How Ivvy CEO Lauren Hall grew to $18.5M revenue and 2K customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is lauren hall she's the founder of ivy a multi-award-winning technology company providing enterprise software to the events industry since its 2009 launch she's overseeing ivy's continued growth and global expansion to apac europe and north america offering the world's first real-time marketplace with live availability for function space and suppliers lauren are you ready to take us to the top i am indeed all right tell us about the company what do you do and and what's your business model are you a pure play sas company we are but we actually a little bit different in the fact that even though we have a fully sas model because we have three enterprise applications which is providing solutions to meeting planners to venues uh which manage their functions-based group accommodation it's their full sales and catering system uh as well as inventory and time-based management systems for suppliers we're actually in the industry of travel and the events industry there's only a big major player like sabre so what sabre does for travel they digitize the online experience for booking for accommodation flights on car hire we're doing that for meetings and events so basically we are a global distribution platform known as a gds but in order to achieve a gds which is the entire price software connection and distribution engine and one you have to build the technology at the source of the supply chain so we built operating systems to be able to manage their live availability rates and inventory of the supply chain we then connected them into our marketplace which then enables all of that supply chain to then have consumers and event organizers book in real time and that was really a huge problem it was something that i experienced many times over having teams organizing events which was really truly a way to be able to solve a global problem so you make money every time someone uses your platform to book an event venue i'm assuming you're taking a referral cut or something like that yeah so what we do is we've got an enterprise sas license fee we've got a transaction fee we've got usage fees we've got multiple revenue streams that come across our platform so we're not just sas so we're obviously transactional model as well yeah if you look at your last 12 months in terms of total revenue what percent of it was just pure software not usage not anything else just pure soft sass um probably eighty-five percent is processed because we're only just yeah yeah predominantly now because we're now only now moving into our distribution model so what we do is we power the platforms for like american express uh flight center globally we're we're building at the distribution b2b platform play so our goal is to be able to bring those who already own that customer base which is enormous markets as an example the top five travel management companies of the world control over 100 billion dollars worth of meetings and events spent because they already service the travel market for those big large corporate customers but there is an enormous opportunity that sits anything between two zero to 200 packs for events which they don't touch and that needed to be a self-service solution so we built that platform so lauren just to be clear who is paying you the sas fee the event the event space all the suppliers pay us their stats because we are their everyday operating systems wait so just to be clear again we don't know who the suppliers are we don't know your business so you're talking about the meeting space itself yeah so like we provide our systems big hotel chain groups systems where they're their everyday operating day-to-day solution as well as their booking engine that sits on the front of their website so we actually connect all the pieces of underutilized assets that have never been online before so as an example you ultimately at the moment can book accommodation for travel but you could never book accommodation for groups which could be 50 to 100 packs when you're organizing an event so let's say you mean people people yeah so that yeah it's as people so as an example let's go back all the way to the beginning the biggest problem with organizing an event that it can take up to six weeks to be able to source and access and get people to respond to an inquiry okay you go backwards and forwards negotiating between a venue and a supplier and the potentially the corporate that you are either organizing it for or on behalf of now the reason for that exists is because there's been no systems that sit at the supply chain so there's been no ability for these um sales and catering systems that sort of venues or inventory management systems that sit um in suppliers that actually connect online that make available the inventory time available and rates for those solutions yeah lauren just sorry i'm going to cut you off but we are short on time i totally get the product it makes perfect sense to me i totally understand why you're doing it it's a huge problem i get it so i want to dive more into i want to get more capture more of your story here so so walk me through kind of a timeline what did you launch company what year i launched ivy in 2009 i started building the first uh platform for meeting and event organizers much like what you see event in the states we built that cvent platform here in australia my journey started back in south africa when i built the first platform to solve that corporate meeting spend problem to be able to be able to provide availability rates and inventory online when i originally built the platform i had massive demand um it outstripped the capability of its uh uh how i'd been built and engineered i had to re-engineer that platform to start again because it had been built in asp.classic not in a php or a.net and um i obviously have bootstrapped that company for a couple of million have you bootstrapped this current company oh no now we've got capital we've got significant capital so we've raised quite a lot how much have you raised to date uh well we're now close to nearly 26 million okay and was that all equity or any of that convertible debt or convertible notes uh we did some convertible notes we've done some um in terms of um majority equity uh but yeah we're in a massive growth path at the moment so we basically so going back on and looking at your timing so i built the first platform in south africa from a timeline i had funded that for about three million of my own cash that was in 2008 okay okay um