Genius Viral Strategy: Growing Our Live-Music Vertical SaaS to an Incredible $6M+ ARR

Upendra Varma: 00:00:00

Yeah. Hello everyone. Welcome to the B2B SaaS podcast. I'm your host Binz Overmind. Today, we have Matt Ford with us. Matt here is the co founder and CEO of a company called Prism FM. Hey Matt, welcome to the show.

Matt Ford: 00:00:11

Hey, really grateful to be here. Thank you.

Upendra Varma: 00:00:14

All right, Matt. Let's try to understand, right, what Prism is, right? And why customers are even paying you money in the first place.

Matt Ford: 00:00:20

I just, I still ask myself that question also, so I don't know if I can answer that for you. All jokes aside, Prism is a vertical SaaS solution for the live music industry. So everyone who professionally plans concerts is our concerts are live events, uh, comedy, Broadway. Um, And, uh, yeah, they pay us to use our software system and our software system organizes all elements of planning an event. So from, uh, all the financial surrounding event, the, all the paperwork, the payments, the financial reporting, the accounting all in one like purpose built system.

Upendra Varma: 00:01:00

And who exactly are these people who are paying you? Right? So I'll just talk a bit about them.

Matt Ford: 00:01:05

Yeah, we have a few customer profiles that the software works really well for music, venue owners, people who run performing art centers, uh, Broadway organizers, and then we have the talent side of the business, which is, um, talent agency. So people who represent the band and are doing like the business of the bookings.

Upendra Varma: 00:01:24

That makes a lot of sense. Right? So, and let's, let's move on to understanding a bit about your customers here, right? Because I think it's pretty clear and it's a clear vertical SaaS here. So, so just, just give us some context here, right? How did it even start? Right? How did you sort of, you know, Come up with this idea of, you know, starting a SaaS in this particular vertical niche, right? What's your background and how did it all start for you?

Matt Ford: 00:01:44

Well, first off, I didn't, I didn't even know the word vertical SAS, to be honest, until I was like many years into building prism. So I didn't start off aspiring to create a vertical SAS company. Um, it just so happened that it worked out that way. Um, and you know, really I was, I've just been following my passion. Um, and you know, so taught myself how to code in college, started a company. It was successful in the live music space. Um, we had hundreds of thousands of users. I worked with a bunch of, you know, really got something off the ground and proven, proven myself. And then a lot of projects just started coming my way. And one of those projects that I found really interesting was, uh, Was a, uh, um, a festival system that I helped build out with a partner. Um, just like a way for people to organize music festivals. And I actually dog fooded the technology myself and started a music festival so that I could really understand the technology. Um, I was like early twenties, like pretty scrappy, crazy idea to just say, Oh yeah, let me just, I'm a tech guy. Let me just like start up a festival. Um, but the festival really worked and it led to me getting a bunch of, um, opportunities to book venues in and around Austin. I ran the festival for four years. I almost like became a concert promoter. Um, I almost lost my identity as a tech entrepreneur and became a concert promoter. And I think, you know, that's what helped me deeply understand the space. And then just through my experience in the problem myself and meeting other organizers of concerts. Um, I saw that they were all running their business off of spreadsheets that, you know, bedding together quick books with calendars, with spreadsheets and, and no one had a really great kind of system of truth. And, you know, given my software background, I could, you know, see that and, um, and, you know, made it come to life and called it prism. And I've been working on it ever since. And this was about like 20, we officially launched in 2018. It took all of 2017 to build it and get it off the ground. And then 2018 was our coming out year.

Upendra Varma: 00:03:43

Got it. And what exactly were you doing before you started Prism? Was, were you doing some sort of consultancy or what was that exactly?

Matt Ford: 00:03:49

Yeah, so I, so there was a company that predated Prism, um, and it was part concert promoter and part software. So I had created like an Airbnb for venues and artists to match. Um, so I had over a thousand bands signed up in Austin and I was really mostly using it myself to like have a roster of bands that I was booking personally. We never really succeeded in getting other kind of professional venues to use the software. I don't think it was the right, um, I've seen this, I've seen this kind of idea get tried many, many, many times, like Airbnb for booking. Um, and there's many reasons why it, you know, I could tell you why I don't think it is economically feasible, at least currently. Um, but you know, that, that led me realizing that it wasn't like the, it wasn't like the core booking kind of network that the industry needed. It was more of like a, uh, like a salesforce. com super customized for the industry to like kind of, to ha to handle the fire hose that they all are drinking from on a daily basis, as opposed to adding more complexity to their organization. Um, so that's, yeah, that's what I was doing for Prism was I was, it was, you know, part booking, part software system.

