Moving from a lifestyle business to a growth business with the CEO of Ticket Tailor

0:00This episode is a rerun of one of our most popular episodes from 2023. 3. Hope you enjoy it. My previous version of me would have felt like I needed to have done all the stuff for people to want to join but actually people want to join because they want to do that stuff they want to be part of it so it's really important to be able to articulate that and kind of create the sell for it to make key hires and then all that stuff starts happening and then it's real. Welcome to the SaaS Revolution show the podcast by SaaS.com. Here we interview SaaS founders from around the world who've been there and done that as they share the ins and outs of how they built their businesses, their operations, their path for securing investment, and more.

0:37Our mission with the podcast is to help you, the founder, learn how to scale your SaaS, maintain your well-being, and navigate the complexities of this ever-changing industry. I'm your host, Alex Deema, and together we'll explore the good, the bad, and the ugly in the journey to SaaS success. Meetings and events suck. We're changing that. This October, we're bringing Meetup to SaaS Stock Europe. The Smartest Way to Network Meetup is a one-to-one meetings program that will deliver over 15 ,000 pre-scheduled 15-minute conversations with the partners, customers, peers and investors who can move your business forward.

1:15No more wasted time, no more missed connections, just purposeful meetings with exactly who you need to meet. Don't miss your chance to be at the AI and SaaS industry's largest meetings event. Register by the 22nd of September to secure your place. book now at sasstock-europe.com slash meetup. This is more than networking, it's making connections that matter. Okay, welcome to the SAS Revolution show. I'm your host, Alex Zuma, delighted to be joined today by Johnny White, who is the CEO and founder of TicketTailer. Welcome, Johnny. Hey, Alex, great to be here. Thanks so much for having me. Yeah, great to have you on the podcast.

1:54Finally, I think we've been speaking for a few years, you've been coming to a few sass docs and uh we've finally got you on the podcast to to share your story so delighted about that uh looks a little bit where it's a an indian summer here in the uk so like i mentioned before we started recording i'm a little bit sweaty in the podcast studio it looks cooler and more more zen where you are especially i think the picture is giving off uh sort of like cooler vibes uh behind you hopefully that'll call you down just by uh just by looking at the picture fingers crossed where is the uh where where is the picture is it a real one or is it a painting painting and it's in new zealand uh on the south island and um yeah we're on holiday there and saw this uh yeah saw this picture and absolutely loved it which is a rare thing for us to do but um you know sometimes you see a picture on holiday and uh you just you just love it so very cool well i i've like never been to new zealand uh i know i think you've got young kids I've got young kids as well always kind of uh felt that maybe it's a little bit too far to travel with the young ones but more with the jet lag side of things so was this a pre-kids trip yeah this was a pre-kids thing but I did go over to Australia with the kids actually we have family in Australia so went over to Australia earlier this year with the kids and um yeah I can tell you it is a real challenge trying to get any kind of sleep um especially when you have like a one year old with you on the plane.

3:18I can imagine. All right, good stuff. Well, Johnny, we always start the show. We get to know the guests a little bit better. So let's start off with who is Johnny White? Yeah, so as you just mentioned, I'm a father of two and I'm also founder and CEO of a company called TicketTailor. TicketTailor is an events ticketing platform that helps event organizers sell tickets online. And I started it back in 2011. We've always been bootstrapped straight from the off and it's been a pretty exciting journey actually uh from like day one you know being quite young naive uh not really uh not not that business savvy and i'm a software engineer background um and really started off as a as a as a sideshow and then you know along that journey sold it two years in um to time out uh which is really exciting got to work there for a couple years and then bought it back from time out and then grew the company, built our team and then to where we are here today, which is we're a team of about 25 people.

