Yash from Momentum (00:00)
Hello, and welcome back to Building Momentum, the show where we peel back the curtain on exciting and often chaotic world of building a successful SaaS business. I'm Yash, your host for this show, where every episode we bring you the stories and strategies of founders who've been in the trenches, conquering churns, killing their teams, and building products that people and businesses love. In this episode, we'll be chatting with Philip Werner, founder and CEO at Maekersuite .com. They're a powerful platform that can help you craft compelling video storylines.
using data and AI. And we're excited to hear their story and the lessons they've learned along the way. We'll be dissecting the wins, the losses, and everything in between. So buckle up, grab your headphones, and get ready to dive into the world of SaaS founders. Hey, Philip, how are you doing today?
Philip (Maekersuite) (00:45)
Hey, Yash Thank you. I'm well. It's sunny here and it's great to be on. Thanks for having me.
Yash from Momentum (00:52)
Awesome. Thank you. Thank you, Philip, for joining in. And I want to start by asking, understanding a little bit around what is Maeker Suite? Why did you start building it? Give us a little bit of an introduction, like the first few months of starting and building Maeker Suite.
Philip (Maekersuite) (01:09)
Yeah. So, the reason why we're building Maekersuite, I mean, goes back for probably my whole life. I grew up in a, in a family of, filmmakers and I was exposed to storytelling and, and video creation or filmmaking from very early on in my life. And, after, business school where I went to for 5 years and then starting my career working for a film production company, and then also running my own.
video production company and social media agency for six years. It seemed a very natural evolution to productize what I learned the decade before. And that's how the idea for Maeker Suite came about. And what we're doing with Maeker Suite is essentially we are trying to...
bring data and storytelling together. So we want to analyze content. We want to figure out what works, what makes content and storytelling engaging. And then we want to feed this information into the creation process for anyone who wants to create a video essentially, right? Obviously at the moment, there's lots of creators and freelancers and agencies using our product, but there is going to be...
in the future, SMEs, maybe enterprises, also going to use the product. So, yeah, I mean, we, we're building Maeker Suite simply because it's an evolution of, of, of years and years of, of experience and gathering experience and then, experiencing the problems that video creation has, and then, coming up with an idea and a product, that tries to solve these problems.
Yash from Momentum (02:49)
Also, thank you for sharing that. I cannot tell you. I'm in the business of talking to founders who started SaaS products. And I cannot tell you how often this story happens, which is where the founder has been an expert in an industry, has identified a problem, and then decides at some point that I'm going to fix this problem and builds out a product that then other people also start using.
and love, right? And so the next thing that I want to understand from you is there are different journeys of founders to starting a business. And some of them could be running a services business and then starting to building a product. Other people directly right out of the gate, you know, just finish their education a couple of years of employment and then start building a product for themselves. In almost all of those journeys, accelerators and incubators,
sort of play an important and crucial role in the early formative years of a startup. And you've been a part of an accelerator. And so can you talk to us a little bit about what that experience was, how that was helpful in formative years of maekersuite?
Philip (Maekersuite) (04:02)
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so as I just mentioned before, right, I, my previous company, I was running an agency and production company and it was a service service company. So we were selling to big clients, big automotive customers, fashion brands and food brands. And everything was done manually, right? We had a big team and it was all dependent on our own creativity.
And when we decided that we wanted to discontinue the business, simply because my co -founder and I wanted to do something else with our lives. I talked to my network and my friends and one friend told me that if you're not yet 100 % sure what the exact ideas that you want to work on.
Why don't you join Antler? Antler is a globally operating VC. I joined them in London and I then met other people, exchanged ideas. And then obviously we pitched the idea to the investment committee and we had three months to basically start developing the first concept. Right.
talking to, doing first user research and, and Antler helped a lot during that phase, right? They introduced us to people who have already built successful companies. They have introduced us to angel investors. They introduced us to experts in specific areas, whether it's marketing or product or tech. And we got a lot of exposure.
to a really, really big network of very experienced operators and investors, which tremendously helped us to stay on track, you know, and not waste a lot of time, but always ask the right questions. And it was tremendously helpful. And especially because with the Maeker Suite, I'm a first time tech founder, right? I wouldn't...
Yash from Momentum (05:58)
Yeah.
Philip (Maekersuite) (06:12)
I would always do it with an incubator like Antler again. If you have built one, two or three successful companies, then maybe an incubator or accelerator is not as important anymore because you've built your own network. You know people you have access to, maybe a couple of investors.
