How Visme CEO Payman Taei grew Visme to $15M revenue and 7.5K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is paymon thai he's an avid technologist loves new trends and tries to stay updated his background is in biology and has led to him to truly believe in the art of evolution everything changes with time you either follow or create new trends or you'll be left behind he founded a company called hindsight which is an interactive at a digital agency in 2001 and out of that in 2014 he incubated his current company this made one of the leading presentation infographic tools online empowering over a million businesses nonprofits and individuals from over 90 countries including nasa ibm and sony to help improve the way ideas are visualized into engaging presentations infographics and other forms of visual content payment are you ready to take us to the top i'm good nicely said my man all right so give me the name correctly pronounced uh visme visme that's a do you ever have issues with that like when your sales reps are on the phone and they're like yeah go to visme.com and they're like how do you spell that uh no sales reps but um it's more of people reading you know about it uh content marketing and so on and depends you know in europe they tend to say this may and then uh in the u.s they tend to get it right they just say it is me it's interesting yeah as long as they find us on the web that you know that's okay they can call it what they want yep so presentations infographics how do you make money is it a peer play sas model yeah we are a sas model everybody starts free so they can play around with it and uh there's certain you know features and templates and assets and additional functionalities that are unlocked in the premium plans okay and i mean give me a sense are you working smb in market or enterprise what's the average you know plan per month well it's so we have a couple plans and we have an enterprise um and uh basically there's a free version and there's the standard model which starts off at uh you know i'm gonna tell you the monthly price because of course in yearly you get discounts uh so that's uh 19 bucks a month okay then we have the complete plan which is a higher plan and that's 30 bucks a month but people go you know annual they get a good 30 or so percent discount off of each of those enterprises a little bit more expensive um and we also have team plans which basically is the complete plan just number of times the number of users that purchase it yep so it's like 19 bucks a seat basically yeah uh you know 19 starting and then uh there's 30. so we have you know both sides a lot of people start standard and they go upgrade so what would you say the average is just to avoid going down every customer cohort yeah it's um it's right in between so if i was to pretty much uh give you a quick estimate it would be take the take the average so it's it's in the low 20s actually a lot of people go annual so they get a nice discount and that's what actually brings the uh per user cost down a little bit but at the same time they stick with us for a while yep all right give me the back story when did you launch it all right so we um are still in beta if you notice on the website we're pretty much might be the sas with the longest beta period ever which will very very soon uh going to be changing um but uh we started developing this thing back in 2012 or so as just a side project at hindsight hindsight just a digital agency used to do a lot of flash work i did a lot of award-winning flash design work and so on and so of course well you know iphone came out and that knocked things down it really really shook things up and that's where in my bio you hear about me talking about evolution and so on that really you know showed me how it works in in business so very quickly uh visually was just an inte a little internal project to be for animations for non-designers for actually for designers initially almost like a flash replacement long story short by the time we launched a little focus group uh we realized that people really don't care about that most of the audience are non-designers and they're just trying to create slideshows and so on so real quickly like well went off and my mission started on wanting to make vizmy the one tool that you use to create all types of visual content so i don't care if you want to create a presentation or a visual report or a social graphic or an infographic which is becoming more popular there should really be one user interface one tool that gives you great things from start to end so that's how it all and why are you still i mean 2012 was six years ago why are you still in beta this is a marketing thing um well and not necessarily i'm kind of a perfectionist i really want the tool to be where i'm comfortable with saying it is you know ready for prime time i mean the reality is that um partially marketing i could have taken this off two years ago you know this could have been off two years ago now when i said 2012 we didn't really actually even present it to people with a very very small group of people back in 2013 and we didn't even launch a premium plan until it was in sometime in 2014. so just to be clear when was your first dollar of revenue what year uh it was i'm actually going by member here i believe it was uh in mid 2014 when we just actually turned it on so everybody was using it free for a period of time very very slow we didn't really do much marketing or promotion uh just let people come in and get feedback and use it and we very very slowly started off as a premium model um and it wasn't really until just a couple years ago that we got more serious with things and now we're going full basis and what have you scaled to now in terms of total customers um because so uh you know of course yeah you know uh there's free users and then there's uh paid just not for users yeah just customers so customers um so there's two things that i don't really disclose openly but i'll give you ranges uh it is the um actual the total number of customers that we have paying and it is also the exact revenue that we're doing but i'd be happy to talk about other things however with that said um you know it's over a million registered users and out of that um it's really what's around where's 250-300 users that we even rolled out the uh the pay plan um so it's really in the range of uh approaching about ten thousand ten thousand paying exactly okay got it well and and walk me through you before i even like pushed you really hard prefaced it by saying like you don't like sharing this kind of stuff i mean what people will hear that go wait is he like why is he saying that is he hiding something why do you do that absolutely nothing to hide it's just more um you know some i feel like we're a private company so there's certain information i'm very transparent and open about and there's a couple of things uh seeing the stresses exact revenue numbers and a number of users strategically where does it hurt you though so some people would argue hey let's publish monthly income reports it's a great piece of content they'll get us new customers others will say that's so stupid i don't want my customers to see all my are my competitors to see on my desk that's not it's not necessary i think it's more of uh you know just more of a personal uh preference at this time and at some point i'm sure we're gonna be opening it up later on uh you know that's uh it's just really more of a um decision at this time that we have but i don't think it's going to destroy us or anything i think we're happy with where we're going where you know growth rates are great uh what's a great growth rate what do you mean by that so we are um the growth rates we're happy with we're pretty much doubling um every year um user base and also revenue um has been uh pretty much close to 900 90 to 100 uh rate last couple of years yeah i mean you by the way payment i mean you've given me enough information to back into a minimum i mean you know that right yeah absolutely yes i mean i can take 10 000 customers times a 23 price point and say you're doing north of 230 grand a year right i mean a month right now that's accurate correct i mean but you could look at the you know i'm giving you around ten thousand so it could be a little bit higher than that lower than that so yeah yeah which other numbers yeah yeah but but i mean just to be clear you could also i mean you're not you're not saying it's like one to ten thousand when you say ten thousand that's you know plus or minus a thousand in that range right it's not one thousand yeah yeah yeah yeah it's not it's not eighteen thousand so why are you i mean so let's say you're doing about 200 grand per month right now and everyone i mean why are i don't understand why you'd call yourself still in beta i mean you're generating revenue yeah i mean we are we are profitable and uh we're happy with uh it's about the product the product itself um and this is going to happen literally over the next month when we will be releasing out of beta we're pretty much going to be removing the beta out of all around the products i just feel that there's a lot of products...