4:19We're about five, six million ARR and we're doing about a million tickets a month through the platform. And actually just found out earlier this week that we've been listed in the fast growth 50 list, which is the fastest growing companies in London. So we just made that list this year, which is really exciting as well. So it's been a long journey of steady growth. And yeah, it's been some really interesting things along the way. So hopefully I can share some of those things today. No, definitely love to dig into that. So I guess a couple of interesting things to kind of pick out there. So first of all, decision to bootstrap.

4:55You've always bootstrapped. Why did you decide to do that? Have you ever thought about taking venture money or even have had like some conversations around that? Because I guess probably now you're becoming pretty interesting for uh for some vcs but like why the initial decision and talk just a little bit about that yeah so initially it wasn't a decision it was just complete naivety that i didn't even think you know i was a software engineer and i was thinking i could build some software that i can resell you know uh what do i need money for you know it didn't even cross my mind i'd need funding um this was back in yeah 2010 when i was starting to build it before i actually launched And, you know, it was when I was on, I was around by Old Street and the tech scene was kicking off and I was going to meetups and pitching Ticket Taylor, you know, these meetups.

5:42And someone asked a question saying, are you bootstrapped? And I didn't even know what the word meant. And then they explained to me, it's like, oh, are you like, are you doing it? Are you not getting any funding? And then I thought, why would I get funding? And then realized that's basically, you know, what everyone does. And then thought, OK, well, that's what I should do. You know, when I got to a certain revenue point, I thought I should go and get some funding. and I remember I made a pitch deck for um yeah I made a pitch deck pitching for investment for 400 ,000 pounds but not even knowing what I was going to spend it on you know as I said like kind of very naive position of just doing something because that's what people were doing uh and today kind of very grateful that we haven't taken funding because we've just got so much freedom now in terms of in terms of what we do um so yeah so always been profitable all the way along and uh did think I needed to do funding at one point because that's what every company does but I guess we've chosen like a slower path and have really enjoyed staying that way.

6:37So we're very, actually, yeah, we're very much going to be bootstrapped. If we get funding, then we've messed up somewhere and we need to course correct. So yeah, that's the strategy. We'll see if we remember that if we read, you know, in a few years time that you've taken on 50 million or something like that. Remember this podcast. But and I think there's nothing also wrong with that. I know a lot of people that have been bootstrapping their business for, you know, for many years. And, you know, eventually at some point they decided, you know, when they got to 20, 30 million ARR that they wanted to become a hundred million dollar business.

7:15And that, you know, they felt probably the best way to do that was then to take on some additional capital. But again, you know, I think like goals change and it's something that we will speak about in a bit. But something also sort of interesting was that you sold the business really early. I think at 2K MRR, I think that's what you said, to time out. So a big company comes in, buys you, you're at 2K MRR, but then you bought it back. Like, tell us a little bit of that story. Like, you know, why did you sell like so early? And then, you know, how did you come to the decision to buy in this back?

7:53yeah uh i was when i when i first launched it my initial goal was to get to 2k mr though that was the month there's the amount in my head that meant that i could focus on this more you know people have that question of like when can i go full-time on this that was my full-time point of 2k mr and i didn't really have a plan beyond that to be honest i you know thought i often think very much in the short term and um yeah i didn't have a plan when i got to 2k mr and that was when i actually was started to think about oh maybe I need investment is that what you know and so kind of like wasting time on something that um I didn't actually you know it wasn't something I was really into uh and then got this email from timeouts and it came across initially as like oh we want to do ticketing um you know can we be a customer and you know as one man band thinking this you know I'm going to go along with this but uh there's a high chance that this could be a waste of time for all of us because can we support a company that big um at this stage in the business and then the more we got talking the more it kind of transitioned into an acquisition type conversation which was really cool it was really exciting from my perspective you know to um uh to to be having these conversations and yeah the more initially you know I wasn't thinking yeah I want to sell that would definitely that wasn't my um yeah that wasn't how I was feeling in the first first part of the process because this thing had just started getting going uh had a bit of momentum and I was quite excited about the future even though I didn't really know what to do next but the more we started talking the more I realized actually there's there's a really good opportunity here like one I didn't have much experience of working with people I came straight out of university got into freelance web development and then launched this business and so you know one of the one of the draws was I can get some experience here working with people and then the other thing was like, well, um, yeah, thinking it's, it's at an early stage in the journey that I could, I could do one of these again, you know, I could go to timeout, get that experience under my belt and I can reset and restart and, and, and do, do, do another business.