Yash from Momentum (06:29)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Philip (Maekersuite) (06:37)
And then it's maybe not important. And then the percentage that you have to give away for the investment that you get is maybe a little bit too much. But in our case, I'm very thankful to this day that I had the opportunity to be part of the London cohort and then also to get the investment from them.
Yash from Momentum (07:00)
Yeah, and so one of the ways that we look at accelerators and incubators is that they help founders reduce their cost of learning. That they put you in touch with the people who will be able to either help you ask you questions or answer some of the questions that you have, which will basically shorten the cycle of the amount of time that you need to spend to get to the next.
whatever the next milestone is. And if you've already done a couple of these successful businesses before, that's where the learning has already happened. And that's an absolute, absolute fair point. So one of the things that you also mentioned is that you've raised external capital. And correct me if I'm wrong, I think it's about a million US dollars. So talk to us a little about that. Why, like there is...
There's always a conversation in the SaaS community between bootstrapping a SaaS company versus raising capital. So why did you go pick the route of raising capital and have investors on the cap table?
Philip (Maekersuite) (08:05)
First of all, in the very beginning, because we wanted to have people on boards that we could trust and that we could learn from. We didn't only want to have the money. By now, I have a couple of angel investors that are behind me that I can call at any time of the day.
to really ask them for feedback and, and ask them whether my, my way of thinking is the correct way. and it's really a sounding board and, and also, a healthy way of having, someone who plays devil's advocate. you know, people who keep you in check. additionally to that, obviously it allows you to, to.
build faster, it allows you to hire a couple of people and to try certain things out, right? Something we would not have been able to do if we didn't get this investment. So I would say that our at our current stage, we are raising our seed round now. And
We have good traction. We have a good understanding of who our users are and how we can reach them. We have a very good understanding of what they want to see in the product in the future. But to get there obviously takes some time, right? And they're also with on our journey, there have been iterations with the product. We had one pivot with the product.
Yash from Momentum (09:28)
Yeah.
Philip (Maekersuite) (09:37)
And we had to readjust our strategy a little bit because with the first iteration of the product that we built, we found another very big problem that customers were facing. And we then had to take a step back and say, okay, before we built this part, we actually have to solve the other part. And this is then when the new version of Makersuite came about. And things like that are not possible when you're
when you are, they are possible if you're completely bootstrapped, but they're very likely to go a lot slower, right? And for us, the learnings happened really fast and the development then of everything happened also fairly quickly, despite the fact that we are a very small team, we were able to focus 100 % on Maekersuite and didn't have to do.
Yash from Momentum (10:12)
Yeah.
Philip (Maekersuite) (10:28)
like side gigs and consultancy jobs and, or maybe take a part -time job on the side. So it really allowed us to double down on the development of the application. And yeah, that's the reason why we do it, right? We, we, and that's also why we are raising a seed round now is because we very strongly believe in the business. We very strongly believe in our vision and raising capital allows us to get there.
Yash from Momentum (10:36)
Yeah.
Philip (Maekersuite) (10:58)
to get there faster. Right. So yeah, that's the that's the reason why we went that route.
Yash from Momentum (11:01)
Yeah, absolutely. So I think everything else is fair. The last bit that you mentioned, which is where if you're bootstrapping and if you have to pivot, while the software or the SaaS company that you're building at the time of pivot needs significantly more attention from you, you will be most likely forced to take up a side gig.
or freelancing or consulting. And I think that it gives you freedom to run more experiments, even in some cases, multiple experiments at once, to arrive at a solution that sort of works. And then you can double it down. And so give us a stock of where Maeker Suite is today. Of course, you're raising your seed. Certain numbers you might not be able to share. Whatever you are able to share, give us a stock of where we are today in terms of.
how many users do we have, how many customers do we have, whatever numbers that you are able to share, just so that the people who are listening to this or watching this episode, they're able to get a sense of size and scale of where Maeker Suite is today.
Philip (Maekersuite) (12:11)
Yeah, absolutely. So currently we have around 25 ,000 users on the platform that we have onboarded since the beginning of the year, since January 2025. We have around 5 ,000 of those paying. And we are currently learning, we're currently looking into user behavior, at the user data.
And we are finding out that lots of the people that use the product, they are obviously there's a, there's a big chunk of creators. So people who create content for themselves, but then actually the biggest cohort of people that is using Maeker Suite is freelancers and agencies creating content for others and for their clients. Right.
because they can leverage the efficiencies that Makersuite is creating the most, obviously, because the more videos you're creating per month, the more efficiencies Makersuite is able to create for you. So, yeah, that is a very interesting learning that we have also made since the beginning of the year. And, yeah, we continue to talk to users.
