Miahana.io

Matt Archer spent his career as a consultant working with Fortune 500 executives, and he kept running into the same problem: the tools available for collaborative working sessions were limited and clunky. Teams couldn't easily pull data into conversations, collaborate seamlessly, or scale facilitation across large groups. Rather than accept this status quo, he decided to build a better solution. By September 2020, he committed his own capital—somewhere between $10,000 and $100,000—and started writing code.

Development moved quickly. By May 2021, just eight months in, Matt had a working platform beyond a mere prototype. He wasn't waiting for perfection; he had something real enough to show customers. The team outsourced some development and infrastructure work, which added to costs, but it allowed them to move faster. By the time of this interview, 13 months into development, they'd built a platform designed for enterprise teams of 100–200 people today, with plans to scale to much larger organizations eventually.

Matt's first customer came through direct email outreach—cold email, the kind most people ignore. His subject line was simple and curiosity-driven: something about "trying something new within the collaborative space." They didn't open the first one, but the second email two days later got a response. He booked a demo, walked them through the platform, and they saw value immediately. So much so that they took it out and tested it with their own clients. That validation led to their first real paying customer relationship. By the time of this interview, Matt had 15 seats across two companies using the platform.

Matt was transparent about challenges. Getting people to switch from their existing tools proved harder than expected. The initial sales-led model wasn't scaling efficiently, so he made a strategic pivot: product-led growth. The plan was to shift away from relying on direct outreach and instead offer a free experience—either freemium or a free trial—to lower the barrier to entry. He identified agile user groups on LinkedIn as a promising channel, reasoning that people running regular stand-ups and meetings were his ideal customers. The work of replicating his outreach playbook at scale wasn't yet solved.

Miahana remains pre-revenue in the traditional sense, though Matt counts his beta customers as meaningful validation. He'd raised a small pre-seed round from friends, family, and angels earlier in the year. He was planning to start charging customers before the end of the year and was considering pricing in the $50–$100 per-seat-per-month range—positioning Miahana as a premium alternative to pure-play whiteboarding tools like Miro and Concept Board. His next growth moves centered on building awareness through LinkedIn groups and expanding the messaging around why collaborative work could be done differently.