How InGo Reached 80 Communities and $20K Average Contract Value After Rebuilding from Zero Revenue in 2020 (Interview with Michael Barnett)

Introduction and What InGo Does

Nathan Latka

00:00Hey, 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 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 COVID and are experiencing explosive growth, two x, in over in the past six months. The

00:21company is called InGo, ingo.me. Michael, you ready to take to the top?

Michael Barnett

00:26>> Yeah. Absolutely. Looking forward to it. Great to be here, Nathan. Appreciate it.

Nathan Latka

00:29Thanks for coming on. Okay. So so what are you selling and who's buying?

Product Explained: Social Registration for Events

Michael Barnett

00:34>> 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 wanna see who else is going. We analyze your network, we say, Nathan, you should also invite these four people. Show grows. Ten, twenty percent. But it's once a

COVID Kills Revenue and Forces a Pivot

Michael Barnett

01:02>> 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. Because what we realized is that COVID meant every brand needed more digital content, webinars, white papers, heck, the podcast 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

New Model: Year-Round Brand Communities

Michael Barnett

01:32>> 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 three sixty five 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.

Nathan Latka

01:57And what are these bigger media brands? I mean, what are they paying on average a month to use the technology?

Pricing: $1 Per Member Per Year and $20K ACV

Michael Barnett

02:02>> They're paying a dollar a member, so per year. So, like, you know, imagine subscriber a year, basically, if in, you know, in the podcast world 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 ten, twenty, 40% growth. And the experience I can talk a little bit to that experience. So, you know, imagine if you're in

02:27>> your industry and it's the reason I'm saying

Nathan Latka

02:29Before we before we jump into that, just to make sure so I understand. So, a dollar per member per month, but I don't know, like, what size we're talking if we're talking a thousand members or 10,000 members or one member. So is the average, like, is the average customer, what, paying, like, $506,100 bucks a month, something like that?

Michael Barnett

02:42>> No. The average customer is paying and it's per member per year. Sorry.

Nathan Latka

02:46Okay.

Michael Barnett

02:46>> But the average customer is at $20,000 a year and going up pretty quickly.

Nathan Latka

02:52So you're very much in the higher mid market enterprise space?

Target Customers: Major Media Brands

Michael Barnett

02:55>> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we're talking about big media companies like Fast or Wall Street Journal or, not all these are, New York Times or Daily Mail. Right? None of these are customers, but to give you a sample.

Nathan Latka

03:08So are you when I go to, like, one of these conference websites, the JavaScript plug in on the pricing page, 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?

Michael Barnett

03:18>> 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 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.

Nathan Latka

03:32Interesting. Okay. Take me back to day one. When did you launch the business?

Founding Story and Early Pivots

Michael Barnett

03:36>> Oh, twenty thirteen. 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 were gonna 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 gonna pay for.

03:59>> So distribution became hard. Pivoted in late twenty thirteen into the front end, which was these people do wanna pay for getting more people to their events. So that was 2013. Did that grew that all the way through 2019, 5,000,000 attendees globally, and then basically had to restart the company in last year.

Nathan Latka

04:22With COVID? Yeah. Did you owe those did you owe those bootstrapped, or did you raise capital?

Funding: $2M Raised in 2015, Now Profitable

Michael Barnett

04:28>> We raised cap in we raised about $2,000,000 in 2015, and then became profitable and now are quite profitable.

Nathan Latka

04:36Mhmm. Why did you need to raise the 2,000,000 back in 2015?

Michael Barnett

04:40>> In the so we initial idea, pivot, new idea, needed funding, needed scale, needed some go to market funding and and product development.

Nathan Latka

04:51Mhmm. And talk 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?

Team Size and Engineering Setup

Michael Barnett

04:59>> There's 11 of us now. About half product, half sales and marketing.

Nathan Latka

05:05And engineers, obviously, sometimes the most expensive. How many engineers are on the team of 11?

Michael Barnett

05:09>> There's four engineers and a product manager.

Nathan Latka

05:12How'd you decide to build that engineering team? So some folks will say, you know what? I wanna outsource it. Right? Cheaper labor overseas. But, then some people say, listen. It's a core asset. I wanna build an in house and hire locally here in Arlington, Virginia.

Michael Barnett

05:24>> Yeah. We've done both and, you know, had different people from different parts of the world. And but the very first, especially when we're bootstrapping, was Upwork, find some people, keep the best, and keep rotating through that. Over time, we've we've found a firm that we really like, and it's all outsourced, but they you know, we interact with them like they're part of the team. They've been with us for a while.

Nathan Latka

05:47Do they just do the development, or do they do the design as well?

Michael Barnett

05:51>> We've got a separate designer as well. Maybe just contract.

