Amazon and medical devices for epilepsy concussions and sleep apnea he touches a lot we're going to dive into all of it today Mike are you ready to take us to the top about ready all right let me start with your consumer play which is interesting a lot of people go man one day when I'm old and retired and Rich I'm going to launch my own game my own little app you've launched wordhuddle.com which how many active people are playing it actively today I'm getting 300 to 400 players per day right now finishing games and that's interesting so so how did you get those downloads this is equivalent to a SAS company building like an internal marketplace right you've got to get the players to play each other alive how did you get your first hundred players uh well actually I posted on a wordal group on Facebook and that gave me about 600 players to start right away and it sort of got down to uh 400 now because I know some of them are just trying it out but so so that's that's a way how did you do that did you get permission from the world group owner or did you just say screw it I'm just gonna post it and see what happens no it's actually a very friendly group there's a lot of uh posting of people posting different games and so on I think the the world players are generally you know friendly and curious to try new games so it wasn't a problem interesting so you get all these signups when you post in the Facebook group and you're watching the activation metrics you strike me as an analytics driven guy what were you watching for you mentioned completed games was that the key activation metric or what were you looking for yeah completed games is important you know time spent uh on on the page uh uh uh I I'm actually you know recording all the plays that are made in the game so I'm looking at you know which which when people get discouraged you know when people give up uh and so on so the um actually early on I put in a um a feature you know just to give feedback on the puzzles and that's been really helpful in terms of understanding uh you know what what uh players like I found uh it was a little surprising to me but I found that um players almost never read a puzzle it's too easy but if they fail the puzzle you know they're gonna say it was too hard and it was no fun so people have fun when they win basically that's a really really interesting so do you have if some if you if you see something that makes you believe a user is about to stop coming back every day will you give them an easier puzzle so they can complete it and get a positive dopamine hit uh it's it's a good idea to have to have uh some easier puzzles on that or some alternatives for people to try different puzzles currently it's just the one puzzle per day but um uh but it's a good it's a good thought interesting and so what is average time sent on page daily today it's about three minutes so three minutes interesting is that good bad yeah I think that's good for these types of puzzles that's about how long it's supposed to take and uh um you know give people uh uh you know almost everybody who starts a game finishes the game so I feel good about that you've built games for a lot of companies my audience I think our Gamers when they're wanting to wind down from running their companies every day is there what what game would be what's the biggest game you built most active users the most publicly well known yeah so um there were two one of them is uh called gem spinner which is sort of a you know in the match three Bejeweled Candy Crush family but with a pretty interesting twist so I was pretty um proud of that it got uh featured on uh the front page of the App Store actually back in the day when you know the app store opened in 2009 the Apple App Store and I think it was that year or early 2010 where we got featured on the on the front page and how many plays or downloads um let's see I think we were charging a dollar a dollar per day at that point and I remember it was about seven thousand uh in in a day in that day so 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 valuation 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 around 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 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 that's amazing okay what's the second game um it's called quote unquote and so it's a um uh it's like a crossword puzzle um where you get a bunch of Clues but the answers to the clues are found inside of a famous quotation like an example would be um Mark Twain has a quote familiarity brain breeds contempt and children okay so so familiarity so then then we we would take um parts of those words and create um a uh uh a set of crossword clues where you pick out the parts of the answers in the thing so all the answers are sitting there in front of you but you have to figure out where where in the quote the different segments of the word what year was this that was uh probably about uh 2013 2014 and we did and and that one had really great success on the Amazon app store they used it as a free app of the day multiple times and so how many downloads did you give via Amazon um I think it was about uh uh 3 000 a day when it was featured on the on the front page free or paid it was all free because that was that was part of their deal that they uh would feature your app but but it is free for that day so but it was it was a good publicity and so how does all this game theory how does all this apply to the B2B work that you're doing you're building some cool stuff for businesses well I mean at the base level I guess uh you know programming is programming so it's uh um you know all the same in that sense but a lot of it's just to mix it up I I um work for NOAA the ocean and atmosphere Administration and I do uh mapping programs and chemical databases for hazardous chemical response so that that's just you know completely different thing and then um I'm working on a Marketplace for a psychologists to find clients so it's a completely different thing I think a lot of it is just driven by the desire to learn new Frameworks you say okay I'm going to do this project and try try to use this framework with it but let's say Noah wanted to I mean I hate to say it like this but let's say no one wanted to take advantage of