[SaaS Series] Visually Appealing Designs for Everyone Featuring Payman Taei, Founder of Visme

Payman Taei is the Founder and President of Visme, a platform that creates engaging presentations, infographics, and almost any other type of visually engaging content. Payman started Visme in response to the need for an easy-to-use platform that allows non-designers to speak visually. Since 2013, Visme’s user base has grown to over 16 million businesses, nonprofits, and individuals from over 100 countries.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• How Payman Taei started and bootstrapped Visme
• Visme use cases
• Why is Visme different from other design tools?
• How Payman decided on the pricing for Visme
• The IBM use case of Visme — and the final results
• Deciding which feature requests to execute
• How to maintain culture for a large remote team

In this episode…

We are in a business world that can’t do without producing and consuming visual content of different forms. The problem is that there aren’t nearly enough affordable pro-designers for hire. So, how do small business owners compete to create visually appealing designs for their brands — even if they don’t have design skills?

Visme was created for that purpose. Unlike any other SaaS design solution, Visme is the bridge between simple and super-sophisticated design. From top brands like IBM and Netflix to startups, everyone can use Visme. But what’s their brand story, and how did they become this big? Is Visme for you?

Listen to this Inspired Insider Podcast episode with Dr. Jeremy Weisz featuring the Founder and President of Visme, Payman Taei. They discuss Visme’s journey from bootstrap to 16 million users from 100 countries (and counting), why the tool is different, how they maintain culture with over 100 remote employees, and more!

Resources mentioned in this episode

• Visme
• Payman Taei on LinkedIn

Special Mentions: 

• Farzad Rashidi, Co-founder of Respona, on LinkedIn

Related Episode(s): 

• “Automation Solutions with Wade Foster Founder of Zapier”
• “From Startup to Multi-Million Dollar Company with Zvi Band Founder of Contactually.com”
• “AcuityScheduling: Split Testing Mastery & Converting Sales- with Gavin Zuchlinski [Sales]”
• “[SaaS Series] Link Building Simplified With Farzad Rashidi, Co-Founder of Respona”
• “[Top Agency Series] Sales First, Marketing After With Joel Erway, Founder of The Webinar Agency”

Episode Transcript

Jeremy Weisz  0:19  

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here founder of inspiredinsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs leaders today is no different. I’m here with the founder of visme.co. Payman and I will formally introduce you Payman in a second before I do I always like to mention other episodes people check out since this is a amazing SaaS company. There’s other some SaaS co founder or founders I’ve had on the show. I had the founder of Zapier. Wade Foster, that was a great episode I had the founder of Contactually was the band who actually sold the company. Do you know see oh, he’s easy. Your neck of the woods? Yeah. Oh, do you guys talk shop when?

Payman Taei  1:04  

It’s been a little while? But yeah, the before. And after the sale thing afterwards, he went on and start another company. So yeah, it’s been about a year or so. But yeah.

Jeremy Weisz  1:16  

Can you tell me? What can you I mean, that’s not confidential that you share with you? What did you learn from each other? When you talked?

Payman Taei  1:23  

I think this was before the event when it occurred. And we were just probably bad a few years ago, when we had breakfast and got introduced through, you know, a VC just a meet up and talk because we’ve been a company that hasn’t gone through that event of raising or, or a m&a and so on. So it was interesting, you know, to hear the other side, the you know, I guess the grass is greener. And it’s not like, you know, that the pros and cons of either side. So yeah,

Jeremy Weisz  1:51  

right, as we will talk about that. I have in my notes here to talk about bootstrapping, because you bootstrap this company to a large scale that it’s not easy to do, you know. So check those episodes out. There’s one with acuity scheduling founder Gavin Zalinsky. And he, he really did a masterclass on not just customer acquisition or client acquisition, but also stickiness and how you put certain touch points into the process to reduce churn. And that was a great episode. I mean, that can be applied to any business doesn’t have to be a SaaS business. But I keep I watch that time and time again. So check those episodes out. This, this episode is brought to you by Rise25 Rise25. We help b2b businesses give to and connect their dream 100 relationships and partnerships. And we do that by helping you run your podcast, you know, for us, every month for me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. And I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships, I found no better way to do that over the past decade and a profile that people in companies I most admire on this planet that I want to learn from that my audience wants to learn from and share with the world. So we thought about podcasting, you should do have questions, you can go to Rise25.com, and learn more. And a big shout out to Farzad, the co founder of Respona.com. They are a link building outreach platform that helps businesses increase organic traffic from Google. And that’s why today’s interview is happening because he was kind enough to introduce me to Payman. So check that episode out that we did together. And without further ado, Payman Taei is the Founder and CEO of Visme. You can find out a Visme.co. You know, he’s frustrated with the lack of easy to use tools to empower non designers, you know, his background is actually in biology. So, you know, he’s not like his graphic design study that I like myself, my background was in biochemistry. So I totally relate. So, but non designers need to speak visually. And so he created this me, which is basically a Swiss Army knife of visual content allows you produce whatever you need, and is now used by over 16 million businesses, nonprofits, individuals, from over 100 countries came on. Thanks for joining me.

