Subclout revenue, CEO Max Metcalf, team size, customer count, churn, and more in 2023.

hello everyone my guest today is max metcalf he's the founder of subcloud a sas platform that allows creators to monetize their premium content through bitcloud he works full-time as a strategy consultant and was previously a software engineer for a health tech company loves building products and talking business max where it takes the top yeah ready let's do it all right so when are you quitting the full-time gig yeah that's the question right now um we're trying to get there's a lot of there's a lot of question marks around big clot now we're trying to get a little bit of stability there so we're talking to some investors next week and um trying to get things ironed out before we take this dive full time what would that mean so you're talking to investors but you know big clout is sort of unique in that we can invest directly by just buying the coins so talk to me about what that means and maybe this is a good opportunity too for those of you that don't know what big cloud is max maybe give a high level over what bit cloud is and what sub cloud is yeah so big cloud's a bit cuts a new social media platform um that's built on top of the blockchain so and the unique thing they do is they allow every creator every profile has their own coin so you have a creator coin that people are able to purchase and the price of that coin is directly correlated with the number of coins that are held so more people buy price goes up um it's a way for creators to incentivize um their holders to own their coin because they can give rewards based on how many coins you had if you're a coin holder um whatever that may be as far as so subcloud is a platform that enables creators to do that so we enable creators to send premium newsletters currently out to out to their fans that own above say thirty dollars of their creator coin that's what our platform enables um people have bought um have invested money into our coin and our coin price has gone up accordingly yeah you have seven about 70 coins in circulation today the market cap is about 157 thousand dollars more than your personal market cap yes yes that is for sure definitely more than my personal market cap so um the reason to raise money outside of big clout is big clout um like the community and the coin itself like the value of the coin is tied to how many coins you hold so us like me being able to support my salary and my life through that um we're still trying to figure out the business model behind that because selling coins decreases the price and kind of it hurts the value of the of the coin itself um so the reason to raise outside funding is to give us a path where we can build this full time without like hurting the value of the coin in the short term so we can like build for more longer term gains so let me max let me push on that for a second right so if you clearly communicated with your audience who's now rooting for you because they want sub clout they want this they want substance to be replaced they don't want to they want this tool you posting an update on the post page saying hey guys i had to sell two coins to pay for a new engineer here are the features the engineer's gonna deliver you by the end of you know three weeks from now that shouldn't i mean yes the algorithm your price like it will decrease but then if they get excited by the features and they like the engineer hiring people are bullish on that they invest more in the coin it goes back up yeah yeah no that makes sense and we've thought about that we've thought about um like having having planned sales of your coin in order to fund operations i think the one thing that's important is that and the thing we don't know from like a regulatory standpoint or just from a business standpoint in general is like when you buy the coin you're not buying stock in the company right those are two separate things um it's it's like a way to get rewards so the reason to buy sub cloud coin is not because you get x percent of the company it's because you get to use the platform right we charge for the platform for people owning the coin itself um but it doesn't it doesn't give you a percentage of ownership of the company um so trying to separate those which is what will what we're trying to do with raising money um is is like still gray area and we're still trying to figure it out but um where we're leaning right now is towards um keeping the value of the coin where it is and raising money for operations not through the coin itself but through um through third-party investors where we can bring outside capital in to actually invest in the company itself not in the coin blockchain enthusiasts would say max i really i really i really wish you could find a way to make those two things the same we understand the legal challenges but the whole premise of blockchain is so that there is never another mark zuckerberg or jack dorsey that controls our data or our tim cook that can do what they want with it right and that they sit in between us and our creators our community are following why aren't you leaning into that i understand there's regulatory risks but uber had regulatory risk as well yeah i think so sub cloud how like how to p how to position sub cloud i think is a big part of this subcloud needs to be for it to be successful needs to be the bridge between crypto enthusiasts and normal consumers because like even if we look at the best case scenario of bitclout um i think like the average newsletter on sub stack or the average patreon page maybe you know 20 of them are going to be investing in bitcloud where the other 80 still will want premium content and will want a way to access that creator so sub cloud wants to create a platform where we're the bridge in between we're an education tool where we educate on what big cloud is but then we also give consumers the option so when you go to the creator page you say you can either pay ten dollars a month for this newsletter or you can own two hundred dollars of the big of their creator coin um so but it is a fine line of like do you want to go all into crypto enthusiasts and have that be your market i think that that's a great market and but at the same time i think