SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
His 50% Co-Founder Hacked Him, Paid $15k to Buy Out, Now $600k in ARR Growing Fast
06 Dec 2022
Chapter 1: What is the background of the guest and his business journey?
The easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool. It's like a big Excel sheet for all of these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. Ticketinghub.com. They help big companies, event companies like Emerson Gamebox and Secret Food Tours process ticket sales.
They're doing about $50,000 per month right now on revenue up from $15,000, $1,500 just a year ago, serving 250 customers as they're coming out of COVID strong. They've got over $90,000 in the bank, $10,000 a month in profit. And we love Carl because he's 100% bootstrapped. Hey, folks, my guest today is Carl Peel.
He's the founder of Ticketing Hub, a successful serial entrepreneur who selected to take part in the BBC series The Last Millionaire. His first business during high school, promoting nightclub events to the young elite of Paris, did well.
And while studying engineering at King's College in London, he established an entrepreneur society and launched a bespoke exotic accessories brand called Monte Napoleon. Is that what that is, Carl? Yes, it is. But now focused on TicketingHub.com, cloud reservation software for tours and activities. Carl, you ready to take us to the top? I am. All right. Very cool. All right. So, so take it home.
Give me an example of a sort of a tour company or activity company that uses you today.
So we currently do the reservation software for secret food tours. They are the largest food tour in the world. They operate in 67 cities around the world and they use us to manage all of their ticket sales, distribution point of sale. So we're Shopify if you want for tickets.
And how do you price? Is it a percentage GMV of secret food tours or is it a flat fee or what?
It's a percentage, yeah. We're on a 3% fee and then enterprise clients get discounts. So another example of client is Immersive Gamebox. They're the biggest VR company in the world. They operate in 15 locations worldwide and opening three new ones. And they have the license for Squid Games and Angry Bird.
Interesting. So your largest customers, how low can they get that fee? 1%, 2%?
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Chapter 2: How did the pandemic impact the business and what strategies were used for survival?
Honestly, we capture everyone. Our system is so easy to use that we allow small businesses that do 5, 10 ticket sales up to people that do a few million.
No, no, I know that. But if someone's paying you $200 a month on average, and that's 3% of their total volume, well, $200 times 33 would be $7,000 in GMV per month on average per account. Yes. Interesting. Okay, very cool. Give me the backstory here. When did you launch? What year?
Well, we launched 10 years ago. So I started a company called Lost in London. And so I tried to set up a social network for students, but obviously you all know Facebook and I failed miserably. And I learned a lot from that experience and I started Lost in London. And we created a social platform for language schools.
So we were selling events, nightclubs, attractions, tours, and activities to those schools. And we were printing tickets in our office and giving them to the schools. So they never had the right amount of tickets. It was always complicated to manage. And, uh, we decided to go digital. Uh, we went to a ticketing company.
They charged us a 20 K set up fee and a 200,000 ticket a year, a minimum, um, at a set fee. And, uh, none of our clients wanted to use it. And they tried to sue us to, um, because we didn't actually do the numbers. And, uh, So then I went back to the drawing board. I hired a developer and he built this backend for all the schools to log in.
And we bought a company called Minicards that are advertising displays in hotels and hostels.
What year did you pay? How did you buy that?
Almost nothing because it was pretty much not working. So I probably paid like 15, 20K to buy it.
What year?
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Chapter 3: What unique features does Ticketing Hub offer to its clients?
And that's when I realized there is no hub for tickets. There's no way to connect distribution and supplier. And we're talking this 10 years ago. And so that's why we decided to first launch a little scanner that would connect to Expedia, TripAdvisor, etc. And allow the suppliers or the museums of St.
Paul's, Berlin to scan the tickets and validate them.
No, so everything is out of the box. So you use an iPhone and Android, and then you just buy your own sum up device, or iZettle, and then a printer if you need it.
Okay. And so fast forward to today, obviously, a compelling story here, but how many customers are paying you today?
So we have between 250 and 300 customers at the minute.
So can we take 250 times an average of 200 bucks a month, you're doing about 50,000 a month in revenue?
Exactly. Okay.
That's awesome. Where were you exactly one year ago? Do you remember?
