SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1607 Why She Said No To Vista Equity Despite $10m in ARR
18 Dec 2019
Chapter 1: What inspired Lauren to start her company after fleeing Africa?
Founded this company after fleeing Africa after witnessing her father's brutal murder. This was in 2009. Really started over in Australia with sites now on building the first kind of female-run unicorn in the hospitality industry. She's well on her way with doing between 10 and 20 million bucks right now in ARR, scaling 100 to 150%.
year over year, just raised an additional 15 million to help fuel that growth. 26 million raised to date, about 65 people on the team total today. All of them are remote, about 4% revenue turn annually. So economics are holding serving 25,000 event locations, whether it's restaurants, hotels, things of that nature, helping them book their space and doing many, many other things as well.
Hello, everybody. My guest today is Lauren Hall. She's the founder of Ivy, a multi-world-winning technology company providing enterprise software to the events industry. Since its 2009 launch, she's overseen Ivy's continued growth and global expansion to APAC Europe and North America, offering the world's first real-time marketplace with live availability for function space and suppliers.
Chapter 2: How did Lauren build a female-run unicorn in the hospitality industry?
Lauren, are you ready to take us to the top?
I am indeed.
All right. Tell us about the company. What do you do and what's your business model? Are you a pure play SaaS company?
We are, but we're actually a little bit different in the fact that even though we have a fully SaaS model, because we have three enterprise applications, which is providing solutions to meeting planners, to venues, which manage their functions-based group accommodation, it's their full sales and catering system, as well as inventory and time-based management systems for suppliers.
We're actually... In the industry of travel and the events industry, there's only a big major player like Sabre. So what Sabre does for travel, they digitize the online experience for booking for accommodation flights and car hire. We're doing that for meetings and events.
So basically we are a global distribution platform known as a GDS, but in order to achieve a GDS, which is the entire price software connection and distribution engine in one, you have to build the technology at the source of the supply chain. So we built operating systems to be able to manage their live availability rates and inventory of the supply chain.
We then connected them into our marketplace, which then enables all of that supply chain to then have consumers and event organizers book in real time. And that was really a huge problem. It was something that I experienced many times over having teams organizing events, which was really, truly a way to be able to solve a global problem.
So you make money every time someone uses your platform to book an event venue. I assume you're taking a referral cut or something like that.
Yeah. So what we do is we've got an enterprise SaaS license fee. We've got a transaction fee. We've got usage fees. We've got multiple revenue streams that come across our platform. So we're not just SaaS. So we're obviously transactional model as well.
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Chapter 3: What unique business model does iVvy utilize in the events industry?
Yeah. So like we provide our systems to big hotel chain groups. We are the central risk systems where their everyday operating day-to-day solution, as well as their booking engine that sits on the front of their websites. So we actually connect all the pieces of underutilized assets that have never been online before.
So as an example, you ultimately at the moment can book accommodation for travel, but you could never book accommodation for groups, which could be 50 to 100 packs when you're organizing an event.
So let's go back to- When you say packs, Lauren, you mean people?
People, yeah, packs. So that, yeah, it's as people. So as an example, let's go back all the way to the beginning. The biggest problem with organizing an event that it can take up to six weeks to be able to source and access and get people to respond to an inquiry.
Okay, you go backwards and forwards negotiating between a venue and a supplier and potentially the corporate that you are either organizing it for or on behalf of. Now, the reason for that exists is because there's been no systems that sit at the supply chain. So there's been no ability for these sales and catering systems that sit at venues or inventory management systems that sit
um, in suppliers that actually connect online that make available the inventory time available and rates for those solutions.
Yeah. Lauren, I just, sorry, I don't mean to cut you off, but we're, we are short on time. I totally get the product. It makes perfect sense to me. I totally understand why you're doing it. It's a huge problem. I get it. So I want to dive more into, I want to get more capture more of your story here. So, so walk me through kind of a timeline. When did you launch the company? What year?
I launched Ivy in 2009. I started building the first platform for meeting and event organizers, much like what you see Cvent in the States. We built that Cvent platform here in Australia. My journey started back in South Africa when I built the first platform to solve that corporate meeting spend problem to be able to provide availability rates and inventory online.
When I originally built the platform, I had massive demand. It outstripped the capability of how it had been built and engineered. I had to re-engineer that platform to start again because it had been built in ASP.classic, not in a PHP or .NET. And I obviously have bootstrapped that company for a couple of million.
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Chapter 4: How does iVvy generate revenue through its platform?
So Lauren, on just the SaaS aspect, what are these companies, and I know you have many different cohorts, but best you can, on average, what are these companies paying per year or per month for the SaaS component of your tech?
Look, it ranges. From a small restaurant, it can take anything from $50 to $100 a month on the SaaS. And then for large hotel chains, it's you know, it can be anything from $250 to $500 a month. It depends on the size. Cause we, you know, as a hotel chain, we also provide all the central res systems. We're integrated into their property management.
Would you say that Lauren, that you lean towards the higher end of that? So maybe 150 or 200 bucks a month on average, or no, you're really long tail SMB.
No, no, I think we lean to the higher end, definitely because we work in non-global groups and typically because there's a lot more complexity. If you're looking at the restaurant areas, which is very simple stuff, okay, there may be lots of smaller players, but definitely I think we sit in the enterprise space, particularly across the market.
So Lauren, can I take the $100 kind of per month average times the 25,000 customer number you just gave me? I mean, that obviously would put you at about 2.5 million bucks a month on the software end. Is that accurate?
No, that's probably not. I mean, we're sitting probably closer between the 10 to 20 million in revenue a year.
And you said about 60% of that is, or sorry, 80% of that is SaaS?
Yeah, it's majority SaaS. Yeah.
Yeah, that's great. I want to understand more of how you've signed. This is incredible. I've signed up so many locations. What's your growth? I mean, what's the number one growth channel look like?
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Chapter 5: What challenges did Lauren face while scaling her company?
Then you obviously want to reinvest that. You shouldn't be cashflow positive right now.
No, no, it's not at this age. Not, not as now we're in that massive, a massive growth trajectory now. And, um, And as we do that, we will continue to capitalize and grow so that we can reach our goals of 100 million and hopefully a $1 billion market cap. And we can celebrate a female unicorn in hospitality, which is a very, very hard place to be.
I would love that. I think that would be wonderful. And I hope you come back on the show and celebrate in four years and we're toasting virtual champagnes together.
All right. I'll be there, Nathan, without a doubt. Thank you for your time.
Yeah. Hey, quick here because it's the format of the show. Really fast, famous five. Number one, favorite business book.
Uh, screw it.
Uh, just do it. Screw it. Just do it. Richard Branson. Number two, is there a CEO? You're, is there a CEO you're following or studying right now?
Um, actually, uh, Alison, um, yes. And there is, believe it or not. And now one of the things that are probably would have been really good if I actually knew that I was going to be asked that probably would have told you, um, yeah, Alison Maslin, who's built, uh, you know, six multimillion dollar company. She's absolutely fantastic. I'm actually working through what's her last company.
Her last company now. Okay. Now you're going to give me, now you're really getting me on the spot, aren't you?
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