How TicketingHub Reached $600K ARR and 250 Customers While 100% Bootstrapped (Interview with CEO Carl Pihl)

Introduction and Company Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Ticketinghub.com. They help big companies, event companies like Immersive Gamebox and secret food tours process ticket sales. They're doing about $50,000 per month right now on revenue up from $30,000 just a year ago, serving 250 customers that are coming out of COVID strong. They've got over $90,000 in the bank, $10,000 a month in profit, and we love Carl because he's 100% bootstrapped. Hey, folks. My guest today is Carl Pihl. He's the founder of ticketinghub, a successful serial

00:26entrepreneur who 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 Napoli Napoleon. Is that what that is, Carl?

00:44>> Yes. It is.

00:44But now focused on ticketinghub.com, cloud reservation software for tours and activities. Carl, you ready to take us to the top?

Carl Pihl

00:51>> I am.

Nathan Latka

00:52Alright. Very cool. Alright. So so ticketinghub, give me an example of a tour tour company or activity company that uses you today.

Key Customers: Secret Food Tours and Immersive Gamebox

Carl Pihl

01:00>> So we currently do the reservation software for secret food tours. 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 ticket sales, distribution, point of sale. So we're Shopify, if you want, for tickets.

Nathan Latka

01:18And how do you price? Is it a percent of GMV of secret food tours or is it a flat fee or what?

Pricing Model: GMV Percentage and Enterprise Discounts

Carl Pihl

01:22>> It's a percentage. Yeah. We're on a 3% fee and then enterprise clients get discounts. So another example of client is Immersive Gamebox. They're the biggest VR company in the world. They operate in 15 locations worldwide and opening three new ones, and they have the the license for Squid Games and Angry Bird.

Nathan Latka

01:40Interesting. So your largest customers, how low can they get that fee? 1%, 2%?

Carl Pihl

01:46>> It's all negotiable. We're a start up. But generally, one and a half percent, I would say, is is is very is probably our lowest tier.

Nathan Latka

01:53Okay. And any flat fee just to sign up, or it's all percent of sales?

Carl Pihl

01:57>> All percent of sales, but we do have customers that prefer a flat fee, and it's calculated on the percentage basis.

Nathan Latka

02:03Interesting. So what would you say the average customer pays you per month?

Carl Pihl

02:07>> Average customer is is around 200.

Nathan Latka

02:11Okay. And what does that mean? What what volume are they usually doing in terms of ticket sales? Would that be something like $7,000 in ticket sales per month?

Carl Pihl

02:19>> Honestly, we we capture everyone. Our system is so easy to use that we allow, like, small businesses that do five, ten ticket sales up to people that do a few million.

Nathan Latka

02:28No. No. I know that. But if someone's paying you $200 a month on average, and that's 3% of their total volume, well, $200 times 33 would be $7,000 in GMV per month on average per account.

Carl Pihl

02:39>> Yes.

Nathan Latka

02:40Interesting.

Average Customer Value and GMV Math

Nathan Latka

02:41>> On average.

02:41Okay. Very cool. Give me the backstory here. When did you launch? What year?

Founding Story and Early Ventures

Carl Pihl

02:45>> Well, we launched ten years ago. 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 learned a lot from that experience. And I started Lost in London, and we created a social platform for language schools. So we were selling events, nightclubs, attractions, tours, and activities to those schools. And we were printing tickets in our

03:11>> 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 20 k setup fee and a 200,000 ticket a year minimum at a set fee. And none of our clients wanted to use it, and they tried to sue us to because we didn't actually do the numbers. And so then I

03:34>> went back to the drawing board. I hired a developer, and he built this this back end for all the schools to log in. And we bought a company called Mini Cards that are advertising displays in in hotels and hostels.

Nathan Latka

03:45What year did you pay all the hotels? How did you buy that?

Carl Pihl

03:48>> Almost nothing because it was it was pretty much not working. So I probably paid, like, 15, 20 k to buy it.

Nathan Latka

03:52What year?

Carl Pihl

03:53>> I don't remember. Oof. That was probably 2010, I think, something like that.

Nathan Latka

04:00And what what value did you see in that? Why not just spend 20 k yourself and build a it's the version from scratch?

Carl Pihl

04:05>> So the the reason why we bought mini cards is because mini 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 King's organizing the international students social program. And then we saw this opportunity to extend to these hotels and Mini

04:32>> Card was the perfect platform. Companies were paying to advertise. And on top of that, we would have the opportunity to sell our tickets. What we didn't foresee is that students started photocopying our tickets and because none of the attractions actually scanned third party tickets, people were let through and we had to pay for those. So the company almost went under, it a massive nightmare. And that's when I realized there is no hub for tickets. There's no

04:55>> way to connect distribution and supplier. And we're talking this, you know, ten years ago. And so that's why we we decided to first launch a little scanner that would connect to Expedia, TripAdvisor, etcetera, and allow the suppliers or the museums of Saint Paul's, Berlin to scan the supplies.

