Satsub Studios Team Size (2026)

[00:00] Guys, and Amazon both love Mike. He launched Gem Spinner in 2009 in the Apple App Store. Was featured as making, you know, a dollar a day in terms of using it, making 7 k per day at its crush at its height. Think of it almost like candy crush, and then quote, unquote, was featured by the Amazon Appstore 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. [00:21] And, also, he's doing a lot of b two b 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. Great guest today. He's made games for Apple two, games for first generation Mac, games for the nineties PC and modern PC, Macs, iPhone, Android. You name it, he's done it. He's got chemical emergency response databases and mapping built for NOAA, consumables [00:43] and recommendations for Amazon, and medical devices for epilepsy, concussions, and sleep apnea. He touches a lot. We're gonna dive into all of it today. Mike, are you ready to take us to the top? [00:52] >> I'm ready. [00:53] Alright. 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 gonna launch my own game, my own little app. You've launched wordhuddle.com, which how many active people are playing it actively today? [01:05] >> I'm getting 300 to 400 players per day right now finishing games. [01:10] And that's interesting. So so how did you get those downloads? This is equivalent to a SaaS company building like an internal marketplace. Right? You've gotta get the players to play each other live. How did you get your first 100 players? [01:20] >> Well, actually, I posted on a Wordle group on Facebook, and that gave me about 600 players to start right away. And it's it's sort of dropped down to 400 now because I know some of them were just trying it out. But so so that's that's a way. [01:35] How did you do that? Did you get permission from the Wordle group owner, or did you say, screw it. I'm just gonna post and see what happens? [01:40] >> No. It's actually a very friendly group. There's a lot of posting people posting different games and so on. I think the the Wordle players are generally, you know, friendly and curious to try new games. So it wasn't a problem. [01:51] Interesting. So you get all these sign ups 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? [02:03] >> Yeah. Completed games is important, you know, time spent on on on the page. [02:10] >> 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, and so on. So the I actually early on, I put in a feature, you know, just to get feedback on the puzzles, and that's been really helpful in terms of understanding, you know, what what players like I found. It was a little surprising to me, [02:35] >> but I found that players almost never rate a puzzle as too easy. But if they fail the puzzle, you know, they're gonna say it was too hard and it was no fun. So peep people have fun when they win, basically. [02:47] That's really, really interesting. So do you 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? [03:01] >> It it's it's a good idea to have to have some easier puzzles on that or some alternatives for people to try different puzzles. Currently, there's just the one puzzle per day. But but it's it's a good it's a good thought. [03:12] Interesting. And so what is average time spent on page daily today? [03:16] >> It's about three minutes. [03:17] So Three minutes. Interesting. Is that good, bad? [03:20] >> Yeah. I think that's good for these types of puzzles. That's about how long it's supposed to take. And, you know, people, [03:28] >> you know, almost everybody who starts a game finishes the game. So I feel good about that. [03:33] You've built games for a lot of companies. My audience, I think, are gamers when they're wanting to wind down from running their companies every day. Is there what what game would peep what's the biggest game you've built? Most active users, the most publicly well known. [03:45] >> Yeah. So there are two. One of them is 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 proud of that. It got featured on 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 two thousand [04:06] >> ten where we got featured on the on the front page. [04:09] How many plays or downloads? [04:13] >> Let's see. I I think we were charging a dollar a dollar per day at that point. And I I remember it was about 7,000 in in a day in that day. So [04:23] Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders. But imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 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 Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second. But you log in, you connect [04:47] your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time, you can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna [05:11] get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation, Private equity firm is different. If you're gonna 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 [05:33] not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder share with us on the show. So traction 1,200,000 seed round 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna 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 [05:59] going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll 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 dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. 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 [06:20] if you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link. This link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. 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. Alright. Let's jump back into [06:47] the interview. That's amazing. Okay. And what's the second game? [06:51] >> It's it's called quote unquote. And so it's a it's like a crossword puzzle 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, Mark Twain has a quote, familiarity breeds contempt and children. Okay. So so familiarity breeds so then then we we would take parts of those words and create a set of crossword clues where you pick out the parts of [07:24] >> 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 words. [07:32] What year was this? [07:33] >> That was probably about 2013, 2014 when we did and and that one had really great success on the Amazon Appstore. They used it as a free app of the day multiple times. And [07:47] And so how many downloads did you get via Amazon? [07:50] >> I think it was about [07:54] >> 3,000 a day when it was featured on on the on the front page. [07:59] Free or paid? [08:00] >> It was all free because that was that was part of their deal that they would feature your app, but it but it is free for that day. So but it was it was a good publicity. [08:10] And so how does all this game theory how does all this apply to the b to b work that you're doing? You're building some cool stuff for businesses. [08:17] >> Well, I mean, at at base level, I guess, you know, programming is programming. So it it's, you know, all the same in in that sense. But a lot of it is just to mix it up. I I, work for NOAA, the Ocean and Atmosphere