Upendra Varma: 00:05:00

All right. So let's, let's come back to today, right? So, so how many customers are we talking about today? How many paying customers are you, are using Prism today?

Matt Ford: 00:05:07

We have 315 organizations, something like that, booking over 10, 000 venues around the world and a hundred thousand concerts and, um, in total, there's about a, a billion dollars of payments flowing through Prism

Upendra Varma: 00:05:21

And then give us a sense of how they pay you. Is it, is it, is it simply a subscription based platform or do you take a cut on, you know, in terms of the revenue that, that goes through your platform? What happens?

Matt Ford: 00:05:31

it's purely subscription right now, which is determined by the size of their business by a sales rep and, um, and it's upsold on renewal, like we don't currently have a lot, any like automation built into. Um, the SAS fees, like, Oh, turn on this module or add a. No, like user account or, um, we don't have anything feature gated really. Um, it's just, we, we have account management that handles upsell and, um, and sales reps that like really, you know, right sides, the deals as they come in. Uh, we do plan to take, um, eventually a cut of transactions process through prism. Um, but that's not yet. Um, we're not doing that yet.

Upendra Varma: 00:06:08

And then how big of a deals are we talking about Matt here? And so approximately, is it a thousand dollar deal? Is it a 10, 000 deal? Is it a hundred thousand dollar deal? How much do your organizations pay you typically on average?

Matt Ford: 00:06:18

Yeah. On the high end, we have folks, you know, deep into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. And on the low end, we go down to like 5, 000 a year and a lot of stuff in between. So it's, it's pretty, it's pretty wide.

Upendra Varma: 00:06:29

that median? What's that median look like? Something that you sort of focus on a regular basis.

Matt Ford: 00:06:34

Oh, like maybe, maybe like 15, 000 a year, 12, 000 a year. That's that's yeah.

Upendra Varma: 00:06:40

That

Matt Ford: 00:06:40

mean, it's a lot of everything to be honest.

Upendra Varma: 00:06:42

it always is. So I'm just, I'm just sort of trying to understand your sales motion because I'm going to ask a lot of questions there. So just trying to get a sense of what that deal looks like.

Matt Ford: 00:06:51

Our, our scatterplot is all over the place, but you could imagine that, you know, it's a, it's a higher volume of deals on the lower end, the medium to lower end and a smaller volume on the higher end, um, that we would like, you know, that would be amazing if it was reversed, but it seems to be that way of the world.

Upendra Varma: 00:07:08

And then approximately how much revenue are you doing today, right? Approximate numbers totally work. Just to get a sense of where you are as a company.

Matt Ford: 00:07:15

Um, yeah, we're, we're, uh, I'm going to be intentionally vague just cause we don't publicize our revenue, but you know, we're, we're below 10 million in recurring revenue. Well, well below

Upendra Varma: 00:07:25

you above five, 6 million? Is that

Matt Ford: 00:07:27

you could infer that if you

Upendra Varma: 00:07:28

sure? Yeah, I think that's more than enough for me. Right. So, so just want to get a sense of how you're growing as well. Right. So. Over the past 12

Matt Ford: 00:07:35

Yeah. We've been, we've been growing since our inception. We've been growing around like a hundred percent year over year and sustain. I mean, early on, like law of small numbers, like we had one year where we went from 40 K to 400 K and that was 10 X, but You know, um, but you know, after our initial kind of pop, we, we've been sustaining about, you know, two X year over year.

Upendra Varma: 00:07:56

got it, right. So enough about the numbers, right? So I want to understand what's happening and what's working for you, right? So the past 12 months, right? So just help us understand where you're getting all of these new customers from, right? What's really been working for you purely from a top of funnel perspective, where are they discovering you?

