How InGo CEO Michael Barnett grew InGo to $9.6M revenue and 80 customers in 2023.

hey folks my guest today is michael barnett he fell in love with communities when advising non-profits on leadership and organizational development after working for members of the us congress and the uk 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 cobit and are experiencing explosive growth 2x and over in the past six months the company is called ingo ingo dot me michael you ready to take the top yeah absolutely looking forward to it great to be here nathan appreciate it thanks for coming on okay so so what are you selling and who's buying uh 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 hovid made that all illegal revenue went to zero events went to zero everything shut down uh which was a horrible experience terrifying and then the best thing that's happened to us because what we realized is that government every brand needed more digital content webinars white papers heck the podcasts you do and we the world went from one webinar in industry a week to one an hour to one a minute and with that demand for audience blew up and it meant that we had this really great opportunity to take what we had built understanding relationships suggesting the right people showing you who was going and turn that into a 365 experience around a brand and not just a single event so now it's mostly big media companies some corporates and our legacy organizers buying us to create these communities and grow them and what are these bigger media brands i mean what are they paying on average per month to use the technology they're paying a dollar a member so per year so but you know imagine subscriber a year basically if in you know in the podcast world uh would be what they're paying and then what they're getting out of that is they're paying us a buck they're installing us into their website and then what they get is 10 20 30 40 growth and the experience uh i can talk a little bit to that experience so you know imagine if you're in your industry and it's not really my fault before we before we jump into that just to make sure i understand so uh a dollar per member per month but i don't know like what size we're talking about we're talking a thousand members or ten thousand members or one member so is the average like is the average customer what paying like 500 600 bucks a month something like that no the average customer is paying and it's per member per year sorry okay uh but the average customer at twenty thousand dollars a year and going up pretty quickly so you're very much in the higher man market enterprise space yeah yeah and we're talking about big media companies like fast or wall street journal or um not all these are just like new york times or daily mail right now these are customers but they give you a sample so are you when i go to like one of these conference websites the javascript plug-in on the pricing page it says look at all your friends that are going and it shows like the twitter profile faces of everyone else that you know in your network that is also going or registered that will be yes that would be us for a lot of these so in 2019 one fifth of the biggest events in the world used us for uh to do that and then to say you're the face 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 uh 2013 and initially we wanted to get rid of business cards i'm sure you had lots of events you end up with these stacks of business cards you never follow what the right people know who to follow up with and find the right business card decided we're going to solve that problem met with lots of great leaders in the event space and found out they weren't 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 five million attendees globally um and then basically had to restart the company and last year with colbin yeah now did you did you owe this bootstrap or did you raise capital bruised cap and we raised about two million bucks in 2015 um and then became profitable and now we're quite profitable why did you need to raise the 2 million back in 2015 uh in the so we initial idea pivot new idea needed funding needed scale needed um some go to market funding and product development it talked to me more about the team obviously a lot of capital raised goes to building a great team how many folks are on your team today uh there's 11 of us now about half product half sales and marketing and engineers obversity sometimes the most expensive how many engineers are on the team of 11. there's four engineers and a product manager how did you decide to build that engineering team so some folks will say you know what i want to outsource it right cheaper labor overseas but then some people say listen it's a core asset i want to build an in-house and hire locally here in arlington virginia yeah we've done both uh and you know had different uh people from different parts of the world and but the very first especially we were bootstrapping was up work find some people keep the best and keep rotating through that over time we've found a firm that we really like and it's all outsourced but they we interact with them like they're part of the team um they've been with us for a while do they just do the development or do they do the design as well uh we've got a separate designer as well okay we just contract okay so contract designer outsource dev team of four allows you to scale up or scale down much faster and as needed and avoid fixed expenses on your balance sheet on your p l yeah that's right yeah very cool would you recommend this dev shop are you like are you open to sharing them uh yeah actually i would as long as they don't take our people and move them anywhere else but uh agile engine they've been absolutely fantastic where are they based uh they've got a few offices we use the one of the out of ukraine we found eastern europe really great for both communication and engineering quality interesting okay cool so how many team members are there in arlington uh uh one okay we've got uh a couple in the uk a couple in austin funny enough oh my god uh and then um where everybody is there it's all spread out remote yeah fully remote yeah we had a whole office here in arlington and with covid everybody kind of spread out i mean costs are pretty high here so people got excited about other opportunities and had family in austin and whatnot we heard about how you got your first couple customers and then obviously the pivot happened and then obviously coveted and then another pivot happen but how many customers can also read today post pivot uh there's about 80 we call them communities uh we had about 80 communities in-house and then we keep adding uh about one a week now one every uh yeah one week and it's getting faster too where are you finding them they're finding us almost universally uh maybe we you know we then nurture them after they find us initially but typically they're seeing the word of mouth marketing we're creating on linkedin or twitter or facebook and clicking through and it's a competitive event let's say and they go oh i want this on my event and so they start following us start getting interested take a meeting and then we get about 40 of the 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 [Music] yeah you could go to fast go to their event page or ink and go to their event page and see us on there yeah uh maybe it's fastcode.com fastcode.com you know i'm just curious what the ui looks like because um i mean look these events are gonna i think come roaring back uh once you know folks put practices in to be to do it safely um okay i can't i don't know fast fastco.com isn't anything um let me see fastcompany.com oh uh and fastcompany.com inc is actually go to inc.com and upcoming events you'll see us in there i see okay ink.