Yash from Momentum (13:18)
Mm -hmm.
Philip (Maekersuite) (13:24)
I approximately talk to 5 to 10 users every day and like very short, 50 minute calls to really understand, okay, who are you, what are you trying to achieve and how can we as a team deliver to really make your life a lot easier. Right. And that is probably describes the stage that we are at the best. We are.
At the moment in, in, at the stage where we spend a lot of time on the phone, right. Talking to users, talking to prospects, talking to investors and, and really learning everything that is about, about our company as well. Right. so, because, yeah, there's so many different use cases, Maeker Suite is used for.
Yash from Momentum (13:56)
Hmm.
Philip (Maekersuite) (14:13)
Some people use Maeker Suite in a way that we didn't intend it to be used, but they still do. And it's super interesting to hear what these use cases are, right? And it's interesting for us to find out whether there's multiple people that find this use case extremely useful or want to use the Maeker Suite in the same way. And yeah, then basically inform our own...
decision -making process for future features on all this customer feedback. And we collect the feedback, we have quantitative feedback, we look at all the user behavior in our back end. So we do everything data -driven, so that's the quantitative part. But then the qualitative part is engaging with our users on our Discord channel every time.
People send us emails, ask us certain things in chat. That's also something yesterday, for example, we did a very long live webinar where people were able to ask us questions about the product in a live session. So we try to really gauge what the users want from these interactions. And then we consolidate everything in a massive...
Yash from Momentum (15:21)
Mm -hmm.
Philip (Maekersuite) (15:31)
spreadsheet. And then by looking at the spreadsheet and obviously having some methods to calculate how valuable certain features are, we then make our decisions on what we develop next.
Yash from Momentum (15:44)
That's, it's interesting how you say that because I think it was Chris Sacca who is an early investor in Twitter, which is now X, who mentioned that, so someone asked them on TechCrunch disrupt stage that how do you know when a company or a product has achieved PMF and.
Chris said, it's when people start to use your products in ways that you had never designed it for. It was never intended to do. And that's sort of how they identified PMF at Twitter in early days. That, hey, we built Twitter for some other use case, but now people are using it for entirely different thing. And I think we've built something of value here, something of note. And so that's interesting. But 5 to 10 customer calls a day. I mean, so.
Philip (Maekersuite) (16:14)
Yeah.
Yash from Momentum (16:35)
So I'm also one of the co -founders at ClientJoy, which we exited earlier this year in January of 25 We were serving about 13 ,000 odd customers in 90 odd countries, all of them agencies. And I thought I was doing a good job because I was getting on two customer calls every week and one churned customer call every week. So three calls a week. But 5 to 10 a day, that's a new benchmark. I shall try to beat them.
But thank you. That's hard work. That's a lot of work.
Philip (Maekersuite) (17:07)
It's, I mean, it's, it's very time intensive and, we try to keep these calls as efficient as possible. but, they're extremely valuable, right? Because without the feedback from our users, we are, we are, we are walking around in the dark. and I think, especially in the beginning, it is important to talk to as many people as possible. Obviously this, I will not continue to do it like this.
Yash from Momentum (17:14)
Yeah.
Yep.
Mm -hmm.
Philip (Maekersuite) (17:31)
but for now it is the right thing to do. And yeah, and then in the future, we are obviously gonna dial it down a little bit, but for this moment in time, it's in my opinion, the only way forward.
Yash from Momentum (17:35)
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, that's absolutely, absolutely essential. It tells you so much more. And one of the other things that it does is it helps you validate all of your assumptions. And so it sort of kicks the founder out of staying in their bubble or confirmation bias or whatever it is that we can choose to call it. But that's interesting. 5 ,000 paying customers, 25 ,000 users, just since January 25. So that's extremely encouraging.
What I wanted to understand is that, so when I went to the Maeker Suite website, I found the website very, very mature. And platform as well. But one thing that I noted was the pricing. And so one of the questions that early state SaaS founders have is, how do you actually arrive at pricing? How do you identify? Because there are no costs. You cannot do cost plus margin, because it doesn't work. And.
Philip (Maekersuite) (18:40)
huh.
Yash from Momentum (18:42)
how do you actually identify? So then the only other option is value -based pricing. So how do you, how have you done it?
Philip (Maekersuite) (18:49)
We're definitely not the end of this journey. Finding the perfect pricing structure is, I think, it takes time. It takes months, if not years. We are playing around with pricing a lot and have been in the last couple of months. When we went live, we went into the market with much lower pricing tiers. We then found...
