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The SaaS Podcast - Growing Profitable AI SaaS & AI Agents
455: Accelevents: How 5 Years of Nights & Weekends Built a $10M ARR SaaS - with Jonathan Kazarian
00:42:52
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign welcome to another episode of the SaaS podcast. I'm your host, Omar Khan and this is a show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business. In this episode, I talk to Jonathan Kazarian, the founder and CEO of Excel Events and an event management platform that helps organizations run everything from conferences to virtual events. Back in 2014, while working at a hedge fund, Jonathan's 17 year old cousin got sick. He organized a fundraiser but couldn't find affordable event software with decent support. So he built a solution with someone he knew. It worked so well that other organizations started asking for it. As demand grew, Jonathan started using upwork contractors to build out the platform with while he managed the product side. But Jonathan didn't quit his day job. For five years he worked 60 hour weeknights and weekends. He and his co founder even scheduled date nights on different days so one of them was always on call. By 2020, after five years of this grind, he hit the first million in ARR and finally went full time. Perfect timing, right? Well, Covid hit and wiped out every event worldwide. Their revenue dropped to zero and cash flow went negative as they refunded all their transaction fees. A month later, Jonathan borrowed $75,000 from his father's retirement just to keep the company alive. But instead of waiting it out, they pivoted hard to virtual events. Jonathan and his team started pre selling features they hadn't even built yet. And within three months they hit the million dollar run rate again. By year's end, they 10x'd revenue and grown from 10 to over 100 people. But in 2022, the tech bubble burst. Revenue got cut in half and Jonathan had to lay off more than half his team while the company bled customers for 12 straight months. And there was another problem. They'd become known as a virtual events platform. Just as everyone was returning to in person events, they had to rebuild their product and reputation from scratch again. Today, Excel Events serves over a thousand customers, generates over 10 million in ARR with a team of 60 people. In this episode you'll learn why. Maintaining a 19 second response time to customers 24. 7 became Excel events secret weapon in the high stakes events industry. How hosting dinner events for event professionals generated better leads than cold outreach without ever pitching the product. What Jonathan learned from going through 21 upwork contractors that changed how he thinks about hiring remote developers. We talk about how pre selling features they hadn't even built yet helped them survive. Covid and reach 1 million ARR in just 3 months. And why? After 10 years and multiple pivots, Jonathan believes that focusing on one business is the only way. I talk to a lot of founders stuck in the same spot. They've got a clear vision. They just need the right team to build or scale it. That's where Gearhart comes in. They combine AI, real engineering and product thinking to help B2B SaaS founders move fast forward from early idea validation to scaling real products. For over 13 years, they've helped launch more than 70 platforms, including SmartSuite, which raised $38 million and is used by companies like Capital One Bank. Through the end of September, you can book a free strategy session and get 20% off validation, discovery, prototyping or embedded engineers. For your existing team, visit Gearheart IO. That's Gearheart IO to win. So I hope you enjoy. Jonathan, welcome to the show.
- [03:49]
B
Thanks for having me on.
- [03:50]
A
My pleasure. Do you have a favorite quote? Something that inspires or motivates you?
- [03:54]
B
This isn't really an inspire one, but I like the Charlie Munger quote. Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.
- [04:01]
A
Yeah, I love that.
- [04:03]
B
It just applies to so many things in life.
- [04:05]
A
Yep, very true. Cool. So tell us about Excel events. What does the the product do, who's it for, and what's the main problem you're helping to solve?
- [04:14]
B
Yeah, so we're an event management platform. We cover everything from event websites and registration to mobile apps, badge printing on site, even virtual events. And we sell to a wide range of different types of customers. The largest bucket for us is corporate, and that's also kind of runs the gamut SMB up through. Through large enterprise. We also sell pretty heavily to associations and media companies. And in terms of the problem we're solving, we're helping them to run their event programs more efficiently, to create better experiences for their attendees, for their sponsors, exhibitors, speakers, really everybody who's involved in participating in an event.
- [04:59]
A
And give us a sense of the size of the business. Where are you in terms of revenue, customers, size of team?
- [05:05]
B
Yeah, so we're just north of 60. 60 people. We are right around 10 million ARR. And we could talk about this, but there was some fun swings to get there, some ups and downs along the way, and then in terms of number of customers, that's around a thousand.
