6:5 Invite only events

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Lee:
Welcome to the Event Engine podcast. This is your host, Lee, and today we have on the show, The One and All Only, it's Paul. How are you doing, mate?

Paul:
Hi, Lee.hi. How are you doing? Good.

Lee:
Good, good. I'm having a bit of beard envy like I just told you a second ago.

Paul:
Yeah, I envy myself.

Lee:
Folks, if you're listening, come on to YouTube and look at that beautiful beard.

Paul:
I don't think of myself as bearded. Is that weird?

Lee:
Well, no. Neither do I. I just spend all my life.

Paul:
I get a shock every time I look in the It's like, Oh, who's that guy? When did that grow?

Lee:
Paul, for the folks who don't know who you are, could you give us a little bit of a potted bio of you as well as your company?

Paul:
Yeah, I'll do my best. I am the co founder and CEO of Tito or Team Tito Limited, our real name. We build an app called Tito, which, as of a month or so ago, has processed over $1 billion worth of tickets sales worldwide in around the past 10 years. I built it because I started a conference in 2010 called Fun Conf.

Lee:
fun conf? fun Conf. That's what it says on the tin.

Paul:
Yeah. It could be a long story, but let's just say I wanted control over the software for selling tickets. I was building software for other people, and I decided to build this up for myself. Two years later, we had our first customer. Two years after that, we were able to quit our jobs. Two years after that, I think we had gotten it to a reasonable level, and then the pandemic happened.

Lee:
Yeah, thanks. Thanks, pandemic.

Paul:
Then we've built some pandemic resistance. We raised some money and spent lots of money. Since then, the classic app for selling tickets, still going, has about 700 customers worldwide events, everything from local meetups all the way up to 10,000, 15,000 person events that you probably would have heard of. We've just built this new app, I/O, which is for high-end invitation only events for Creating bespoke experiences for events that need to look really good.

Lee:
All right. Well, let's not go there quite yet. We'll save the best to last then, shall we? But tell us then, tell us Now, I really want to just go in on this. Why did you want to control the event ticket selling process right back at Fun Conf?

Paul:
Got it. I had attended a conference called Build, which was put on by an Irish chap called Andrew Mac Millan, who went on then to build XOXO Fest in Portland, a beloved event. He was very particular about the purchasing experience of tickets. When I bought tickets to build, I clicked on a button to buy tickets, I paid, and then I had tickets. And buy gum. That felt revolutionary. Because some other events, I would click on buy ticket, then I'd fill in my name, then my email, then my job title, then my location, then my cat's My name, then my potted bio, then my teacher's name from school. It was like, I just want a ticket.

Lee:
I just want a turn up, please.

Paul:
If you recall, some of these websites have the 15-minute countdown Timer. I'm like, Can we get 15 minutes to do this? Can you ask me for all this? Then I would add somebody else and I have to put in all their information. It's like, I don't know Doc's cat's name. I just want a button to say, Send the damn ticket to Doc. I just wanted a really elegant, simple Pay and you have tickets. That's That's what I built. I didn't even build a UI. I just built a little thing that said, buy tickets to Fun Conf, Pay on paper, and then you're back on the Fun Conf website saying you have a ticket. It was brilliant. It was so simple. Often, I think we lose sight of the effectiveness of experiences that are so simple that they feel like you haven't actually built in them.

Lee:
Well, there's something to be said about Apple Pay. I spend more money because of Apple Pay all the time, because if a website has the option to Apple Pay it, I'm going to do that because that means they get my email address, they're going to get my address to ship whatever it is to. For me, all I need to do is double tap on the button and recognise my face, and I've checked out. I've not had to register for that site and go through all those hoops.

