How Intronetworks CEO Mark Sylvester grew Intronetworks to $5.3M revenue and 50 customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is Mark Sylvester he is the CEO of intro networks which is the deployed the first social network for the 2003 TED conference that's what obviously the tech does he successfully created hundreds of inter network communities for global organizations to make a cultural change in how they connect with their audiences as the co-founder of wave front in 1984 mark helped developed my ax the first commercial 3d animation system alright mark are you ready to take it to the top yeah let's do it so this is this like a more customizable kind of API version of a meetup group [Music] actually it was designed as a patent it's around a matching engine so imagine that you're you work in a big company and you're looking to put together the ten best people to do a pitch like I work for big ad agencies in New York they'll use this software to figure out the hard skills and soft skills experience and industry expertise of you know 18,000 employees and then say ok we got to put a pitch together for a bold thing and it's in Scandinavia how are they going to do that and so they go and use our system to search to find the very best people and then they know what kind of team they have so that's a simple example ok and is with the business model is it a SAS model yeah it is ok and so give me an average per month what our folks paying you so it's it's probably 10 bucks a person per month somewhere in that you know it you know it varies as you know because all of our work is all private custom networks so for instance we run NASA's professional development network for teachers that's a pro bono project that we do so that our nation's educators are fully versed in STEM education and are able to share information with one another how are you able to convince the community members to pay 10 bucks a month versus going directly to the business organizing the community it's typically the business organizing the community so people won't pay 10 bucks a month right we know that that's you know it's that that's a always been a challenge we oversee and they buy 200 seats at once yeah back in the day yeah back in the it was now mmm now that's when Chris Anderson first bought the bought Ted and so he said listen I want to have a different experience for all of the attendees like they they come here to this conference and this is when this is before TED talks were online before people even knew what Ted was and he felt that the relationships that you build at the conference should last all year long we know we go to events all the time and that half-life of that the conference meetup that you had is by the time you get on the plane you've forgotten those people's names he didn't want to have that happen with Ted and so with them it was it was a different situation so all of them are a little bit different the way we recharge when you work with large enterprises and you're doing enterprise based pot pricing it gets very challenging especially with large IT groups and what have you scaled to today in terms of total kind of individual logos you're working with well probably right now I've got 50 sites that we're running we're building I can't talk about all of them because they've see it's a competitive advantage but I've got a large beauty company that uses us to connect their 25 R&D labs around the world so about 2,000 employees and the idea there is there there's all these really interesting differences which I didn't know about when we started about products as they relate to different skin types different ethnicities and there are different cultural things that are related to R&D around the world and so that what they wanted was a private secure place for people to have these conversations and collaborate more importantly or as importantly what the matching engine does is it says based on this specific criteria these are the three most likely to work with people that you should contact interesting okay and on average these 50 logos on average how many seats you have under each of these are we talking a thousand ten thousand yeah a couple thousand a couple of maybe three is fair three thousand yeah sure okay so can I mean if I take three thousand times the 50 I can generally what you guys are serving about one hundred and fifty thousand or one point five million seats it's it's probably more around a million seats okay around a million seats okay good so healthy group wait no I did that math wrong fifty logos from three thousand seats would be a hundred and fifty thousand right yeah yep wait so but you said it's closer to a million so where's my so it's a well I'm thinking of dollars so it's a right got it yep two hundred fifty thousand seats times ten bucks that put there's obviously discount some of those so around a million bucks a month right now in revenue and are you guys growing what are you growing out you every year yeah so we're probably ten fifteen percent what's interesting is that this this challenge of brands connecting with their employees or where their audiences is a big deal and what we found was when you've got this network they were trying to find ways to connect with them even more people are really busy and what we started doing was podcasting ironically enough which is what you're doing and so like we built a an economic development network for Central California that covers three counties and we did it with the county economic development people and what we found was the people didn't read newsletters they didn't read the blogs they didn't you know none of that stuff they're just busy yeah and so we started a podcast three years ago and that has turned out to be something that really really works to keep these people engaged and so we now do that we're doing a site for an organization out of New York that's associated with the UN which is a way to how do we connect these urban health professionals people who work on slums in third-world countries how do we connect those people so that they could be sharing best practices then so that the community does the connecting then the podcast as the communicating and sharing best practices amongst all those people really smart model have you driven all your growth in a bootstrapped fashion so far of you raise capital yeah we raised 4.1 million dollars when we start you know over a couple of different rounds got it but so 4.1 million is the total amount in yeah okay and give me the backstory here what your jewel 2003 we launched at the TED Conference mostly as a project for macro media to show off how their new technologies were working this wasn't this was before I went up to the level before rich internet applications and people fell in love with it and all of a sudden we had you know people at Ted saying oh you guys made that thing that connected us could you make that for us so you know Polaroid and and just a ton of big brands it was you know now you couldn't really launch a brand at Ted it's not what it's about and it really wasn't what it was about then it was a just a cool experience for the attendees and people fell in love with it all right mark let's let's move forward here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book death of competition by James Moore number two is there a CEO you're following or studying right now Jeff Bezos number three is there a favorite online tool you have to run your business slack number four how many hours of sleep to eat every night six to seven and a half pretty good and what's your situation married single you have kids grandpa grandpa very good so yeah I'm really married and how many kids you have I've got two kids and three grandchildren and my nine-year-old grand child's birthday is today oh how exciting okay how old are you yeah I am gonna be 65 this year great and leave that that's amazing you look young and fresh and ready to conquer the world all right look forts and kickboxing that's what it is I bet you could kick my ass all right let last question mark take me back to your 20 year old self what he was she knew that he should meditate every day mid you died today absolutely 751 days in a row as of this morning that's amazing news headspace yeah it's it's a it's epic it's the one thing I wish someone would have slapped into my head and made me to meditate every day it seems to be 10 minutes for Hemme lunches company back in 2003 now scaled over 50 customers 150,000 seats 1 million in revenue growing between 15 around 15% year-over-year healthy model each company's pain caught 20 grand per month because of how many seats they're signing up for they're helping really keep folks connected whether it's a it's an early Ted event or any other kinds of companies they're working with intronetworks is the name of the company check it out mark thank you for taking us to the top thanks about