- [05:25]
A
So let's go back to where this business started. So you founded accelevents back in 2015. You were working full time as a hedge fund manager.
- [05:39]
B
I wasn't a manager. But I was working at an asset management hedge fund. Yeah, okay.
- [05:44]
A
And you did that for five years before you went full time. And you also managed to get to the first million in arrangement during that time. So let's kind of unpack that a little bit because the conventional advice is you've got to go all in, you've got to do this thing full time, blah, blah, blah. Where did the idea come from and why did you decide that this was something that you were going to start doing?
- [06:18]
B
I have mixed feelings on that conventional advice. I think if the goal is to go raise a mega round, then yeah, you absolutely have to be doing that full time. But if you want to own a lot of your company, then get to material revenue number before you go out and raise. Prove the concept de risk it for yourself. As for how I got into this, so I had been kind of hosting events for a variety of different things, tended to be more on the social side. But then back in 2014, my cousin at the age of 17 got sick and I wanted to do something for her. So ended up hosting a 1000 person, just shy 1000 person event in Boston, where I lived at the time. Fundraiser for Dana Farber Cancer Institute. And going into that event, I was trying to find software to help run a couple of different components of it, more so on the fundraising side. And I couldn't find anything out there that was either affordable, good or had support, especially on the weekends when, you know, when our event was. And that was the catalyst. I ended up, had a bit of a tech background, ended up working with a friend of a friend and built out this lightweight solution. And we just gambled. We took a risk and we said, okay, we're going to try this for our own event. If it works great, maybe Dana Farber Cancer Institute can use it for some other events. We didn't really envision it as a company, but then it did work and it worked very well. And we started getting a lot of demand from people that were at that event, from the organization we put the event on for. And we're like, all right, maybe we've got something here.
- [07:48]
A
Okay, great. So it wasn't really a business at that point. What was the sort of pivotal moment that it turned into a business was it when people started reaching out and you were like, hey, there's something here. We should take this more seriously.
- [08:04]
B
Even that was. It wasn't ready to be a business. I mean, we incorporated two months after that event. But. But I think the idea at the time was like, all right, well, you know, at least I'll be able to write off the expenses if this thing doesn't go anywhere. It was not until, let's see, corporate in January. It wasn't until June. I remember I was at lunch with, with my dad and my uncle and we got the first sale or like organically through the website without us going out and selling anything. It was $49. And that was when it kind of felt like, okay, maybe we, like it wasn't even enough to pay for lunch, but like maybe we've got something here. And I think I probably started to lean in harder at that point when it's like, okay, there is actually some product market fit, there's some organic demand out there for what it is that we're building.
- [08:54]
A
And then sort of just tell me like how much of your time was being spent once you decided that you were going to kind of treat this as a business and you know, start to build it out. How much of your time was being spent on this business and product? Given that you had a full time job, how are you balancing that?
- [09:14]
B
And oh, I probably spent 60 hours a week on this. Like it was every night and weekend mornings. Yeah, it was, I was putting more hours into this than my, than my day job.
- [09:27]
A
Yeah, but that doesn't sound like it's pretty, it's sustainable.
- [09:31]
B
I made it five years.
- [09:33]
A
Yes. I mean working like full time and working 50, 60 hours a week on something like this.
- [09:42]
B
Yeah, no, it got taxing, got draining and I had a co founder at the time, the 1st, I guess 4ish years and he hit a point where he had a good opportunity with his day job and he came to me and said, I want to lean into that. You know, basically I went out and I really appreciate the way that he came to me with that conversation because I was probably starting to feel like, you know what, I'm betting on what we're building and you know, he wasn't taking the same gamble there. And him having the maturity to come to me with that conversation, like still very good friends today. And I think that's rare.
- [10:28]
A
So you didn't raise any money at that point. You, you were bootstrapping mostly during that period. And so it was just, you're, you know, you're working a full time job and you're just taking money from your job and feeding it into this business. Like did you, did you build a team around you? Were you and your co founder at the time doing everything yourselves? How was that set up?
