SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1099 Salt Lake Event Management Company Breaks $4m in ARR, 30,000 Paid Events
28 Jul 2018
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is the Top Entrepreneurs Podcast, where founders share how they started their companies and got filthy rich or crash and burn. Each episode features revenue numbers, customer counts, and other insider information that creates business news headlines. We went from a couple hundred thousand dollars to 2.7 million. I had no money when I started the company.
It was $160 million, which is the size of many IPOs.
Chapter 2: What is the main focus of SpinGo and its achievements?
We're a bit strapped. We have like 22,000 customers. With over 5 million downloads in a very short amount of time, major outlets like Inc. are calling us the fastest growing business show on iTunes. I'm your host, Nathan Latka, and here's today's episode. Hello, everybody. My guest today is Craig Peeler.
He's committed to creating an extraordinary experiences no matter where you are related to events. He's best known for founding Spingo, a robust event platform powering 5,500 entertainment apps and delivering live event content for more than 7 million events worldwide.
Spingo is dedicated to providing integrated solutions for its 350,000 registered event makers, enabling them to efficiency list, promote, and optimize their events. Craig, are you ready to take us to the top? Great. Thanks, Nathan.
Chapter 3: How did Craig Peeler transition from a corporate background to entrepreneurship?
Good to be here with you. You bet. So we talked before the call about you sponsoring Silicon Slopes event, which is not, you know, that doesn't have the cool factor of a rock star, you know, going on tour. Who do you work with more general events or kind of artists on tour? More general events, actually.
We found there's a lot of opportunity to innovate and add optimization to fairs, festivals, comic cons, things that a lot of times people don't think about all the pieces that need to go in to make one of those events successful. We like to work with them. So there's a lot of people working with the major headliners. That's not really our gig.
And it's a pure play SaaS model or is it a one time per event kind of fee? What's your model? Yeah, it's a per event SaaS platform. They pay as they do an event. A lot of our clients do an event every month or at least six events a year. And so there is a recurring revenue base, but we also do a lot of marketing with them. We help them navigate different options on Facebook and Google channels.
We're getting more and more into influencer marketing. and trying to help them just overall make their event a success. The influencer marketing and the relationships with registrants throughout the year, were those both added later on when you realized those were the key to driving down churn in this kind of business? Definitely.
And there's no question that those are the big things that drive event attendance as well. Interesting. And did you see that pan out? Did churn decrease with the launch of these? Yeah, definitely. We've been able to provide a much better ROI to our clients and they come back to us
time and time again so so give me a general sense of size here are we talking folks paying a hundred bucks per month on average you know a thousand ten thousand a million what general size are you working with uh for the events it's somewhere between a thousand and ten thousand per event okay interesting so why when you give me the pricing why do you tie it to the event when you know the reason after the event they're going to work with you is for the life cycle stuff i mean how do you position that
Well, the challenge is that every event maker, as we call them, they have a different pattern of events. So it might be a state fair that only does one event a year, whereas we have other people who do an event every two weeks. So we couldn't find a one size fits all kind of SAS recurring monthly cost. And so they'd rather just pay as a direct correlation to what they're earning per their event.
Interesting. So we could probably talk for days and take up the full 15 minutes going down every one of your cohorts you serve. I mean, generally, on average, would you say these customers, you know, it's a grand a month on average, a hundred bucks or you're more enterprise? Like I say, it's per event and it's usually somewhere between a thousand, ten thousand dollars that they pay. And that's.
Yeah, I'm trying to normalize the registration. I'm trying to normalize. Right. You said some people have five events in a month. Some have one. So that's a that's a huge difference. OK, we'll move on. When did you launch the company? Launched in 2012. Okay, and give me a general sense of where you were at when you launched.
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Chapter 4: What unique challenges do event organizers face that SpinGo addresses?
Obviously, I can't just divide that by six because you're growing. Generally, I mean, how do you like to talk about your growth year over year? So this year, we'll probably have over 30,000 clients that will pay us for either campaigns or for event support. That's great. Now, can one of those 30,000 put on five events? Yes. Okay. Okay. Got it. That's interesting.
So tell me more about as a CEO, how you do capital planning in this business. I mean, when you look at the revenue streams, it's highly dependent on the velocity of events. It sounds like, right? If someone does one a year, they're nowhere near as valuable as one a week. So how do you plan revenue relative to hiring and investing in CAC and stuff?
Yeah, it's always a challenge because of the event cycle, and there's definitely a seasonality to our business. The spring and summer months are definitely more busy. Okay. But we have a self-serve platform where people come and add their event for free and then pay to upgrade, and that kind of normalizes throughout the year. That's pretty dependable revenue.
Chapter 5: How does SpinGo's pricing model work for event organizers?
And then...
we uh we try to get payments over time for even the events that are happening this summer they they prepay for some services as early as june or january you know prior to pre-marketing right yeah yep interesting so so and you said that 30 000 number that those are not free events you're way higher in terms of free those are just people that pay you that upgrade now free events are uh close to a million a year that are listed on our system and there's value there because you it sounds like you syndicate that content to some partners that's right yeah we have uh
We have thousands of media partners and travel websites and things like that where our content is published. So that's why they come to Spingo. We're like an AP press wire of event content. Yeah, it's close to what I was about to say.
But with 30,000 folks, 30,000 events at that grand kind of price point on average, I mean, it's fair to say you guys are north of 30 million in ARR at this point or some form of ARR. No, some of those campaigns are quite small. So we're not at 30 yet. So the average is lower than the grand, you'd say? Yeah. Do you think you break 30 this year? Uh, 30 million in AR. Come on. No.