9:58Um, so, so that was kind of, that was kind of the, the, the motivation. And then obviously, you know, being, uh, around that time, being a young person and also being in that environment of, um, tech crunch talking about who's got funded who's being acquired there was an element of like oh this will be exciting you know this will be good for for you know my ego and my status and um you know on the day actually when it came to signing uh it was a very long process it was a really exciting bit at the beginning of negotiations and then like a very long drawn out legal process and then on the day of signing it was literally just me and a lawyer in a um west end uh uh yeah lawyer's office and sign it signed the documents and there's like no one to celebrate with because you know it's uh kind of just me and yeah and it was a massive anti-climax at that point there wasn't any PR announcement or anything like that and so that part of it was like I'm glad I didn't do it only for that reason because if that was the reason then I would have been very very disappointed um at the uh at the kind of like yeah what I thought would happen but actually what the reality was you know I guess no looking back now so probably one of the best decisions you've made to in terms of buying it back would you say yeah so yeah i think it was it was so lucky to be able to do that you know i think to have that opportunity to be able to buy it back at the end so after after two years of working there um or a year and a half it was uh i yeah i realized kind of like i'd done my time the integration wasn't going to happen the ticket tailor integration wasn't going to happen at time out as what was planned and um I handed my notice and um yeah uh they are anxious about the fact they've got this business and they don't I want to leave as quickly as possible but they don't want to cut my notice period short because of um because of uh the fact they've got this business and they don't know what to do with it so that gives me the idea of like oh well you know let's make an offer here to buy it back and sure enough they're like yeah this is great you know we can just um make this happen so that was brilliant and it was it was massive uh luck and an absolutely like amazing decision because i could it was it was where it was when i sold it it was a 2k mrr still uh the business is in very much the same shape and yeah i was more experienced um had a bit of money from the sale uh and you know had a whole like a reset you know two years of not being not running a business so nice to have that break you know you don't really get that opportunity um so i could come into it with a real fresh head and um and then start to think about okay well what is the next chapter of ticket taylor maybe um we could probably spend a lot of time on this but from a a couple of like quick key lessons that you've implemented so when you you bought it back.

12:47And so this would have been, let me do the math here. Was it 2014, something like that? Yeah. And so you bought it back and now it's 2023, you're at 5 million in revenue ARR. So you're going from 2K MRR to now 5 million. What are some of the things like that you've done to kind of help you get there? well one of the things is obviously kind of compound growth you know so just like it's a long time and the market has grown a lot so that yeah it would have been hard to turn that around in in like less time obviously other companies have done that sort of thing so this is definitely possible so but i think the things that the terms of the things that um that i've done so So, you know, so for a whole portion of that journey from that point to now was still me on my own, but working with other bootstrappers in an office and we would share growth hacks and tips and so on.

13:47And so there was a bunch of things in those days which were kind of like move the needle in that realm, you know, from like 2K to 8K, you know, like and those sorts of things were things like integrations, you know, like we did an integration on the WordPress plugin directory. And that's the kind of thing that moved the needle at that point. And then there came a point when I got stuck and I no matter what I did, I couldn't I just couldn't I didn't feel like I could move the needle. I felt like I'd reached my limit as a kind of individual. And so from there, really, that was the point at which was about building out the team and then and then thinking about doing business in a really different way, investing in our brand, investing in our team and investing in.

