How TitanX grew to $9.7M revenue and 1.5K customers in 2026.

What did you spend on the IP? 1 million. 200 grand upfront, 800 grand seller. No. What's revenue today at Titan X? Today we're sitting at the time of recording this we're at 9.7 million error. What's your largest customer pay you per year today? One just expanded to 406 AR three-year contract. Oh wow. Okay. So it's a $1.2 million contract. Did you get creative on this acquisition? Was it 10 million acquisition, a million up front or how did you structure it? Yeah, it was a $13 million acquisition. We put 7 million up front. We went growth equity. So we raised 27 million and then 10 million went in our pocket as secondary cash. Zoom. If Henry Shuck at Zoom Info came and offered you $200 million all cash today to sell the company, do you take it? Hey folks, my guest today is Joey Gilkkey. He's a serial entrepreneur and the founder of TitanX, a sales intelligence platform that created the phone intent category. He famously bet his entire net worth on the company, shutting down three other cash flowing businesses to focus on a proprietary model that predicts who will actually answer your cold call. under his leadership, it's grown to millions of revenue and they just recently raised a series A. Joey, you ready to take to the top? Let's do it, brother. All right. So, tell me first, how did you get into this space? Are you an ex salses guy or when did you launch? Yeah, man. I've been in the enterprise sales world my whole career. So, I started off in the fortune world. Okay. So, tell me about that. When did you acquire that piece of IP? What year? That was August of 2023. And I acquired it for a different reason than it turned into. So, I seem like a brilliant I'm more just like a brilliant idiot. uh thought how I was going to use it was I was going to build it for my my fractional business. It was going to be the moat around that services company. We started using it in like a licensing model at the fractional company and then I realized pretty quickly that uh it was it was like dark magic that was heavily expensive and very slow and if I can get my hands on it, I can throw money at R&D and optimize it. Plus, I knew where a lot of the bodies lived when it comes to where does unique telode data live and fraud detection data and all that kind of stuff. So why what did you spend on the IP? Did it, you know, was it millions of dollars or one million on the dot cash? 200 grand upfront, 800 grand seller note. So I turned $200,000 into what is currently valued at 100 million, you know. Okay. Well, and now we have to like I got to figure out where to jump around. I'm curious about so many things. So I guess why did you feel like you needed to buy the IP versus just build it from scratch? And or the million bucks just bought you so much time? Uh it bought me a ton of time for one, for two, uh a lot of my competition, again the goal is to to both build the moat and pull the drawbridge up from competition. So a lot of folks in my space were starting to to look at it, see it, use it a little bit. And there were some big behemoth competitors like memory blue, abstract marketing, and things of that nature on the like outsourc sales development world that were starting to get their hands on it. And I was like, if I'm going to protect this and have a unique value prop, I got to own it and I'm going to dictate who can use it. What was I mean, I interview a lot of folks that tell me they have proprietary data and then when you dig under the hood, all they're doing is buying other people's data. They're running an ETL process on it and then selling it back to customers. What was the actual proprietary data set here? Was it a process or an actual data set? It was both, right? So, and it's been built upon dramatically at this point. So, when I bought it, it was a tech- enabled service. So there's a lot of like technology enabling humans in the loop to power it. And so for us, it was more about how do we make this scalable without having a deprecation of the quality of the outcome. So if anything, it's actually gotten faster, it's gotten cheaper, uh it's we can do it at scale at this point. And uh it's more effective in terms of the the data we're able to find now. So fast forward to today, you've grown this thing. You bought for 200k cash plus 800 sellers note. What's revenue today at Titanex? Titanex is sitting we just did a a small acquisition. Uh we paid low 8 figures for that. Um and that is in the dialer space. So we acquired a company called Front Spin at the time of this going out. That will be very public. So Front Spin was built for high velocity dialing. Not a very sound business, but an incredibly sound and scalable technology. Can scale