SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Your $250 Ticket to Luxury Did $700,000 in 2015, EP 292: Carlo Cisco
16 Jun 2016
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have.
Chapter 2: What inspired Carlo Cisco to start his first business?
I'm now at $20,000 per top. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark. And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Okay, Top Tribe, this week's winner of the 100 bucks is none other than Derek Roddenbeck. He is an artist and he's looking to increase his revenue.
If you want your chance to enter and to win 100 bucks each Monday on the show, simply subscribe to the podcast on iTunes now and then text the word Nathan to 33444 to prove that you did it. Again, text the word Nathan to 33444. Good morning, Top Drive. You are listening to episode 292 of The Top. Be sure to tune in bright and early tomorrow morning to hear from Ryan Lay.
He breaks down the math behind Donald Trump's brain. Finally.
Chapter 3: How did Carlo Cisco achieve significant returns on his early investments?
Okay, good morning, Top Trap. I've got my coffee this morning, and I gotta tell you, you're gonna really enjoy our guest this morning. His name is Carlo Sisco. He's currently the founder and CEO of Select, which is a private membership community that provides access to exclusive events, savings, and perks at thousands of Premier Partners locations across the globe.
Before that, he was super involved at Groupon and many other companies that you might know, and also was active in investing. We'll get into all of that and more. Carlo, are you ready to take us to the top? Yeah.
Chapter 4: What lessons did Carlo learn from his experience at Groupon?
All right. Let's do this, man. So first things first, you look pretty young, but it sounds like you have a lot of success. How old are you? So I'm 28. 28. Very cool. So tell us real quick before we get into select, what did you tell us what you did before selecting kind of how you got into entrepreneurship in general?
Yeah, sure. So I started my first business when I was 18. I had an events planning and promotion business while I was in school at University of Miami, basically doing like large scale takeover type events.
Chapter 5: What is Select and how does it differentiate from Groupon?
So 300 plus attendees with all the different premier nightlife venues, some hotels, some retailers, etc. I was also actively investing while I was in school. I majored in finance. So I was doing a lot of that. And then
If you're investing in what kind of stuff, just out of curiosity, because we have a lot of people listening that are 18, 16, 19.
Yeah, sure. So I was doing mostly tech companies initially. And this was before the recession. So the first thing I bought was Apple. And then I bought a couple of different tech companies. Some of them got acquired.
and then uh you know during the recession i bought a whole bunch of different stuff i got baidu during the recession which was really awesome um got uh you know a bunch of the different financial companies goldman morgan stanley um and also just other companies that were kind of like leaders in industry that's what i always look for is kind of who's the best in this industry um because that's typically the company that's going to outperform everyone else
ignoring the, I'm sure spectacular returns you've gotten from your investments. You made an 08 when everything was suppressed.
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Chapter 6: What is the revenue model for Select and how does it generate income?
What was, what was the total value? Just, and I'm asking this question because again, this is valuable for our young listeners who are thinking about investing. How much total were you putting in per month just into stocks? Are we talking a grand, five grand, 10 grand more?
Yeah, that's a great question. So it was basically, I turned about like 9,000 I had put away from the events company into about 85,000 by a year after graduation. So within four or five years. So it was a pretty nice return. And graduation was what year? 2009. So it was right as we were starting to come out of the recession.
That's great. That's really great. Okay. So take us to what happens after the events company.
So after the events company came up to New York, worked with a trading firm up here. So, you know, still doing a lot of like stock investing stuff. I liked it. I didn't love it. It's kind of the opposite of investing.
Chapter 7: What is Select's customer acquisition cost and lifetime value ratio?
You know, trading is much more about kind of short term manipulation and arbitrage opportunities and that sort of stuff. And then about a year and a half in, I got offered the opportunity to join Groupon when they were sort of in crazy growth phase. So I actually got to go help build Groupon in Japan, which was an incredible experience.
Groupon is kind of like the ultimate startup on steroids story. It was the fastest growing company in history at that time. And Japan was just the epitome of that. They had acquired a company with about 20 people and not really significant revenue. And then within a couple months, we had over 700 people, over 20 million a month in revenue. So it was really Groupon's kind of extreme growth story.
And in Japan, it was Groupon on steroids. It was absolutely crazy, but a tremendous experience and a lot of fun.
Did you get in early enough where you got equity? No, unfortunately, I was just past it.
What employee number were you? I would say probably in the low thousands. They were already operating in probably, I would say, 15 to 20 countries. I basically joined right before they turned down Google's offer. And then, you know, shortly after that was when they raised 950 million.
And then that was when it was like, okay, we're just starting here, but here's our goals for this month, the following month. And, you know, they were all crazy, but we were actually able to beat them.
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Chapter 8: How does Carlo define his target market for Select?
So it was a really fun time.
Why are these guys getting, so living social, obviously these guys are just getting crushed right now. Why are they, why are they, what's, what's, there's something flawed with the business model. Why are they getting crushed?
Yeah, so that's part of where the inspiration for Select came from. But the issue is that the merchants that were doing it initially thought that it was going to be great for their brand. They thought that they were going to have all these repeat customers. They thought the customers would spend more when they were there. None of those things are true. Less than 20% of the customers ever return.
There are places that have literally shut down by doing a daily deal. And then what's happened in the market, and it was easy to see, there was actually a point where I bought Groupon stock, because it was really, really low, and then sold it. I got kind of lucky at almost an absolute high.
But what's happened is all these other companies have kind of faded out, because they were basically trying to do what Groupon was doing and undercut them by like 10 or 20%. But that's pretty irrelevant when they're already giving up up to 50% or sometimes even more on these deals. Um, so there's always going to be certain businesses it works for.
Um, you know, a lot of businesses are really high gross margin. So it makes a tremendous amount of sense for them to get the exposure to, to get the customers, but for someone like, you know, a premier restaurant or a premier hotel, or, you know, any sort of brand that's important that has other costs and, you know, needs the loyalty, um, doesn't make as much sense.
And that's kind of the gap that we've, that we've been filling with Select. But I think that Groupon itself will always exist. They've been doing a tremendous job. Groupon Goods is a huge success. That's basically just their arm that sells products. It's now over half of their business. Most people don't realize that. It's selling the products, not the local stuff.
Um, so they'll always be around, but I think most of the other companies are going to go away. And we've been seeing that over time. Guilt just got acquired living social is in dire straits. They sold their best asset to group on, um, about a year and a half ago. So I think we'll see a lot of business. Yeah. Fab was a disaster. Yeah. Big, big disaster.
Yeah. So, okay. So tell us about select what year did you start it in?
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