Yash from Momentum (18:51)
Yeah.
Philip (Maekersuite) (19:11)
out that we are probably leaving a lot of value on the table for us. And then what we did was we took down the pricing page from our website and we didn't allow anyone to subscribe manually and they all had to go through personal calls with me. Right? Yeah.
Yash from Momentum (19:36)
you.
Philip (Maekersuite) (19:38)
So we did, we done, this is, this is where we really started to talk to lots of people. We then went on calls. We tried to figure out what they wanted to do. And then we tested different prices, right? And we tested their willingness to pay. And that's how we ended up with the pricing structure that we currently have. Right. So we simply asked people.
We started asking people what their willingness to pay was. And then we adjusted our pricing. We looked at the churn numbers. And the first, I mean, obviously we started commercializing in January, so it's not a lot of data that we can look at, but we looked at churn, we looked at customer satisfaction. And then this is the pricing structure that we...
that we ended up with for the moment. I'm not saying that this is now set in stone and will be the prices for the next three years, but we feel very comfortable that this is a really good value for money that Maeker Suite is delivering. And yeah, it's to be seen where the different subscription tiers go, the different pricing tiers go, and how we may be
Yash from Momentum (20:49)
Yeah.
Philip (Maekersuite) (20:56)
include other pricing strategies in the future. So for example, we've seen that some people reach their monthly limits in their respective tiers. So one thing that we're thinking about is maybe adding bundles so you can top up your subscription every month without having to subscribe to a higher tier, things like that. So we are...
Yash from Momentum (21:14)
Yeah.
Philip (Maekersuite) (21:21)
Again, we are talking to people, we're listening closely to them. We ask them about their feedback. We look at churn and try to figure out why people churn and if price was the reason, then obviously we want to make a very strong connection. Was the price point too high or did you just not use the product regularly to justify that price point? What would have been a price point?
that maybe would have kept you on board for a little longer. So these are all things that we are currently figuring out. We are absolutely nowhere near the end of this process, but at the moment we feel comfortable with the pricing.
Yash from Momentum (22:01)
Yeah, awesome. And so HubSpot does about, I think, what, $2 billion a year in revenue, changes its pricing every six months. So I think there's no right answer to this, but it's always interesting to understand perspectives of different founders and how they are approaching it. So another thing that you mentioned early on was,
was that you had to, you made a pivot. And so can you talk to us a little bit about the circumstances? I'm sure it would have been a difficult decision at that point of time. How did you identify that a pivot needs to be made? How, like at what point would you say, okay, I think we need to reinvent what we set out to do. How do you do that?
Philip (Maekersuite) (22:49)
Yeah. So it was in fact a very hard decision. But what was interesting, let me rephrase it. It wasn't really a hard decision. It was a decision that required commitment and decisiveness during the moment when the decision had to be made. But when did...
Yash from Momentum (23:03)
Okay.
Got it.
Philip (Maekersuite) (23:14)
Right after the decision was made, it felt like we made the right decision. And the reason for the pivot was that we simply, again, we watched our users use the product. We called them and we asked them why they're not using the product on a regular basis and what they are struggling with. And after like the...
the 50th call, we had the same answer over and over again. And then we said, okay, if this is the problem that everyone is facing, then we need to start early on the value creation process. And we need to help them solve this problem first before we can solve this other problem for them later. So yeah, that's what we then did.
We basically took their feedback to heart and there would not have been a sustainable road forward for us or a way forward for us with the old product simply because retention was not good enough. And yes, we could have gotten more users and I don't know.
and do certain things to maybe look, make it look better than it than it actually was. But it felt like we needed to change something substantially. And that was only achievable by refocusing and pivoting our attention to a different problem. And that's what we're doing now. And now,
retention and churn is actually in a good spot and manageable and yeah, it's something that we can build on.
Yash from Momentum (25:06)
Absolutely. And so one of the biggest mistakes, so I like my next question that I've written down is, is how do you figure out what to build next? And I know the answer to that. And so it's, it's no, I mean, it's one of those few interviews where, that I get to see that the founders have their priorities, right? Because three out of 5 questions that I've asked you the answer in some way, shape or form is just talking to customers. And so it's talking back to back to enough customers and it's not something.
It's something that a lot of successful founders have always advised first time founders. But one of the biggest mistakes still that I've seen a lot of other founders make, especially in their early journey, is that as soon as they're using Amplitude and Expanded to figure out what parts of the product are being used, what parts are not being used, and then as soon as they identify that this piece of the product is not being used, their response to that is, OK, let's do a design change. Let's introduce this into our onboarding.
sequence or make it a part of our drip emails and stuff like that and just pick up the phone and invite them for a call, a 15 -minute call or something like that. That's always meaningful. That brings me to my last question for today. That is not actually my question. That's a question that Pierre from Icypeas has left for you. I'll also ask you for a question for our next guest.