Paul:
100%, and we lose touch of this. For example, we met on Blue sky yesterday, and people are trying to solve, why is Blue sky winning? Why is everybody moving to Blue sky? If you just think about all the things that it doesn't do compared to Twitter, it doesn't show you this algorithmic feed full of marketers telling you how to market your business that you never asked for. It doesn't have irrelevant content underneath a thread of us chatting about this thing. It's taken away all stuff that has slowly been added to Twitter over the years. They make it slightly worse each time, we don't notice. Then we realise that it's terrible when you see the absence of it. I'm really into that minimalistic experience. But then Blue sky, there's a huge amount of technology underlying Blue sky to make that possible. Oh, yeah. That was generally the idea as well. You still need to build the technology to make it work, but also trying to preserve that experience. And of course, Apple is a huge inspiration. I ran an Apple-themed conference for seven years, I think.

Lee:
Did you?

Paul:
Oh, UL. Really? Irish word for Apple.

Lee:
I did not know that. That's amazing.

Paul:
Because of that, I got to know a bunch of Apple-related conference organisers.

Lee:
Can I show you something?

Paul:
And the best was 2018 when I went to This is the original iPad mini.

Lee:
This is the second generation, 2008 iPad Touch. Holy moly. I know.That.

Paul:
Is beautiful.It isn't it?

Lee:
That battery still goes. Look at that. I charged that yesterday. That's amazing.

Paul:
My kid would absolutely lose.

Lee:
I know. Sorry, folks, if you're listening on the podcast, you'll have to go YouTube at this point. I'm showing him my iPod. So cool. Look, battery, they've both been on all day. No way. I'm in battery saver mode on the iPhone 12.

Paul:
Do you use this to listen to music?

Lee:
Yeah, I listen to all the time.

Paul:
What iOS version is it?

Lee:
There's four. I think I was going to call that iOS 4.

Paul:
What you're saying is that sometimes we do achieve perfection and we just stop.

Lee:
Exactly. That is gorgeous. We should have just stopped here, shouldn't we? This is so beautiful. This is simple. It plays music for me. It can't go on the internet anymore.

Paul:
I want that for my kid, and they don't even sell it. Not that one. Because, I mean, presumably, if they produced something of that power today, it would be thinner. It would be so thin you wouldn't be able to see it.

Lee:
So thin, the battery would still only last a day.

Paul:
Exactly. Holy moly. That's amazing. I know. Doing UL created this little mini network, and it ended up that I went to San Jose for WWDC, Apple's developer conference in 2018. And across the street was Alt Conf, Alt WWDC, ticket by Tito. Across the other side of the street was Layers Conf, a design conference, ticketed by Tito. How cool. Ryan Gruber held his podcast for a thousand people interviewing Apple executives.Tickets by Tito.No way. There was a band show. It was just brilliant. All these things were linked on the Apple website. That's amazing. In terms of cool, doing stuff like that and then ending up in California, feeling like you're really in the thick of it. It was wonderful. That was one of the great memories of down through the years. That was 2018. Just before things started going a bit wild.

Lee:
Yeah, a crazy couple of years. It was all locked down and everything. Yeah.

Paul:
But we have been really lucky to have some great opportunities, often among very nerdy adjacent. Yeah, it's a lot of nerd-adjacent stuff.

Lee:
Well, you've just met a nerd because who carries an iPod from 2008 in their pocket. That is true.

Paul:
But it's more just to be able to say that the tickets for the official JavaScript conference on Tito for a while.How cool is that?Official Ruby conference. Brilliant. It was really good. Then showing up or getting the odd free ticket and seeing everybody scan their tickets in. It's really gratifying.

Lee:
It's amazing, though, how your business started. Tito started literally from you saying, We want to keep this simple, so I'm going to do it for my own event. Presumably, you didn't think at the time, and I'm then going to make a really business out of this registration platform. I'm just going to... This is just mine for now. And then you're like, Oh, maybe other people could use this. Is that how it started or was there a bit of you?

Paul:
I'm guilty of just want to make something nice. And then losing sleep now that I'm in my 40s and realising that I could have built a big business around it. I never did.

Lee:
You're in your 40s, damn it. So am I. Welcome to the 40s.

Paul:
It's great, isn't it? It's funny. I don't have all that many regrets, but it's like, you know you can build nice software and put a bit of effort into the business side of things, too, if you want. I'm definitely guilty of letting the business come to us a little bit too much, but this is why I'm here today. Everybody we meet is like, What's Tito? Tell us about Tito. Nobody knows about us, which the sales people say, Well, that's good, which I think it is good because if they haven't heard of us, then they're not even considering us. So fingers crossed.

