Run Of Show Revenue, Valuation & Funding (2025)

[00:00] Guys, sold about 30% of his company as pre seed round, $200,000 at a $650,000 valuation after he left his job at WeWork where he was running 50 to 100 events per week. And he said, oh my gosh. I need to build a tool for event organizers to help them build their run of show. That's how he created runofshowapp.com. He's got five free users on it right now. Getting ready to launch paid pricing. I encourage you to check [00:21] it out. We'll see what he does next. Hey, folks. My guest today is Gil Gibli. He's a strategic events in operation leader, founder and entrepreneur, and former senior director of private events at WeWork. He's now building runofshowinc. Alright. Gil, you ready to take us to the top? [00:36] >> Sure. Runofshow is a smart task management, project management tool that is specifically designed for event planners and [00:52] >> hospitality industries. Over the last five, six years, WeWork and even before, I've struggled often with mobilizing teams, getting everybody on the same page, running multiple platforms. So runofshow's intention is to essentially consolidate all of these platforms into one collaborative place that your team of planners, your team of staff can efficiently and collaboratively work on executing tasks and driving your event to the finish line. [01:25] Gil, one of the questions I always have about tools like this is it's effectively a product management tool. Right? I mean, sorry, a process sort of management tool. Right? You have ClickUp, you have Basecamp, you have Jira. Now your argument would be, yeah, but we are doing a bunch of specific things that are specific for event producers and, you know, etcetera. So give us a sense. Why why does someone need runofshow when things like ClickUp already exist? [01:47] >> By the way, I watched your ClickUp interview with the CEO of ClickUp. I loved it. It was an awesome interview. [01:54] Oh, good. Thanks. [01:55] >> That's one. The second thing is runofshow is designed with events planning in mind. We have features that are very specific to the event industry that don't exist on Monday, they don't exist on ClickUp and [02:13] Name a couple of those features. [02:15] >> For example, a specific key moment runofshow, meaning when you create an event, you want to make sure you have a moment by minute by minute runofshow of what guests may see. Or you also want to have a production timeline. You want to know what your entire team of collaborators are working on behind the scene. This is something that is oftentimes done without anybody noticing in terms of guests. So this is done behind the scene. So we have [02:49] >> production timeline, key moment timeline, you have a schedule. I don't believe ClickUp has it, I might be wrong, but employee and staff schedule, dynamic schedule that allows you to plug your staff into specific positions of the events. We do have the shared document features, which I believe ClickUp is offering as well and other task management tools do the same. Master calendar for all of your events with different labels on whether the event is confirmed, pending, upcoming [03:24] Yeah. [03:25] Mean, this is a very fragmented space. We put on two events per year, SaaS Open dot com and Founderpath five hundred. And we use a combination of sort of Airtable for runofshow, ClickUp for task management, Google Drive for storing slide decks. I mean, it's sort of all over the place. You know, Bizzabo for selling tickets, Bizzabo for the mobile app, you're effectively taking all these and trying to put them into one thing. [03:47] >> Correct. You're exactly exactly describing the issue that I had to deal with when I ran and planned events. [03:55] Make us feel that. What did you actually do at WeWork? And most people are gonna go say, wait. Isn't Gil's, like, super rich? WeWork was worth a lot of money. Did you own equity there? [04:04] >> So no. I'm not rich, but I had the best five, six years, you know, amazing time working for I joined in 2015 and I left when COVID hit in May 2020, unfortunately. What I did for WeWork at the beginning was I programmed and streamlined a lot of the experiences that took place inside our facilities, inside the WeWork buildings. And about two or three years afterwards, after I began working for WeWork, they identified an awesome opportunity to [04:46] >> rent WeWork locations for private events, not just for offices. So take in the unoccupied, unmonetized space and rent it for people that are interested to host daily workshops, conferences, multi day events, and so on and so forth. [05:05] Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders, but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 interviews I've done manually. Saves you a lot of time. Well, we've done this. We've built it into the beautiful interface inside of Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you connect [05:28] your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time. You can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna [05:53] get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation. Private equity firm is different. If you're gonna do a minority sale, that's different. And if you sell the whole business, that's a different valuation. You can see all those when I hover over here. Right? So the teal is what a VC would pay. Yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright. Now what's cool about this is this is [06:14] not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founders share with us on the show. So traction 1,200,000 seed round three point seven raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna see companies that have sold the whole business. Well, here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple. [06:40] Maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down, what they raised, what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold. There's