Prism

Matt Ford launched Prism in 2018 to solve a critical inefficiency in the live music industry. The ecosystem is a connected network of venues, promoters, talent agencies, and artists all coordinating to make concerts happen—but they were drowning in manual data entry and disconnected systems. By 2018-2019, Prism was gaining traction, reaching $15,000/month in revenue before the pandemic hit.

When live events came to a grinding halt in early 2020, most would have assumed Prism was dead. Nathan Latka thought Matt "was going to totally die." But Matt had made a strategic decision in late 2019: he raised a $1M seed round and a $2.9M extension, putting a couple million in the bank. When the crisis hit, instead of laying off his entire team, he scaled down to a core bootstrap unit—four engineers focused entirely on product development and three part-time customer success/sales people. This decision proved transformative. "Keeping product development stronger in that time and going into the crisis with our customers really accelerated our impact," he said.

The retention numbers tell the story: Prism went into COVID with 120 customers and came out with about 100, losing minimal churn. As venues and festivals began reopening, the five-year-old company had built something sticky enough to survive the industry's worst nightmare.

By the end of 2021, Matt raised a $5M Series A and aggressively grew the platform. One year before this interview, he had 240 customers doing $155,000/month in revenue. Today, he's crossed 300 customers with current ACV above $11,000/year and revenue between $150-200K/month (he declined to disclose exact current MRR for strategic reasons). He's now targeting $15-20M in recurring revenue by end of next year.

The network effects are kicking in hard. Prism creates a gravity well: when both a promoter and venue use the platform, the show planning becomes tangibly more efficient. Customers notice the friction when they have to work with someone not on Prism. This built-in stickiness shows in his metrics: net retention of 110% across the whole customer base and 127% in one key segment—the hallmark of a truly loved product.

Matt is now eyeing the biggest opportunity yet: becoming the payment facilitator for venue-to-artist transactions. His platform already tracks an estimated $500M-800M in annual payments flowing through the system. If Prism facilitated even a small 1-2% cut, that could generate $5-16M in incremental annual revenue. "We've kind of earned the right to be involved in the payment," he explained, because Prism already handles contracts, scheduling, and payment ledgers. Artists and venues currently do ACH transfers through their banks—a fragmented experience. Offering streamlined, organized payments through Prism is a natural next step.

The team has grown to 27 people, 17 of them engineers, mostly based in Austin with a few distributed across Detroit and internationally. Matt is focused on profitability as the default and approaching fundraising from a position of strength rather than desperation. He owns a healthy stake in the company and is charting a path to $15-20M ARR within 18 months.