all you know the train obviously issue happening right now I think it's in Ohio right hazardous chemicals all over the place will they say hey Michael figure out a way to gamify this add some psychology to get so we can get the awareness spread faster to more people okay um I yeah I think that would more be uh related to um with the normal products it tends to be just given the answer as fast as possible so there's not a lot of not a lot of games playing there the the mapping component of it was informed by you know the graphics knowledge that I got from games so there's that that overlap and then uh um uh one tool that I'm building now is sort of a um a way for uh Indie programmers and hackers to document their uh Tech stack and so it you know there's a lot of information that I want them to be able to document easily so I'd say the user interface design in terms of being as easy as possible to take those steps is where can we go find that the tool you're building for Indie hackers that actually is uh not yet uh so so I'll let you know what what would it take for you to quit like your full-time gig and do some you know build one of these side projects out or are you really just sort of a serial tinkerer and you just want to rely on your full-time gig at Noah to pay the bills actually it's not a full-time gig so I'm a contractor with them although I'm working with a group that I've worked with for years and um the hours are are very flexible when there's deadlines of course you have to meet them but if uh it's not a crunch time you know I can work half time recorded time at any time if I need to so interesting I appreciate that but how do you I mean some of the most successful SAS companies start off as agencies I mean are you you're are you a one-man agency right now is that what you call yourself a team uh uh I have worked with others in the past on gem spinner I worked with a team of artists um uh but right now I'm just doing this stuff on my own so uh like word huddle for instance is uh we're just driven by feedback from family friends and users and I'm just doing all of the all the graphics all the work that's interesting so are you a guy that sorry you actually wouldn't enjoy taking something from one to ten you really like to take a bunch of stuff from zero to one well I think you have to you know just have a lot of irons of fire to to hope for you know something to really catch on so you know there's different um attitudes about you know whether working on multiple projects is going to spread you too thin and you're not going to be able to give anyone the focus it needs but um for me uh uh you know three or four projects going it's a good balance yeah well we'll certainly see what happens I I just have a sense that folks that have your kind of DNA they end up building the big SAS companies of the world so on that note though let's wrap up here with a famous five Michael what's your favorite book on let's do it on game design and creativity um well you know I I think I would actually say uh drawing on the right side of the brain which is an old book but I read it about 20 years ago and it's just to teach people how to draw but but it's uh um you realize after a while what it's really teaching you is how to see and and that was a really important insight for me that sort of like bad drawings come from Bad seeing and and it opened up a a sort of a world to me that that I hadn't known about I love that number two is there a Founder that you're following or studying um there's a guy named Damon Chan who's doing really well he made um uh testimonial yeah which is you know team so simple it's like it's like yes of course everybody needs a testimonial you know and and he uh he did a really good job with it and he's also uh balancing other projects as well so um he he's a good example of someone who I'd be happy if I was doing what he's doing yep no he he's he's great and he's using founder path which we love and he's growing nicely so number three what's your favorite online tool for doing all these projects that you do um well uh so online Tool uh I'm trying to think I've used a figma a bit but I tend to honestly I tend to just draw my mock-ups directly and uh paint.net you know for Windows I got fast at that um so I'm trying to think of online tool I mean I I rely on Visual Studio code and a bunch of plugins uh constantly that that's sort of my that's good most efficient tool yeah number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night boy that's a tricky question um I I would call it um maybe three plus two plus one which which reflects the two two naps that I get all right six that's good and what's your situation Michael married single kids uh single I actually have a girlfriend in Romania so I've been spending about um half my time over there which has been really great that's amazing okay and how old are you I am 55. so five last yeah the reference the reference to Apple II games was sort of yeah give that away last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. um wow I I I I I I think that I think this idea that online was going to be the way to go I think you know with the network speeds that we had back then you just couldn't imagine you know being able to have this conversation online and so I wish that I sort of had known that or someone had told me like you know this stuff's going to get really fast I think about that guys apple and Amazon both love my key launch gem spinner in 2009 the Apple App Store was featured is making you know a dollar a day in terms of using it making 7K per day at its Crush at its height think of it almost like Candy Crush and then quote unquote was featured by Amazon app exchange many times he was getting 3 000 downloads per day now he's taking what he knows about gamification and he's building wordhuddle.com and also he's doing a lot of B2B stuff as well whether it's a Marketplace for folks to find help in terms of psychology and other stuff we'll see what happens next he really enjoys Damon Chan at testimonial on that note Mike thanks for taking us to the top okay thanks a lot one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1 pm 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 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