Introducing Team Tito Limited

A New Company

Last week’s Irish budget sparked some serious criticism and response from some clued-in folks. VC Brian Caulfield even went so far as to recommend that I decamp to the UK.

Whilst I’m somewhat concerned by the implications of the budget, I really like living in Ireland. I really like being Irish, and I really like doing business from Ireland. So despite everything, I say this:

Fuck it, let’s just keep focused on building something great. And let’s do it in Ireland.

And so, with a lot of pride (and a modicum of shame), I’m announcing that we have incorporated Team Tito Limited, registered in Ireland, company number 566334, trading as Tito.

What does this mean in practice? Well, not a lot really. As a huge fan of getting real, my approach to Tito has been great product first, bureaucracy (and everything else) second. In my mind, everything stems from the product, and indeed, where we are today is completely as a result of focusing 90% of our time building a tool that we are happy to put our name to.

In theory, though, Team Tito Limited represents a significant shift in our mindset. From day one, our goal was to build a great product, and from that product, to get to a profitable, bootstrapped company. Team Tito Limited will be privately held here in Dublin, and thanks to the work we’ve put in building up our initial customer base, it will be profitable from day one.

A New Design

The timing is also significant in terms of how much progress we have seen this year. In the last few months, we’ve refreshed the designs of our UI for event organisers, this blog, and our marketing site. From today, we’ve also switched to a refreshed event homepage design, which will be the default for new events.

A lot of the design work recently has been out of a tight collaboration between Doc and designer Pete McDonagh. The new event homepage has been beta tested by some cool events from The Emerald Fund and The Dublin Startup Commissioner

A New Commitment

Incorporating a company is dead simple in Ireland, and whilst it includes a bunch of legal responsibilities and protections in certain cases, it’s effectively mostly bureaucratic symbolism. But that symbolism is important, and for us it introduces a new commitment to build a great company.

Since day one, we’ve been committed to building a great product, and we think that we’re well on our way. Building a product that people use is hugely challenging, and even more challenging is building one that people want to use and enjoy using. We’re not there yet, but the challenge keeps us going.

Finally, taking the time to iterate on the designs of our main public outlets shows our commitment to great design, in both form and function.

New Friends

It’s been a while coming, but I do think it appropriate here to introduce some of the new relationships that have emerged during 2015. Firstly, it has been a real pleasure to work with WOBI on their global World Business Forum series of events. It’s pretty cool to know that folks buying tickets to Tito will be going to keynotes from some of our heroes like Kevin Spacey and Richard Branson.

Another exciting new arrival this year has been The Innovation Enterprise. IE run a network of business-to-business events all over the world. They’re great people, and they run a great business. It’s still exciting to click on their “Register” link and get a Tito checkout form.

I’ve been hugely excited to see Cognitect host Clojure/Conj, and it was super cool to welcome Wistia earlier this year. The list of new and exciting customers does really go on: The Sunday Business Post, Cold Front Conference, ChicagoRuby, CoreOS, Xamarin, HashiCorp. This list goes on, and on, and on.

Holy Moly. We love you all, and to all of our existing customers from 2013 and 2014: we love you too!

A New Beginning

And so, here we are. The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. And each step we take, takes us exactly that: one step further on an amazing journey, with inspirational people, friends, partners and government-backed organisations. Or maybe not that last one.

We have a long list of things that we’ve been working on that we’re really eager to share with you in the coming weeks and months. Stay tuned.

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