SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1120 He Helped TED Community Connect, Now at $12m in ARR
18 Aug 2018
Chapter 1: What is the background of Intro Networks and its significance?
He launched his company back in 2003, now scaled over 50 customers, 150,000 seats, $1 million in revenue, growing around 15% year over year. Healthy model. Each company is paying, call it, $20,000 per month because of how many seats they're signing up for. They're helping really keep folks connected, whether it's an early TED event or any other kinds of companies they're working with.
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 of 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. We're a bit strapped.
Chapter 2: How does Intro Networks facilitate connections for large organizations?
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 Mark Sylvester. He is the CEO of Intro Networks, which is the deployed the first social network for the 2003 TED conference.
That's what obviously the tech does. He successfully created hundreds of intro network communities for global organizations to make a cultural change in how they connect with their audiences. As the co-founder of Wavefront in 1984, Mark helped developed Maya, the first commercial 3D animation system.
Chapter 3: What is the pricing model for Intro Networks services?
All right, Mark, are you ready to take us to the top? Yeah, let's do it. So this is this like a more customizable kind of API version of a meetup group? Actually, it was designed as a the patent is around a matching engine. So imagine that you're you work in a big company and you're looking to put together the 10 best people to do a pitch. Like I work for big ad agencies in New York.
They'll use this software to figure out the hard skills and soft skills experience and industry skills. expertise of 18,000 employees and then say, okay, we got to put a pitch together for a bowl thing and it's in Scandinavia. How are they going to do that? And so they go and use our system to search to find the very best people and then they know what kind of team they have.
Chapter 4: How does Intro Networks engage community members effectively?
So that's a simple example. Okay. And what's the business model? Is it a SaaS model? Yeah, it is. Okay. And so give me an average per month. What are folks paying you? So, it's probably $10 a person per month, somewhere in that. You know, it varies, as you know, because all of our work is all private custom networks.
Chapter 5: What challenges do brands face in connecting with their audiences?
So, for instance, we run NASA's Professional Development Network for Teachers. That's a pro bono project that we do so that our nation's educators are fully versed in STEM education and are able to share information with one another. How are you able to convince the community members to pay $10 a month versus going directly to the business organizing the community?
It's typically the business organizing the community. So people won't pay $10 a month, right? We know that. That's always been a challenge. So Ted pays $10 a seat and they buy 200 seats at once. Yeah, back in the day, yeah. Back in the day it was.
Chapter 6: How has podcasting contributed to community engagement?
Now that's when Chris Anderson first bought Ted. And so he said, listen, I want to have a different experience. for all of the attendees. Like they come here to this conference and this is when, this is before TED Talks were online, before people even knew what TED was. And he felt that the relationships that you build at the conference should last all year long.
We know we go to events all the time and the half-life of that, the conference meetup that you had is by the time you get on the plane, you've forgotten those people's names. He didn't want to have that happen with TED. And so, With them, it was a different situation. So all of them are a little bit different the way we charge.
Chapter 7: What funding has Intro Networks received since its launch?
When you work with large enterprises and you're doing enterprise-based pricing, it gets very challenging, especially with large IT groups. And what have you scaled to today in terms of total kind of individual logos you're working with? Well, probably right now I've got 50 sites that we're running, we're building. I can't talk about all of them because they see it's a competitive advantage.
But I've got a large beauty company that uses us to connect their 25 R&D labs around the world, so about 2,000 employees. And the idea there is there's all these really interesting differences, which I didn't know about when we started, about products as they relate to different skin types, different ethnicities. And there's different cultural things that are related to R&D around the world.
And so what they wanted was a private, secure place for people to have these conversations and collaborate. More importantly, or as importantly, what the matching engine does is it says, Based on this specific criteria, these are the three most likely to work with people that you should contact.
Chapter 8: What advice does the guest give to his younger self?
Interesting. Okay. And on average, these 50 logos, on average, how many seats do you have under each of these? Are we talking 1,000, 10,000? Yeah, a couple thousand. A couple, so maybe three is fair, 3,000? Yeah, sure. Okay. So can I, I mean, if I take 3,000 times the 50, I can generally, what you guys are serving, about 150,000 or 1.5 million seats? Yeah.
It's, it's probably more around a million seats. Okay. Around a million seats. Okay, good. So healthy group. Um, wait, no, I did that math wrong. 50 logos from 3000 seats would be 150,000, right? Yeah. Yep. Wait. So, but you said it's closer to a million. So where's my math wrong? Well, I'm thinking of dollars. So it's 150, right? Got it. Yep.
So 150,000 seats times 10 bucks that put, there's obviously discounts on some of those. So around a million bucks a month right now in revenue. And is the company growing? Are you guys growing? What are you growing at year over year? Yeah, so we're probably 10, 15%. What's interesting is that this challenge of brands connecting with their employees or with their audiences is a big deal.
And what we found was when you've got this network They were trying to find ways to connect with them even more. People were really busy. And what we started doing was podcasting, ironically enough, which is what you're doing. And so we built an economic development network for central California that covers three counties. And we did it with the county economic development people.
And what we found was people didn't read newsletters. They didn't read the blogs. They didn't, you know, none of that stuff. They're just busy. Yep. And so we started a podcast three years ago, and that has turned out to be something that really, really works to keep these people engaged. And so we now do that.
We're doing a site for an organization out of New York that's associated with the U.N., which is a way to how do we connect these urban health professionals, people who work on slums in third world countries? How do we connect those people so that they could be sharing best practices?
Then so that the community does the connecting, then the podcast does the communicating and sharing best practices amongst all those people. Really smart model. Have you driven all your growth in a bootstrapped fashion so far? Have you raised capital? Yeah, we raised $4.1 million when we started, you know, over a couple of different rounds. Got it. But so $4.1 million is the total amount in?
Yeah. Okay. And give me the backstory here. What year did you launch? 2003, we launched at the TED conference, mostly as a a project for Macromedia to show off how their new technologies were working. This was before web applications and people fell in love with it. And all of a sudden we had people at TED saying, oh, you guys made that thing that connected us. Could you make that for us?
Polaroid and just a ton of big brands. Now you couldn't really launch a brand at TED. It's not what it's about. And it really wasn't what it was about then. It was just a cool experience for the attendees and people fell in love with it. All right, Mark, let's move forward here with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite business book? Death of Competition by James Moore.
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