never been a larger dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. Alright. We're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second, [07:02] but if you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link. This link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. Or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products, click on get your valuation here, and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl. Again, all that valuation data live right inside the platform. I hope to see you there. Alright. Let's jump back [07:28] into the interview. Gil, were you managing engineers here? Were you building software to solve this problem, or was it all just project management and spreadsheets? [07:37] >> It was pretty to build this, no. I did not run an engineering team. It was pretty much all working using companies like Triple Seat, using the Google Drive, using multiple tools that enabled me to mobilize the 30 people that were under my team. [08:00] And so 30 people on your team, how many events would you say you put on while you were at WeWork across how many locations? [08:05] >> So there are different types of events. There were external events of companies that are paying money for WeWork to use the spaces. I would say that every week, we probably had close to [08:18] >> 50 to 100 events across the country of folks that rented out WeWork space. [08:24] Across The United States is the country you're in or somewhere else? US? [08:27] >> Yeah. [08:27] >> New York. [08:28] >> I have an accent. I'm originally from Israel, but I live in the state for twenty something years, but I still didn't lose the accent. So [08:35] That's awesome. [08:36] Yeah. Okay. So so 50 to 100 events per week from WeWork members. What about external events? [08:42] >> That was not necessarily just WeWork members. You have [08:44] Oh. [08:45] >> This specific service that I managed for WeWork was open to members and nonmembers. [08:54] Okay. So 1,500 events per week in WeWork locations by members and nonmembers? [08:58] >> Correct. [08:59] Okay. And then and then, I guess, when did you what year did you leave? [09:04] >> I left in May 2020 when public gathering wasn't possible anymore. So that's [09:11] And did you launch runofshow right afterwards? Or when did you write the first line of code for runofshow? [09:14] >> No. That's when I that's when the idea sparked me when I left WeWork. I realized that there is an opportunity, there was a gap in the event planning business. And that's when I began doing the research to understand what's out there, what's missing. That's when I hired the developers to start taking- taking. [09:33] When was that? Was that 2020, twenty twenty one, twenty twenty two? [09:36] >> 2021. Beginning of [09:37] So you launched the company in 2021? [09:40] >> Correct. Yes. [09:41] Okay. So my next question is you've gone now 2021, all of 2022. You told me pre show your pre revenue. How are you funding this thing? How are you paying people with no revenue? [09:51] >> We raised a small amount of a 150 to $200,000 from friends and family that believe in me, believe in the idea, were interested to join this. [10:06] And that was last year? [10:07] >> That was in the last two years. That was between 2021 and 2022. [10:12] Okay. [10:13] >> Keep in mind, I did deal with a lot of startups managing and switching and changing development teams. I'm not sure how much you've seen that over the, you know, in your experience, but finding a winning team of engineers wasn't easy for me. And that's probably one of the reasons why it took me a little while to get to where I'm at today. [10:36] Well, let's come back to that in a second. But first, the 200,000 you raised in 2020 on the pre seed round, I mean, most people sell 20 ish percent of their company in the pre seed round. I mean, was that at what? Like a million dollar cap or a 5,000,000 cap or something? [10:48] >> That's what that was about 650,000. Okay. [10:53] 650,000 cap. Okay. So you sold about 30% of the business, something like that? [10:58] >> Yes. [10:59] Okay. Do would you do it again? Was that the right move? [11:03] >> No. [11:04] Why do you say that? What would you do different? [11:07] >> I say [11:09] >> Well, I am a I wanna say that I'm an entrepreneur. I've launched [11:15] >> different businesses in the past, but I did not launch a startup business that is similar to runofshow. The thing that I kind of didn't pay enough attention was the cap table and how shares are distributed, how much I should raise and how much shares and equity I should give in exchange. So I do think that I've been a tiny bit generous at my friends and family round. I think I should have given away less equity from [11:45] >> the company when I did it. Yeah. So that's kind of, you know, one of the things that I that I would have done differently. [11:54] So talk to me a little bit about your first developer hire. There's a lot of engineer business people listening right now trying to find engineers to help them build their first idea. So how much money did you spend or sort of like waste on engineers that didn't end up building the MVP you needed? [12:08] >> Probably a $100,000. [12:10] Okay. And what did you learn to that process? [12:14] >> That as a business owner that hires a software engineer, first and foremost, you have to have full control of the code. You have to have full access and ownership of every single line of code that the engineers are writing. Never, you know, trust an engineer to eventually pass on the access to a code and product and software that you're paying for in the development. So that's [12:44] Were you paying an engineer who then didn't give you software when it was over? [12:49] >> I got the access to the code, but I think that I paid, well, I couldn't get a CTO to join for equity and not for compensation. So I hired this sort of