- [10:56]
B
Yeah, so I became the Product guy, and he became the marketing guy. We both took on the role of support, and we knew that we were focused on fundraising events at the time. They all took place nights and weekends. So we knew that in order to make this thing work, we had to be available nonstop. There were times I remember pulling over on the side of the highway to respond to a customer on a Saturday night. And we got to this point where we'd alternate who would go on, like, date night with their girlfriends now wives, versus the other person being on support. Because, again, we knew that was the only way to build this business. And I think as things started to pick up, SEO was probably the biggest driver for us back then. And then a little bit of word of mouth, which was what, you know, he was focused on. I was focused on the, again, on the product side, engineering side. But I wasn't a coder. I mean, I wrote some code. I think, I hope every line of code I've written has been rewritten since. But I ended up finding folks on Upwork. And frankly, we went through probably like 21 different people before we found somebody that we really liked. And that person helped us to grow the team there in India. And that's. That's ultimately how we built our engineering team to start.
- [12:16]
A
So what was the. The problem with the other 20 people that you went through?
- [12:22]
B
They weren't as. They didn't care. They didn't care enough. It was just to get things done. If there was a bug on that Saturday night, I couldn't call them and have them help me. And once we finally found somebody who cared as much as we did, then that really helped get us to the next level. And we ended up rebuilding our entire code stack. I mean, our first version was basically a WordPress PHP hack for like 14 months. And then we ended up rebuilding the whole thing on. On. On Java. And that, you know, that gave us the scalability. But along the way, I had to basically become technical. I did like a bunch of AWS courses and got in there and learned things on my own. Because one of the tricky parts about events is that it's not consistent traffic. It's massive spikes in traffic.
- [13:13]
A
Right, right.
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B
And you have to be able to handle that.
- [13:15]
A
And were you able to?
- [13:17]
B
No. We certainly had our problems and outages, and naturally they always came at the most inconvenient time imaginable. But we learned from it. We knew the capacity we had to plan for. It was really when we moved to, you know, we pivoted during COVID that it became a Thousand times worse because instead of event software being there for say registration and check in and maybe a couple of things that happened during the event, we ended up becoming the venue for the event, the entire experience. So the, the number of like, you know, not to get too technical, but the number of like API requests we would get would go from maybe 100 per attendee to 10,000 per attendee. And that volume just became something we had to, we had to build scale around. And we did. And we've matured quite a bit as a company and a technology platform and getting there. But on the other hand it does create a barrier of entry for others to enter this space, which I guess, you know, in one regard helps being one of the platforms today that can scale to handle some of the largest events in the world.
- [14:19]
A
So it was around 2020 that you went full time with this business. By that time your co founder at the time had you know, know, decided to follow his, his career path. And so it's just you and this team that you've sort of built around you. And I think it was around 2020 that you hit that first million in ARR as well.
- [14:46]
B
So before we got to that first million we had ended 2019 around I think just like 355k in revenue some, somewhere, somewhere right around there. And we were not profitable. Then Covid came. So March 2020. Most of our revenue up to this point was, was transaction fees. But every event in the world got canceled and all of those fees got refunded. So not only did our revenue go to zero, but from a cash flow basis it was actually negative because we were refunding those fees as well. So that was, that was our like sink or swimming moment. And I convinced my dad to invest 75k out of his retirement in probably like April, beginning of April 2020. Because if you know, he was either that or the company was over and, and he did and I think it ended up working out. But about two months later we were at a, at a million dollar run rate. And by the end of the summer of 2020 we had done a million in cash that year. So we basically had tripled revenue in three months. We ended up basically 10xing revenue by year end grew our team from 9 or 10 folks to 70 something. The next year we at our peak we hit 117 people worldwide and doubled revenue again. And that led us to the beginning of 2022, at which point we decided to go out and raise. One of the interesting things in the event industry is a lot of seasonality. So as the team grows and revenue is not consistent because our revenue is a combination of SaaS revenue but also usage revenue, we had to basically increase our cast cash buffer to be able to better handle that. However, that was also two months before the tech bubble.
- [16:50]
A
Let's talk about the COVID piece. Tell me about the pivot that you had to make during that period. What was going on and how did you pivot?
