How Eventespresso CEO Seth Shoultes grew to $2.8M revenue and 20K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is seth schultz he lives in southern utah where he's been hardwired to the web development community since 2001. in 09 he launched his first wordpress plug-in then in 2011 he quit his full-time job to focus on building a business around the plug-in called event espresso which now powers over 60 000 ticketing websites seth are you ready to take us to the top yes all right tell us tell us about this thing what's the plug-in doing what's your revenue model how do you make money so uh so the plugin so the plugin allows uh wordpress users uh to sell tickets to events um basically we're we are uh oh man you're kind of like you're kind of like you're kind of like eventbrite but specifically for wordpress yeah we're like eventbrite for wordpress we're like the number four competitor in the event management sphere um for against eventbrite um and we have about close to 150 event espresso websites in the alexa top 1 million and um we just hit a we we started a we actually started a sas software a software as a service platform using our using our wordpress plugin event espresso which now power which now powers um about 100 mil about a million dollars in you and ticket sales a month um from that platform and then we're also powering over 100 million uh ticket sales per month from our van espresso platform for for wordpress very cool and so what's the pricing model on average what do you what do you charge per month for this so um so on average for for i guess it's about it's about twelve dollars a month for our for our venespresso software we charge we have a yearly pricing model and so far we've we've been able to keep around 70 uh renewal rate going on that and we're bringing in between the two and then our venice our vent smart platform our clouds our cloud-based service um we're bringing in about um let's see between the two platforms we're bringing in about 80 000 a month oh it's great and memberships and sales yeah and both of those each year you'll kind of you know you'll keep about 70 of that you'll turn about 30 is that right right that's great so so and what does that equate to in terms of how many customers you have paying today um let's see we have about around i think 20 000 paying customers 20 000 paying customers that's amazing so twenty thousand divided by into eighty thousand they're each paying what about four bucks a month yeah something like that yeah okay and what are they getting for that that feels really cheap so they're getting they're getting uh they're getting a standalone software um where they can sell tickets to to any type of event say a conference a concert um and they're they're basically they're in control of all their data um with our with our software platforms so um and they're and they're bypassing they're bypassing ticketing fees um so such as like event smart or not eventbrite and you know cvent and those types of platforms they charge they charge per ticket so a dollar to two dollars per ticket with us with our platform you customers are bypassing that that so that's our customers are basically paying paying us to keep the keep the platform going since it's a since it's an open source model so did you have sorry i don't mean to cut you off but did you have people that you signed up early on that paid way like because right now on your website your cheapest plan for one website is about 80 bucks i think uh and i think is that that's for the year yes that's for a year yeah so but divide 80 obviously by 12 and and obviously it's higher than four bucks a month so did you have people early on paying you way less and that's why the average is for today yeah so so we had people paying so we have a we have a freemium model we're based on a freemium model we have a free software that we that people can use and they upgrade to the premium model um and so when we first started we were only charging like 50 for for like a lifetime membership and then over the years we found that that model didn't work out so we also started charging um a yearly month by yearly fee and so um i think we started off at like sixty dollars or something like that per year and then when you're watching that star you have a bunch in that 20 000 that may have paid that one-time fee early on so today it's not contributing to your 80 grand a month yeah yeah got it how many are on monthly plans um let's see little numbers but uh i don't know off the top of my head i think we have about what 10 000 event smart users that are paying monthly you know and they're paying they're paying anywhere from five dollars up to you know a hundred dollars a month or something yep yeah for their very cool okay so so put this on the timeline for me when did you launch obviously you quit the job in 2011 but when did you launch the platform so i launched the the plug-in in in 2009 about april 2009 um after after that i just uh well wait seth hold on why i mean you have a job you're comfortable while on earth just on your side you just build a plug-in for events for wordpress so yeah my wife my wife was a scrapbooker and she talked scrapbooking classes um in craft booking crafting classes and uh basically people would people would rsvp uh via email and then they wouldn't show up and they or they they would show up and they wouldn't bring a they wouldn't bring their payment for the class so she needed a she needed a simple inexpensive system to sell tickets and i was looking at eventbrite but you know her the cost ratio and you know the return on investment would have been really low and um so i decided to try to find something with work within the wordpress sphere um at the time there was only 5 000 plug-ins you know total in the entire wordpress market space and so i decided to find find something that would kind of get me there like i found a simple rsvp plug-in but it didn't have any payment uh you know features or anything like that and so i reached out to the to the developer and and i never heard anything back you know i reached out to him about adding payment options and stuff never anything back so i went ahead and i i started adding a couple features here i had added paypal payments because my wife wanted to set paypal and so i i contacted the developer once again i was like hey you know i added some features you want to take this over what do you want to do once again i never heard back so i just released it on the wordpress.org repo plugin repository um for anybody that wanted to use it and about after about a month i was getting i was getting email after email requesting new features and stuff like that so at first i was i was doing this part time you know just that after after i got done with my day job put the kids in bed what was your day job i was in a