a staffing team that connected me to developers offshore in Egypt. And I trusted them and eventually it turns out that unfortunately, I was sort of misled by that team. And I don't wanna get into details, but the good news is that I was able to [13:26] >> transform the entire product development into a different team of engineers that are now doing an extraordinary job. [13:34] I see. Okay. So how many folks are on the team today, both full time and contractors? [13:39] >> Four. [13:40] Okay. How many full time? [13:42] >> Four. [13:42] Oh, four. How many contractors? [13:45] >> Oh, I have two designers that are part time contractor and four full time engineers. [13:54] Okay. Very cool. Now let's talk about revenue and sales. Right? I mean, you have a beautiful website. You have pricing up. Why hasn't anyone purchased yet? [14:03] >> I didn't promote the website. The website is live and available for people to see, but nobody knows about it. I did not start marketing this business. The goal is to begin marketing the website on January 15. Just when you see pricing, but it's not even connected to a payment gateway. So even if you wanted to pay for it, you couldn't. [14:26] Yep. Yep. Interesting. Okay. So when I see like PopShop, the makeup show, Igo, Metropolitan Pavilion, are they using your free version? [14:37] >> Yes. I mean, PubShop, yes. The [14:42] >> short answer is yes. [14:43] Okay. And what feedback are you getting from some of these early free users? [14:48] >> I love it, by the way. We have a weekly course to discuss feedback features that potentially they would be interesting to see in the application. We get, first of all, I think it's giving us a great reassurance that we're doing the right thing when they're using it and using it successfully. So two things, one is reassurance and two is awesome valuable feedback. Those are the two main things that we get from those free users. [15:18] How many free users do you have today? [15:20] >> Not a lot, about four or five. [15:23] Four or five. Okay. Well, at least you can stay focused. That's great. All right. So you got five folks. You've got the site up. You're launching pricing officially January 15, which is great. How do you plan to get your first 10 paying customers? [15:35] >> Interestingly enough, I've realized in the last couple of months that restaurants are also target users that may find runofshow useful and valuable. So what we're going to do on January 15 is we're to go after our immediate network of planners and restaurants, and we're going to begin selling the platform. Again, this is not going be a massive promotion effort. This is going to be more of a, you know, handholding experience with the first users, the first [16:10] >> clients. Potentially, we're going to extend a free trial, you know, 100% discount code to get everybody to use the platform. But the intention is to immediately get in contact with our people that, you know, network of planners and restaurants and stuff. [16:29] Gil, you're hedging a lot here with your pricing launch. Are you scared to ask people to pay you? [16:35] >> Not when I'm happy with the product, I'm not gonna be afraid. [16:41] I can tell you there's products that look way worse than your website doing millions of dollars of revenue. I don't know what you're waiting for, but I'm certainly rooting for you. We're out of time today. Let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite business book? [16:58] >> I would say [17:05] Or the last one you read? [17:07] >> I would say that it's [17:12] We'll skip it. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? [17:16] >> Is there a CEO I'm following or studying? I particularly love it's funny because you're mentioning it. You interviewed the [17:28] >> CEO of ClickUp, which I see as an amazing company that is growing exponentially and I love them and I love them and what he does. [17:36] Great. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building runofshow? [17:42] >> Wake up. [17:43] Number four. How many hours of sleep do you get every night? [17:46] >> Six. [17:47] And what's your situation? Married, single, kids? [17:49] >> Married with one, two with a two years old baby. [17:53] Oh, can can okay. So one kid, two years old, how old are you? [17:57] >> I'm 48. [17:58] 48. [17:59] Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20. [18:12] >> Buy real estate. [18:15] Guys, he sold about 30% of his company as pre seed round, $200,000 at a $650,000 valuation after he left his job at WeWork where he was running 50 to 100 events per week. And he said, oh my gosh. I need to build a tool for event organizers to help them build their run of show. That's how he created runofshowapp.com. He's got five free users on it right now. Getting ready to launch paid pricing. I encourage you [18:36] to check it out. We'll see what he does next. Gil, thanks for taking us to the top. [18:39] >> Thank you. [18:40] Thanks, Gil. One more thing before you go. We have a 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 [19:05] Thursday, 1PM Central. Additionally, remember these recorded Founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM 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 breaking news in the SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, [19:28] a big fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or something else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if you wanna take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS founders. You want to get in there. We've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing. You can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying. [19:50] Sign up for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, but I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people. [20:10] We got to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. All right. I'll be in the comments. See you.