One year ago, we were just coming out of the pandemic, and we were doing about $200,000.
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Chapter 4: How does Ticketing Hub price its services and what are the payment structures?
Oh, I love that. So you own 100%?
I own 100%. Yes.
That's awesome. I love that. Any plans to raise or you want to stay bootstrapped?
Um, I want to stay bootstrapped for, for a little longer. Um, I want to reach the, the million cap or, or 1.5, uh, and then look to raise, uh, to be honest, we have money in the bank now. Um, I'm, um, I'm making a profit every month. So how much profit per month? Uh, not much. So on my accounts for the last six months, we're at 90,000 in net profit on, uh, 300 and something. Yeah.
That's awesome. So you're profiting like you're profiting like five or 10 grand a month right now, something like that. Yeah, something like that. That's interesting. If someone came by and offered you $2 million all cash up front, do you sell? No. You said that quickly. Yes. Why so quick?
The opportunity in the market for tours and activities is $254 billion. We've taken customers from the largest tour booking systems. And we have a system that's easier to use. We're half price.
You've been doing it for 10 years, though, and you're under a million in revenue.
I had a problem with a co-founder. who basically started his competing business, hacked our platform, told all my clients. At one point, I didn't even have developers for three months. So I survived that and I only got him out of the business in October 2019.
What did you do that made him hate you so much?
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Chapter 5: What challenges did the guest face with his co-founder?
Because he didn't want to sell without me signing this agreement because he's hacked us. He's done a lot of illegal things and he didn't want me to discuss it. We're competing in the same industry, actually.
So you didn't sign it, which is why you can talk about it now. Correct. That's so funny. Who's going to win?
I think we're going for different verticals now. He specialized in hop-on hop-off buses and created this very complicated system. I want to do the opposite. I want to do a very simple and cheap system for 40-50% of the market. I think the market is big enough to have multiple players in the industry. I don't see him as a competition.
Maybe he's going to try to come into our game soon, but not for the moment.
How do you make sure he's not going to get jealous of you and hack you again?
I mean, now we've put everything in place. Before, you know, I'm not a technical person. So he was able to control the domain because he had access to Cloudflare. So he managed to steal all our historical emails in the company. So there's a lot of things that he was able to do. Now, you know, I have a team of five developers full time.
So I don't think it'll be as easy for him to access the platform. And we've changed. The system has changed a lot in five years.
So you told your tech team, watch out for this IP address blacklisted.
Oh, we were completely. No, no. We started logging in from other accounts and we have all the trail and absolutely everything. And what's crazy is that the police don't do anything about that.
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Chapter 6: How did the guest handle the co-founder conflict and what was the outcome?
Okay. So nine people on your team today, fiber engineers, um, your bootstrap, this is great. Any plans to buy other small companies like you did with the first one?
Potentially. We're more interested in building auxiliary services that can plug into other systems. And that's what we're working on now because we have extra cash. And right now we're refactoring our code so we can't hire more developers because we have very, very senior developers working on this. Once that's kind of made all the systems a bit independent, we'll be able to hire more.
In the meantime, we're just building like really simple one-off kind of system that solves the problem that we or other reservation systems don't solve.
Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. Well, listen, we're rooting for you on that note. Let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, favorite book.
Favorite power persuasion.
Yeah, that's a good one. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?
I really like, so in my industry, it's Frederick Lalonde, who's the founder of Hopper. I find what he's done with data incredible. And I want to kind of replicate that in some way.
Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building ticketing hub?
Uh, surfer SEO is awesome. Uh, I think it's really, really great.
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Chapter 7: What growth metrics are being reported for the business today?
And how old are you?
I'm 39.
Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.
Uh, to spend Bitcoins differently.
Uh,
That's a good reason. Guys, there you have it, ticketinghub.com. They help big companies, event companies like Emerson Gamebox and Secret Food Tours process ticket sales. They're doing about $50,000 per month right now on revenue up from $15,000, $1,500 just a year ago, serving 250 customers as they're coming out of COVID strong.
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Chapter 8: What are the future plans for Ticketing Hub and its team?
They've got over $90,000 in the bank, $10,000 a month in profit. And we love Carl because he's 100% bootstrapped. Carl, thanks for taking us to the top.
Thanks so much, Nathan.