How TicketingHub CEO Carl Pihl grew TicketingHub to $851.1K revenue and 250 customers in 2024.

ticketinghub.com they help big companies event companies like Emerson game box and secret Food Tours process ticket sales they're doing about uh fifty thousand dollars per month right now on Revenue up from fifteen thousand one five thousand just a year ago serving 250 customers as they're coming out of covered strong they've got over 90 000 bucks in the bank 10 000 bucks a month in profit and we love Carl because he's 100 bootstrap hey folks my guest today is Carl peel he's the founder of ticketing Hub a successful serial entrepreneur who's selected to take part in the BBC series The Last millionaire his first business during High School promoting nightclub events to the young Elite of Paris did well and while studying engineering at King's College in London he established an entrepreneur society and launched a bespoke exotic accessories brand called Monte Monte Napoleon is that what that is Carl yes it is right but now focused on ticketinghub.com cloud reservation software for tours and activities Carl you ready to take us to the top I am all right very cool all right so so taking him give me an example of a sort of a tour company or activity company that uses you today so we currently do the reservation software for secret Food Tours uh they are the largest food tour in the world they operate in 67 cities around the world and they use us to manage all of their um ticket sales distribution point of sale um so we're Shopify if you want for tickets and how do you price is it a percentage gmv of secret Food Tours or is it a flat fee or what it's a percentage Yeah we're on a three percent fee and then Enterprise clients get discounts so another example of client is immersive game box they're the biggest VR company in the world they operate in 15 locations worldwide and opening three new ones and they have the uh the license for squid games and Angry Bird interesting so um your largest customers how low can they get that fee one percent two percent it's all negotiable uh we're a startup but generally one and a half percent I would say is very it's probably our lowest here okay and any flat fee just to sign up or it's all percent of sales uh all percent of sales but we do have customers that prefer flat fee and it's calculated on the percentage basis interesting so what would you say the average customer pays you per month uh average customer is uh is around 200. okay and what does that mean what what volume are they usually doing in terms of ticket sales would that be something like seven thousand dollars in ticket sales per month honestly we we capture everyone our system is so easy to use that we allow like small businesses that do 510 ticket sales uh up to people that do a few million no no I know that but if someone's paying you 200 a month on average and that's three percent of their total volume well 200 times 33 would be seven thousand dollars in gmv per month on average per account yes interesting okay very cool give me the back story here when'd you launch what year wow we launched uh 10 years ago um so I started a company called Lost in London and so I tried to set up a social network for students but obviously you all know Facebook and I failed miserably and I I learned a lot from that experience and I started lost in London and we created a social uh platform for language schools so we were studying events nightclubs attractions tours and activities to those schools and we were printing tickets in our office and giving them to the schools so they never had the right amount of tickets it was always complicated to manage and we decided to go digital we went to a ticketing company they charged us a 20K setup fee and a 200 000 ticket a year a minimum at a set fee and none of our clients wanted to use it and they tried to sue us to um because we didn't actually do the numbers and uh so then I went back to the drawing board I hired a developer and he built this uh this back end for all the schools to log in and uh we bought a company called mini cards that are advertising displays in in hotels and hostels did you buy that um almost nothing because it was it was pretty much not working so I probably paid like 1320k to buy it what year I don't remember remember uh that was probably two thousand 10 I think something like that what what value did you see in that why not just spend 20 grand yourself and build a version from scratch so the reason why um we bought mini cards is because many cards had access to all these hotels that we didn't have access to and it would give us an opportunity to give this platform this kind of like concierge platform to them so we were already working with 100 Schools we also worked with universities like soas and Kings organizing the the international students social program and and then we saw this this opportunity to extend to these these hotels and mini card was the perfect platform um companies were paying to advertise and on top of that we would have the opportunity to sell our tickets um what we didn't foresee is that students started photocopying our tickets and because none of the attractions actually scanned third-party tickets uh people were let through and we had to pay for those so the company almost went under it was it was a massive Nightmare and that's when I realized there is no hub for tickets there's no way to connect distribution and supplier and we're talking this you know 10 years ago um and so that's why we we decided to First launch a little scanner that would connect to Expedia TripAdvisor Etc and allow the suppliers or the museums or St Paul's Merlin tours have to pay you for the hardware the scanner uh no so everything is out of the box so use an iPhone and Android and then you just buy your own sum up device or Izel and then a printer if you need it okay oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data 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in terms of run right now you're doing five zero Grand so really Healthy Growth but I mean who was using you during the pandemic no one yes where did that money come from uh so uh I learned how to do SEO and we signed the biggest zoo in the UK um and they paid us a monthly fee so they actually kept us going uh during the pandemic because we was visiting three people on the team um zoos were open it was actually one of the the only places because like uh the UK was open to...