Matt Ford: 00:08:10

It, I mean, it's, there's no, no silver bullet right now. Like I think, you know, the product has built in Network effects. So, um, there's a ton of world and word of mouth. Um, like if you, if you are a talent agent and you use Prism and the promoters are using Prism, you, you want the promoters to use Prism because it saves you massive amounts of time and it's a better organ to organization. So there's a, there's a lot of like kind of multi sided pressure to join the network and we're, we're leaning in on that more and more and more, like some of the best things If you can pull it off the best marketing strategy is like products, you know, um, and all the paperwork that leaves prism has our logo on it and our marketing website. So we generate a lot of marketing just through product use, which is fantastic. Um, but then we do traditional marketing, SEO, SCM, and we have sales reps go to conferences. Um, we have sales reps work relationships and, um, and, you know, I, I do a podcast similar to you do here and blast out to the network and, um, just every, we try to leave no stone unturned in terms of like top of funnel strategies.

Upendra Varma: 00:09:17

So I'm going to ask you a bit of a question here, right? So if you were to pick two channels, that's, that's, that you would really not want to sort of invest your time into, right? What are those two channels which contributed to most of this, you know, brand awareness or, you know, new customers coming through, coming through that funnel?

Matt Ford: 00:09:31

Well, what are the two that if I had to do

Upendra Varma: 00:09:34

Yeah, that's, that's really been working for you.

Matt Ford: 00:09:36

product marketing, um, and I'd say it's a toss up between conferences and SEO and SEM.

Upendra Varma: 00:09:44

Got it. All right. So, so now let's, let's sort of understand a bit about your product marketing here, because that's, that's something that unique that I've seen over, you know, with respect to your company, just talk about how it all works, right? So the way I'm understanding you, you sell your product to a bunch of business users and they sort of onboard more people into the network and they sort of start seeing it and then that sort of spirals up like what, how does it exactly work? Can you just explain that?

Matt Ford: 00:10:05

Yeah, so when you're when you're planning one concert, you have oversimplified, you have the venue, and then you have the talent agency and the venue and the talent agency coordinate an amazing amount of details. Like the the first thing they do is generate like a pro forma of the show, we call it an offer, and it lays out all the financials of the event. And they send that to the agent, the agent, if they're not using prison, the agent, like just kind of copies and paste that information into their system, generates a contract with all the, and, and these, these deal points have like probably 30 deal points that are meaningful and matter. So the, the data entry is extremely tedious. Uh, and then all through the life cycle of the event, they're just doing all these things that, you know, a software platform can handle really easily, but if they're not connected. Like it just turns out to be a bunch of emails. So, um, if, if the venue and the agent is both using prism, the, the deal points are all translated perfectly. The ticket sales update in real time, the settlement numbers update in real time, the payment information. I mean, it's a nine day difference from one, two people are using prism compared to like when one is in prison and one is not. So, um, it's really, it's like, uh, Implicit network effects. There's not like an explicit way for someone to say. Hey, just join prism here without like talking to us. And perhaps we'll get into that more and more. But, um, right now it's like very much like, uh, you know, yeah, it's, our partners want their partners to join prism and go through our onboarding process so that, so that it's easier to do business together. So that's what

Upendra Varma: 00:11:45

essentially you have a talent partner as a customer. So naturally they end up sort of, you know, bringing all of this, when you, when you sort of, when you manage managers to your platform as well. Right. And the reverse also works.

Matt Ford: 00:11:57

Yeah. And then it's just an amazing amount of word of mouth. Like when we, when we're, you know, now that we're successful in Austin, Texas, like the people who all run venues in Austin, like. Know each other really well and they're like Hey, you should use Prism. We use Prism. It's like massively helpful. And at first, sometimes they were, they were caught. And they're like, Oh, they saw it as an advantage. They're like, Oh, we, we want to, we don't, I don't know if we want to tell anyone about Prism because we want it for ourselves, but over time folks realize that the more people use it, the better the system gets and yeah.

Upendra Varma: 00:12:25

And that makes a lot of sense. Let's just talk about the sales cycle here. Right? So, so when somebody starts discovering you, what does it take for you to sort of close that 50, 000 deal that you talked about?

