SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How TitanX Hit $9.7M ARR After Buying IP for $200K
25 Mar 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: How did Joey Gilkey turn a $200K IP purchase into a $9.7M ARR company?
What did you spend on the IP? 1,200,000 upfront, 800,000 seller note. What's revenue today at TitanX? Today, we're sitting at the time of recording this, we're at 9.7 million ARR. What's your largest customer pay you per year today?
One just expanded to 406 ARR, three-year contract. Oh, wow. Okay, so it's a $1.2 million contract. Did you get creative on this acquisition? Was it 10 million acquisition, a million upfront, or how'd you structure it?
It was a $13 million acquisition. We put $7 million up front. We went growth equity. So we raised $27 million and then $10 million went in our pocket as secondary cash.
Zoom, if Henry Shuckett's Minfo came and offered you $200 million all cash today to sell the company, do you take it? Hey, folks, my guest today is Joey Gilkey. He's a serial entrepreneur and the founder of TitanX, a sales intelligence platform that created the phone intent category.
He famously bet his entire net worth on the company, shutting down three other cash-flowing businesses to focus on a proprietary model that predicts who will actually answer your cold call. Under his leadership, it's grown to millions of revenue, and they just recently raised a Series A. Joey, you ready to take us to the top? Let's do it, brother. All right.
So tell me first, how did you get into this space? Are you an ex-sales guy or when did you launch?
Yeah, man, I've been in the enterprise sales world my whole career. So I started off in the fortune world. OK, so tell me about that. When did you acquire that piece of IP? What year? That was August of 2023, and I acquired it for a different reason than it turned into. So I seemed like a brilliant, more just like a brilliant idiot.
Thought how I was going to use it was I was going to build it for my fractional business. It was going to be the moat around that services company. We started using it in like a licensing model at the fractional company. And then I realized pretty quickly that it was like dark magic that was heavily expensive and very slow.
And if I can get my hands on it, I can throw money at R&D and optimize it. Plus, I knew where a lot of the bodies lived when it comes to where does unique telco data live and fraud detection data and all that kind of stuff. So what did you spend on the IP? Was it millions of dollars or? One million on the dot. Cash? 200 grand up front, 800 grand seller note.
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Chapter 2: What is the importance of acquiring IP instead of building from scratch?
And so for us, it was more about how do we make this scalable without having a deprecation of the quality of the outcome? So if anything, it's actually gotten faster. It's gotten cheaper. We can do it at scale at this point. And it's more effective in terms of the data we're able to find now.
So fast forward to today, you've grown this thing. You bought it for $200K cash plus $800 seller's note. What's revenue today at TitanX?
Titan X is sitting. We just did a small acquisition. We paid low aid figures for that. And that is in the dialer space. So we acquired a company called Frontspin at the time of this going out. That will be very public. So Frontspin was built for high velocity dialing. Not a very sound business, but an incredibly sound and scalable technology can scale to a million users.
And we've been power users of Frontspin in a lot of different ways. It actually powered the call center in the early days. That's how we know so much about it. It excels in call deliverability. So anyways, today we're sitting, at the time of recording this, we're in early 26. We're at 9.7 million ARR. That's post-acquisition, right? Post-acquisition, they're contributing about 2 million.
So formerly, or excuse me, wow, old school. Titan X is sitting at about 7.2, 7.4, and front spins at 2.1.
And did you get creative on this acquisition? If it's, you know, what is it, 10 million acquisition, a million upfront, or how do you structure it?
It was a $13 million acquisition. We put $7 million up front. We went growth equity. So we raised $27 million, 10 of which is primary. So that's for growth, a little bit more than 10. $7 million went towards the acquiring Frontspin. $6 million of that from Frontspin CEO got rolled in. And then $10 million went in our pocket as secondary cash. Yeah.
Because I want to, first off, it's very rare to find a founder that's as transparent as Joey. So I'm going to really push on this. One of the things that I see founders, they're just making a mistake right now is, you know, we want to raise external capital. People say, Nathan, you just hate VC. That's not the, that's not true.
