SMD

Andres Tassi and his business partner started SMD as a side project in 2016 while running their digital marketing agency. The spark came when they landed a massive contract with a £1 billion revenue UK company—a potential £1 million deal managing paid Facebook ads and content marketing across 150 locations and 300 pages. Facing the logistical nightmare of managing this scale manually, they searched for existing software solutions but found nothing suitable.

The team decided to build their own content management tool to handle the complexity. In 2017, their first year, they did £15k in total revenue from the agency work. However, the Brexit-triggered regulations and contract termination forced a strategic pivot. Rather than abandon the software they'd built, they doubled down on it as a standalone product. The official launch came in February 2020—catastrophically timed with COVID lockdowns. Since their primary niche was restaurants, casinos, and hotels, the pandemic decimated demand.

After the COVID hit, they pivoted their target market from hospitality to franchises and multi-location businesses—a rebranding effort that took four months. They relaunched in October 2020. To validate the product, they offered a $300 lifetime access package to their network and past clients via social media. This beta phase brought in 35 one-time paying customers and proved the core value proposition. By February (when this interview aired), they had 98 total customers: 68 paying monthly subscriptions and 30 who'd paid the lifetime fee.

The franchise pivot was the key unlock. By partnering with major franchise organizations like QFA, they created a compelling package: franchises could offer SMD's service and software to their franchisees as part of the onboarding package, creating a bundled service-plus-SaaS model. This partnership channel proved far more scalable than direct B2B sales. Growth exploded—from $3,500 MRR in January to $10,000 MRR by February, with the founder claiming they'd hit $20,000 MRR by month-end. The organic social media channel and network referrals worked for initial traction, but partnerships became the growth engine.

SMD is a lean, bootstrapped operation with 9 people: the two founders (Andres running sales, his CTO business partner handling technology), four full-time employees, one part-timer, plus a contract development and support team. In 2019, before any revenue, they raised £35,000 ($50k) from friends and one early client at a £7 million ($7M) valuation through the Seedrs crowdfunding platform—an aggressive valuation that Andres admitted locked them out of traditional venture capital. By the time of this interview, they were growing 2-3x month-over-month, targeting $50k MRR by year-end. Their bet: partnering with franchise systems to embed their software into the franchisee acquisition and support process.