um like 2006 it took me two years to build that uh take it to market commercialize it i then ran out of funds i then was awarded i went to the south african government i was awarded 10 million from the government because of the national benefits is that included is that included in the 26 no no this is excluding because within two days of me being awarded those funds i was then given access to australia i left south africa because i witnessed the brutal murder of my father and i chose to leave the country so i took my two young kids and started the game so i entered australia with no money no job no network i started again i recapitalized the company i you know started out brought in a good co-founder we built up our first phase we built and commercialized that now and we're now currently in 13 countries how many customers are you serving oh we've got about 25 000 now okay these are like again hotel hotel chains event locations hotels restaurants uh meeting planners corporates not-for-profits because we've got multiple uh customers across the globe um i mean we work with it people can get onto our platform in many different ways you know they can either sign up and be part of the marketplace which is their online rfp tool they can be part of the sas system which is a full operating systems they can use our meetings tech to take all the registrations and payments and processing for their events you know there's multiple layers with an iv in terms of where people can actually utilize that on just the sas aspect what are these companies and i know you have many different cohorts but at best you can on average what are these companies paying per year or per month for the sas component of your tech look at ranges like you know uh from a small uh restaurant it can take anything from 50 to 100 a month on the sas and then uh for large hotel change it's you know can be anything from 250 to 500 a month it depends on the size because we you know as a hotel chain we also provide all the central rare systems we're integrated into their property management would you say to lauren that you lean towards the higher end of that maybe 150 or 200 bucks a month on average or no you're really long tail smb no no i think we lean to the higher end definitely because we're working on global groups um and typically because there's a lot more complexity if you're looking at the restaurant areas which is very simple stuff okay there may be a lots of smaller players but definitely i think we sit in the enterprise space uh particularly across the market so lauren can i take the hundred dollar kind of per month average times the 25 000 customer number you just gave me i mean that obviously puts you at about 2.5 million bucks a month on the software and is that accurate uh no that's probably not i mean we're sitting probably closer between the 10 to 20 million in revenue a year and you said about 60 of that is is or sorry 80 of that is sas yes majority cess yeah yeah that's great um i want to understand more of how you've signed this is incredible how you've signed up so many locations what's your growth i mean what's the number one growth channel look like look right now i mean majority of our time of the last nine years has actually been spent in the uh asia pac region uh we've obviously recently launched into the us which we've got you know enormous pipeline because we're working with global groups we also launched into the uk we have global teams out of south africa but we found that you know definitely because of the large volume of major groups which are brands like in the states as well as in europe you know the volume of properties that we're getting on board are you know in the hundreds you know we don't just get on one property we get on large groups okay and then we roll those out across the markets i think there's still a lot of learnings to be honest nathan about our growth structure it's not like it's not like a simple tool where people just sign up and you know we have outbound sales teams we have on the ground uh you know high level executives what's the team size today lauren uh we've now about 65 okay we probably will be uh before the end of our financial year we'll be closer to a hundred and when your financial year june okay and where's everyone based are they remote or all in australia no no they're all over the world we've got offices in um america okay which is california we just are now opening dallas and we're just opening canada in january we've got offices in the uk south africa india yeah we've got offices in all the regions predominantly it has been australia for quite some time and um you know for the last nine years but now we we will be opening offices every three months around the world that's great in terms of in terms of growth i mean if you said between 10 and 20 kind of today let's assume kind of lower end so if you're at 10 million ar today where were you about a year ago um i suppose some of that i don't actually want to share too much in terms of all the numbers um nathan because i think as you know my chase now is um 100 billion in revenue in the next four years okay so rather working forward versus backwards you know part of our growth you know we've been growing anything between you know 100 150 percent year on year okay so 100 over your growth i mean 100 year growth would mean you mean you you could call it maybe 400 and 420 grand a month about a year ago if you're at 800 or 900 grand a month now yeah by the way the reason the reason i ask those is because my listeners want to be like you right potentially if they're smaller and you can learn a lot from history so i love the ambition i love when do you think you hit 100 million by the goal is four years okay are you right now are you in talks right now with vista equity or cvench to acquire you oh that came they've come i'm not interested in someone why why aren't you interested in selling at all no i've got a goal to be the first female uh unicorn in hospitality to reach a billion dollar market cap and i potentially want to list the company i love that goal where would you list it if you did list look i think certainly my head office is probably going to end up being in the u.s uh we've got our r d stuff here in australia because of the tax benefits we receive the view is that we will probably grow our us team extensively uh we've had a lot of people approach us for acquisition uh we know who ultimately would want to buy us they're really sitting around the table um but the goal for us is grow out our us team enormously because it's a 400 billion