to a million users and we've been uh power users of Front Spin in a lot of different ways. It actually powered the call center in the early days. So that's how we know so much about it. It excels in call deliverability. So anyways, uh today we're sitting at the time of recording this, we're in early 26. We're at 9.7 million AR. That's postacquisition, right? Postacquisition, they're contributing about 2 million. So for le or excuse me, well, old school Titanex is sitting at about 7 uh 7.2 7.4 and uh front spins at 2.1. And did you get creative on this acquisition? If it's you know what is it 10 million acquisition, a million up front or how did you structure it? Yeah, it was a $13 million acquisition. And we put 7 million up front. We went growth equity. So we raised 27 million uh 10 of which uh is primary. So that's for growth. A little bit more than 10. Uh 7 million went towards the uh acquiring Front Spin. 6 million of that from Front Spin CEO got rolled in. And then 10 million went in our pocket as secondary cash. Guys, I want to first off, it's very rare to find a founder that's as transparent as Joey. So I'm going to really push on this. One of the things that I see founders, they're just making a mistake right now is, you know, when you go out and raise external capital, people say, "Nathan, you just hate VC. That's not the That's not true. What What I actually am saying is if you're going to go give up control, g take cash as well. Don't give up control and cash. So like Joey gave up some control here with the series A, but he also got paid. He got his first bite. I mean, I don't know, Joey, what your personal net worth is, but I imagine 10 million secondary is meaningful for you. Yeah, I mean it it certainly adds some padding. I mean, I've done well in my career, but it I did bet my net worth on this this. So, uh, I'm basically just replenishing a lot of capital at this point, but yeah, it helped. So, let me ask you a question. You raised the 27 million at what valuation? Uh just under 100. So 90 something 92. Um but since then we've grown. We've added we've added about a million to in the past month since the acquisition finished. So we're well over 100. The reason I'm bringing this up is this is really cool arbitrage here. Mostly public companies do this, but you're doing it in the private markets. What I mean by that is when you did the 27 million round at we'll just call it 100 million post money. uh and you're doing 7 million of ARR that's about about a 14.3x multiple at the same time you use that money to go buy front spin which was 2 million of revenue right for call it uh I think you said 7 million right that's that right is that right that's 4x 13 oh 13 okay still though you're still in the money and so I wanted to give them a piece put them on the cap table obviously it's earned um and so I had a lot of criteria I wanted control I wanted to steer the ship don't touch my culture respectfully go f yourself if you want too and they were like cool we believe in that was great guys up in you know founder path my main gig it looked very similar to Joey's deal I'll just put it that way so update you'd also I guess Joey say good things about updata oh they're awesome I you know that was the biggest thing is I need a partner that believed in our vision knew our market like when they showed up for the first management meeting they had interviewed customers done deep market research like they came prepared whenever you're ready though I will convince Trey and eventually you to take a $5 million term loan from founder path with a with a 4-year IO no period and an all-in interest rate in the 12 to 14% range. No warrants, no PGs, no nothing. Click that. There we go. All right. Hey, so where do you do you keep running this playbook over and over? I mean, you effectively could buy your way to 100 million bucks of revenue just doing the same thing over and over. Yeah. I mean, I look at again just the buy verse build risk quadrant. For me, it's it's more along uh what's the timeline? What's our goals? When's our recap timeline of when we're going to actually recap this thing again? I plan on rolling this thing two, three times. Um, in terms of rolling equity over, I just really believe in the vision. It's always going to be about the partner. It's going to be about the valuation clearly and what the secondary looks like on those deals. Um, but we have, you know, with where Titanex lives today, we are an intelligence layer that lives between where people get their data from. So, think Zoom Info, Clay, Apollo, Cogniz, and where they dial that, right? So that goes through Salesforce SCPs and then eventually makes it to Nooks and ORM and now Front Spin. Well, we we captured the book end