How Tradablebits CEO Darshan Kaler grew to $13M revenue and 250 customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is darshan Kaler he is a the CEO and founder behind a company called tradable bits which helps music and sports brands know their fans and marketers and market smarter their fan data platform is built for one purpose to create the best possible fan experience music festivals and sports teams trust them to collect analyze and activate their fan data at scale increasing ROI with automated personalization darshan are you ready to take it to the top all right all right good all right so tell us more about what the company does and and how do you price this thing how do you make money well first of all its its main purpose in life is to really understand the fans that actually go through food to sporting games or go to a festival or concert we all know that each individual person that comes to a given event has multiple different reasons right down to the affinity of the artist meaning that they like the artist that's why they're going to you know to a group activity group of friends coming together to enjoy a moment in time a bottom-line for a lot of people that you that are in the entertainment industry you know they're all about trying to make sure that they get the best experience but in the end in the digital world when you're trying to do advertising it becomes a much harder struggle to make sure that one awareness on the particular event that's happening and then also trying to maximize your advertising budget so that you can get into a scenario where you're reaching the right audience for a given type of event so our platform does all of those things to ensure that the fan experience you're getting ads that are more appropriate to you for example all the way down to communication bases we're informing you of certain activities and events that may happen within your neighborhood you're charging the company the event organiser or the attendees the fans this is actually tied to the promoter so in this case our clients are going to be like the companies like the live nations of the world Ticketmaster or right down to a potential artist that's trying to roll out their new album and things like that tied to a label and how do you how do you price to them is it number of attendees predicted is it a pure place ass model fixed-fee what is it it is a SAS model it's again it's a long-term play it's not necessarily uh-oh I'm gonna do one campaign with you and then run with that so we do an integration with the ticketing vendor of choice whether it be Eventbrite Ticketmaster or front gate whichever whichever models and then we then integrate that also as part of your enterprise so typically most people that are going to be buying this thing is not a consumer base it's a b2b so it's a you know this is a business to business transaction I've been providing certainly our platform provides services on to the consumer basis so when trailer give me sorry give me an example right so all these companies are paying you whether it's a small artist or Live Nation on average so if I force you to give you an average what's the average customer paying you per year to do and use the platform it's gonna range between a starting point of $15,000 a year all the way up depending on the volume of data that we're gonna be providing services to measured by what number of events nor attendees how do you measure the data data is tied to individual fan records so for us for example you as an individual is one potential fan record ID however you might have an Instagram account you might have a Facebook account you might have a LinkedIn account all of those things are different personas of yourself you're still considered on our platform as one fan record okay got it so minimum is 15 grand I mean is that an accurate average though or is your average much higher than that no that's about a good start okay and give me or the backspace here were you at like an EDM concert rocking and rolling you know sniffing all kinds of crazy things you said you know what I got a I got a create a fan engagement platform like how'd you launch this thing that's a great question so prior to starting tradable bits I was a director of Olympic services during the winter 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics and as part of my mandate was to deliver flawless games and and and it was really interesting to see media come meeting with the mom-and-pop down on the bottom of the hill where they're sending a tweet of the time and awesomeness of that activity and then NBC going guys we got to compete now in real-time so these photos and images need to be up on our website as fast as they go on to Facebook or Twitter so that really dawned on me is something the unique change in our industry where everybody is an editor an opportunity to engage in in the world and what shocked me the most was that people didn't really understand a individual who was on Twitter maybe different than they are on Facebook and certainly different than they are on LinkedIn but it's still the same person and so then we came up with a with a model of understanding social media and in the enterprise world interesting so what year was that have been your one year one would have been 2011 when we first rolled out our suite of apps was we know how many people are yet today well the engagement platform if we go and take a look at it we've gone through a lot of different herbs and turn in the technology so when we first rolled out tradable bits in 2011 was to really understand social media so we actually gave the platform free yeah darshawn sorry what's your team's eyes today Oh team size uh were over 17 people were adding more people they all in Vancouver all in Vancouver okay so now go back to the question I think you were answering which is what have you scaled to in terms of total customers yeah so you have to take a look at it from an engagement perspective so total customers for us you know for example if we have a Live Nation that's one company but they may have multiple different events concerts and so on so there's you know hundreds if not thousands of activities so we have to look at it from engaged audience so today you know we're we're about our enacted basis over 20 million engaged audiences in a yearly basis okay but priced that out so what I'm hearing you just priced it out something when you say an account pays you on average 15 grand a year right is like I mean do you include Live Nation is one customer in that scenario or you break them down into the 30 different events if they run yeah they might depending on the engagement component it might change so if we're looking at actual let's let's take a look at companies by entity you know we're about 250 different companies that we deal with got it and that is that's including the Live Nation all the way down to the solo artist that wants to use you for three events a year correct okay got it now can I'm so I mean can I multiply 250 times you know $15,000 a CV is assuming as you're doing about 300 grand per month right now in revenue well it changes for a month per month but yeah you can go in between anywhere between you know 200 300 okay well and why does it I mean most SAS revenue is very predictable why is