Event Espresso
Seth Schultz was a front-end web developer working at a marketing department for a medical coding and billing company when his wife needed a simple solution. She was teaching scrapbooking and crafting classes, but students would RSVP via email and then either not show up or arrive without payment. When Seth looked at Eventbrite, the cost-to-revenue ratio didn't make sense for small classes. He decided to build something within WordPress, the platform he already knew well.
In April 2009, Seth found a simple RSVP plugin in the WordPress repository but it lacked payment features. He reached out to the developer twice about adding payment options, but never heard back. So he built the features himself—most importantly, PayPal integration—and released it publicly on WordPress.org. Within about a month, feature requests started flooding in. What began as a nights-and-weekends project while working his day job was clearly resonating with WordPress users.
The WordPress plugin repository became his first customer acquisition channel. Seth started making $2,000 a month from his own website through PayPal. He then recruited his co-founder, a marketing-savvy coworker who was pursuing an MBA at the University of Utah. Seth would literally buy pizza for his office colleagues and pitch them on the opportunity. This grassroots approach helped him grow the business to $20,000 a month—enough to quit his job in 2011 with confidence.
Seth initially tried a freemium model with a $50 lifetime membership, later shifting to yearly subscriptions starting at $60/year. He eventually realized that pricing model wasn't sustainable. The company scaled to about 70% renewal rates and settled on an average of $12/month per customer, though pricing varies—some customers pay as little as $5/month while others pay up to $100/month depending on their usage. By October 2017, they were growing about 3% month-over-month, which Seth recognized wasn't fast enough. He began investing in content marketing with hired writing teams and exploring paid advertising (PPC) to accelerate growth.
Event Espresso now operates two platforms: the original WordPress plugin and EventSmart, a cloud-based SaaS service. The company processes over 100 million in ticket sales per month and powers 60,000+ ticketing websites. With 20,000 paying customers generating $80,000 in monthly revenue, Seth has built a completely bootstrapped, profitable business with a 9-person team distributed across Utah, Idaho, Canada, Ukraine, and the UK. Their customer base ranges from paint-and-wine classes selling 20-30 tickets to medical conferences selling 10,000 tickets per month.
- •Seth solved his own wife's specific problem first, which validated there was genuine demand before investing significant resources into a full product.
- •Releasing the solution as a free WordPress plugin on an existing marketplace eliminated customer acquisition friction and let the WordPress community itself surface feature requests that prioritized the product roadmap.
- •By staying bootstrapped and profitable from month one ($2,000 MRR), Seth maintained control and could grow at a sustainable pace without pressure to chase growth at the expense of unit economics.
- •The subscription pricing model with tiered usage ($5–$100/month) allowed the company to capture value proportionally across customers with vastly different needs, from small craft classes to large medical conferences.
- •Investing in content marketing once the product was mature and the core business model was proven (at $20K/month revenue) provided a scalable lever to accelerate growth without undermining the organic, word-of-mouth foundation that built the initial customer base.
- 1.Identify a specific operational problem you or someone close to you faces, then prototype a narrow solution within a tool or platform you already know well rather than building from scratch.
- 2.Publish your solution in an existing marketplace or community hub (like WordPress.org) where your target customer already congregates, rather than building your own distribution channel first.
- 3.Monitor and respond systematically to feature requests from early users to validate which capabilities will drive retention and expansion revenue before over-engineering the product.
- 4.Test multiple subscription pricing tiers tied to actual customer usage or segment size (e.g., $5–$100/month based on ticket volume) to maximize revenue capture across different customer segments without requiring separate products.
- 5.Delay paid acquisition channels and heavy marketing investment until the product, pricing, and core business model generate at least $20K/month in sustainable recurring revenue, then deploy content marketing to scale profitably.
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