What I actually am saying is if you're going to go give up control, take cash as well. Don't give up control and cash. So like Joey gave up some control here with the series A, but he also got paid. He got his first bite. I mean, I don't know, Joey, what your personal net worth is, but I imagine 10 million secondary is meaningful for you.
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Chapter 3: How does TitanX structure its pricing model for customers?
At the same time, you use that money to go buy frontspin, which was $2 million of revenue, right, for call it, I think you said $7 million, right? Is that right? $4X. $13. Oh, $13. Okay, still. You're still on the money.
And so I wanted to give them a piece, put them on the cap table. Obviously, it's earned. And so I had a lot of criteria. I wanted control. I wanted to steer the ship. Don't touch my culture, respectfully. Go F yourself if you want to. And they were like, cool. We believe in that. It was great.
Guys up in, you know, founder path, my main gig, it looked very supportive of Joey's deal. I'll just put it that way. So update you'd also, I guess, Joey say good things about updata.
Oh, they're awesome. You know, that was the biggest thing is I need a partner that believed in our vision, knew our market. Like when they showed up for the first management meeting, they'd interviewed customers, done deep market research, like they came prepared.
Whenever you're ready, though, I will convince Trey and eventually you to take a $5 million term loan from FounderPath with a four-year IO period and an all-in interest rate in the 12% to 14% range. No warrants, no PGs, no nothing.
clip that there we go all right hey so where do you do you keep running this playbook over and over i mean you effectively could buy your way to 100 million bucks of revenue just doing the same thing over and over yeah i mean i look at again this is the buy versus build risk quadrant for me it's it's more along uh what's the timeline what's our goals when's our recap timeline and when we're gonna actually recap this thing again i plan on rolling this thing two three times um in terms of rolling equity over i just really believe in the vision it's always gonna be about the partner it's gonna be about the
valuation clearly and what the secondary looks like on those deals. But we have, you know, with where Titan X lives today, we are an intelligence layer that lives between where people get their data from. So think ZoomInfo, Clay, Apollo, Cognizant, and where they dial that, right? So that goes through Salesforce, SEPs, and then eventually it makes it to Nooks and Orem and now Frontspin.
Well, we captured the bookend there on Frontspin.
um with with having the the dialer and the intelligence layer built in what is what i do believe is the future i don't want to be a data provider in the sense of i'm not trying to compete with zoom info and those guys i think data is a commodity but it's how do we manipulate that data how do we use ai to really help inform better decisions how do we close the full feedback loop of here's how i built a list here's how it scored with titan x here's how it performed in the dialer what does that tell me about the next list for my reps um
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Chapter 4: What role does proprietary data play in TitanX's business strategy?
Guys, remember, I am not just a YouTuber. I'm investing in my third fund. We've deployed $250 million into 550 software companies so far. Again, at founderpath.com. If you're interested in capital, I would love to cut you a check because I know you're investing in your education. You watch my show. So sign up at founderpath.com. And when you get the onboarding email, I reply and I see all those.
Just reply and say, Nathan, I found you through YouTube and I'll make sure to prioritize you. I would love to cut you a check. Check out founderpath.com. Question I've got for you, how are you getting customers today? Because when I put Titan X in Ahrefs, there's like no traffic. I think he maybe did a recent rebrand, but how are you getting customers today?
I would say right now we're 45% inbound organic or about 9%.
Wait, where is that though? Look, I'm not seeing any, I'm seeing very little inbound organic here. Is it a different website you're getting traffic from?
No, TitanX.io is correct. I mean, we get about 9,000, 10,000 uniques a month. So maybe Ahrefs is just full of it. It's full of it, yeah. Interesting. No, we probably generate, you know, in our average ticket, we have different customer bands, right? So we have 3 to 10 reps, 10 to 30 reps, 30 to 50, 50 plus. Those kind of correlate to a price range of 24K, 50K, 90K, and 250K.