14:31Yeah. In that scale side of things as well. Well, I think that's a good segue into that because, you know, as you say now, five million ARA plus recently or even this week, you said just listed on the fast growth 50 in London. And you are a growth business and you've gone from being a lifestyle business to a growth business. so let's talk a little bit about um why you decided to do that because i'm sure we've got many listeners who are running lifestyle businesses and actually nothing wrong with that and running a growth business you know is it is a different thing and you know comes with different sets of challenges and uh and so on but i guess let's start with why did you make that decision to move from lifestyle to growth like when you know when did did a switch just kind of flick uh you know did you wake up one morning it's like okay you know i want to build out a team i want want to get to 10 million, 100 million or whatever?

15:26Yeah, it's a great question. And it was a long drawn out decision, actually. And, you know, back when I was running it as a lifestyle business, I love my life. I was in the office with my mates who are other bootstrappers. I've got a dog. The revenue is a decent place. You know, at one point I was like, I can do this forever. I could hit the pause button on 8K MRR and, you know, this would be great. I'm set. But, you know, know, a year goes by or so and I get stuck on things as I mentioned earlier. And I remember redesigning the website three times over, you know, I'd done it once. I wasn't happy with it.

16:00Did it again. I wasn't happy with it. And it's just, yeah, what am I doing? And so at that point, a friend of mine who's a designer, he had quit his job and I said, Oh, come and, um, you know, come and help me redesign the website as a contractor. And he did. And he came in and he made loads of decisions and did loads of great work. And I was like, this is amazing. You know, like I've gone from having to think through every little bit of detail to now loads of stuff happening and it being better than I could have done it uh and so that was a kind of taster of what it could be like if I started to hire people but obviously was scared about losing this freedom losing this lifestyle where I didn't have the stakeholder of a team my only stakeholder were the customers you know and it was like that was that was quite a uh freeing position to be in but um yeah offered him a job uh part-time as a designer and and he accepted and so that was the kind of the shift at that point was like okay well now now i'm hard now now now i have you know the start of a team and i've got this new responsibility and i need to think about that as well as think about customers um and it kind of created a bit of a mind shift at that point obviously that was just one person at that point but then we hired a head of tech and hired engineering we made these hires that were um uh so with engineering it's it's very they're quite easy decisions in the sense that we knew we had loads of features we wanted to build you know it's low risk in the sense that uh also also an area that i understand very well as right as as understand very well so i knew what i wanted i knew what kind of people and i knew um yeah what i was looking for so So kind of the first, you know, two years of going from lifestyle to kind of transitioning into, you know, a growth business was really thinking, was really in these kind of like dipping my toe in, I suppose.

17:52And it wasn't until a point actually when I started working with a coach and the coach did this exercise where he said, OK, where do you want to be in two years time? and we did this thing where we stepped back right and I've had this vision of where I want to be in two years time and as I say I'm quite a short-term thinker so this was such a helpful exercise and we stepped back and we stepped back and stepped back and stepped back and then it was like hang on a minute I need to hire a lot more people I need uh all these other roles filling that I'd been quite anxious about hiring and actually had attempted but kind of got wrong so I didn't really know what I wanted and so on and so that was the point when I was like okay we need to build out a leadership team um and properly be more strategic and think more like a business than think like with building software, you know, to fulfill customer demand, you know, to think about those other things.

18:34So, so there's a real point there of thinking, okay, we're a proper business now. And we need to invest in the business as well as investing in, you know, what the customers want. Was it hard for you? And maybe like some of the challenges are from being this solo founder with no people, no team to kind of manage to all of a sudden making your first hire, building out a leadership team now a team of 20 plus you know has that been hard or you know often we hear from founders you know some of the hardest thing can be people managing people and um yeah just kind of interested from from your perspective yeah absolutely it was really hard um one of the hardest things i've done and uh but you know it's gradual it's happening over a number of years so um and yeah the things managing was really difficult um and my experience working with people as I was that two years of time out getting the coach was a real game changer the coach could really help me um you know do understand that uh understand or yeah figure out how to manage people and how to how to get the most out of people um and absolutely transformed how I work um and then And the other thing I was going to say was that there's a really good point I had in my mind.

