SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Ingo Breaks $100k/mo Helping Major Media Brands Get More Conference Attendees
16 Jun 2021
Chapter 1: What is InGo and how does it help increase conference attendance?
5 million gets us an additional give or take 2000 customers. That gets us to the place where we're generating 25 million a year in revenue.
You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, CAC, valuation, or other metrics, 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. Hey folks, my guest today is Michael Barnett.
He fell in love with communities when advising nonprofits on leadership and organizational development after working for members of the U.S. Congress and the U.K. Parliament. Now he's building a platform that connects people and helps them bring more folks to causes, brands, and companies that they absolutely love.
They found a product market fit with COVID and are experiencing explosive growth, 2X, in over in the past six months. The company is called Ingo, I-N-G-O dot me. Michael, you ready to take us to the top?
Yeah, absolutely. Looking forward to it. Great to be here, Nathan. I appreciate it.
Thanks for coming on. Okay, so what are you selling and who's buying?
Great question. So historically, before COVID, we were selling social registration to event organizers. So you run New York Times Travel Show or the Army Show or the PGA Show, and you want more people to go. You drop us into your registration process. We get you to say, yeah, I want to see who else is going.
we analyze your network and we say, Nathan, you should also invite these four people, show gross, 10%, 20%. But it's once a year. COVID made that all illegal. Revenue went to zero, events went to zero, everything shut down, which was a horrible experience, terrifying, and then the best thing that's happened to us.
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Chapter 2: How did COVID impact InGo's business model?
So in 2019, one fifth of the biggest events in the world used us for, uh, to do that. And then to say, here are the faces of the people, you know, here are the faces of the people you should invite.
Interesting. Okay. Take me back to day one. When did you launch the business?
Oh, 2013, initially, we wanted to get rid of business cards. I'm sure you had lots of events, but these stacks of business cards, you never follow the right people, know who to follow up with, can find the right business card. Decided we were going to solve that problem.
Met with lots of great leaders in the event space and found out it wasn't a problem they wanted to solve, we're going to pay for. So distribution became hard. Pivoted in late 2013 into... The front end, which was these people do want to pay for getting more people to their events. So that was 2013. Did that, grew that all the way through 2019, 5 million attendees globally.
And then basically had to restart the company last year.
With COVID. Yeah. Now, did you own this bootstrap or did you raise capital?
We raised about 2 million bucks in 2015 and then became profitable. And now we're... quite profitable.
Why did you need to raise the $2 million back in 2015?
Initial idea, pivot, new idea, needed funding, needed scale, needed some go-to-market funding and product development.
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Chapter 3: What types of clients are using InGo's services?
And so they start following us, start getting interested, take a meeting. And then we get about 40% of the meetings we take close.
Oh, wow. Can you name, is there a conference page that's live right now that's using you?
Yeah, you could go to Fast, go to their event page or Inc. and go to their event page and see us on there. Yeah, maybe it's fastco.com.
Fastco.com. You know, I'm just curious what the UI looks like because, I mean, look, the events are going to, I think, come roaring back once, you know, folks put practices in to do it safely. Okay. I can't, I don't know. Fastco.com isn't anything. Let me see. Fastcompany.com. Oh, fastcompany.com. Got it.
And Inc. Inc. is actually, go to Inc.com and upcoming events. You'll see us in there.
I see. Okay. Inc.com upcoming events.
And so I agree, physical events are going to come roaring back. We've already been crushing it with customers in Dubai, where they're starting to launch again. Going all the way back to November, actually, they had some pretty good results because they were way ahead on vaccines. But what we found, what was great for us was all the virtual side.
So webinars, virtual events, podcasts, white papers. And the functionality we built was to go, you don't just want to acquire somebody once. You want to acquire them and keep them for a long time. And you want to get them to engage as often as possible. So for your own podcast, imagine if every time people sign up for one of your podcasts, then one of their friends listens to the next podcast.
They get a note saying, hey, great news. Michael just listened to this next podcast. Don't you want to listen to it also?
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Chapter 4: What is the pricing structure for InGo's services?
Okay, yeah, this makes a lot of sense. Very cool. Why hasn't Hopin or Events.com or Bizabo or Cvent tried to buy you?
Well, we've had a lot of reach out over the last few months. And so we've been growing quickly and kind of holding off those conversations and also talking to funding sources as well. But we'll see what happens.
Are you more likely to raise more capital and keep building product? Do you see a path to grow product? Are you more likely to take the sale now?
I think that there's a lot of product and a lot of growth opportunity. If you look at it as there's 700, we're mostly B2B. So 700 million professionals out there, getting them all to be members of Ingo and our customers, a few customers each, that's a huge addressable market. But the right offer, we could be, you know, hop in or somebody could probably support us.
Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. Um, if you went the raise path to keep doubling down, how much do you think you'd go target? How much would you raise? We'd raise 5 million. And why is that the right number?
That is the right number because it gets us to, it gets us to about 50 million of, and a recurring, or sorry, it gets us to about a $50 million valuation. What do you think? This isn't live. Sorry. That's not the right answer.
Can I, no, no, we can, we can edit it. We can sort of talk through it. So you're, you'd be raising 5 million to try and grow your valuation to 50.
No, I, I, Five million, I should go back and look at the numbers. Five million gets us an additional, here. So five million gets us an additional give or take 2,000 customers. That gets us to the place where we're generating about 25 million a month in, 25 million a year in revenue. I see, I see, I see.
And can I take the math? 80 customers today at that average ACV, you told me of 20 grand, you're doing what, like 150 a month right now, 150 grand?
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Chapter 5: How did Michael pivot InGo after the initial business model failed?
Very good.
Okay, let's wrap up, Mike, with the famous five. Number one, favorite business book?
Ooh, Measure What Matters.
Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?
That's a really great question. I don't want to give the cliche Musk because everybody does it. Actually, you know who I do find most compelling that I think is pretty popular but not everybody? Warren Buffett.
I think the analysis and his idea, he's got this quote about if everybody invested as if they had a date card or a dance card of nine options and they invested knowing that they only had nine investments to make in their lifetime. they would do a lot better job. It resonates to like something Jobs did where he was like, well, we're only going to have six products, but they're going to be amazing.
I think that same thing from Buffett of his analysis of exactly where to put your money. I think the same thing is true for time and same thing is true for a company. And it goes back to the measure what matters thing too. It's just that precision of thought process.
Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building the business besides your own?
Really good question. HubSpot.
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