there on Front Spin um with with having the the dialer and the intelligence layer built in. What is what I do believe is the future. I don't want to be a data provider in the sense of I'm not trying to compete with Zoom Info and those guys. I think data is a commodity, but it's how do we manipulate that data? How do we use AI to really help inform better decisions? How do we close the full feedback loop of here's how I built the list? Here's how it scored with Titan X. here's how it performed in the dialer. What does that tell me about the next list for my reps? Um, so I think we'll probably play an MA play there. Um, I've got a couple targets in mind. I can't necessarily talk about I know you're going to ask um on that front end of the book end. How do you know? How do you know I'm going to ask? Will you listen to the show? I haven't listened, but I've read your book back in the day actually when I was broke. Oh, nice. Yeah, that was Yeah, dude. I actually arbitrageed a few things. I arbitrageed a Chrome extension back in the day off your Yeah, I went and bought a Chrome extension. Look at terrible reviews. Yes. The unique part about us is there's if you think about our whole model, we've got 70 plus signals that we're pulling in or sources. Uh most of which are either compliantly scraped in some ways or purchased on the private markets um or it's public data. And then there's there's human elements to what we do that's impossible for AD to touch. Outbound dialing is regulated by FCC's TCPA guidelines. So you can't touch that. I mean that's a very small micro thing but we have a lot of other things. No, I think it's extremely relevant though. I mean you just gave a perfect example when when someone comes to me and says Nathan you should you should invest in the company. We have proprietary data. If they can't give me an answer like you just gave. I say guys like the foundation mods aren't just going to scrape this and anyone can get this easily. What's your IP? So that that makes a ton of sense. It's super interesting. Guys remember I am not just a YouTuber. I'm investing into my third fund. We've deployed $250 million into 550 software companies so far. are again at founderpath.com. If you're interested in capital, I would love to cut you a check because I know you're investing in your education. You watch my show. So, sign up at founderpath.com and when you get the onboarding email, I reply and I see all those. Just reply and say, "Nathan, I found you through YouTube." And I'll make sure to prioritize you. I would love to cut you a check. Check out founderpath.com. The question I've got for you, how are you getting customers today? Because when I put TitanX and ah Refs, there's like no traffic. I think you maybe did a recent rebrand, but how are you getting customers today? I would say right now we're 45% inbound organic or about 9%. Wait, where is that though? Look, I'm not seeing any I'm seeing very little inbound organic here. Uh, that's Is it a different website you're getting traffic from? No, Titanex.io is correct. I mean, we get about 9,000 10,000 uniques a month. So maybe ah refs is just full of it. It's full of it. Yeah. Interesting. No, we probably we probably generate, you know, in our average T we have different customer bands, right? So we have 3 to 10 reps, 10 to 30 reps, 30 to 50, 50 plus. Those kind of correlate to a price range of 24K, 50K, 90K, and 250K. 45% is coming through inbound, organic. That's about 40 meetings a month just from the website with high ACV. Uh outbound's our bread and butter. Clearly, we use our own product. And so about 38% comes through outbound sourcing, uh phone only. And then I would say the rest is a mix of paid uh referrals and affiliates. We're building the referral affiliate market right now. It's a really underutilized channel for us, but it's powerful. What's your high What's your largest customer pay you per year today? We're sitting at uh well, one just expanded to 406 AR 46,000 a year. Three-year contract. Yeah, that's great. Okay, so 406 per year over that three years. Uh AR one year each year. Oh, wow. Okay. So, so it's a $1.2 million contract. Yeah, we have one right now that's they're they're a publicly traded company. They're currently at a quarter million, but they're about to expand like 1.5 AR in a three-year. What makes your sales team be able to drive that upsell revenue? Is it number of dials, number of seats, product based upselling, something else? Yeah, it's so we're we're unique in the sense, not unique, we're we're consumption based, so it's a credit model. And so, we're very hands-on account management, technical account management, technical solution consultant. We have a VP of customer strategy that comes from the space. And so, when we jump into an org like the one I'm talking about, they uh we got in at 250. We've only got one team currently. there's six teams I can expand to. So, a lot of it's moving to different teams and therefore adding credit consumption. Uh, their credit a lotment goes up. Um, but then there's also different plays. You can go up, down, sideways. You can get into their partner side. You can get into their go to market inbound side. Um, so six is the outbound side, but then you have other channels that or um other departments we can crawl our way through. 