yours changed month-to-month a great question so we do audience targeting as well for ads and so on so in some cases depending on the time of the year there might be more ads and we take a percentage fee associated with those things I see I see okay and what percent of your revenue is that versus a pier play SAS model it's about twenty percent okay so it's not okay so your main size SAS model yeah it's insignificant compared to the overall so mean is it fair to say if akid I mean pure SAS you're around 200 grand per month right now in revenue and then you make another 50 grand ish per month on paid stuff paid bad optimization yeah it goes up and down yeah yeah yeah depend it's probably very seasonal yeah yeah interesting and what's growth look like I mean are you doubling you every year yeah so we're growing 50% year-over-year okay fifty okay so fifty percent so about a year ago call it you were doing you know maybe 130 ish per month Pierre play SAS yeah and it changes so so from our perspective you know it's interesting now that we're in the millions in revenue you know growing from hundreds of thousands of revenue to millions is significantly different yeah yes over the past twelve months would you do like like like two to two three well at this point I mean we're looking at growth or total revenue over the past twelve months is what two and a half something like that yeah yeah and then what do you think you'll do this year you know depending on right now we're just focusing on North America right and you know we are taking a look at potentially going south South America and Europe we haven't decided whether we're going to go that route but if we do then yeah they're not going to generate some other significant income but for now it'll be between you know I'd say targeting to about you know two to three million in growth okay so that would be on top of the three you're currently doing so hopefully adding five million in ret total revenue something like that uh no no no so two to three million in total that we want to try to attain so the growth every year fifty percent we've been doing in the last three years it's harder to do when you're starting to get to two to three million yeah John so I just to be clear though if in the past twelve months you've done two and a half million bucks and you're saying over the next twelve months you want to do between two and three million that's not growth that's flat yes flat from that perspective right now if we don't go into Europe got it so you don't think you can drive growth if you just stay in North America at this point we haven't seen the growth capacity because once we start signing up some large accounts it's more about trying to get there sub accounts and inside in there so for example if we sign up a company like a Live Nation there's multiple different events underneath there and so there cyclical so at that point if we get them in at a particular timeframe we might not get them again to follow their yeah so have you bootstrap the thing erase capital we raise 0 dollars that's a that's a nice place to be congratulations yeah thank you yeah so we've never raised any money and you know at this point it's all organic growth through word of mouth tell me about churn churn is more on tied to the refocus so in the last year a year and a half we focused exclusively on us sports and music and so we did have you know companies that are tied to tourism and things like that that we've slowly said goodbye to because on my total revenue churn has there been with the model change no a small amount I would say I'd say about 5% okay fine okay annually annually expansion revenue across the fit you know the customers you're going more after now more than make up that 5% so that net growth is there no oh yeah no we we are growing every month and so the churn is not something that is impacting us do you know what net revenue retention is well let's see if we're taking a look at this point we're just focusing on music right music and sports the the retention on on that side is I would say overture and I just say it's probably less than 1% because it's it's not like it's a very sticky product so once it gets deployed inside the enterprise world it's very difficult to remove what are you spending to acquire these customers what's CAC so the spend is predominantly tied to events we don't do a lot of digital advertising we go through and inform a lot of our clients through those little scenarios so cost per acquisition can range between you know three to five thousand and and from that perspective you know we're pretty strategic about which events we go to yeah and if you're making a grand or two grand per month from customer means you're getting paid back in two to three months right pretty well yeah on an average depending on which events that we go to some are more expensive to it you know to sponsor but in most cases we get those returns at least within six months six months okay good and then what are you certainly know this is hard but what do you assume these customers are worth to you over their lifetime I would say each customer is within let's take a look at the last three years of most of our customers that have been on the platform you know a lifetime is going to be between 50 to 60 grand and in a three-year window okay interesting interesting in folks you're citing them now is that kind of what you're using for a forecast and you think 50 60 grand lifetime value which means call it three four years yeah yeah yeah that's pretty well our overall view I mean we get if we get a large account it might be much larger than that mind you now we might attain you know three to four times the size of value yep yep interesting all right let's wrap up here to Shawn with the fame five number one what's your favorite business book ah don't make me think so that's about it that's the basis of everything that we do that's good number two is there a CEO you're following or studying right now well Bill Gates has always been another an individual like Apollo number he's no long yep number three what's your favorite online tool for building a business the best online tool for building a business believe it or not is Google suite products number four darshan how many hours of sleep are you getting every night if I'm lucky five and what's your situation married single you have kids I have kids and married how many kids I'm three kids Wow three okay and how old are you I am 48 48 okay last question what he was your 20 year old self knew well let's see the fact that by time you reach 40 you get old very fast so make sure you are you know you're good with your body new 20 start early be good with your body from from darshan launched his company back in 2011 now at 17 people based in Vancouver helping events more effectively manage and fill their events and remarket to fans to keep them engaged over the long term serving about 250 customers paying a grand ish per month so 250 grand per month right now on a revenue that's about 80% pure SAS and then about 20% is some ad spend fees they're less than 5% gross churn annually that's on a revenue basis paying about three to five grand to acquire customer getting that back in under six months star Sean thank you for taking us to the top all right thank you