How Social Media Directions Ltd. CEO Andras Tasi grew Social Media Directions Ltd. to $182.2K revenue and 68 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is andres tosi he is a husband and father of twin boys entrepreneur business owner for 23 years big follower of god 21 years of business networking franchise social media specialist motivation education inspiration you name it now building smd dot com andrus you ready to take us to the top i am yes okay what is smd is it sas or an agency it's actually a susp company so it came from an agency the original company was an agent a digital marketing agency are mainly focusing on on paid adverts and the story started with a with a really interesting uh step for us basically when me and my co-founder is two business owners in the business me and my best friend we we started as a house and like a side project uh this company and we landed a huge contract so it started with a with a huge contract we talked about the 4250 company in the uk um like a billion pound revenue company how much money was that contract for uh it was a potential for a million uh million pound at that time and how did you how did you get that deal that's a big deal well it's uh i think it's down to the to the uh talents of sales and politics how we build it up and and and it was some connections and uh to to the company originally and there was a trust build it up on our knowledge and they they decided to work with us it was it started with a trial for a business for a region and then it would potentially grow uh for uh for a whole nationwide contract so what are you doing for these customers that was uh that was facebook paid adverts and uh and content marketing okay so that was an agency deal basically when does the sas come in yeah we started as an agency as an agency deal there was no such uh society at that point and basically what happened we we started to build the system because obviously it was a small agency we just started and we we had to build the system to actually cover this we talked about 150 locations 300 pages so we started to do research finding these uh the software solution we can help us to actually run these these pages and we couldn't find anything and what year was this this is 2016 2000 at beginning of 2017. okay and how much revenue do you do in total in 2017 i was it was something like 15k in 2017. so what happened to the million dollar contract that's the thing yeah so basically what what happened we started to work with this uh in this project we got the first contract we signed that started to pay uh this uh the start of the project and um in the meantime we realized that okay so and living and using your thermology and this is our golden goose we got a big company we need to build a company behind it and we need to build ourselves up but what happened we realized there is no tool really so we we just find out that there is a there is a pickaxe there or we can build and that's the sas project so we started to focus on the sas project and building the this this actual content management tool um focusing on that one particle company but then what happened was brexit and many regulations for that business and they they just stopped the contract so how much revenue did you do last year on the sat or sorry last month on the sas business the last month last month the last one for the last month was three and a half k three thousand five hundred and how many customers you're talking about february sorry february three hours is march well that's a good news then because we just hit it 10k nathan we are quiet quite happy at the moment the last month was one of the best months for the sas for us and we just heated 10k so how did you go from three thousand five hundred dollars per month in january to ten thousand dollars per month last month in february at the last month in february we actually start the system what we built now especially sales and the connections start to work out and we landed four big clients that's it and it's it's basically uh package and uh sas combined together how many customers are you working with today total we got 98 customers at the moment 98 customers this is great and who is we what's your team look like so um i got my business partner best friend that's uh that's numbers he's acting as a cto at the moment in the company an amazing talented guy and then we got uh four full-time employees in the business one part-time employee in the business and on contract we got our development team and couple of support team that's nine people in total how many engineers total uh that's free engineers and do support for the engineers project management any marketing or sales reps well that's us got it that's the two of you guys company yeah so we do have yes you don't have sales i'm the one running the sales in the business at the moment i see so where are you finding these customers you have 98 of them where'd you find them so the first the first customers we actually did a tryout it was the beta phase of the software uh what we did and then instead of there is a model you know the lifetime model and then instead of just running a really cheap lifetime model we decided that we'll try out our pricing structure and and the value of the software so we built it a 300 dollar package what is a lifetime offer but for 300 dollars and we sold that to our networking so we got quite a few connections in our our obviously we got some clients from the past we got our networking uh clients as well and we use social media to do that the new customers who we will be acquiring is all organic social media but just to be clear that 98 customers paying today those are ones actually paying per month not ones that paid one time for lifetime access no there are there are 35 companies who paid one time and the upsell into them services and then everyone else is paid by month yes goddess you've got about 60 that are paying monthly 35 paid 300 one time and got you about ten thousand dollars of one-time revenue yeah why did you do that well as i said we needed to see that what is the value behind the structure we're building inside the software the unique static point of the software is a a special template and we decided that the beta phase of the software the testing will be better if you actually got real clients or i didn't wanted to go in the room to do the free uh free accounts so we actually did this and this is why we we went with uh i don't mind i i don't mind it so that that brings in ten thousand dollars worth of cash it gives you a little bit extra runway now you're focused on selling month-to-month plans yes that's that's correct that's great well it really we officially launched the software in february so last february when the covet started and that was a huge hit and it really really didn't work out for us because our main niche was restaurants casinos and hotels so it was it was a disaster for for the software and for ourselves as well so what we did uh we reverted our strategy for focusing on franchises and multi-side businesses and that took us about four months delivered for our marketing materials and everything and that's why we relaunched us in october so really we started in october and have you bootstrapped or raised capital we got some capital um mostly like uh mostly um really good loans and we sold about we got 35 000 pounds from like friends and and one particle client we invested in based on seven million dollar uh valuation seven million dollar evaluation yes that's a big valuation for no revenue that is a story behind this so what's happened we actually um back in 2019 we started to talk with some angels and we talked about thinking some invest investment into inside the business and we couldn't find any angel anyone who fit into our business and we just decided that we will go something but i never really heard on your channels crowdfunding so there is a platform called cedars and we decided that we'll go with cedars so can you tell us s-s-e-e-d-r-s dot-com yep okay so you raised money you raised money there then nobody did sorry you raised you raised forty thousand there at a seven million valuation uh yes that but it was not on cedar so what's happened let me just quickly uh run to you so what happened we went for cedars we we built it together the project they they approved our our application uh they approved the valuation and then how it works you start to collect uh like investors behind the project you you you try to get in your own investors to start the project and we did that so if you build a quite big um um follower base and and people who want to invest into the business and then before we launched the actual campaign coveted and we just stopped the campaign and we got a couple of really really good investors who then decided to stay with us and that's what happened but how are you able to convince him to give you money at a 7 million valuation i mean that's nothing well we really built we really built a really nice business plan and then um it was a proof of proof of concept that we got some franchisees we got the clients already in talk and and they actually managed to achieve it i mean i mean basically if they put in 50 grand at a 7 million valuation they're buying less than one percent of the company uh they're betting on the fact that you're able to grow this thing to sell for something for more than seven million...