Nathan Latka

05:55Okay. So contract designer outsource dev team of four allows you to scale up or scale down much faster and as needed and avoid fixed expense on your balance sheet on your p and l.

Michael Barnett

06:04>> Yeah. That's right.

Nathan Latka

06:05Yeah. Very cool. Would you recommend this dev shop? Are you like, can you are you open to sharing them?

Michael Barnett

06:10>> Yeah. Actually, I would as long as they don't take our people and move them anywhere else. I really won't. But AgileEngine, they've been absolutely fantastic.

Nathan Latka

06:17Where are they based?

Michael Barnett

06:19>> They've got a few offices. We use the one out of The U out of Ukraine. We found Eastern Europe really great for both communication and engineering quality.

Nathan Latka

06:27Interesting. Okay. Cool. So how many team members are there in Arlington?

Michael Barnett

06:32>> One. Okay. We've got a couple in The UK, a couple in Austin, funny enough. Oh, nice. Intro. And then

06:42>> in front of me where everybody is, it's all spread out.

Nathan Latka

06:44Remote. Yeah. Fully remote.

Michael Barnett

06:46>> Yeah. We had a whole office here in Arlington, and then with COVID, everybody kinda spread out. I mean, costs are pretty high here. So people got excited about other opportunities and had family in Austin and whatnot.

Nathan Latka

06:57We heard about how you got your first couple customers, and then obviously the pivot happened, and then obviously COVID and then another pivot happened. But how many customers you're serving today post pivot?

80 Customers and Adding One Per Week

Michael Barnett

07:05>> There's about 80. We call them communities. We got about 80 communities in house, and then we keep adding about one a week now. One every yeah. One a week, and it's getting faster too.

Nathan Latka

07:16Where are you finding them?

Inbound Growth via Word-of-Mouth and Social

Michael Barnett

07:18>> They're finding us almost universally. 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.

Nathan Latka

07:46Oh, wow. Can you name is there a conference page that's live right now that's using you?

Michael Barnett

07:52>> Yeah. You could go to fast, go to their event page, or Inc. Can go to their event page Just FastCo see us on there. Yeah. I it's fastco.com.

Nathan Latka

08:03Fastco.com. You know, I'm just curious what the UI looks like because there I mean, look. The events are gonna, I think, come roaring back once, you know, folks put practices in to be to do it safely. Okay. I can't I don't know. Fastfastco.com isn't anything. Blah blah blah. Let me see if I can

Michael Barnett

08:21>> fastcompany.com.

Nathan Latka

08:22Oh, fastcompany.com. Got it.

Michael Barnett

08:25>> Got it. And Inc. Inc is actually go to inc.com and upcoming events. You'll see us in there.

Nathan Latka

08:30I see. Okay. Inc.com upcoming events.

Michael Barnett

08:33>> And so I agree. Physical events are gonna 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 we built was to go, you

08:59>> don't just want to acquire somebody once. You wanna acquire them and keep them for a long time. You wanna 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 your to the next podcast, they get a note saying, hey. Great news. Michael just listened to this next podcast. Don't you wanna listen to it also?

09:23>> So Yeah. So I'm on the I was gonna say I'm on the Inc. Events page and under featured speakers where it says begin your registration, you're basically powering this whole registration thing and the checkbox that say, let people know I'm going to the event. You're then powering the social graph behind the scenes.

Nathan Latka

09:39That's right. Interesting.

Michael Barnett

09:40>> Okay. Yeah. This makes a lot of sense. Very cool.

Nathan Latka

09:43Why hasn't Hopin or Events.com or Bizzabo or Cvent tried to buy you?

Acquisition Interest and Future Options

Michael Barnett

09:47>> Well, we've had a lot of reach out over the last few months, and so we've been growing quickly and kinda holding off those conversations and also talking to funding sources as well. But we'll see what happens. Think we're likely to do it. Are you are

Nathan Latka

10:03you more likely to are you more likely to raise more capital and keep building product? Do you see a path to grow product, or are you more likely to take the sale now?

Michael Barnett

10:11>> 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 b two b. So 700,000,000 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, Hopin or somebody could probably afford us.

Potential $5M Raise and Growth Targets

Nathan Latka

10:34Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. If you went the raise path to keep doubling down, how much do you think you'd go target? How much would you raise?

Michael Barnett

10:42>> We'd raise 5,000,000.

Nathan Latka

10:44And and why why is that the right number?

Michael Barnett

10:46>> That means the right number because it gets us to it gets us about 50,000,000 of annual recurring or sorry. Gets us about a $50,000,000 valuation free.

Nathan Latka

10:54What what do you think isn't live.

Michael Barnett

10:56>> Sorry. That's not the right answer.