Matt Ford: 00:12:33

Yeah, I mean, um, once again, our scatterplot is like very diverse. Um, but you know, if we cut through it, it averages about 45 days and it's exactly what you think you would like. The typical small deal closes in 30 days. The typical big deal might close in 90 days. But then there's examples of bull flip flopping. So, um, you know, like, yeah, once again, the, the mean of the mean cutting through the noise is smaller deals take quicker, larger deals take longer. Um, but it, but we do have a lot of like deviation in our mean.

Upendra Varma: 00:13:06

And then what happens during the sales process as such, right? So what exactly are you trying to sort of, how exactly are you showcasing the value, right? Is your customer switching from sort of Excel's and, you know, Google docs to sort of your platform or do you have any competitor out there that you want them to switch, pitch from it? What, what exactly happens? How do you convince them?

Matt Ford: 00:13:24

Yeah. Re recently I, I finally hired like professional sales and, um, you eyeopening experience for me because I think, you know, I, I, I think the biggest thing that he's instilled, his name is Dustin. Dustin Duvonage, he's instilled, um, like this idea of price validation, um, in, in our sales reps and like really kind of making a business use case around like, Hey, like, you're, you have a workflow right now that is. the core flow of your business and it takes a certain amount of hours to do it the way that you're doing it. And, um, to generate a certain amount of output and what could you, how much would it be worth if you dramatically reduce the number of hours and dramatically simultaneously dramatically increase the throughput. Um, and, and then, you know, backing into price based off of that and. Um, you know, at first it was hard to get Prism sold for 1, 000 a year or 3, 000 a year. And, um, maybe that was the fact that we just were extremely early. Um, but I think, you know, we, we, we didn't do the best job of validating like why a price really makes sense. But, you know, to start getting like 30, 40, 000 contracts, one way we started talking about it is like, all right, look, like if you don't spend 30, 000 in Prism, like let's say you go and hire someone for 30K. Like what can, what realistically can one 30 K a year employee do for you? Um, what is the value you're going to get out of prism? Um, like, do you care about your profitability? Do you care about getting time back? So it is a more sophisticated sales pitch that we've developed over time and it works, it works really well. Yeah. And I didn't quite believe it at first. I was like very much just like build the best product and they will come. And I think that's true to a certain extent. Um, but people also won't pay you your value unless you ask for it.

Upendra Varma: 00:15:20

All right, man. So let's, let's go back to 2016, 2017, right? During this first couple of years, right? So just talk about how you got those first 10 odd customers.

Matt Ford: 00:15:27

Yeah, 2017, 2018, um, 2016, we're still a glimmer in my eye, but, uh, yeah, so, uh, we, we had a, we had a flagship customer we were building for in 2017. And it was important for me to just get a few others in, um, like one was absolutely committed. And I had probably five that were like weighing in on specific things. And I was meeting with them consistently. And that was

Upendra Varma: 00:15:51

did you knew them basically? How did you knew

Matt Ford: 00:15:54

Is that, well, I, uh, cause I was booking shows in Austin. So I had built up a network of venue owners and just found the most kind of tech savvy one. Um, you know, for me having five was great, but having one that was like, I am, I'm going to push my team through jumping on here before it's ready. Um, I'm going to push you to get it ready to have my team jump on. But then when it's like good enough, I'm going to, I'm going to like, You know, maybe swallow some grief from my team of them being slightly more inefficient at first trusting that you'll be able to adapt and make them more efficient. Um, that's always been extremely useful for us. Um, and that like, you know, White House customer that's willing to, uh, endure some pain. And we've used that in other customer segments now as well. We've had, we, I would say we have about five or six unique customer segments and, and each one I can point to like an original White House customer in those situations that. Just wanted it so bad that they were willing to go through the pain management of switching and, and having something that was nascent. Um, and I think the art of that is just really good communication and, and being clear, like, hey, and, and then just following through, like, talk, having real talk with the engineering team and saying, hey, like, you know, we really have to rapidly develop with these folks, like, we have to find a way to get them quick solutions. Like, they're, they're taking a leap of faith with us. Um, we have to, we have to just, we can't leave them hanging and say, Oh, you know, you,

Upendra Varma: 00:17:21

yeah, Matt's one question here, right? So when did that transition happen? Right. And like, for example, when did it go from you founder led sales to your team, sort of closing that deals. So like when you were, when you were doing that, right. So what channels would really be, what channels have worked for you, right. So what was that first marketing channel that was, that sort of brought you more leads and that, that you were able to close without your own, without you not having to use your own network.