- [16:59]
B
Obviously every in person event evaporated overnight. We had been moving more into the corporate space, so more focused on trade shows and conferences, which meant that we had a lot more of the building blocks like agenda management, exhibitor management, polling, Q and A. The pieces that you would see in a, you know, software pieces you would see in a traditional conference. So that did give us the building blocks to pivot to facilitate virtual events. And that's where everything moved to was basically taking traditional in person conferences and putting them online. And that's what we did. We started, you know, we put some figma. Well I think it was envision back then, but you know, basically FIGMA files together, mocking this thing up. We started pre selling something we hadn't even built yet, just with the confidence that we would be able to build it. And you know, we were all stuck inside. So that's all we did. We just worked like a hundred hours, 110 hours a week building this thing, demoing things we didn't have yet. And then when somebody signed, we would go and build it. And most of the time it worked, some of the time it didn't. We don't, we don't do that anymore because we've learned that, you know, as we've moved up market, the reliability needs to be there, especially with in person events because everything gets more serious and dangerous, frankly, when you have, you know, an issue with an on site event. Everything needs to work perfectly every single time. And that's where the infrastructure side of things comes into play. But yeah, that was the direction we went and just basically tried to replicate all the different experiences that take place during a conference, but bring them online.
- [18:38]
A
One thing I'm a little confused about is you had this spike during COVID and you're making this pivot. But it was, I think around that time you also saw a significant chunk of your revenue disappear as well, right?
- [18:53]
B
Yeah, we did, but there's kind of two waves. So there was, there was the March to May of 2020 where we had zero revenue. We went from doing 35k a month to zero. And then we started pre Selling the virtual functionality. And then we were doing hundreds a month, hundred hundreds of thousands a month. Then 2022 came, the tech bubble burst. Marketing teams got wiped out. Event teams went first. Organizations weren't sure. Do we continue to do virtual? Would we try to move back to in person? But even trying to move back to in person was challenging because everything was so expensive. There was the supply constraints. Venues were booked out for 24 months. So event teams were very impacted by that. And at the same time we had built this reputation for being a virtual event platform company even though we had started on the in person side. But maybe at the time we weren't fully ready to facilitate those 10,000 plus person in person conferences that we are today. So some of our customers went back to the platforms that they had been using before COVID and our revenue. So I think we, in 2022, I think we, we hit like a $9 million run rate and I think we did 6.6 on a cash basis at year end. And, and that got cut in half within six months. That had, had gone down to. Yeah like 3, 3, 32 churn was obviously incredibly high.
- [20:35]
A
What happened in 2022 to cut that revenue? I missed that.
- [20:39]
B
It was the bursting of the tech bubble.
- [20:41]
A
Oh the. Okay, got it. Yeah.
- [20:42]
B
Because we had been selling heavily into the tech industry and it was which, which led to significant layoffs and event programs being cut. But it was also this uncertainty around do we continue to host virtual events? Do we move back to in person? And it was almost like events were on hold in 2022. Like nobody knew what to do. Right. Like everybody was starting to go back outside again. So virtual events weren't performing but they weren't ready to go to an in person event and be around 5,000 people shaking hands. So yeah, events were just this like gray no man's land of nobody knew what to do.
- [21:20]
A
And then. So what was your strategy at that time?
- [21:23]
B
Stay alive.
- [21:24]
A
Stay alive. Yeah.
- [21:25]
B
And we had to make some really hard decisions and, and, and yeah. And reduce staff. And we did and it sucked. But we did it and we got through it.
- [21:41]
A
What kind of cuts did you have to make? Because you said at that point what it was a hundred plus.
- [21:45]
B
Yeah. Personnel wise.
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A
Yeah.
- [21:48]
B
More than half head count wise. So we did that and then it took, it was probably, it was probably a 12 month bleed where we just had crazy churn month after month again because nobody knew what was going on and we didn't know when it was going to bottom. Kind of what I'm hoping happens in the real estate market right now. And then, and then we started to start to recover. We started to, you know, we knew the direct, we knew that the direction had to be moving fully back in person. Leaning into that, we started to try to change our narrative, our reputation from being a virtual event platform to being a in person hybrid event platform. We built the close the functionality gaps we needed to fully facilitate those in person events, lean very heavily into our mobile app, into our badge printing capacity, everything that's really necessary for large scale on site in person events. And then we started to win back customers and again it took a year just to get to the bottom and it was a slow grind to get back up from there.