Nathan Latka

10:58Can I Well, it's okay? No. No. We can we can edit it. We can sort of talk through it. So you're you'd you'd be raising 5,000,000 to try and grow your valuation to 50?

Michael Barnett

11:05>> No. I I 5,000,000 I should go back and look at the numbers. 5,000,000 gets us additional here. So 5,000,000 gets us an additional, give or take, 2,000 customers. That gets us to the place where we're generating about 25,000,000 a month in 25,000,000 a year in revenue.

Nathan Latka

11:28Yeah. I see. I see. I see. And can I take the math? 80 customers today at that average ACV, told me of $20K. You're doing, what, like, $150K a month right now, $150K?

Michael Barnett

11:37>> Getting there. Close to that.

Nathan Latka

11:39Okay. Can you break that this year, you think, or is that needing more time?

Michael Barnett

11:42>> Yeah. We'll get we'll we'll get there. We'll to somewhere near 2,000,000.

Nathan Latka

11:46That's great. And if you're sort of between, call it, a $100K and a $150K a month right now in revenue, where were you a year ago? What's growth look like?

Revenue Was Zero in March 2020

Michael Barnett

11:52>> Well, honestly, in March of last year, we were at zero. So I I You are amazing. Yeah. We 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 to me and said, this is gonna last for a long time. We gotta redo the company. And I was like, please. Eventually, back in June, July, we'll be fine. And he

12:16>> he was like, no. No. You gotta get ready. And then had a couple board members who were great too. And like, no, 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 of last year. And we went we emailed out, got

12:39>> 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 ingo. All of those people experienced it. All of them were like, I I gotta have that for mine. The only thing that actually the limiting factor, funny enough, was those initial integrations with the Hopins and all of the new virtual platforms, which we built and now we can do. But, but, yeah,

13:01>> that's how we we got that initial burst. We still help get a lot of them.

Nathan Latka

13:05Yeah. When you raised that 2,000,000 in 2015, what I assume there's probably a note. What cap did you use?

Michael Barnett

13:12>> What was that?

Nathan Latka

13:13What cap did you use for the 2,000,000 raised in 2015?

Michael Barnett

13:17>> I don't I'd have to go and look.

Nathan Latka

13:19I guess the reason I'm asking that question is do you feel like the business has now recovered to the point where you can you could go do a raise at a higher valuation with than what the cap was in 2015?

Michael Barnett

13:29>> Yeah. I'd be surprised if we couldn't get a substantially higher valuation given the multiples out there too. You got two things. Right? The growth rate plus the marketplace plus a higher revenue baseline.

Famous Five Rapid-Fire Questions

Nathan Latka

13:41Mhmm. Very good. Okay. Let's wrap up, Michael, with the famous five. Number one, favorite business book.

Michael Barnett

13:47>> Oh, Measure What Matters.

Nathan Latka

13:49Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Michael Barnett

13:55>> It's a really great question.

13:59>> I don't wanna give the 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 or a dance card of nine options and they invested, you know, knowing that they only had nine investments to make

14:21>> 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 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 mean, same thing's 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 that

14:40>> precision of thought process.

Nathan Latka

14:42Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building the business besides your own?

Michael Barnett

14:47>> Really good question.

14:49>> HubSpot.

Nathan Latka

14:50Okay. Number four, how many hours of sleep do get every night?

Michael Barnett

14:53>> I get six or seven.

Nathan Latka

14:55Okay. That's pretty good.

Michael Barnett

14:56>> In situation, married, single kids?

14:58>> Married, no kids yet. No kids yet. Married second anniversary yes yesterday.

Nathan Latka

15:03Oh, congratulations. How old are you, Michael?

Michael Barnett

15:06>> 37. 37.

Nathan Latka

15:08Last question. What's something you wish you knew when you were 20?

Michael Barnett

15:11>> Everything? I wish that I knew to focus better when I was 20.

Nathan Latka

15:18Guys, ingo.me launched back in 2013, raised 2,000,000 in 2015, lost almost all their revenue during COVID but pivoted fast. Now they're doing caught between a $100K and a $150K a month in revenue, hoping to break a $2,000,000 run rate by the end of this year. Got all of 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. They're

15:41working again with eighty eighty of those customers. They're profitable so they can do whatever they want. Maybe they look at an exit, to a Hopin, or something like that. Or Michael says they might go out and raise, you know, $5,000,000 to get 2,000 new customers. We'll see what happens. Michael, thanks for taking us to the top.

Michael Barnett

15:53>> Thanks, Nathan. Appreciate it.

Nathan Latka

15:56One more thing before you go. We have

15:58a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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, one p. M. Central. Additionally, remember these recorded founder

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17:28See you.