Lee:
That's phenomenal. Now, can we talk about registration process a second? Because you mentioned earlier, didn't you? It's really annoying when you have to give your entire history just to register for an event. They want to know what industry you're in, how many employees you have, all that stuff, and you've not even gotten to the credit card point. You've probably already lost me. Hence my reference to Apple earlier. If you're offering me Apple Pay, I'm going to pay. I'm probably going to come to your event. Otherwise, if you're going to make me answer all these questions. On the flip side, though, devil's advocate, is an event organiser missing out on something if they don't capture that information, or is there a way of capturing that information later on?

Paul:
Yeah. We just inverted the process. The first screen by default on Tito is name, email, credit card. Then you press Pay. Then the first screen that pops up after you pay is now assign your tickets, and if you want to collect information there. Typically, we recommend not collecting too much, but we don't have a limit on it. So some people really do the life history on that form. And it's not a great experience. But it is possible. The idea behind it was that paying for an in-demand ticket is stressful. We just want you to make sure you get your ticket first, and then you fill in all the details otherwise. The flip side of that is that most events are not actually high demand, and most events have to actually fight for attendees and work harder. So the optimising for the case where there's a thousand people trying to buy 50 tickets in 15 minutes, or Whatever it is, it isn't necessarily representative of most events and most event organiser experiences, but I still really like that. It's name, email, pay.

Lee:
Yeah, but I still think. I sold an event a few years ago with just 100 attendees. For me, making sure that I kept that purchase process as easy as possible because it was a relatively high value ticket for the market. We were charging £400. That's not necessarily a cheap ticket for a conference. We wanted to try and at least make it as easy as possible so that when the person was like, I'm going to go for it, we didn't give them too many opportunities just to change their mind. They could go through and buy quickly. It's reducing that friction.

Paul:
That's exactly the philosophy. Some people love it and some people just... I don't know, it's not their bag, but I've used it for all my events since I built it. I'm always impressed when I buy a ticket for an event that's using Tito. Like, jeez, you done good. This isn't bad. Good. I don't have all that many notes.

Lee:
Tell me about the exclusive side. You've got this new product. What's this all about?

Paul:
We had the opportunity to build the guest list for a very high-end event around this time last year. It was really fun to build. On the back of that then, we brought in our first external customer, which was the Deutsche Film Academy. This is the equivalent of the Motion Picture Arts Academy in the United States that run the Oscars. The German Oscars. Nice. They have several thousand members, and they run events each year. They're They're paid, they're not paid. They're members' events, but they need to send links to register and accept RSVPs. The tech guy there had asked ChatGPT, Do you have a system that lets us send invitations to the platform? Tito, the classic app, does have a little mini feature for sending these things, but they wanted it to tie the RSVP to an email address. They reached out saying, Can you do this? We don't want people to be able to change the email address. These are non-transferable invitations. We were like, Funny, you should ask. We've just built this thing that does exactly that.Nice. They onboarded last January and they did, I think within about four days of them getting in touch, they were sending invitations to their member base for the...

Paul:
It was their reception at the Berlin International Film Festival. It just went really well. The stick is that it comes from their email address. It doesn't come from a Tito-branded email address. They land on their own website. It's rsvp. deutschefilmakademie.com or. De, maybe. The page is branded completely to their branding. The confirmation email is completely branded to theirs. The digital pass is the Apple Wallet pass, and the Google Wallet pass is their branding. The whole thing looks like they've gone and spent a bunch of money building a bespoke system, but actually it's using I/O, but we've just figured to front it. Even if you view source on the landing page, it looks like they've. It's really nice.

Lee:
That's cool.

Paul:
Yeah, it's cool.

Lee:
And not just an iframe then.