- [23:07]
A
So you started out as an in person events platform, then during COVID it shifted to being a virtual platform. You build your reputation on that and then suddenly everybody starts going back to events and you have to pivot again. What did that involve? Was it like you had to make kind of major changes to the product again? Was this more about a positioning thing?
- [23:39]
B
It was all of that. It was very much on the product side as well. You can only be very good at so many things. And again, the with in person events, you can't mess up, right? You can't have a scenario where doors are open, but 1700 people can't get through the doors because the check in functionality isn't working properly. So we just had to lean very heavily into ensuring that the reliability of the technology that we're building to make sure that we didn't put our reputation at risk as a platform that failed our customers in person. So we were maybe, maybe, you know, maybe I could say that we were a little cautious about not releasing too quickly because we knew the repercussions there.
- [24:25]
A
Let's talk about customer acquisition and sort of beyond SEO. I know you were telling me earlier that you guys, you know, we're doing paid media, paid search, all that stuff.
- [24:38]
B
But.
- [24:40]
A
What stood out to me was what you told me about you doing your own sort of events and going around the country and inviting people to dinners and using that as an acquisition channel, which seems like a lot of time, a lot of work. Not as easy as putting in your credit card and running some ads on Google AdWords or anything like that. Just explain what you were doing and how successful you were in being able to acquire customers that way.
- [25:17]
B
Yeah, it certainly is a lot of work. We did nine events in 2024 and these were events that we hosted, dinners that we hosted. This doesn't count. Like the third party conferences and trade shows that we would go to and this year we'll end up doing about the same number. We didn't host them by ourselves though. We worked with partners, either agency partners or combination, frankly, the agency partners and other software vendors that we integrate with so that we're all bringing folks to the dinner and we're sharing the cost. So that certainly helped. But the idea of the dinner was really to be an opportunity to bring senior event professionals together who likely don't have a counterpart within their organization. So the struggles and challenges they're going through, there's not somebody else that they have on a day to day basis that they can really empathize with. And that's where I think a lot of the success of these dinners came from, was, was creating that community in terms of where it helps us from a business perspective. It was another way for us to get our brand and our name out there. But we've tried, we've tried Cold Outbound so many times and never had any success unless we have some, some offer. And in this case that offer was, hey, we rented out this nice restaurant, come join us for two and a half hours with other people that are going through the same thing that you are. And it's a two and a half hour facilitated conversation with good food and some wine. And, and it works. You know, we get a much higher response rate. We get people that say, hey, I'm sorry I can't make it, but I'd love to hop on a call and learn more about what you do. So we're leaning heavily into that, into that motion.
- [26:57]
A
Were you pitching the product at the dinners or was this more kind of like indirect thing?
- [27:01]
B
No, never. We don't need to go Google. Before somebody goes to a dinner, they look, they go to your website, they know enough. Every dinner I've been to where somebody stands in front of the room and gives a 30 second pitch, it's plain, it's just painful. It's like people gloss over. It doesn't, it doesn't make them think where, when we facilitate this conversation, we can ask these probing questions, hear how people are going through things. And yeah, you know, selfishly, it's not just like, it's not just that we're going to help answer their questions or their peers are going to help answer their questions, but it's also, we get to hear what challenges folks are having and think about ways that software can step in and make life a little bit easier for them. Because when you're planning an event. It's I had a customer call at 6:30am on Sunday morning. Customer I've been working with for a long time, like have a very personal relationship with and they had a, they had an event, they were hosting a very, very large like 100,000 person event that we weren't doing all of, but we were doing the VIP portion for. And, and they needed help and it's just like they literally didn't sleep the night before the event, not because of us, they didn't even get to all their other things before they had to send out this invite list that morning at 6:30. And like everything just needs to go perfectly and software needs to be there to take things off of their plate, to reduce stress, to just help them get onto the next thing that actually allows them to focus on that attendee experience. So we learn from the, the attendees of those dinners where we can, we can solve those problems.
- [28:41]
A
Tell me a little bit about. So you get these people at these dinners, you're building brand awareness, they're asking about the platform, how the product can help them. But given what you just described about the importance of trust, the sleepless nights, the event going to plan, how much, what's the process involved in somebody saying yeah, I'm going to switch from using something which might not be great, but it's the devil I know kind of thing to your product, which sounds great, but then I've got to make sure I'm going to be able to check these boxes and make sure that everything is going to work and have that confidence.
