2015: You Won’t Believe How Incredible Our Journey Has Been

We’d like to update the entire Tito community that, despite the odds, Tito is still in business. Our incredible journey continues without venture capital or acquisition, and the only sunsets in view are the ones that light up Dublin’s beautiful Georgian streets. 2015 has been a coming of age kind of year. Here are some highlights.

In January, we applied, and got rejected for Enterprise Ireland’s “High Potential Startup” programme. Apart from feeling a bit ashamed, we went on to meet all of the “ambitious” growth targets that we had made up for the meeting for the next six months.

In February, our biggest customer, The Innovation Enterprise, went live with over 100 worldwide events. Innovation Enterprise are a dream to work with, and we’re looking forward to growing alongside them next year.

March was a huge watershed month for us. The previous year, Doc had taken a few weeks off, and Kilbo and I decided that we wanted to surprise him when he got back with a CSS rework that would add a responsive-design for mobile devices. We named the branch doc-is-away. 364 days later, doc-is-in shipped to customers. There are no small changes.

Our best quarter ever came in April, May and June, where we saw over 150% year over year revenue growth, cleanly exceeding our projections, and putting us firmly into sustainability as a business.

This busy time in terms of sales was also busy in terms of product development, and in July we shipped a UI refresh that wrapped up all of the recent UI work in a neat bow. Thanks Pete.

August and September saw us revamp our homepage, blog page design, and we introduced a new theme for event pages: McDonagh, which shipped in October. September also saw us featured (thanks to Gav and Tom) in Ireland’s Sunday Business Post, as well as the fateful admission by Web Summit CEO Paddy Cosgrave that he did not, in fact, build Tito.

In November, we started trading as Team Tito Limited, registered in Ireland. The company ends its first “year” showing modest profits for its first two months of trading. We look forward to adding to those in the coming year!

Finally, this past month December, is typically our slowest, but this year has been surprisingly busy, which bodes well for 2016. We have signed up a few new customers that we’re particularly proud to serve, like DIBI and Strange Loop and we still pinch ourselves every time we review some of the amazing customers we have around the world. But there are folks we’ve talked to that we still need to do more to encourage our way, and after a month of reflection in December, we’re looking forward to putting our heads down, moving on, and continuing to build on the base that we’ve established.

And finally, every year end post needs some metrics. The main achievement in terms of numbers this year is that our numbers for 2015 exceed all of our previous years combined.

  • We processed almost $50m worth of tickets sold, which is quite a bit more than everything we processed in 2012, 2013 and 2014.
  • Our revenue from Tito doubled.
  • We issued over 270,000 tickets… 80,000 more than we had issued prior to 2015.
  • Over 140k messages were sent using our beta Messages feature.
  • Over 80k people were checked in using our beta Checkins feature.
  • Over 10k people joined waiting lists using our beta Waiting List feature.

One final metric is hard to quantify, but it feels like it’s going through the roof: our enthusiasm. We’re very proud to be independent. We’re proud that we’re a small team that serves customers in over 60 countries. And we’re excited to take what we’ve built so far, to keep improving it, and to bring it to hundreds and thousands of new customers in 2016. We’re looking forward to making new friendships, to building new relationships, and to going further with the friends and customers that we’ve met over the last 3 years.

Happy New Year!