19:52Oh, yeah, this is it. When you're working on your own, you're so instinctive. There's no communication. You don't think about values, anything about mission, anything about anything like that, because it's all ingrained in your mind. You don't need to articulate it in words. It's just there. And so when you get out of bed every day, you know why you're doing it. You know what what makes sense. You know how to prioritize. You know, all this stuff just happens. And the communication, you don't need to have a meeting to talk about anything. and you don't need to have values to align on anything. And so that was a really important part of it was trying to decode which bits of my instinct was helpful and like form the DNA of what made Ticket Tailor successful.

20:29So it's like trying to pull that out, trying to put it into words and then trying to get that across to other people and then get people to buy into that as well. So I spent a lot of time thinking about values, thinking about mission, thinking about purpose. And it's so, that has been so important. And particularly as well, like getting that right before making those key hires as well. Super important because, you know, one of the things that I'm really passionate about is business for good. And at that stage, it was mostly words. You know, we're doing some stuff around the idea of business for good.

21:01But we're so early on that actually it's mostly words. And what I needed to do was articulate that and get people to buy into it and join it. you know what i've a kind of a previous version of me would have felt like i needed to have done all the stuff just for people to join to want to join but actually people want to join because they want to do that stuff they want to be part of it so it's really important to be able to articulate that and kind of create the cell for it um to to um uh to to make key hires which then you know and then all that stuff starts happening and then it's real so um it's that kind of like manifesting that business for good and what that could be to get that excitement going to hire those people and And can you give us some examples of like how you would do that?

21:39So from, I guess, maybe whether it's, and I'm just putting words out there with just examples, but from the company website to the job description through the interview process to you have the team in place, how often are you talking about the purpose, the mission, the vision, the values, you know, what is the cadence there that, you know, gets people, keeps them going, you know, on the daily basis to do the mission, deliver the mission for Ticket Tailor? Yeah. So on those early hires, I think it was kind of, you know, something in the job ad, but then it was really about when meeting the people and then just like me letting loose and letting it all come out of my heart kind of thing.

22:14And I think people then relate to that. So that was what it was like in the early days. These days is we're, you know, we're much further along on it and it comes through across all of our stuff. So, you know, for every ticket we sell through the platform, we donate a penny to climate causes. So we talk about that loads on social media. We talk about it to our customers because they're the ones selling the tickets. So we can celebrate with them that they're creating this. And then every year we do this with a certified B Corp. And part of that you have to, I've just got one here actually. You have to create an impact report.

22:47And this is a document, doesn't have to be printed out. This one is, but we have it on PDF as well, which kind of talks about all the stuff you're doing. all the stuff besides profit, like what's going on in the business, what are you doing about planet, what are you doing about people? And we use this loads, we use this in interview processes, we use it with customers, and it really helps us shine and stand out against kind of the competition. Very cool, very cool. Well, obviously great to hear that, you know, about a couple of the key things there, you know, the decisions from moving from lifestyle to growth, how you've done it in building out the team and prioritizing sort of purpose.

23:29Before we go into the sort of quickish fire round, like if you well, and again, I'm sure there are some founders out there, whether they're technical or not that are running lifestyle businesses, but maybe thinking about running a growth business. What would you say to them like any advice or do's and don'ts about maybe the way to go about that? Yeah, I think the mistakes that I've made are not being confident in what it is that I want, and then wasting time with other people in terms of hiring. And yeah, so times of, you know, trying to hire for a role and going through a long interview process with them, and then and then changing my mind at the last minute, you know, things like that, that is my biggest regrets kind of thing is that is that kind of thing.