But the question that Pierre has asked is, at what point of time do you think that, OK, I've done enough user research, I should now start writing my first line of code? How do you differentiate that?
Philip (Maekersuite) (26:46)
It's, it's, it's, I would honestly say, you should never stop talking to your users, but obviously at some point you have to start, you have to start writing code, right? So from what I've learned over the last couple of years, what I would, and I'm, because I'm also part of Antler and I talked to a lot of, Antler founders that, that are doing the program right now. And what I always tell them is first of all,
Build a market first before you start building a product. Right. So talk to your people that you talk to people that you want to do something for. In our case, that was video creators. Talk to them and figure out what the problem is and then offer a service that you can offer a small, a very small service.
that you can do manually, you know? And then try to automate certain steps of that service for yourself. And when you make revenue and when you're able to generate revenue from that, only then start building a product. That's my advice. And I would, if I had to start all over again with a different business,
Yash from Momentum (27:54)
Hmm.
Philip (Maekersuite) (28:02)
That's how I would do it. I would not start building a single line of code before having a waiting list or paying customers for something that I'm trying to solve. And with Maeker Suite, we did the same, right? In the beginning of Maeker Suite for the whole of last year, we had a manual service running in the background for our clients. And then...
I was the biggest customer of the Maeker Suite platform. And I said, I need this to solve my problem. I need this to solve my problem. I need this to solve my problem. And this is how we then came up with the design of the first MVP. And because it was useful for me, then suddenly also became useful to others. Right. So that would be, that would be my advice. Really start as simple as possible.
Yash from Momentum (28:40)
Got it.
Got it.
Philip (Maekersuite) (28:58)
And then, and then very like build your product in small increments. I've obviously also seen it the other way around. I've, I've, I've seen people that have raised a 2 million on a, on a pitch deck and they, they just build and then launched with a big bang and, and then tried solving the problems later on. But this is, this is not the reality for first time founders.
Yash from Momentum (29:14)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
Philip (Maekersuite) (29:26)
So that would be my advice.
Yash from Momentum (29:29)
there. Thank you. And so this, by the way, I should also mention our first guest, the first ever episode that we did was with this founder called Josiah Coad, who's building a social media content generator using AI called MyMarky. And he had a fairly similar answer to a different question, but fairly similar answer where he said, software is a sunken cost. And so don't start writing code unless you're able to sell it as a service first.
So sell it to the service first, and then as in when it becomes extremely painful for you to offer this service, as in when you generate more and more demand, try and automate it. And then once you automated it enough, bundle it into a product, and then lower the cost of the service by 5x or 7x or whatever it makes sense to, and then just offer it as a product. And so thank you for sharing that. What's, by the way, your question for the next guest that we have? What's the question that you're currently wrestling with?
Philip (Maekersuite) (30:28)
Yeah, absolutely. So my question would be, what are the top three distribution channels that you are tackling as a founder with your startup? Because I think the product is one side, building the product, but distribution is crucial.
Yash from Momentum (30:44)
interesting.
Yeah.
Philip (Maekersuite) (30:54)
for the success of your business. And I would say that it's probably equally as important as the product side. Finding a good way. Yeah.
Yash from Momentum (31:05)
I can say that he wanted to say more important. And I would have agreed more to that statement, that distribution is a little more important than product. Because in my limited experience, I've seen average products do extremely well, generate greater financial outcomes, value creation outcomes.
Philip (Maekersuite) (31:12)
Yeah.
Yash from Momentum (31:29)
with greater distribution than amazingly great products. So like a good product is a necessary condition, right? It's not a sufficient one. That's sort of where we are. But that's interesting, right? So top three distribution channels is something that I will ask. And Philip, that brings us to the end of this episode. I would like to thank you for joining in on this conversation. And everyone who joined in.
Philip (Maekersuite) (31:34)
Absolutely.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yash from Momentum (31:56)
So listen to this or to view this wherever it was, whether it was YouTube or Apple Podcasts or Spotify, you'll be able to find the link to Maekersuite .com in the description as well. If you are looking to use a powerful platform that can help you craft compelling video storylines using data and AI, you should check them out as well. Thank you, everyone, for joining in. Until next time.
Philip (Maekersuite) (32:19)
Thank you. Pleasure.
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