Paul:
It's not an iframe, and it's not a theme inside of an external system. What that allows us to do is it's not just minimal on the front end because, again, it's this principle. You go on a landing page and there's two buttons, attending or not attending. That's it. It just seems too simple. Then you click on attending, and if you need to put in additional information, again, it's the same thing you put it in there. If you want to add your plus ones, you can add a number of plus ones. It's a really simple app that does so many little things in ways that try to reduce friction. I'm really happy with it. It's very similar to Tito, but it is a slightly different use case. But all of the lessons that we've learned over the last 10 years of Tito, we've brought into this app. For example, something that comes up that is so silly, but when you export data and then you pull it into a spreadsheet, and let's say you need to update a bunch of people all at once, we can track that, and then it's really easy to put the data back in to I/O with those changes.

Paul:
Then you can use that data to affect how certain things look or what they see. It's just what we're saying is that everything the customer sees can be customised. The Intercom, for example, used this for their big product launch last month. The first 150 invites that they sent, they featured a custom message from the CEO inviting you personally to the event. When they asked, Could we do that? I was like, Oh, yeah, we can. We didn't require any changes to what we'd already built just because we've built it with flexibility in the way. That was really gratifying. It was cool. It's It's a different challenge. It's also, to me, embracing the spirit of the web a bit more because Tito was leading with this platform mentality where you try and keep people on our domain and you try and own the process and you put your I'll go on anything. I realised that that's actually... That is a... It's not necessarily always the best experience. The power of the web is that you can actually deliver different experiences on domain names per brand. I feel like this is really embracing that principle of the web and not necessarily trying to silo everybody into one singular experience.

Lee:
I'm excited about what- Everyone having to use Eventbrite, for example. A lot of event organisers are using Eventbrite, aren't they? People are going off to a completely separate platform. You're losing that end-to-end brand experience. Really, ideally, what I'm hearing here is that I'm going to go to a particular website, and if they're using your more bespoke version, then I'm enjoying an entire experience all within that brand.

Paul:
One of the inspirations there is, for example, Shopify. Everyone's using their platform in the back-end, but all the sites look and feel like the brand. I think that vendors really like that.

Lee:
Yeah, that is so cool. What's the ideal event who would want this as opposed to just the regular Tito?

Paul:
It would We don't do much in the entertainment industry. And so, yeah, like movie premieres would be really cool.

Lee:
So movie premieres, if you're going to one, you know anyone who does movie premieres then get in touch with the world.

Paul:
I don't know all that much about that world, but that would be really cool.

Lee:
There's an exclusive networking events, I guess. Yeah.

Paul:
I mean, these are all currently being served, like these use cases. The product launch one is really cool as well. It was really fun to go to Intercom's event as crew and just to see the behind the scenes of launching their new AI products and seeing their top customers all piled into a room to hear the latest and greatest.

Lee:
Yeah, so invite led, but it doesn't have to be Invite Only, does it? You could actually just have this as we want the branded experience as well, so they're using that.

Paul:
Yeah, we're leaning on Invite Only at the moment because we're figuring Tito is very general purpose. We have everything from spoon carving festivals to tech conferences. On the Tito platform. At the moment, I am thinking, what if we became the very, very best at exclusive high-end events that were completely... You had to get an invite to go. But it's software, it can change.

Lee:
Yeah, well, exactly. Well, exactly. You mentioned that earlier, didn't you? Can we add the name in? Well, actually, yeah, we can. It's not that hard, is it? Exactly. Now, going back to Tito then, because it sounds like a lot of people listening would be interested in taking a look at that. People have their own web platforms, et cetera. How easy is it to plug Tito in to take event registration and then continue?

Paul:
Super easy. The platform, you can be up and running in five minutes. If you have a Stripe account, it's even quicker. You just go in, you connect Stripe, you add an event, put your ticket live, and then you can be accepting payments on our hosted page. Then there is a JavaScript widget, but the JavaScript widget is so, so simple. One line of JavaScript, and then there's this Tito widget element that you just put on your page where you want it to appear, and that's it. It's magical. I designed this, I think, just as people were talking about web components, and I got advice from somebody who was at Google, just on the best way to do it. It worked then and it works great now. It's really, really... It's almost too easy. Nice. Then we embed the entire checkout experience. You can opt to completely brand that experience if you want as well. Or this one does work in an iframe. Yeah. Nothing wrong with an iframe. There is nothing wrong with an iframe. It's just it's not quite the... If somebody views source, they can see that you're using Tito.