marketing i worked in a marketing department for a medical coding and billing company and i was the front end web developer no offense that that sounds boring as hell right yeah all right so you so you get now i want to get in your head in 2011 i mean did you know you were gonna do this so you saved up a cushion in case it didn't work like you just or i mean how did you do it um well the company was profitable enough that i could just quit i could do it my job and and and pay myself and pay my child how much was it at that how much was it doing a month um i think we were doing like 20 000 a month oh okay it's pretty good yeah yeah and but so we started off the first when i first started the you know selling selling the plug-in we were doing i started off on my own just my own little website through paypal i was making 2000 a month and then i was telling you know my office my co my co-founder which was a fellow co-worker at the time of my marketing job and uh you know i was buying pizza and talking to talking to everybody i was like hey man you got to get on in on this i need some help because he was really business savvy and he was getting his mba at the university of utah so he uh basically gave up a job at the at in michigan uh to be uh uh uh you know to work at the uh to the hospital out there and be like a business i guess uh uh you know i guess they need uh you guys worked you guys worked together out of the business at the hospital yeah yeah no we didn't work at the hospital he was going he was leaving to go work at a hospital okay what's your team size today so our team size is about nine people um and where's everyone based so i'm in utah uh my co-founder is in idaho and we have three developers in canada we have um we have a developer in ukraine uh we have uh tech support in the uk and we have two we have two other or three other tech support people here and that's great and your bootstrap today have you raised uh yeah we're completely bootstrapped that's that's wonderful and what's growth rates you're doing 80 grand a month today taking back a year in october 2017 what were you doing so we're about uh see i think we're about 70 something i think so we had last time i looked we're growing about three percent okay so how do you how do you juice that up how do you grow faster um yeah we have we've been really um doing a lot of marketing um writing blog posts we've hired out a couple a couple of writing teams now um for for blogging across our different platforms yeah but just to be clear when you're you're you come from development backgrounds you're a smart analytical guy growing from 70 you know 8 grand to 80 grand over 12 month period using these tactics obviously that's it's that's it's not working how you hope so i mean how do you scale faster um man how do we go faster we're right now we're looking at uh you know pay-per-click advertising stuff like that um you know trying to get the word out about you know our as they were competitors against eventbrite um as far as getting you know getting things going faster it's you know we're just been focused on on our marketing and stuff like that tell me about tell me about the kinds of people using you is it a lot about is it people like your wife like what's for example what's the at when you look at all your kind of database data you do a query what's the average uh size in terms of attendees to an event that's put up on your platform so um gosh man it it really varies you know we have conferences that are that are selling 10 000 tickets a month um whereas and then we have paint and wine you know classes they're they're selling you know 20 to 30 uh you know tickets at a time and the ten thousand the ten thousands per month what kind of company is that what kind of conference are they having yeah that's usually like a um you know like a like a medical conference a marketing marketing conferences are very huge we found um there's there's uh we've had one customer in illinois that does uh does a conference for hazmat and safety stuff um he's he's raking in about ten thousand ten thousand per conference yeah that's great and that's ticket sales ticket sales yeah yeah that's amazing very good all right let's uh let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book oh my favorite business book is uh let's see free um or actually the lean startup yeah lean startup is probably my my biggest one number two is there a ceo you're following or studying right now um yeah elon musk i guess um i see how that would say i see all the space pictures behind you what's the connection um yeah so i've i've always i've always been into like you know followed nasa and stuff like that um i was in the air force i went to the air national guard i learned about uh aeronautics stuff and and things like that i was i inspected airplanes in my past life that's great well thank you for your service thank you all right let's go to number three here what's your favorite online tool for building the business um favorite online tool uh um for building a business i think uh you know getting our our recurring revenue recurring revenue model in place has been been huge and we've been relying on recurling um for that recurley.com has helped us really uh put things into perspective um and you know track analytics and sales and stuff a lot better number four how many hours of sleep getting every night um let's see about five or six and what's what's your situation married single kids yeah married two kids two kids and how old are you uh i just turned 43 a few days ago congrats that's exciting to have my birthday's october 3rd so we're similar kind of that way all right thank you you too last question why do you wish your 20 year old self knew what do i wish my 20 year old self knew man um i wish i i wish i knew um i wish i knew uh how to take care of money a lot better how to i'd have to spend so much money and you know yeah guys there you have any wishes maybe he had more money management skills early on but it sounds like he's got he's got some courage he's got some gumption launched this little eventbrite uh sorry this event bright competitor back in 2009 for his wife as she was doing like her first little scrapbooking events he then added it to the wordpress plugin site before you know he's getting a bunch of feature requests 2011 doing about 20 grand a month quit his full-time job is now scaled to about to about 80 grand per month in revenue 20 000 paying customers paying on average four bucks a month they turn about 30 percent of their customers return or revenue per year so working on bringing that down he's also working on growth through things like uh sorry through things like paid spend and also some writing and content initiatives all bootstrap twitch i love seth thanks for taking us to the top great thank you for having me