How Vived Learning CEO Tom Nicknish grew Vived Learning to $2.4M revenue and 2K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is tom negnesh he is the president of vivid learning he brings a wealth of knowledge about 3d from healthcare marketing and technology and loves learning and finding new ways to engage learners to improve learning outcomes tommy ready to take to the top yes all right thanks nathan really appreciate you having me on you bet so folks gonna follow along it's vividlearning.com what's the company do uh we help education publishing companies create uh engaging 3d interactive content to improve student engagement yeah as you can imagine getting keeping kids interested right now especially with online learning is really uh difficult and so that's an area that we can really help improve for education publishers curriculum providers etc and who are you selling to the teacher directly or the school system um actually we're entirely b2b so we we market our solutions to again education publishers or 3d interactive providers and then they market our solutions to schools universities etc who pulls out the credit card though and pays you uh superintendents at k-12 school environments or you know uh president or or provost at a university and how much on average are these superintendents paying you per month ah per month is is around anywhere from you know i we do everything on an annual basis so it's anywhere from two dollars per user per year up to 500 to a thousand dollars depends on the the device or a thousand per user per year yes so if someone has 100 students and they pay a thousand for each students for for for a year yeah so some of our device or device specific solutions and on it basically you could have a hundred students run through a single device and so that's why oh god it's more so who is a user when you say two dollars per user per year what do you mean by user i thought it was a student yeah so they're typically uh a student again at the k-12 level we our sweet spot right now is is uh seventh and eighth grade so middle school and then with our anatomy solutions they go all the way up to higher ed so before we go and get the backstory of how you launch this thing i mean what is the i guess the average annual contract value one of your customers is going to be paying you um so one of these schools might be around a thousand dollars per year so per building okay got it got it now what's the back story here when did you launch we are uh a company that started in 2007 the uh the initial solution was was desktop-based it was an installed solution um running through a projector and then students would each have 3d glasses on and as you can imagine over the last like 10 years we've really moved towards more of a web-based solution and the offerings are now rather than one-time sales they're all software as a service and how many customers are you serving now today uh we are at about 2 000 school districts and probably 100 plus uh higher ed institutions got it so can i take 2 000 times the thousand dollar acv you're doing about two million a year in revenue yes that's great congrats what were you doing exactly a year ago so we can calculate growth rate um well actually because of covid it actually uh was about two million a year ago and this last year was around 1.5 million so we did see a little bit of a fall off um but we also completely revamped our system over the last year and so that new platform architecture is something we're super excited about basically we're we're currently developing a youtube like environment um except where the content will be interactive and and sometimes 3d and so that's that step back if you will enabled us to really just kick forward on some new ideas so 2 million in 2019 pre-covered do you take a little hit 1.5 million last year you'll think you could back up to past 2 million right this year i believe so yeah i mean i think the the beauty again of this new interactive platform is that we can onboard new partnerships a lot faster um with this web-based environment and you know again that development effort even with a scale back sales uh really really helps us in the long run so that makes that makes sense now do you remember the first year you did a million in what year was that uh the first year we did a million and was probably around 2016 2017 and how did you get your first like you know 10 customers first 10 customers came about through again these these various partnerships we work with companies like cengage learning rahel elsevier so these are some of the biggest names in education publishing and basically they have the feed on the street we provide this solution and you know again around the the student engagement aspects and so we i would say early days it was all about the wow factor of 3d right how'd you incentivize them though i mean there must have been a bunch of companies trying to do what you did how did you how did you convince member hill to sell your product um basically by creating a a way for them to do it easily embedding the product within their solutions was easy based on the the apis that we had written um you know allowing them to to take what we had done and just plug it right into their existing platforms was really the key got it and and how did you finance this are you bootstrapped or be raised uh bootstrap company from from the beginning we love that any plans to raise uh you know we we've looked at it we've entertained the idea a few times but never really uh thought it was necessary i mean we carry a significant amount of cash consistently just to to make sure that we can always pay everyone and take care of our team so i think you know i think right now at least we're in a good position what's a significant amount of cash uh any given day you know we're we're 500k plus you know on hand so that's that's always the goal and why do you why do you run the business that way i love it but you know vc back folks be like why you sit on that much cash did you have some horror story in the past that makes you a bit more conservative on the cash side or no uh no not really but you know again we just we always want to be ahead of the curve and really have foresight on you know if we come up with this new idea that's going to be expensive um and we we start to see traction we want to be able to spend money right and we don't want to have to go out and raise in order to do it so what would you value the business at today i know you're not looking to sell but would you value it at i would say we're we're easily a a seven to ten million dollar business right now um but you know it depends on the valuation depends on the brand any given day so things like that and what's your team size today how many folks uh seven seven people seven people how many engineers uh we have four engineers okay and and at this price point can do you have quota carrying sales reps or no no no it's just uh myself on the sort of the sales and and then um our our ceo is as a professor at the university of iowa and so he's he's kind of in and out and uh what are you sorry i thought you were ceo no i'm the president of the company sorry how does that what does that mean how do you guys work together um basically i run day-to-day operations and then you know he's he's involved with uh bigger high level decision making hiring etc but are you like co-founders do you own equity i do yeah okay okay got it so you guys are your co-founders you just split roles and i came in later but again brought up a lot of these ideas of software as a service um changing to this web-based approach things like that so and tom talk to me about getting new customers right what are you paying fully weighted to get a new thousand dollar a year customer um again like the marketing side of it is is with these education publishing companies so we our spend is is really just on getting more of them um but you know i can imagine they're they're spending a decent amount of money but they're also keeping these customers for for quite some time i mean we a couple years ago we were worried about churn um through some of these partnerships it got down to i think around 85 percent renewal and now we're up around 90 plus so that really is my biggest concern is if if we have some fall off and what do you pay mcgraw-hill as a kickback um basically every one of our partnerships is some kind of a rev share and so you know some of them are it's 50-50 others are you know much smaller percentage things things like that is how we try to drive the business i love it makes a lot of sense tom what's the next big product you guys are working on uh really this roadmap that we're working on is just new templates so we want to create different slides essentially that will support animation in 3d custom models being able to compare things side by side adding images video um more quiz types we want to plug in some some other apis so imagine like a wordpress type plug-in environment for 3d asset creation if chegg came along and offered you guys seven to ten million bucks to buy the company would you sell no i mean we're really we're so excited about what we're doing right now that it'd be a hard time what do you think about check right now they're in the news you know evaluation is going up but a lot of teachers say listen you're helping people cheat it's it's it's not a good...