24:15So I'd say definitely, it would be about working with a coach or whoever maybe his mates as well like if you you know if you've got friends who are in a similar uh similar kind of work to really understand what it is that you actually want to achieve and then that will help you um because that's the that's the thing that I didn't know I just you know it's the I guess it's that classic thing of like doing it because you feel like you should and that's perhaps where I started doing it's like you know got to a certain point and felt like oh I should be doing this I should be going to a growth business but um yeah was it was it uh did you decide to get a coach and then the coach helped you decide to go to be a growth business or did you decide to be a growth business and got a coach and then helped you map out the plan I'd say I got the coach first um yeah they've got the coach runtime was building out the engineering team without you know without strategically thinking I want to get to a certain point it was more like oh we've got a team because it made sense to um to hire engineers to help us get to a certain point but it wasn't till yeah then it was getting the coach and then the coach was like yeah really helping me understand where i was going you know why am i doing it what am i what's it all for and how often do you meet with the is it like every two weeks every month um so at the moment i'm not actually working with the coach but during this period i was meeting twice a month doing uh two hours every two weeks and that was the right kind of rhythm for me and then actually had the same coach uh work with everyone in the leadership team so when when i hired these hard uh hired out the leadership team then we all worked with the same coach actually which was brilliant for alignment people could have used other coaches if they wanted to um but um but turned out everyone everyone wanted to use the same one so that was that was pretty cool very cool all right we're going to move on to the quickest fire round now johnny um so what one thing has moved the needle the most for you in your career well we've just been talking about it i have to say getting a coach or or even like working with other bootstrappers you know having those other people around to question you and to help you see it from a different perspective yeah no definitely extol the values of having a coach but also support network of uh not only peers but in general the support network of people that can help progress too what's the best advice you've ever received um it's just this question actually is uh who are you afraid of failing in front of?

26:37Confidence has definitely held me back over the years. And this question really put it into perspective of, well, why am I afraid of failing? And it's usually to do with someone else's perspective. And when you ask that question, you can really break it down and think, actually, do you know what? I'm not afraid of failing in front of anyone. So let's do this, you know? So that was a really good question for me that really helped me build out confidence uh what's the biggest failure you've made and lesson learned yeah i'd have to go back to those um kind of hiring mistakes in the process of um not strategically building out the team of where um you know gone through a hiring process and um let someone down wasted their time um or even worse hired and then and not work out throughout the probation period that has been the biggest uh biggest failure um and the lesson learned is to is to is to figure out what what i want better like spend more time doing it up front and um and not you know not letting someone else carry the expense of that very hiring mistakes were very common and uh um yeah uh can can i don't know really so eat at you but you know impact the growth of the business but you kind of learn from these things or hopefully you do and you don't keep making the same mistakes um hardest thing about bootstrapping yeah so at this stage of our business the hardest thing is keeping a lean mindset we're doing very well and we but you know we don't want to uh yeah shoot ourselves in the foot or get complacent or anything we want to stay lean we want to keep really efficient and we want to stay a small team we we're capped at 25 people is like our like you know we don't want to get bigger than that so it's constantly keeping this mindset of just because we can you know buy a tool to do something do we need to do it for example or just because we can hire someone to solve this problem should we hire that person can we solve it in another way can we automate it can we can we ignore it you know uh really keeping that lean mindset that you just get by you have to do it when you're starting out you've got no money and you've got very little time and as you get more options it's harder to keep that mindset but preserving that is something that we spend a lot of time thinking about johnny uh you've been a great guest on the show where can people find you online if they want to reach out also ticket taylor if they're they're interested in what it does.

28:53Yeah, cool. So you can find TicketTailor at TicketTailor.com. Check it out, sign up for free and give it a go for all your events. And you can find me online on LinkedIn, just search for Johnny White and yeah, connect with me on there. Well, thank you so much, Johnny White, CEO, founder of TicketTailor. Congrats on the great success, the growth, getting on the fast growth 50. Looking forward to seeing more. Have you back on the show when you're at 10 million and we'll talk about what you did then. Thanks for listening to the SaaS Revolution Show. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review and follow the show.

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29:45Thank you.