that that market is going to find a way to use bitclout on their own independent of subcloud we want to be able to target the whole market it's a much bigger market and then we can be that education piece and we can be like the bridge in between like the normal person who doesn't own any bitcoin they couldn't get into big cloud if they tried and the crypto enthusiast who has millions of dollars in 18 different alt coins right um we're trying to be the bridge in between that your your son or daughter in the background does not like that idea yeah that's that's my little daughter stella in the back so hey that's part of being you see i'm actually in the nursery that's my work from home gigs no i love i love that that's how this works yeah i mean so so one thing i look for with this sort of new platform like big cloud it's still very early adopter i don't know what the numbers are but i assume it's under 100 000 people that you know have some material amount of exposure a big cloud account whatever verified account i always look for the mouse trap right like what can take this thing mainstream and it looks sounds like you're sort of thinking the same way how can we build subcloud as a mousetrap to connect the everyday joe schmoe to the folks that are enthusiasts and sort of marry the two so so i guess question for you is a couple questions for you is this is valuable bit clout or sub cloud is valuable to bitcloud right because of the mousetrap nature of it are you in any acquisition talks with the bitcloud team no would you sell a big cloud i mean i'm like two weeks in right so it's like would i sell to like if someone came to me and offered me a ridiculous sum of money yes i would sell to big clout right but like um no that's not that's not our plan our plan is to build independently of them i also think like our it's it's in the interest of both parties to have them run independently i think bit clout um the big clout team wants to bring everything into bitclout so like the possibility that bitcloud will eventually offer a premium newsletter where you can do a long form post to your top x holders of the coin the possibility that actually is pretty high i think very the possib the possibility that they will also say you can access this if you pay 10 a month or if you own the coin is very low because they want to bring people into the community they don't want to give people that option of using fiat currency um they they are crypto like through and through so i think that's where sub-cloud can exist as a as an in-between where we we are in both and we we provide value through that and i think that that's more valuable than having it work only within the big cloud like ecosystem if that makes sense yeah it makes sense look i think about public market today and why i like big clout so much better you know you are one of the early pages along with mubs and some other people building business profiles on bitcloud with real market caps i like the idea of someone coming in like maybe big cloud itself and saying hey hey uh hey max metcalf whaleshark.pro salex per v2 cloud hacks everyone who owns a lot of your coin with the current market cap of 160 saying we're going to offer you a premium of 360 000 right so it's a 2x multiple on current market cap to acquire this business i mean don't you think as this thing gets scaled 10 years from now if it hits we're going to see these sorts of deals happening where they create the people that backed and bought the coin early via usage or actually paying are actually the big winners yeah i mean that gets i think from a regulatory perspective that gets very you get very sticky very fast there like all of a sudden all of a sudden you're a stock market for private companies who don't disclose any data and i think like the potential for fraud and the potential for hurting investors more than helping them in the long term is pretty high there um but max is a better way like i hate analyzing products based off laws i don't think i don't think it is actually like i don't think that i don't think being able to i don't think having any investor to be able to invest in any private company with very limited data that's extremely biased from the from the creator of the business themselves by a third party if you don't publish that people buy my coin right and i and i and i've put up a website and and have an idea and like spit my thoughts out constantly but like like i'm not that's what could be that's right that's why they do it right because they know and trust you and momentum takes over there's a lot of publicly traded companies right now that game they're auditing i mean look at enron right just because your public company doesn't mean you're not going to fraud the hell out of the system and defraud investors happens all the time happens but it's is you can now have the community and every public person with dollars and actually control some of this stuff so i don't buy that argument yeah i think i think that people do still fraud the system where when it's regulated i think if you if we think that the the percentage of fraud would not increase if it wasn't regulated doesn't make a lot of sense to me like i think yeah people are going to gain the system either way but like regulations i think sometimes can help especially in instances where it's investing investing in a company with little to no data right like that's a i just think that like and whether we think it's it's the best thing or not i think like it's inevitable that that's part of the equation like the sec isn't gonna allow that to happen at least in america um so it it's like a fine line here and that's what we're trying to figure out through this whole big clap thing right it's like opened the doors to a lot of like these discussions that are really good and like i i'm really opinionated but i think i like i have i have very strong opinions that i try to hold loosely so i'm i can be swayed one way to another and and this could be the thing that in the future um is a way for like normal investors to get into private companies at low valuations because they believe in it right like if you could buy airbnb when it was a 10 million dollar coin because you know you booked a room and you thought it was great