Administration, and I do, mapping programs and chemical databases for hazardous chemical response. So that that's just, you know, completely different thing. And then I'm working on a marketplace for psychologists to find clients. [08:47] >> 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 gonna do this project and try try to use this framework with it. [08:56] But let's say NOAA wanted to I mean, I hate to say it like this, but let's say NOAA 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 the awareness spread faster to more people? [09:15] >> Okay. I yeah. I I think that would more be related to [09:24] >> with the NOAA products, it tends to be just give me the answer as fast as possible. So there's not a lot of not a lot of game 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, [09:42] >> one tool that I'm building now is sort of a a way for, indie programmers, indie hackers to document their, 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 that the user interface design in terms of it being as easy as possible to take those steps is [10:02] Where can people find that, the tool you're building for Indie Hackers? [10:05] >> That actually is not yet up. So so but I I will let you I'll let you know. [10:13] 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 wanna rely on your full time gig at NOAA to pay the bills? [10:22] >> 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, hours are are very flexible. When there's deadlines, of course, you have to meet them. But if if, it's not a crunch time, you know, I can work half time or quarter time at any time if I need to. So Interesting. I appreciate that. [10:44] But how do you I mean, some of the most successful SaaS companies start off as agencies. I mean, are you you're are a one man agency right now? Is that what you call yourself or [10:50] do have a team? [10:51] >> I have worked with others in the past. I'm Gem Spinner. I worked with a team of artists. But right now, I'm just doing this stuff on my own. So like, WordHuddle, for instance, is just driven by feedback from family, friends, and users, and I'm just doing all of the all the graphics, all the work. [11:12] That's interesting. So are you a guy that sorry. You you actually wouldn't enjoy taking something from one to ten? You really like to take a bunch of stuff from zero to one? [11:20] >> Well, I think you have to, you know, just have a lot of irons on fire to to hope for, you know, something to really catch on. So, you know, there's different attitudes about, you know, whether working on multiple projects is gonna spread you too thin, and you're not gonna be able to give anyone the focus it needs. But for for me, [11:41] >> you know, three or four projects going, it's a good balance. Yeah. [11:44] Well, we'll 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 SaaS companies of the world. So on that note, though, let's wrap up here with the famous five. Michael, what's your favorite book on let's do it on game design and creativity. [12:03] >> Well, you know, I I think I would actually say drawing on the right side of the brain, which is an old book that I read about twenty years ago. And it's just to teach people how to draw, but but it's [12:19] >> you 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 sort of a world to me that that I hadn't known about. [12:35] I love that. Number two, is there a founder that you're following or studying? [12:40] >> There's a guy named Damon Chen who's doing really well. He made a testimonial. Yeah. Which is, you know, it seems so simple. It's like it's like, yes. Of course, everybody needs a testimonial, you know, and and he he did a really good job with it, and he's also balancing other projects as well. So he he's a good example of someone who I'd be happy if I was doing what he's doing. [13:06] Yep. No. He he's he's great, and he's using Founderpath, 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? [13:17] >> Well [13:20] >> so online tool. [13:24] >> I'm trying to think. I I've used Figma a bit, but I tend to honestly, I tend to just draw my mock ups directly in paint.net, you know, for Windows. I got fast at that. So I'm trying to think of online tool. I mean, I I rely on Visual Studio Code and a bunch of plug ins constantly. That that's sort of my [13:44] That's good. [13:45] >> Most efficient tool. [13:46] >> Yeah. [13:47] Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night? [13:50] >> Boy, that's a tricky question. I would call it maybe three plus two plus one, which which reflects the two two naps that I [14:01] Alright. Six. That's good. And what's your situation, Michael? Married? Single? Kids? [14:06] >> Single. I actually have a girlfriend in Romania, so I've been spending about half my time over there, which has been really great. [14:13] That's amazing. Okay. And how old are you? [14:16] >> I am 55. So 55. [14:17] Last last question. [14:18] >> The reference the reference to Apple two games was sort of supposed to Yeah. Give that away. [14:24] Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20. [14:30] >> Wow. I [14:33] >> think I think this idea that online was gonna 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 I wish that I was sort of had known that or someone had told me, like, you know, this stuff's gonna get really fast, so think about that. [14:52] Guys, Apple and Amazon both love Mike. He launched Gem Spinner in 2009. The Apple Appstore was featured as making, you know, a dollar a day in terms of using it, making 7 k per day at its crush at its height. Think of it almost like candy crush. Then quote, unquote, was featured by the Amazon Appstore 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, [15:14] he's doing a lot of b to b 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 Chen 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 1PM central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. We call it [15:34] 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, ARPU CAC, LTV, you name it, they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live. It is fun to watch every Thursday 1PM 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 [16:00] any of that, make sure you click the subscribe button below here on YouTube, the 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 SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a big fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or something else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if you want to take this conversation [16:22] deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS founders. You want to get in there. We've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing. You can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying. Sign up for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. [16:44] Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, but I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people. We got to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. All right. I'll be [17:02] in the comments. See you.