45% is coming through inbound organic. That's about 140 meetings a month just from the website with the high ACV. Outbounds are bread and butter. Clearly, we use our own product. And so about 38% comes through outbounds sourcing, phone only. And then I would say the rest is a mix of paid referrals and affiliates. We're building the referral affiliate market right now.
It's a really underutilized channel for us, but it's powerful.
What's your largest customer pay you per year today?
We're sitting at, well, one just expanded to $406,000. $406,000 a year. Three-year contract, yeah.
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Chapter 5: How does TitanX generate revenue through inbound and outbound strategies?
You can get into their go-to-market inbound side. So six is the outbound side, but then you have other channels or other departments we can crawl our way through. 300 over-consuming, therefore it's an expansion opportunity. The under-consuming, it's a churn flag. And then we're just looking for different ways.
And now naturally that we've acquired the dialer, now we have a whole other product line that we'll be able to add on. It gives us a whole other level of intelligence and signals for how they're using platformed.
Interesting. As we wrap up here, finish your revenue story. You launched in 2023 with the acquisition of IP. What was 2024 ending ARR? Well, we didn't have one because I didn't launch this till June of 24.
So I acquired in 23 as the IP to be the moat around the services company. I made the decision in early 24 to sunset the services company. Again, I was doing mid seven figures. And then June 1st of 24 was when we took our first dollar beta launch, 200 users. It was like we're trying to do a PLG model like the first month or two. I realized that's for the birds.
And so we ended up going zero to one point four million at the end of twenty four and then one point four to whatever six ish six something end of twenty five. And then now we're with the combined acquisition and the growth of twenty six so far about nine point nine point seven.
Really fascinating. And all that early, again, going from zero to six minute revenue that quickly, I just want to make sure I'm not missing any learnings from you. Was there any like customer acquisition strategy you used in those early days?
Yeah. I mean, like one, we do have a superpower in our tool. It's like why we have high retention is why our NRR is out the roof. It's why our magic number is a 4.1 the last quarter. What's NRR? Net revenue retention. Oh, what's this? What is your? I know. 1.36. Come on. You know me. You know, I know what NRR means, but you're at 136. Okay. Yeah. Gross dollar retention is a little low.
It's like 92. We're fixing that. And then our magic number was 4.1 Q4 versus.
Why do you say you're fixing the 92? I mean, that's not terrible in this segment of 92 gross, but 136 net.
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Chapter 6: What is the significance of expansion revenue in TitanX's growth?
If we 3x, I get something back. If I 3x on a certain timeline, I get something, something, something back.
Like you set up an ESOP pool and that gets distributed to you at certain revenue targets? Yeah. Bonus structures, I get equity back, points back, so on. Super smart. This is awesome. I've learned a ton here, Joey. If people want to follow you online, learn more from you, where can they find you?
I'm pretty active on LinkedIn, linkedin.com slash Ian slash Joey Gilkey and tynext.io.
Guys, really interesting founding story. Had a seven figure agency in 2023. He said, you know what I'm using this
one tool let me go buy the ip it's called phone ready leads spent about a million bucks to do that 200k cash up front rest was a seller note ultimately took that 200k and turned into a nine million dollar ar business 9.7 now today it started off with 200 beta users and call it june 2024 he then killed that model moved towards enterprise and broke 1.4 million bucks at the end of 2024 scaled to 6 million into 2025 again now today scaling nicely just did a series a of 27 million bucks at around 100 million post money valuation of which there's a large secondary component of 10 million bucks the rest went to his first
or second, really acquisition of a company called Frontspin doing 2 million of ARR, bought it for 13 million bucks. Creative deal structure there as well. Now focused on break and call at 14, 15 million bucks here in 2026. TitanX.io. If you're doing outbound and you're using phone numbers, test them out. Joey, thanks for taking us to the top. Thanks, man. Appreciate it.
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