like like there is potential for that to be awesome i just think like there's a lot of things to go through now and i i don't think we're there on a platform that's literally like one month old i like i think that i think we need time to figure out to how this how this thing is gonna work how everything's gonna iron out before we we make that jump to this being an investment in a company max do you have so ignoring the blockchain aspect of this do you have your first paying subscribers on uh sub cloud like paying fiat to use the tool yet no we don't charge fiat for our tool okay no you are going to create a coin for our tool i thought you said you're gonna have two options you're trying to bridge the gap they can pay 10 bucks a month to use it oh yeah yeah no that's for that's for newsletters so our customers are the creators no we don't yeah we're on boarding we're on boarding our first newsletters this week so we have my newsletter up i write a newsletter as well for this called clout hacks um that's live we sent our first we sent our first newsletter yesterday that was written and sent and packaged everything on natively on the platform um so it was really fun for us and then we're onboarding people we uh we have uh like 160 on our wait list right now um onboarding starting tomorrow so yeah so we're so good for that so we part of the reason i want to do this because i also want to use this right we've got about 30 000 people on our list uh via activecampaign and convert convertkit and we want to move part of what i want to do is actually put out data about what i'm doing personally on a personal brand level via token holder so they can see if and they can bet and say is nathan going to be worth more in the future or less in the future and make coin decisions based off that data so i'm thrilled to hear you personally got the first one out i'm on the wait list i'd love to try it let's position and and go back now to the money side of the equation you said you're talking to investors how much are you looking to raise and what would you use the money on you think yeah we're looking to raise like 250 to 500 000 um looked to we'd use the money to pay salary build on a team um i've been talking to my friend at work who's uh stanford grad and then my friend from home who's big marketing guy at a tech company um that's kind of our team right now that we're looking at um but we need we need to raise money to like fund that whole process so yeah and how what would you do that would you do like on a note like a safe note and would you let you know sale k per v2 it's a bit clout user with 3.9 sub tokens right now would you let your token holders participate in the equity right the safe note that that's a really cool idea and i think yeah that's something that we'll look into i hadn't thought about that but that sounds like an awesome idea so i mean you can see the negative headline i'm gonna paint it people can think it right you know it's supposed to be you know let's say you let some i'm gonna this is gonna sound horrible but some old white guy from san francisco and his penthouse to do your five hundred thousand dollar round the rich get richer all your early token holders didn't have an opportunity to participate right and really actually participate there you could see where like all of a sudden you have cultural clashes again and i just think the more people can do that are building businesses on blockchain like this the more you can do to align these two things the better it's gonna be for everybody yeah that's a that's a great idea and a great insight we'll have to see what happens are you did you get any responses to the email you sent out this morning via sub cloud your own update can people like is in is it via email or is it via your own api or something you build inside of sub cloud no it's via email like we we send the email out to all of our subscribers got it but it's not again it's not like it's actually going directly to their gmail inbox they can reply to you you can manage replies inside of sub cloud things like that can't manage replies right now we're not we're not an inbox per se right where we send out a newsletter um we don't we don't have functionality to manage replies yet yep very cool what else did i miss anything you want to talk about i mean you're excited about the space you're early on and anything i should ask that i didn't no i think that like covers it i think like the main thing like the main tagline that we've been going for that i think is really helpful for people to understand is like we compare it to spotify if you we want to build a platform that enables people to have the option of paying 10 a month for spotify or owning two shares of their stock and if you if you could have that choice i feel like most people would choose to own two shares of their stock given that you have money to buy two shares of stock say that i mean you would do both so like when i used airbnb for the first time i'm going wow i'm a user i can clearly see the value i also want to figure out a way to get exposure besides just like rental income so i mean that's what you hope to see happen right is people who use it and love it want to immediately buy the token and that's what's going to drive the token value up is because you're giving them so much value yeah yeah but then the next step of that is buying the token means that you don't have to pay the fiat yeah so you don't have to pay the right so it's like it's like yeah right now you do both but like you'd be even more incentivized to buy spotify stock if it meant you didn't have to pay your monthly fee right like that would be awesome and that's what we're trying to build um for all creators so max met clap up subcloud.com uh max where else can they find you online uh my twitter is maxmetcalf12 um you can email me max.metcalf hey.com um shout out dhh and jasonfreed for hey.com um but yeah that's how you can get a hold of me appreciate you guys max with sub cloud one of the first businesses actually built on top of big cloud thanks for making time for me max appreciate it 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 back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you 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