Payman Taei  4:09  

Right. Well, thank you for having me.

Jeremy Weisz  4:12  

I want to start the bootstrap conversation. I mean, you started from biology, I think your first company with like, $160 or something like that, what was the iteration that started Visme on your journey? Yeah,

Payman Taei  4:29  

so I will, you know, I’ll make the story as short and sweet as it can be. In a nutshell, you know, to pay my way through school. I always liked design, but I was also into sports and weightlifting and so on. So that’s why I was in biology, and then to pay my way through school ended up, you know, starting to create websites. I didn’t know what the heck I was doing it since the early 2000s. And, you know, so was self taught, and then from then ended up you know, changing gears going into Who just starting my own little web agency, and creating websites and designs and graphics for various businesses. And that kind of led me into creating a lot of, with my team, a lot of interactive animated websites. For those of you that were around in Adobe Flash, you know, a year we took Knology. This was in the in the mid 2000s, to the late 2000s. So we’re talking about 2005 to early two and 11. Yeah. And so a lot of the stuff that we did was very interactive, all the animated websites, and so on. But then, of course, when iPhone came out, Flash was essentially a plugin that was no longer supported Long story short, I took it out to kind of create Visby, which wasn’t actually supposed to be for non designers, it was supposed to be for designers like myself to basically create animated content for websites that could be played on any device phones, Android, you know, iOS, Mac, PC, and so on. But the pivot moment was where I realized that this could be much different and bigger than what it is. And that’s where I, myself had a frustration, using very high end design tools. And I love using them, they’re very powerful. But one of the problems such as, let’s say, Adobe Creative Cloud, and so on, I love using them to this day to some of my designers use them. But one of the things was that for, I just didn’t like the fact that I have to move from one software to another to accomplish something. So let’s say creating an animation or presentation and go to Photoshop, or illustrator, get some vector elements, bring them back in bring them to flash animate them. So in each of them, of course, is made for a very specific use case. So the interface was different. And even as a professional designers, I just thought that this this could be easier, could be better, could be different, it could be streamlined. And so putting that together, you know, I figured that, why don’t we, you know, pivot with me very, very early on, into being an all in one platform that anybody with little to no design experience can create anything, the static graphics, presentation slides, for social media for, you know, even websites, and so on. Infographics, data visualizations be able to do in a one interface, one web platform, give them all the beautiful templates, give them all the graphics and elements that they can and yet give them the ability to be able to fully customize it. So we use the term like, you know, you can create the ordinary things that look nice, but there’s nothing crazy interactive about them, or create the extraordinary, so you can add all the bells and whistles you want. So, you know, we just kind of serve that, you know, it’s like the rabbit hole and on the surface is me is looks, you know, it’s pretty easy to use. It’s a no code setup, it’s a SaaS platform. But you can start very, very basic. So you don’t have to feel overwhelmed like oh my god, there’s a big learning curve. But yet, you can start, you know, peeling the layers and get into things where you can do more and more with it. So last but not least, but the way that I would explain our platform, because people say like, how are you different than this platform? How are you different in that respect would explain is that if you were to take a very simple dumbed down design tools that are great for the purpose, they have to get the non designers and very quickly to achieve something. And then on the other side, that’s the left and over again, on the right, you have these very high end professional tools that are really meant for that, like the top 5% of the, you know, users out there are creators out there. And in between of it is where Bhisma falls in, we are bridging the gap between a simple and a powerful between the, you know, the platforms that you can get the best of both worlds. And so that’s actually been very, very challenging for us because we could easily pivot to one to the left or to the right, and then we wouldn’t be what we are, you know, and that is to serve the audience who don’t want to jump all the way from the left to the right, and they want to get the best of both worlds. That’s what a platform is,