Matt Ford: 00:17:45

the first, the first 20 deals was me. I closed personally and it was me going to conferences and relationships. Yeah.

Upendra Varma: 00:17:53

that 20, right? From between 20 to 50, what's that?

Matt Ford: 00:17:57

Yeah. Um, you know, then I'd say we started developing SEO and SEM and just showing up on search engine marketing and that's never been a silver bullet for us, but it's consistently high quality leads. Um, and that, and. And then I just, and then it was, I mean, for a long time, we've, we it's our, I wouldn't claim that we've done anything. Inventive around getting ourselves out there. It's just hiring good reps that are showing up at the conferences and building relationships and, and then, you know, creating word of mouth from the product. And then it's just kind of snowball. Yeah. It's been a overnight success that took eight years or not eight, but like six at this point. Yeah.

Upendra Varma: 00:18:35

So Madeline, talk about your team today, right? So how many folks do you have on your team and what do they do?

Matt Ford: 00:18:40

Uh, 26 primarily, you know, 17 in product and engineering, uh, six in. Um, sales and go to market and then three in customer

Upendra Varma: 00:18:51

So were you always building the product in house or did you ever sort of outsource it or all this? And what, what was the reason there? Why, why didn't you sort of explore sort of,

Matt Ford: 00:19:00

Well, we are nothing but a pro, like, like you could boil down like, yeah, we have a good team, but it's the good team is only there because of the products. Um, and it's, it's the core of what we do. Like, I think everyone at the company works on the product, whether you're in customer support and, or you're in sales and you're getting new people to use it. Um, so, and, and the most direct thing you can do to work on the product is build it. And, uh, I mean, we take. Every engineering decision, extremely seriously from architecture to code review to QA, um, and, uh, like you can't, I never felt like I could outsource my secret sauce. Like, it's just, it's not even been an option for me, like not even close quality over quantity, you know, cause we're, we're a tech company. We're not like to outsource my product, I think would just be like, I like, that would be a house of cards in my perspective. It's like. I'm like brewing beer, but I, I don't know how to make beer. You know,

Upendra Varma: 00:20:00

Yeah. That's that, that makes a lot of sense. And how much money have you raised in external funding so far?

Matt Ford: 00:20:05

we just closed 5 million series B. Um, and that puts us up to like 15 million in total.

Upendra Varma: 00:20:10

All right. So like one last question here, right? What's, what's the vision here, right? Where do you see your company going like five, five, six years down the line? Right. What's the big vision here?

Matt Ford: 00:20:18

Um, I think I'm more so like a two to three year type person right now and, and two to three years. The main, the main vision of Prism is to be, is to create a platform shift in the live music industry such that like, it's not like you're using something like Prism to run your business. And I think we're about three years away from doing that. And like it just being so aggressively good that. You know, an overwhelming percent of the industry is using Prism as an industry standard. Um, and it's a fully robust network system and payments are flowing through Prism. Um, so I think that's like mission one and there's a lot of unknowns. It's hard to see around that corner. Like I'm kind of, I'm really got my head down. Like, I know that that could be a launch pad for many other products and. And acquisitions and all that. Um, I don't fully know what's on the other side of this horizon that we're approaching. Um, but that's, that's what I see in the next three years happening with us. Um, I gotta, you know, is that, is that 50 million recurring revenue? Is that 80 million? Is that, you know, 120, um, you know, how, how

Upendra Varma: 00:21:19

you've got to give me a number here, right? So

Matt Ford: 00:21:23

I don't, I don't fully know yet. I don't fully know yet. I mean, uh, the, we, we will find out. I mean, I think it has potential to be, uh, without evolving the product. I think it has potential to be in the hundreds of millions. Um, but you know, I also like, you know, we'll see, we'll see how many professional venue organizers are out there. I've got, I've got numbers on a spreadsheet, but it's, that's, that's numbers on a spreadsheet. Let's, let's see what actually happens.

Upendra Varma: 00:21:49

Yeah. All right, Matt. Thanks for taking the time to talk to me. Hope you scale Prism to much, much greater heights.

Matt Ford: 00:21:54

Thank you. Thank you. God willing. Appreciate it.