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 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 the functionality 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 podcasts 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 so i was going to say i'm on the ink events page and under featured speakers where it says begin your registration you're basically powering this whole registration thing and the checkboxes that say let people know i'm going to the event you're then powering the social graph behind the scenes that's right interesting yeah this makes a lot of sense very cool um why hasn't hopping or events.com or visibo or c-van tried to buy you uh well we've had a lot of reach out over the last few months uh 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 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 uh 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 for professionals out there giving them all the members of ingo and our customers a few customers each that's a huge addressable market uh 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 let me raise five million and why is that the right number that means the right number because it gets us to it gets us to about 50 million of and a recurring all right sorry it gets us about a 50 million valuation pretty well 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 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 this additional that here so 5 million gets us an additional give or take 2 000 customers that gets us to the place where we're generating uh about 25 million a month in uh 25 million a year in revenue yeah i see icic and can i take the math 80 customers today at that average acv you told me i'm 20 grand you're doing what like 150 a month right now 150 grand uh getting there close to that okay can you break that this year you think or is that any more time yeah we'll get we'll we'll get there somewhere near 2 million that's great and if you're sort of between called 100 grand 150 grand a month right now in revenue where were you a year ago what's growth look like well honestly in march of last year we were at zero so you were really busy yeah i mean everything was physical events and all of it went away there was a moment in time my cfo was awesome because my cfo this guy scott turned me and said this is going to last for a long time we got to redo the company and i was like please eventually back in june july we'll be fine and he was like no no you gotta get ready and then we had a couple board members were great too and like no no you gotta get ready for a long haul and thankfully we did we pivoted hard we funny enough i don't know how much of this story you guys want our first customers were awesome we launched an event on virtual events in april like third third of last year and we went we emailed out got 200 people those 200 people used ingo and got us another 4 000 people to go to our events and so all of those people saw in go all those people experienced it all of them were like i gotta have that for mine the only thing that actually the limiting factor funny enough was those initial integrations with the hop ins and all the new virtual platforms which we built and now we can do but um but yeah that's how we we got that initial burst when we get a lot yeah when you raised that 2 million in 2015 what i assume that's probably a note what cap did you use what was that what cap did you use for the 2 million raise in 2015 uh i don't i'd have to go and look i guess the reason i'm asking that question is do you feel like the business is now recovered to the point where you can you could go do a raise at a higher valuation than what the cap was in 2015. yeah i'd be surprised if we couldn't get a substantially higher valuation given the multiples out there too you've got two things right the growth rate plus the marketplace plus a higher revenue baseline very good okay let's wrap up mike with the famous five number one favorite business book oh uh 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 i do find most compelling that i think is i mean pretty popular but not everybody warren buffett i think the the analysis and his idea he's got this quote about if everybody invested as if they had a date card of our dance card of nine options and they invested you know knowing that they only had nine investments to make in their lifetime they would do a lot better job it resonates like something jobs did where he was like well we're only gonna have six products but they're gonna 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's true for a company and it goes back to the measure what matters thing too it's just that that precision of thought process number three what's your favorite online tool for building the business inside your own really good question uh hubspot okay number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night i get six or seven okay that's pretty good in situation married single kids uh married no kids yet no married second anniversary yes yesterday oh congratulations how old are you michael uh 37 37 last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20 everything uh i wish that i knew to focus better when i was 20. guys ingo dot me launched back in 2013 and raised 2 million in 2015 lost almost all our revenue during kobe but pivoted fast now they're doing caught between 100 and 150 grand a month in revenue hoping to break a 2 million run rate by the end of this year he's got all his options on the table works with about 80 event organizers to help them get more event attendees coming in via powering a social graph behind the registration uh they're working again with 8080 those customers they're profitable so they can do whatever they want maybe they look at an exit to a hop-in or something like that or michael says they might go out and raise you know 5 million bucks to get 2000 new customers we'll see what happens michael thanks for taking us to the top thanks nathan appreciate it one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss 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