dollar market for us um and the reality is as we grow our global footprint um is to you then look at the pace of our growth and look i think many opportunities will come to the table at the same time but um i definitely think we're going to have a heady uh dominance in the us and europe churn's critical and a company like this what's your revenue trend annually today and how do you make sure to keep that as low as possible look one of the things that i think is really important i think we've got a we've got a 96 retention rate which is only a four percent churn that's logo or revenue um that's in part of me that's logo or revenue revenue okay got it so four percent revenue turn annually that's really low yeah yeah it's very low and look we've been very one of the biggest things that we really pride ourselves is retaining our customers you know and working right really really heavily on um uh making sure that the customers because we're such an agile development company i mean we release about a thousand releases a year okay do you implement ci continuous integration or no yeah you do we do and we mapped out into integrations into you know opera oracle crs cybers uh point of sale you know we are and we have an enormous road map of revenue management uh integrations and you know we run an agile waterfall approach in terms of our sprints you know so we've you know we're a very very fast and agile company lauren last question here because we're out of time uh before we wrap up with the famous five are you profitable today cash flow positive no because we are not actually chasing profit we're chasing growth and currently we are capitalizing for that growth around the world that the the last round you raised what year was that well i've just completed a round now for 15 million okay that's included in the 26. all right got it okay by the way that makes sense then you obviously want to reinvest that you shouldn't be casual positive right now no no it's not at the stage no not as now we're in that massive a massive growth trajectory now and um and as we do that we will continue to capitalize and grow so that we can reach our reach our goals of 100 million and hopefully a one billion dollar market cap and we can celebrate a female unicorn in hospitality which is a very very hard place to be i would love that i think that would be wonderful and i hope you come back on the show and celebrate in four years and we're toasting virtual champagnes together all right i'll be there without a doubt thank you for your time yeah hey quick quick here because it's the format of the show really fast famous five number one favorite business book uh screw it uh just do it screw it just do it richard branson number two is there a ceo your is there a ceo you're following or studying right now um actually uh alison um yes and there is believe it or not and now one of the things that probably would have been really good if i actually knew that i was going to be asked that okay i probably would have told you um yeah alison maslin who's built uh you know six multi-million dollar company she's absolutely fantastic i'm actually working through what's your last company her last company now okay now you're gonna give me you know you're really getting me on the spot aren't you well if my audience wants to look her up what would they type into google well i would go in there alison meslin she does this level up um solutions teaching people in sas companies to be able to grow to multi-million dollar companies and i think she does scale of fail is a really really good book that i've been reading i would definitely particularly businesses that are moving from that you know now you've built your national platform now you need to scale out fast how are you going to do it how fast what are your growth still she wrote that she wrote scale or fail yeah and she's she basically puts together a ceo strategic roadmap okay that really really can help people that are looking to be able to grow their business as far as number three what billing tool do you use billing well we've written our own billing systems okay we are payment gateways as well so we actually are the entire engine it's our custom yeah we've done custom builds on all of our payment processing however we do integrate to 25 payment gateways and we utilize different um solutions for our customers also one of the other ones that we're integrating to is like stripe as well for the global platform um and braintree there's a couple of ones around the world great number four how many hours i sleep to get every probably luckily for i lauren that's not healthy i know i'm terrible i'm a workaholic and uh you know i start early in the mornings and then i finish late like 11 12 at night i mean i wouldn't have guessed you have like no energy you wouldn't sound like i should be on drugs no i'm kidding okay so for four hours and what's your situation married single kids it sounds like you have two kids right i am married and with two kids my son has just finished school and done schoolies week for the last week okay in australia typical crazy uh week of partying and i've got a son of 13. that's great okay they're two and then do you mind me asking how old you are i am 47. 47 years young last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew you know i think one of the things that for myself is i would actually say celebrate myself for the last 30 years of business because i have given everything all the time in everything i've ever done and i've never given up and i have to actually pat myself on the back because i have indomitable spirit and fearlessness like no other guys celebrate yourself more from lauren founded this company after fleeing africa after witnessing her father's brutal murder this was in 2009 really started over in australia with sites now on building the first kind of female run unicorn in the hospitality industry she's well on her way with doing between 10 and 20 million bucks right now in ar scaling 150 year-over-year just raise an additional 15 million to help fuel that growth 26 million raised to date about 65 people on the team total today uh all of them are remote about four percent revenue churn annually so economics are holding serving 25 000 event locations whether it's restaurants hotels things of that nature helping them book their space and doing many many other things as well lauren thank you for taking us to the top that was such a good summary you better share that with me so that i could share that with my team all right sold we're done you're on thanks lauren thanks nathan