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.