- [29:29]
B
There's a couple pieces to that. About 80% of our customers are switching from an existing solution, but more often than not it's not one solution, it's some duct tape together, a couple of different vendors that they've integrated and when they're moving over to us, they're able to consolidate that stack. So saving themselves money but, but also time on the management side and creating more seamless experience for attendees because it's not multiple login credentials or different platforms to learn and use. So that part of the story or the pitch is, is generally easier. And usually they're at a point where either they know they need to consolidate their stack for one of the reasons I just mentioned, or they've just hit too many limitations with their existing, their existing provider and our providers and they're looking to see who can do this unique thing that I need to do, who's got the flexibility within their platform to facilitate it. And we are certainly opinionated in how we've developed certain areas of our application, but also quite flexible in the other side of things where they can, they can accomplish those things that maybe they weren't with with their existing platform. The other thing is, if we're not a good fit, we just tell people that like it's not. We, we don't want to. We don't want to try to adjust our roadmap to make something happen that's going to be a bad outcome for both of us. It just leads to unhappy customers and churn and puts our reputation at risk. So we're pretty transparent up front around where we are going to be a better solution and when we're where we're not.
- [31:07]
A
I'm still thinking about the person who is running events at a company has a bunch of pressure on this event. They like Excel events. But to go all in and just switch to a platform seems like a scary thing to do. Maybe. Maybe because I don't understand it. It's. Maybe it's not as scary or complicated as that. Or was there a way that you were making that transition easier for them? Like you can start by doing X and then you can add, you know, use the other functionality in the platform. Or was it. Was it pretty much like. No, you. They were kind of like pick up the platform and you know, flick the switch. And now I'm using this new platform for everything.
- [31:51]
B
It's twofold. So on one hand, where they are using a mix of different vendors, they certainly can come over and use one component. So they might use us for just the badge printing or just the mobile app or just registration and then add those other pieces over time we'll basically, you know, work to win that remaining business from them. But the other part of it is that I mentioned before how there'd be times I'd pull over on the side of the road to respond to customers is a decade ago. But we've built a culture around our customer success team. We even post our stats on LinkedIn at the end of every month. But we average a median response time right around 19 seconds, 24, 7, 365. So we are always there. Yeah, we have people who work around the world so that we can always be available for any questions that come up. So people message us on chat, they'll jump on a call, which obviously helps people get up to speed and comfortable much, much faster. But we also learn a ton from that. We see what questions are coming up where people might get frustrated, where we can make things more intuitive or improve an experience and it also helps us quite a bit just to make a better product that then makes it easier for them to make that type of gretch.
- [33:04]
A
Why do you think so many products suck at customer support? I mean, it's very rare that you get in touch with support for anything and hear back from a human in seconds. It could be days sometimes. What do you think kind of holds them back? And if that was a challenge you also face, what did you do to overcome that?
- [33:38]
B
We faced that challenge with some of our vendors, but we've never faced that challenge internally because from day one we built a culture that was the opposite of that. I think a lot of it stems from the fact that in many areas of business, dates are arbitrary. Somebody picks a due date for something with limited justification, and the repercussions of missing that date are maybe you get yelled at, but nothing bad really happens. And in the world of events, dates are very, very real. Right? People are booking plane tickets, they're showing up on site, they have hotel rooms, Thousands of people are lining up outside of your venue. Those dates are very, very real. And it requires a different sense of urgency in order to build a customer success team around the event industry than it does in many other places in software. And that's what we've done.
- [34:39]
A
What's your retention rate like? I'm curious about. I mean, I know you mentioned to me earlier that most of your customers are running events throughout the year. But you know, I've seen some, some companies that maybe only, you know, maybe doing like one. The kind of customer I'm thinking about is they do like one or two events a year and maybe for the 10 or 11 months, the rest of the year, they're not doing anything. Is that, is that a challenge you face? Is pro. You're probably not targeting those types of those companies.