300 over consuming, therefore, it's an expansion opportunity. Are they under consuming? It's a turn flag. And then we're just looking for different ways. And now naturally that we've acquired the dialer now we have a whole another product line that we'll be able to add on that gives a whole another level of intelligence and signals for how they're using platform. Interesting. If uh as we wrap up here finish your revenue story you launched in 2023 with a acquisition of IP. What was 2024 ending ARR? Uh well we didn't have one cuz I didn't launch this till June of 24. So I acquired in 23 as the IP to be the moat around the services company. I made the decision in early 24 to sunset the services company. Again I was doing mid-se figures. Um, and then June, uh, June 1st of 24 was when we took our first dollar beta launch, 200 users. Uh, it was like a we're trying to do a PLG model like the first month or two. I realized that's for the birds. Um, and so we ended up going uh 0 to 1.4 million at the end of 24 and then 1.4 to whatever 6ish, six something uh end of 25 and then now we're with the combined acquisition and the growth of 26 so far about 9. 9.7 really fascinating and and all that early again going from 0 to six minute revenue that quickly. I just want to make sure I'm not missing any learnings from you. Was there any like customer acquisition strategy you used during those early days? Yeah, I mean like one we do have a superpower in our tool. It's like why we have super high retention is why our NR is out the roof. It's why our magic numbers a 4.1 the last quarter. What's NR? Net revenue retention. Oh, what is your I know 1.36. Come on. You know me. You know I know what NR means. But you're you're 136. Okay. Yeah. Gross dollar retention is a little low. It's like 92. Um, we're fixing that. And then our our magic number was 4.1 Q4 versus Why do you say you're fixing the 92? I mean, that's not terrible in this segment to have 92 gross, but 136 net. I want to see us at 97 is my goal. Yeah. Interesting. All right. First of all, well, hey, finish up with a prediction here. What do you guys think? You'll finish 2026 with 2026 18.7. If someone came, if Zoom, if Henry Shuck at Zoom Info came and offered you $200 million all cash today to sell the company, do you take it? Absolutely not. That's why it's so quick. Well, I have, you know, part of my growth equity deal is I threw in some kickers I need. Tell me what you mean by that. Uh, if we 2.5x, I get something back. If we 3x, I get something back. If I 3x on a certain timeline, I get something something something back. Like you set up an esop pool and that gets distributed to you at certain revenue targets. Yeah. Bonus structures, I get equity back, points back, so on. Super smart. This is awesome. I've learned a ton here, Joey. If people want to follow follow you online, learn more from you, where can they find you? Uh, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. linkedin.com/joilkkey and ty next.io guys really interesting founding story had a seven figureure agency in 2023 he said you know what I'm using this one tool let me go buy the IP was called phone ready leads spent about a million bucks to do that 200k cash up front rest was a seller note ultimately took that 200k and turned into a $9 million AR business 9.7 now today it started off with 200 beta users and call it June 2024 then killed that model moved towards enterprise and broke 1.4 4 million bucks at the end of 2024, scaled to 6 million end of 2025. Again, now today scaling nicely. Just did a series A of 27 million bucks at around 100 million post money valuation of which there's a large secondary component of 10 million bucks. The rest went to his first uh or second really acquisition of a company called Front Spin doing 2 million of AR bought it for 13 million bucks. Creative deal structure there as well. Now focused on breaking call at 145 million bucks here in 2026. Titanx.io. If you're doing outbound and you're using phone numbers, test them out. Joey, thanks for taking us to the top. Thanks, man. Appreciate it. You won't believe this CEO's revenue. Click here to watch the next episode right now.