SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1450 20k Customers and $1m in ARR Event Management Company Started as Wife Project
14 Jul 2019
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Launched this little Eventbrite, sorry, this Eventbrite competitor back in 2009 for his wife as she was doing like her first little scrapbooking events. He then added it to the WordPress plugin site. Before you know it, he's getting a bunch of feature requests. 2011, doing about 20 grand a month. Quit his full-time job and has now scaled it to about
to about 80 grand per month in revenue, 20,000 paying customers, paying on average four bucks a month. They churn about 30% of their customers' return or revenue per year. So working on bringing that down. He's also working on growth through things like CAC, sorry, through things like paid spend and also some writing and content initiatives.
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. 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, everyone. My guest today is Seth Schultz.
He lives in southern Utah, where he's been hardwired to the web development community since 2001. In 2009, he launched his first WordPress plugin. Then in 2011, he quit his full-time job to focus on building a business around the plugin called Event Espresso. which now powers over 60,000 ticketing websites. Seth, are you ready to take us to the top? Yes. All right. Tell us about this thing.
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Chapter 2: What inspired Seth to create a WordPress plugin for event management?
Yeah. And both of those each year, you'll, you'll kind of, you know, you'll keep about 70% of that. You'll turn about 30%. Is that right?
Right. Right.
That's great. So, so, and what does that equate to in terms of how many customers you have paying today?
Um, let's see, we have about around, I think 20,000 paying customers, 20,000 paying customers.
That's amazing. So 20,000 divided into 80,000, they're each paying what about four bucks a month?
Yeah, something like that.
Okay. And what are they getting for that? That feels really cheap.
So they're getting standalone software where they can sell tickets to any type of event, say a conference, a concert. And they're basically in control of all their data. with our software platforms. And they're bypassing ticketing fees, such as Eventbrite and Cvent and those types of platforms. They charge per ticket, so $1 to $2 per ticket. With our platform, customers are bypassing that.
So that's...
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Chapter 3: How does Seth manage customer churn and retention?
our customers are basically paying, paying us to keep the, keep the platform going since it's a, since it's an open source model.
So did you have, sorry, I don't mean to cut you off, but did you have people that you signed up early on that paid way? Like, cause right now on your website, your cheapest plan for one website is about 80 bucks, I think. Uh, and I think is that that's for the year. Yes.
Chapter 4: What strategies is Seth using to grow his customer base?
That's for a year. Yeah. So, but divide 80, obviously by 12 and, and obviously that's higher than four bucks a month. So did you have people early on paying you way less and that's what the average is for today?
Yeah. So, so we had people paying, so we have a, we have a freemium model. We're based on a freemium model. We have a free software that we, that people can use and they, they upgrade to the premium model. Um, and so when we first started, we were only charging like $50 for, for like a lifetime. Um, uh, membership. And then over the years we found that that model didn't work out.
So we also started charging, um, a yearly month by yearly fee. And so, um, I think we started off at like $60 or something like that per year.
Sorry. You have a bunch in that 20,000 that may have paid that one time fee early on. So today it's not contributing to your 80 grand a month.
Yeah.
Yeah. Got it. How, how many are on monthly plans?
Um, Let's see. I'd have to look at the numbers, but, uh, I don't know off the top of my head. I think we have about what, 10,000 events, smart users that are paying monthly, you know, and they're paying, they're paying anywhere from $5 up to, you know, a hundred dollars a month or something like that.
Very cool. Okay. So, so put this on a timeline for me. When did you launch? Obviously you quit the job in 2011, but when did you launch the platform?
Um,
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Chapter 5: How did Seth transition from a full-time job to entrepreneurship?
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Chapter 6: What is the revenue model for Seth's event management software?
Keptera, that's C-A-P-T-E-R-A. Now, I want to get in your head in 2011. I mean, did you know you were going to do this? So you saved up a cushion in case it didn't work? Like you just or I mean, how did you do it?
Um, well, the company was profitable enough that I could just quit. I could quit my job and, and, and pay myself and pay myself.
How much was it at that? How much was it doing a month?
Um, I think we were doing like 20,000 a month.
Oh, okay. That's pretty good.
Yeah. Yeah. And, but so we started off the first, when I first started the. Selling the plugin, I started off on my own, just my own little website through PayPal. I was making $2,000 a month, and then I was telling my office, my co-founder, which was a fellow co-worker at the time in my marketing job, And, uh, you know, I was buying pizza and talking to, talking to everybody.
I was like, Hey man, you got to get on in on this. I need some help. Cause he was really business savvy and he was getting his MBA at the university of Utah. So he, uh, basically gave up a job at the, uh, in Michigan, uh, to be, uh, uh, uh, you know, to work at the, uh, to the hospital out there and be like a, a business, I guess, uh,
uh, you know, I guess they need, uh, you guys worked, you guys worked together with the business at the hospital. Yeah. Yeah.
No, we didn't work at the hospital. He was going, he was leaving to go work at a hospital. Okay.
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