Nathan Latka

05:13Have to pay you for the hardware, the scanner?

Carl Pihl

05:16>> No. So everything is out of the box. So use an iPhone and Android, and then you just buy your own SumUp device or iZettle, and then a printer if you need it. Okay.

Nathan Latka

05:26Oh, 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

05:49your 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

06:14get 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

06:35not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder share with us on the show. So traction 1,200,000 seed round 3.7 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. Maybe you're

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07:23if 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 into

Surviving the Pandemic with SEO

Nathan Latka

07:49the interview. And so fast forward to today, obviously, compelling story here, but how many customers are are paying you today?

Carl Pihl

07:56>> So we have between two hundred and fifty and three hundred customers at the minute.

Nathan Latka

08:00Mhmm. So can we take 250 times an average of $200 a month? You're doing about 50,000 a month in revenue?

Carl Pihl

08:06>> Exactly.

Nathan Latka

08:08That's awesome. Where were you exactly one year ago? Do you remember?

Carl Pihl

08:12>> One year ago, we were we were just coming out of the pandemic, and we were doing about 200,000.

Nathan Latka

08:19That's still pretty impressive coming out of out of the yes. You're doing like 15,000 a month in terms of run rate. Now, you're doing $50,000, so really healthy growth. But, I mean, who was using you during the pandemic?

Carl Pihl

08:30>> No one.

Nathan Latka

08:31Yes. Where did that money come from?

Carl Pihl

08:34>> So I learned how to do SEO, and we signed the biggest zoo in The UK, and they paid us a monthly fee. So they actually kept us going during the pandemic because we

Nathan Latka

08:42Who were was visiting the on the team.

Carl Pihl

08:43>> Zoos were open. It was actually one of the the the only places because, like, The UK was open to the public, so you couldn't actually go inside, but a zoo was outside. So they were actually doing really, really well.

Current Team Size and Bootstrapped Status

Nathan Latka

08:55Interesting. That's really funny. Okay. So so you've done this now. You're doing 600,000 in terms of run rate. And how many folks are on the team today?

Carl Pihl

09:02>> Now we're nine people.

Nathan Latka

09:04Nine people. And have you bootstrapped this or did you decide to raise capital?

Carl Pihl

09:08>> Completely bootstrapped.

Nathan Latka

09:09Oh, I love that. So you own a 100%?

Carl Pihl

09:12>> I own a 100%. Yes.

Nathan Latka

09:13That's awesome. I love that. Any plans to raise, or you wanna stay bootstrapped?

Profitability and Plans to Raise

Carl Pihl

09:18>> I wanna stay bootstrapped for for a little longer. I wanna reach the the million cap or or 1.5 and then look to raise. To be honest, we have money in the bank now. I'm I'm making a profit every month. So

Nathan Latka

09:31How much profit per month?

Carl Pihl

09:34>> Not much. So on my accounts for the last six months, we're at 90,000 in in net profit on

Nathan Latka

09:38That's awesome.

Carl Pihl

09:40>> 300 and something. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

09:42That's awesome. So so you're profiting, like, you're profiting, like, 5 or $10,000 a month right now, something like that?

Carl Pihl

09:47>> Yeah. Something like that.

Nathan Latka

09:49That's interesting. If someone if someone if someone came by and offered you 2,000,000 all cash upfront, do you sell?

Carl Pihl

09:58>> No.

Nathan Latka

10:00You said that quickly.

Carl Pihl

10:03>> Yes.

Nathan Latka

10:04Why so quick?

Market Opportunity and Competitive Positioning

Carl Pihl

10:06>> The opportunity in the market the the market for tours and activities is 254,000,000,000. We've taken customers from the largest for booking systems, and we have a system that's easier to use. We're half price.

Nathan Latka

10:22You've been doing it for ten years. You've been doing it for ten years though, and you're under 1,000,000 in revenue.

Co-founder Conflict, Hack, and Buyout

Carl Pihl

10:24>> So I had a problem with a co founder 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

Nathan Latka

10:40Why did what did you do that made him hate you so much?

Carl Pihl

10:44>> It's a it was a very complicated relation. He was very arrogant, 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, yeah, after that, he hacked our platform. I have

11:05>> 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 I you know, not to discuss anything that's happened, and I never signed it and got a 100% of the shares. So I really started pushing ticketinghub

Nathan Latka

11:21What did you pay? What did you pay to get him out?

