801: The $60M King of Ticket Sales

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

Nathan Latka

Ceo, Entrepreneurs, Founders, Software, Business, Entrepreneurship, Saas, Startups

4.6 • 683 Ratings

🗓️ 3 October 2017

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Jayesh Parmar. He’s a serial entrepreneur with two decades of event industry experience. Currently, he’s the CEO and co-founder of Picatic and is listed as one of the world’s top 10 tech entrepreneurs disrupting the event industry.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – The Hard Thing About Hard Things
What CEO do you follow? – Jeff Bezos
Favorite online tool? — Amy
How many hours of sleep do you get?— 6-8
If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “Failure is just a data point”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

01:44 – Nathan introduces Jayesh to the show
02:10 – Picatic brings people together and does things that are absolutely different from others
- 02:22 – Picatic has given away a product for free
- 02:55 – Picatic has changed the ballgame with their pro product
- 03:13 – Picatic offers Picatic Anywhere which is a new ticketing service
04:00 – The bigger stream for Picatic is the commission-based stream
05:00 – Average pay for Picatic varies
05:26 – Picatic has a basic product which is free and the pro product which is commission-based
- 05:33 – Base rate is a dollar and commission rate is 2.5% per ticket
- 05:46 – Stripe is on top of Picatic
06:18 – Enterprise API ranges from $5K to $100K depending on the API calls and ticket sales
06:58 – Event businesses are seasonal, but Picatic has partnered with different venues and organizations that aren’t seasonal
08:00 – Picatic was launched in 2008 as a side project
08:20 – Picatic went through Extreme Startup and got $250K with 10% equity
08:33 – Picatic has raised $1.5M as additional capital
09:22 – First year revenue is less than $10K
09:48 – 2015 revenue is less than a $100K
10:05 – As an event organizer, Jayesh wanted to de-risk events
10:31 – Picatic has pivoted from their previous model
11:40 – 2016 revenue
- 12:22 – The revenue is around $1.2M
12:40 – Team size is 15 based in Vancouver, Canada
13:55 – 2017 goal
14:05 – Picatic grows 100% year over year
14:25 – Jayesh has been going to different events to market his Picatic by being a doorman
16:40 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

Don’t stick with your current business model just because—test other models that your company could benefit from.
The online ticketing world is consistently improving.
The best way to get your business out there is by marketing it yourself.

Resources Mentioned:

Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost.
The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more
Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books
Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Jayesh, founder of Picatik, he founded it back in 2008 hell of a year to found the company.
0:05.1	Since then, 2013, they made a major pivot, but they were still doing less than 100 grand in revenue.
0:09.9	Eventually, they went on to raise about $1.5 million total.
0:13.3	They hit in 2016 over $30 million in gross ticket revenue.
0:17.0	They make about 4% of that, so call it $1.2 million.
0:19.4	Here in 2017, they are on track to break $ million bucks in gross ticket revenue as they look to empower event organizers,
0:25.8	whether it's nonprofits using their free product or big enterprise accounts and big venues using their enterprise API.
0:32.1	This is the top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry
0:38.5	in terms of revenue or customer base.
0:41.6	You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like,
0:45.3	and how many customers they have.
0:48.2	I'm now at $20,000 per talk.
0:50.5	Five and six million.
0:51.4	He is hell-bent on global domination.
0:53.3	We just broke our 100,000 unit sole mark.
0:56.1	And I'm your host, Nathan Latka.
0:59.4	Many of you listening right now don't have time to listen to every B-to-B SaaS CEO that I've interviewed. with year-year growth rates, customer accounts, margins, and many, many other data metrics and
1:11.5	data points, you can go to g-et-l-a-tK-A.com. Here's the thing, though, this database, I keep it to
1:18.5	myself. It's so freaking valuable. And to preserve the quality of the data and make sure that the
1:23.7	people that have access to it have a true advantage. I'm only letting 10 companies on
1:27.7	each month. So we're full this month, but you can go to gitlatka.com to get on the waiting list
1:31.8	for next month. And look, there's big people on the waiting list. I mean, the biggest vCs
	...

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