Lee:
But that's only you and me as web developers who are going to view the source. Most people don't really care.

Paul:
There you go. Yeah, I don't know. I do like the idea of iterating it and figuring out ways for people to customise it. Oh, yeah. There is an API that exists, but nobody's ever used it to do spoke check-out experiences.

Lee:
I'm very big on APIs because if I want something to look good, I want to be able to do everything myself and just pass data across as opposed to... Because often you can't do much with the third-party tool with regards to colorization, fonts, and moving things around. If it is in an iFrame, then you're screwed because you can't use CSS.

Paul:
That's the thing with the Tito one, you can opt to have it break out of the iframe, and it just sends HTML down to your page, and you can use CSS to type everything. It is really cool.

Lee:
You thought of everything.

Paul:
It's all opt-in, but it's really nice, and it is super simple.

Lee:
That's amazing. That's ti.to.

Lee:
Nice to remember ti.to.

Paul:
Io, we got the domain yesterday.

Lee:
Happy first birthday then. Happy Nord's birthday.

Paul:
Happy first day. It's io. Rsvp.

Lee:
How cool is that? That is such a cool domain.

Paul:
That's really cool. I didn't know it existed until yesterday. That's epic. I had a good old fight with the team about, Can we get this? Can we get this? Yeah.

Lee:
And you won, obviously.

Paul:
It wasn't cheap.

Lee:
Shall I guess? Five hundred quid.

Paul:
Yeah, thereabouts.Was it?Yeah. That's not the most we've spent on a domain. Sure. But io.rsvp, it just looks so cool. That's nice.

Lee:
It does what it says on the tin.It is exactly that.It is. It's that whole invitation only. I like this. I can't wait to fast forward another year, catch up with you on the podcast and find out what's happening.Oh my goodness. Are you up for that?

Paul:
Absolutely.

Lee:
nice one.Love it. What's the best way for people to connect with your mate? And then we should say goodbye.

Paul:
Why don't we promote Blue sky?

Lee:
Let's do that.Yeah..

Paul:
My Twitter handle was @Paulca, but I've made that private, but I also owned @Paulca.com. I connected that to my Blue sky. Nice.

Lee:
Folks, this is how us two got to know each other. Randomly, I connected to Doc two days ago because he shared something that I agreed with. Then I then found that he was going to EventTech Live. I was like, All right. So he then connected us to. Who'd have thought it? Who'd have thought it, yeah. That's amazing. Blue sky is just really nice, isn't it? Because I've come from this... Well, I don't know what your experience with Twitter is, but mine has been a lot of people being very negative and miserable, and just going out to Blue sky has felt like a breath of fresh air.

Paul:
It was more that there were people on there who I wanted to hear from, and I would click on their tweets, and then underneath there would be an ad for something not so nice.

Lee:
Yeah, not so nice.

Paul:
I'm just like, I just want to see what my friend is saying. I don't want my brain to be tricked into thinking that it wants that it definitely doesn't.

Lee:
Yeah.

Paul:
Blue sky, let's just say there's reasons for hope and reasons to be sceptical, but at the moment it is a lot of fun. I think that one should sometimes just Live in the moment. Enjoy the moment.

Lee:
Well, I'm enjoying the Blue sky moment. I think they're at least at 15 million subscribers so far or something.

Paul:
20 million as of yesterday.Was it 20?Yeah.

Lee:
It's going fast.

Paul:
It's moving fast.

Lee:
It is. Yeah, amazing. There you go. One of the lessons, let's see what It happens this time next year. Will we still be using Blue Sky? Who knows? Thanks so much for your time.Thank.

Paul:
You so much. Cheers.

Lee:
See you again soon. Cheers, buddy.

Paul:
Love it.

Lee:
That was awesome..