Carl Pihl

11:23>> 15,000.

Nathan Latka

11:24And do you feel like that was how much did he own?

Carl Pihl

11:27>> 50, 50%.

Nathan Latka

11:28Okay. So you bought it. You paid $15.01 5,000 to get 50% equity back. What year was that?

Carl Pihl

11:35>> That was in October 2019.

Nathan Latka

11:38And why did it take so long? I mean, it sounds like this is going on for years.

Carl Pihl

11:42>> Because he didn't wanna sell without me saying signing this agreement because he's hacked us. He's done a lot of illegal things, and he didn't want me to discuss it. We're we're competing in the same industry, actually.

Nathan Latka

11:53So so so you didn't sign it, which is why you can talk about it now?

Carl Pihl

11:58>> Correct.

Nathan Latka

11:59That's so funny. Are you who's gonna win?

Carl Pihl

12:03>> I think we were going for different verticals now. He specialized in hop on hop off buses and created this very complicated system. I wanna do the opposite. I wanna do a very simple and cheap system for 50% of the market. I think the market is big enough to have multiple players in the industry. So I I don't we don't see well, I don't see him as a competition. Maybe he's gonna try to come into our game

12:23>> soon, but not for the moment.

Nathan Latka

12:25How do you make sure he's not gonna get jealous of you and hack you again?

Tech Team, Future Plans, and Acquisitions

Carl Pihl

12:29>> I mean, now we've put everything in place. Before, you know, I'm 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 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

12:51>> the platform, and we've changed the system has changed a lot in in in five years.

Nathan Latka

12:56So you told your tech team, watch out for this IP address, blacklisted.

Carl Pihl

12:59>> Oh, we were completely. No. No. We we started logging in from other accounts, and we have all the trail and absolutely everything. And what's crazy is that the police don't do anything about that.

Nathan Latka

13:09Yeah. What would they why do you think they don't do anything?

Carl Pihl

13:13>> I think they they don't see it as a crime. I think cybercrime 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 HMRC 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.

Nathan Latka

13:29What?

Carl Pihl

13:31>> Yes. So I think, yeah, I think they focus more on crimes, and if you ever get robbed or someone comes to your house, which I really don't wish, there was a 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. Yeah. We'll send someone a patrol in in

13:51>> an hour or two.

Nathan Latka

13:53That's funny. Interesting. Okay. So nine people on your team today, five are engineers. You're bootstrapped. This is great. Any plans to buy other small companies like you did with the first one?

Famous Five Rapid Fire Questions

Carl Pihl

14:04>> Potentially. We're we're more interested in in in building auxiliary services that can plug into other systems. 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 because we have very, very senior developers working on this. Once that's kind of made all the systems a bit independent, we'll be able to hire more. In the meantime, we're just building like really simple one off

14:33>> kind of system that solves the problem that we or other reservation systems don't solve.

Nathan Latka

14:39Yep. Yep. Very cool. Well, we're rooting for you on that note. Let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, favorite book?

Carl Pihl

14:46>> Favorite power of persuasion, Cialdini.

Nathan Latka

14:49Yep. That's a good one. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Carl Pihl

14:53>> I really like so in my industry, it's Frederic Lalonde, who's the founder of Hopper. I find what he's done with data incredible, and I want to kind of replicate that in some way.

Nathan Latka

15:03Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building ticketinghub?

Carl Pihl

15:08>> Surfer SEO is awesome. I think it's really, really great.

Nathan Latka

15:13They're great.

15:14Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?

Carl Pihl

15:18>> Four or five.

Nathan Latka

15:19Okay. Five. And situation, married, single, kids?

Carl Pihl

15:23>> Girlfriend.

Nathan Latka

15:24Okay. And how old are you?

Carl Pihl

15:27>> I'm 39.

Nathan Latka

15:28Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Carl Pihl

15:34>> To spend Bitcoins differently.

Nathan Latka

15:39That's a good that's a good reason. Guys, there you have it. Ticketinghub.com. They help big companies, event companies like Immersive Gamebox and secret food tours process ticket sales. They're doing about $50,000 per month right now in revenue up from $30,000 just a year ago, serving 250 customers as they're coming out of COVID strong. They've got over $90,000 in the bank, $10,000 a month in profit, and we love Carl because he's 100% bootstrapped. Carl, thanks for taking

16:03us to the top.

Carl Pihl

16:04>> Thanks so much, Nathan.

Nathan Latka

16:08One 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 Thursday 1PM

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