TicketingHub Revenue & Valuation (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 out from over 2807 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 founder path check this out I'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for evaluation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frownerpath dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different valuation private Equity Firm is different if you're going to 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 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 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well 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 data set of SAS valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash 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 all right let's jump back into the interview and so fast forward to today obviously a compelling story here about how many customers are paying you today so we have between 250 and 300 customers at the minute so can we take 250 times an average of 200 bucks a month you're doing about 50 000 a month in Revenue exactly that's awesome where were you exactly one year ago do you remember uh one year ago we were uh we were just coming out of the pandemic and we were doing about uh 200 000. that's still pretty aggressive coming out of the hand yeah so you're doing like 15 000 a month 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 the public so you couldn't actually go inside but as it was outside so they were actually doing really really well interesting that's really funny okay so so you've done this now you're doing six hundred thousand dollars in terms of run rate and how many folks are on the team today and now we're nine people nine people and they have you bootstrapped this or did you decide to raise capital completely bootstrapped oh I love that so you own 100 I own 100 yes that's awesome I love that any plans to raise or you want to stay bootstrapped um I want to stay bootstrapped for for a little longer um I want to reach the the million cap or or 1.5 and then look to raise uh to be honest we have money in the bank now um I'm um I'm making a profit every month so how much profit not much so on my accounts for the last six months we're at 90 000 in net profit on uh 300 and something yeah you're profiting like five or ten Grand a month right now something like that yeah something like that that's interesting yes if someone if someone if someone came by and offered you uh two million all cash up front do you sell no he said that quickly yes why so quick uh the opportunity in the market the market for tourism activities is 254 billion um we've taken customers from the largest um for booking systems and we have a system that's easier to use We're Half Price we've been doing it for 10 years you've been doing it for 10 years though and you're under a million in Revenue I had a problem with a co-founder uh who basically started his competing business hacked our platform told all my clients at one point I didn't even have Developers for three months so I survived that and I only got him out of the business in October 2019. so I only really what did you do that made him hate you so much ah uh it's a it was a very complicated relation he was very arrogant um and I got the largest contract so we got the city sightseeing worldwide contract and he was not able to deliver them and then he went behind my back and tried to do a deal with them which didn't work and then he set up his own business and you know I kind of want to forget about him but um yeah after that he hacked our platform I have all the IP I went to the police I did all these things and nobody did anything and I managed to buy him out because his lawyer made a mistake he wanted me to sign an NDA saying that you know not to discuss anything that's happened and I never signed it and got 100 of the shares so I really started pushing ticketing what did you pay what did you pay to get him out fifteen thousand and you feel like that was how much did he own 50 50 okay so you bought it you paid fifteen one five thousand to get five zero percent equity back what year was that um that was in October 2019. Andrew why did it take so long I mean it sounds like this was going on for years um because he didn't want to sell without me saying signing this agreement because he's hacked us he's done a lot of illegal things and uh he didn't want me to discuss it um we're competing in the same industry actually so so you didn't sign it which is why you can talk about it now correct that's so funny um are you competing who's gonna win um I think we're going for different verticals now um he specialized in hop on pop-up buses and created this very complicated system I want to do the opposite I want to do a very simple and cheap system for 40 50 of the market uh I think the market is big enough to have uh multiple players in the industry so I don't we don't see well I don't see him as a competition maybe he's going to try to come into our game soon but um Not For a Moment how do you make sure you're just not going to get jealous of you and hack you again I mean now we've put everything in place um before you know I'm not a technical person so he was able to control the domain because he had access to cloudflare so he managed to steal all our historical emails um in the company so there's a lot of things that he was able to do now you know I have a team of five developers full-time so I don't think it'll be as easy for him to to access the platform and we've changed the system has changed a lot in in five years so you told your Tech Team watch out for this IP address blacklisted oh we were completely no no we started logging in from other accounts and we have all the trails and absolutely everything and what's crazy is that the police don't do anything about that yeah what would they why do you think they don't do anything uh I think they they don't see it as a crime uh I think cyber crime is not really you know until it gets to like a large scale it's not really seen the same way like all of these calls I'm getting saying that uh it's MRC is following me and that I'm gonna go to jail and I love staying on the phone with these guys for about an hour and telling them that I'm an old lady and I don't understand what uh yes um so I think yeah I I think they they focus more on on crimes and if you if you ever get robbed or someone comes to your house which I really don't wish um there was a friend of mine that told me just tell them that you see a gun and within two minutes the police will be there if you tell them you can see someone you know in your garden they'll say yeah I will send someone a patrol in an hour or two um that's funny interesting okay so nine people on your team today fiber Engineers um your bootstrap this is great any plans to buy other small companies like you did with the first one uh potentially um we're more interested in in building auxiliary services that can plug into other systems um and that's what we're working on now because we have extra cash and right now we're refactoring our code so we can't hire more developers um because we have very very senior developers working on this uh once that's kind of uh made out all the all the systems bit independent uh we'll be able to um we'll be able to hire more in the meantime we're just building like really simple one one-off uh kind of system that solves the problem that we or other reservation systems don't solve yeah yeah very cool well listen we're rooting for you on that note let's wrap here with the famous five number one favorite book uh favorite Power persuasion uh cialdini yep that's a good one number two is there a CEO you're following or studying I really like so in my industry who's the founder of Hopper um I find what he's done with data incredible and I want to kind of replicate that in some way number three what's your favorite online tool for building ticketing hub uh so for SEO is awesome I think it's really really great they're great number four how many hours of sleep do you get on every night four or five okay five and situation married single kids uh girlfriend okay and how old are you I'm 39. last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. oh to spend Bitcoins differently uh that's a good that's a good reason guys there you have at 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 coveted strong they've got over 90 000 bucks in the bank ten thousand bucks a month in profit and we love Carl because he's 100 bootstrap Carl thanks for taking us to the top thank you so much Nathan one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm Central it's called Shark Tank for SAS 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 our poo CAC LTV 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