- [35:14]
B
We're not targeting them, but we do offer one off event pricing because there are people that are dipping their toes in the water with hosting events. And if that first event goes is a success, then there's the opportunity for them to expand the program. So we break up our retention into those two different categories are our annual subscription customers and the one off event customers. As you can imagine, the churn is much higher on the one off event customers. Churn in that bucket is around 45%. But it's not necessarily churn because of software. It could be churned because that event doesn't ever happen again. We also have some customers that we've been working with for like six years and they host the event every other year. But the primary reason that we have that program is the expansion, and that's around 20%. The single event customers are. We're able to take about 20% of them and move them onto an annual plan.
- [36:18]
A
So looking back at the last 10 years of building this business, what's been, what's been the hardest part of that?
- [36:27]
B
Probably the ups and downs.
- [36:28]
A
I mean, you've had to make some pretty major pivots.
- [36:34]
B
Yeah, the pivots weren't the hard part. It was the. When you're growing, everything is fun and exciting and when you're contracting, everything is scary because you don't know when the bottom is going to get there. You don't know where the bottom is. You don't know if, if the bottom means it's over. And then you're trying to make decisions around keeping the company alive. And that's going to impact people's. People's lives and their livelihood. And yeah, like, the hardest days would be, you know, the hardest day would be, you know, the big layoff we did without question. That was harder day than when. Like, was it March 15th or something when every event in the world got canceled? Because in that one, it was kind of like, you know, whatever, two weeks to flatten the curve. Like, events are going to come back in a couple of weeks. We'll figure it out then. But, but when we did that big layoff, we didn't know the direction was still down and we just didn't know where things were going.
- [37:45]
A
All right, we should, we should wrap up. So let's get onto a bit of fun. Let's do the lightning round.
- [37:53]
B
Yes. That was a hard one to end on. So let's do that.
- [37:56]
A
I'm going to ask you seven quick fire questions.
- [37:59]
B
All right?
- [38:00]
A
What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?
- [38:03]
B
I think I'm going to stick with the same quote that, that I opened with. Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome. I think it just, again, it drives everything.
- [38:11]
A
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
- [38:13]
B
Oh, Unreasonable Hospitality. It is a book about some famous chefs and their Michelin star restaurants. And if you're trying to build a business where customer success is at the core of it, there is nothing better. In fact, our customer success team is doing a book club right now. They're halfway through. We're doing a chapter a week. It's also just a fun read of your foodie.
- [38:34]
A
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a Successful founder.
- [38:39]
B
Stick to itiveness. Just keep going. Don't give up.
- [38:43]
A
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
- [38:46]
B
Keeping every message on unread until I've replied an email. You mean email, Slack and sms?
- [38:53]
A
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?
- [38:58]
B
I'm very big on not and staying away from shiny object syndrome, so I'm just really focused right now. I don't have an answer to that.
- [39:08]
A
I mean, it's pretty impressive that you've been doing this for 10 years and you still have that level of focus on the one thing.
- [39:15]
B
There are very few people in the world who have tried to do more than one thing at the same time and succeeded.
- [39:19]
A
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
- [39:24]
B
My wife always makes fun of me when I say this one. I wrote my college essay about teaching sailing but not knowing how to swim.
- [39:36]
A
There you go. That shows some initiative.
- [39:42]
B
If you're good at sailing, you shouldn't be in the water.
- [39:44]
A
That's right, yeah. And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
- [39:49]
B
Well, I've got a 19 month old son, so now it's that.
- [39:53]
A
All right, well, thanks for joining me. It's been a pleasure chatting and sort of unpacking the last 10 years. If people want to learn about Excel events, they can go to accel a c e l events.com and if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
- [40:11]
B
Yeah, I'm all over LinkedIn.
- [40:12]
A
Sweet. Thanks man. Appreciate the time and I wish you and the team the best of success.
- [40:19]
B
Thank you very much. Likewise.
- [40:20]
A
My pleasure. Cheers. If you're building an AI agent, a SaaS product, or trying to scale, check out Gearhart. They're a product development studio building scalable SaaS platforms, AI tools and custom software for startups and growth stage companies. As founders themselves with real exits behind them, they know exactly what you need at every stage of the founder's journey. With tailored services, enterprise grade engineers and an AI partner we with 15 years of experience on projects for Meta and Google, this is nothing like a classic dev shop. Through the end of September, you can book a free strategy session and get 20% off validation, discovery, prototyping or embedded engineers for your existing team, visit Gearheart IO. That's Gearheart IO.