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SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

801: The $60M King of Ticket Sales

03 Oct 2017

Transcription

Chapter 1: How did Jayesh Parmar start Picatic?

0.031 - 19.761 Nathan Latka

Jayesh, founder of Pikatiki, founded it back in 2008, hell of a year to found the company. Since then, 2013, they made a major pivot, but they were still doing less than 100 grand in revenue. Eventually, they went on to raise about $1.5 million total. They hit, in 2016, over $30 million in gross ticket revenue. They make about 4% of that, so call it 1.2 million.

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19.741 - 41.193 Nathan Latka

Here in 2017, they are on track to break $60 million in gross ticket revenue as they look to empower event organizers, whether it's nonprofits using their free product or big enterprise accounts and big venues using their enterprise API. This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base.

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41.693 - 51.429 Nathan Latka

You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per talk. Five and six million.

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Chapter 2: What unique strategies does Picatic use for ticket sales?

51.529 - 66.538 Nathan Latka

He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000 unit sold mark. And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Many of you listening right now don't have time to listen to every B2B SaaS CEO that I've interviewed. If you want to get access to the database I've created,

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66.518 - 88.543 Nathan Latka

with year-over-year growth rates, customer counts, margins, and many, many other data metrics and data points, you can go to getlatka.com. Here's the thing, though. This database, I keep it to myself. It's so freaking valuable. And to preserve the quality of the data and make sure that the people that have access to it have a true advantage, I'm only letting 10 companies on each month.

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Chapter 3: What revenue models does Picatic implement?

88.523 - 105.638 Nathan Latka

So we're full this month, but you can go to getlatka.com to get on the waiting list for next month. And look, there's big people on the waiting list. I mean, the biggest VCs you've ever heard of. You've probably heard of them. They're big, private equity, billions and billions under management. So it's an impressive waiting list. Go get on now at getlatka.com. Hello, everyone.

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105.658 - 111.945 Nathan Latka

My guest today is Jayesh Parmar. He's a serial entrepreneur with two decades of event industry experience.

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Chapter 4: How has Picatic evolved since its launch?

112.365 - 121.476 Nathan Latka

Currently, he's the CEO and co-founder of Pikatik and is listed as one of the world's top 10 tech entrepreneurs disrupting the event industry. All right, Jayesh, are you ready to take us to the top?

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122.337 - 123.358 Jayesh Parmar

Yeah, yeah, I'm ready.

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123.378 - 127.643 Nathan Latka

Okay, good. So tell us how Pikatik works and how you make money. What's your revenue model?

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128.483 - 154.879 Jayesh Parmar

Okay so we do things completely different and that's extremely fun for us so in the event taking our biggest thing is to bring people together so one thing that we did do kind of completely different is we give a product away for free and that sounds a little bit weird and people generally ask what's the hook or the gimmick we allow event organizers that are selling tickets around under $25 or $18 in the United States

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154.859 - 173.003 Jayesh Parmar

to go out there and use our platform, sell tickets, organize tickets, manage tickets. And the whole idea around that is for community events or people who are changemakers or nonprofit organizations that are really trying to go out there and make a difference, that gives them a piece to go out there and help bring people together and engage the community.

172.983 - 182.403 Jayesh Parmar

Then we have a pro product where we change the ballgame up and completely where now it's not the ticketing company anymore.

Chapter 5: What challenges did Picatic face in its early years?

182.764 - 193.506 Jayesh Parmar

We act like we give you the power of having your own ticketing company embedded within your website. It's called Pick and Take Anywhere where...

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193.486 - 216.872 Jayesh Parmar

event organizers that are putting on events and they have an asset or they have an app and the asset being a website or an app they just take a couple lines of code and they have effectively ticketing in apps so that makes this completely different and that's how we make money on that because there's a commission there and then We have another product for big brands, enterprises, multinationals.

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216.932 - 230.367 Jayesh Parmar

It's an API, so it's a software-to-software approach. And basically, think of an iceberg. We cut off the top, we give them the whole bottom, and they can build whatever they want on top of it. So that's our business model, and that's how we make revenue.

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230.648 - 238.317 Nathan Latka

And which ones is the bigger revenue stream, the commission-based approach or where you're selling the SaaS product that allows people to kind of build on top of your iceberg?

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238.597 - 238.697

Yeah.

Chapter 6: How does Picatic ensure predictable revenue streams?

238.964 - 264.02 Jayesh Parmar

Yeah, the iceberg is completely. I mean, the B2B aspect of that is definitely the much bigger piece of the pie. The first piece, obviously, there's no revenue that comes to us. It's completely community empowerment. It's creating value for them. And then helping them build to the next phase, which is a small amount of revenue, which is great. That's not what we feel is the big driver.

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264.04 - 282.015 Jayesh Parmar

We feel like... The future of where ticketing is, is high school kids know how to program, and they want to be able to go out there and build their own ticketing company, have their own identity, have their own vision, and not bounce people off to somebody else's properties. Come to us, and then from an end user's perspective,

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Chapter 7: What marketing tactics has Jayesh used to grow Picatic?

282.62 - 288.733 Jayesh Parmar

People who are buying tickets don't want friction. So we now can empower those people to really have that experience.

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289.033 - 296.308 Nathan Latka

So Jayesh, what on average, what is a customer paying you to use kind of the bottom half of the iceberg you're selling them?

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297.149 - 314.128 Jayesh Parmar

In terms, it ranges. It ranges from, if we're talking about the enterprise product or the API product, it could be on calls because a lot of them might be just free tickets. So it could be on a licensing agreement. It could be on a commission of tickets that are sold.

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314.429 - 321.857 Nathan Latka

Wait, Jayesh, sorry, just to be clear. So this is not a SaaS product. It's still a commission-based or something-based product?

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Chapter 8: What are Jayesh's insights on entrepreneurship and failure?

322.31 - 337.479 Jayesh Parmar

Well, the first two, we call them the basic product. The basic is free. The pro product is a commission base. It's a base rate. What's the base? A dollar. Okay. And then the commission around 2.5% per ticket.

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337.619 - 340.605 Nathan Latka

Okay, so it's a dollar per ticket sold?

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340.788 - 361.722 Jayesh Parmar

That's right. Got it. In a small commission. And then we partnered up with Stripe, so you would have the Stripe be on top of that, and that's the pro. And then the enterprise or the API, it's completely different. I mean, the beautiful part about that, you may want to bring in your own merchant account. You want to only do free events.

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362.022 - 373.357 Jayesh Parmar

So it's generally, there is a licensing component to that piece. So there is a SaaS pricing to that. And then it ranges between in terms of volume or what the complexities that you have.

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373.397 - 377.342 Nathan Latka

What would you say the average is on the enterprise? Are we talking like two grand a month, 10 grand a month, 100 grand a month?

378.363 - 381.447 Jayesh Parmar

It can range anywhere from five grand to 100 grand a month.

381.467 - 385.172 Nathan Latka

Okay. And that's just strictly dependent on basically how many API calls there are per month.

385.591 - 394.318 Jayesh Parmar

that as well as how many tickets you might sell or there's just a variety of range. But yeah, that's kind of like a safe bet. How do you...

394.855 - 411.679 Nathan Latka

I imagine by nature events are seasonal. So like if someone buys access to your enterprise API, how do you as a CEO make decisions around scaling your team and such? Because I can imagine one month when they have a big event, they're going to pay you a hundred grand because of the volume. And then next month it might be five grand because it's winter and they're not doing any events anymore.

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