How many years you need? Uh, give me three years. All right. We'll have you back on in three. We'll have you back on in three. Are you north of 10 today? Can you give us a general sense of size? We're just, we're at under 10. Okay. We did a, we grew last year by 50% and the year before that we grew a hundred percent. That's good. That's good. Can I put a minimum on it to give you credit?
Like up north of five? Last year we did 3.6.
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Chapter 6: What marketing strategies does SpinGo utilize to attract clients?
That even makes it easier. So 3.6 last year going 50% year over year. Yeah. You've raised how much? We've raised 10. Okay, 10. And walk me through in the conversations you were having with these investors trying to describe your revenue flows. I imagine there were some objections about churn and it's a one-time event. How did you overcome those objections in the capital raise? Yeah.
I think a lot of it's the vision and the excitement for the space. I think there's still a lot of room for disruption around events. Then the events have been a lot failed startups in the space. And there's definitely been kind of some anxiety around, you know, can you convert human behavior around going to live events?
And that's where we didn't want to focus on a discovery app, we wanted to focus on solving the problems for the event maker.
And when the, uh, when the VCs I was working with saw that we were focused more on solving that kind of pain and frustration rather than just trying to change the consumer behavior, they were definitely more interested in my vision and the overall opportunity in the company. Yep. No, that, that, that makes good sense. And what's the team size at today?
Uh, right now we're 20 people all based out there in Salt Lake. Nope. Uh, they're spread out. We've got some remote team and, uh, But our headquarters is here in Salt Lake. And how are you signing these folks up? Talk to me about customer acquisition strategy. Yeah, so a lot of times they come in, they add their event for free to the Spingo distribution network.
How do they find it, though, in the first place? So early on, like I said, back in, you know, as early as 2008 and then moving into 2012 when we expanded nationally. We signed partnerships with everything from LA Times, New York Daily News, the Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle. And if you went to any of those event sections, they were actually powered by Spingo.
And most of them still are today. And so when somebody would come and see their event not listed there, they would add it. And when they add it, they're actually submitting it to Spingo. And so we got a steady stream of public submissions today. We get about 50,000 public submissions every month. that come into our system.
And then we follow up with them and say, hey, we see you have a great event coming up. What are you doing for registration? What are you doing for marketing? We can help you grow your audience. Have you done a Facebook campaign? What are you doing for SEO or SEM? And that usually piques their interest and they recognize that they're in over their head and they've got too many
too many plates spinning, and so they come back to us and say, yeah, we'd like to have you help us out. So do you do any direct advertising right now, Facebook ads, Google ads, things like that? Not typically, no. Okay, so you mentioned conferences. I mean, what are you spending, would you say, in an average year on other forms of direct paid marketing?
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Chapter 7: How does customer acquisition impact SpinGo's growth?
That's really, really healthy. Are you in the net negative churn rate right now because of the expansion or no? Yes, definitely. It's a good place to be really good place to be. Um, do you look at payback at all or no? Cause CAC isn't obviously that only matters if you have CAC. Yeah. Um, You know, you pay back in terms of marketing ROI or?
Yeah, in terms of if you spend X amount of money to acquire a customer, you want to get that money back in the first 12 months kind of thing. Yeah, we try to recoup it within 12 months. And are you right now? Yeah, for the most part. You know, there's always events. The challenge for us is we will believe in an event. We'll take the event maker a little bit at their word and we'll help them.
And in the end, if their event still flops, you know, that can hurt us too, because we put a lot of energy and marketing behind it as well. And And you're banking on that event, you know, being able to pay back the money that was invested. And sometimes they just don't get the ROI on their event that they were expecting.
So last two economics questions before we wrap up with the famous five in terms of dollars. I mean, what do you assume one of these guys is worth? Do you put a minimum on it? 50 grand, 100 grand? We have such a wide range. You know, if you're talking about a county or state fair, I mean, we think those are 50,000 annually all the way up to half a million annually, just depending on the volume.
There's a San Diego County Fair, for example, they have 1.4 million attendees in a county fair. That's just, you know, phenomenal. And so there's a lot of opportunities out there. They are longer sales cycles just because they're big organizations with big committees and a lot of them, you know, receive government funding. And so they like Spingo. They want to switch to our platform.
They see that it's a no-brainer to help their event attendee experience improve, but just to get them to change their behavior and switching costs kind of get in the way sometimes. Makes sense, Craig. Let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, what's the last business book you read? Oh, zero to one. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying there in Salt Lake?
Aaron Sconnard. And what's your run? Portal site. Portal site? Plural site. Plural site. Okay, number three. Besides your own, what's your favorite online tool for building your business? Zapier. That's a good one. Number three or four. How many hours of sleep are you getting every night? Six. Okay, and situation? Married, single, you have kids? Married with kids. How many? We have five kids.
Holy mackerel, Craig. How old are you? I'm 38 years old. Well, look, okay, so you get some tax deductions and maybe that's five free employees in about 20 years. But take me back to your 20-year-old self. What do you wish you knew? Oh, I wish I knew how long sales cycles are.
sales cycles are long there you guys have it from kyle building out spingo launched really as an agency to start then really started getting serious in 2012 building out the management system behind these events there's a content play here as well that's really how they're getting so many new users with very very little cack is through this these branded kind of channel partnerships where they publish the uh the content for the events they've raised 10 million bucks serving over 30 000 events annually did 3.6 million
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